‘A renegade who was right . . . He was truly a man before his time’ SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH
‘One of the finest and most lyrical nature writers in English’ OBSERVER
They say that a child who aspires to be an engine driver very rarely grows up to fill that role in life. If this is so then I am an exceptionally lucky person, for at the age of two I made up my mind quite firmly and unequivocally that the only thing I wanted to do was to study animals. Nothing else interested me.
From the age of two Gerald Durrell filled his home with animals but, as his ambitions swelled, so the hostility of his family became more implacable. The only solution was to work in a zoo, and so one winter's day as a bright-eyed twenty-year-old he found his way to Whipsnade.
Joyfully, he recaptures the glory of these early years: of Teddy the bear, ‘a great rolling, gingerbread-coloured fool, with the tiny, rather frantic pleading eyes’, who thought he was an operatic tenor and sang sad arias with one paw clasped over his breast; of Peter the giraffe, with his liquidly beautiful eyes, and his friend, Billy the goat, who acted as PRO and social secretary; of the astonishing Captain Beale, Superintendent of Whipsnade, who made curry which seized hold of your throat with a hard, cunning grasp.
Gerald Durrell’s account of his life at Whipsnade – a legendary moment in his coming-of-age – is something which all who know his books have long been dreaming of.
