Durrell's father insisted that Louisa leave household chores and parenting duties to the Indian servants, as was expected of Anglo-Indian women of the day, but she was more independent than he wished.

[4] When Durrell was fourteen months old, the family left Jamshedpur and sailed to Britain, where his father bought a house in Dulwich, in south London, near where both the older boys were at school.

[9] The house in Dulwich that Lawrence had bought in 1926 was large and expensive to run, and in 1930 Louisa moved the family to a flat attached to the Queen's Hotel in Upper Norwood, also in south London.

Gerald and Lawrence later gave varying accounts of how the decision was reached: the poor English climate, Louisa's growing dependence on alcohol, and financial problems may all have played a part.

[20] Lawrence and Nancy moved into a house in Pérama [sv], near the Wilkinsons, and the rest of the family stayed in the Pension Suisse in Corfu town for a few days, house-hunting.

[21] Gerald fell in love with Corfu as soon as they moved out of the town, and spent his days exploring, with a butterfly net and empty matchboxes in which to bring home his finds.

[26] Gerald collected animals of all kinds, keeping them in the villa in whatever containers he could find, sometimes causing an uproar in the family when they discovered water snakes in the bath or scorpions in matchboxes.

[note 6] Lawrence encouraged Gerald to read widely, giving him an eclectic selection of books, from the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover to Darwin.

[35] Equally influential was a copy of Wide World, an adventure magazine, which Leslie lent him: it contained an account of an animal-collecting expedition to the Cameroons, in west Africa, led by Percy Sladen, and gave Gerald the ambition of someday doing the same.

[45] He was transferred periodically between areas of the zoo, and spent much of his time cleaning the animals' cages, but occasionally had more interesting tasks, such as helping to hand-rear four newborn Père David's deer.

The work could be dangerous: he was asked at one point to separate an African buffalo calf from its mother, and on another occasion to cage an aggressive brindled gnu, and broke some bones in his hand during one of these tasks.

[59] He spent months there, collecting hundreds of animals, and the return to Mamfe required him to hire sixty people to carry them all, with Durrell suffering from sandfly fever during the trip.

Reporters from most of the British papers came on board the ship to interview them when they docked at Liverpool, and Durrell told them that he and Smith had already begun planning another trip, this time to South America.

[81] Smith stayed in Georgetown, the capital, while Durrell made collecting trips—to Adventure, a town near the mouth of the Essequibo river; along the seashore to catch freshwater wildlife in the creeks; and to a ranch on the Rupununi savannah.

Gerald still demurred, and then came down with a recurrence of malaria: Jacquie later recalled that when the doctor advised a light, high-fluid diet, she had to ask if bread and tea would suffice as that was all they could afford.

[note 13] Curtis Brown read a galley proof of The Overloaded Ark and asked Durrell to come to London to meet with them, and again he had to phone them to explain that he could not afford the fare.

The Durrells left Tilbury by ship in November 1953: they had been promised a pleasant trip out by their travel agents, which they were looking forward to as a substitute for the honeymoon they had not had, but in the event the accommodations were cramped and unpleasant, the boat filthy, and the food appalled them.

[108][109][note 14] They soon discovered there were no flights available to Tierra del Fuego, which they had planned to visit, and went instead to the Pampas, beginning their collecting with burrowing owls, Guira cuckoos, and a baby southern screamer.

[111][112] They acquired a baby giant anteater, a dourocouli, a crab-eating raccoon, and a grey pampas fox, among many other animals, but in May, as they were making plans for the thousand-mile journey back to Buenos Aires, they discovered there had been a coup d'état in Asunción, the Paraguayan capital.

[115][116] To bring in more money, Durrell wrote an account of the South American trip, titled The Drunken Forest, and as soon as that was turned in to the publisher he began a children's book, The New Noah.

[117] In November Durrell gave a sold-out lecture at the Royal Festival Hall, illustrating the talk with ex tempore cartoon drawings, and showing film of the capture of an anaconda from the Guiana trip.

[123] He planned the book meticulously: there would be three parts, one for each of the villas, and he decided to constantly switch between the three main themes of the book—the landscape, the inhabitants and animals, and his family's eccentricities—to prevent a reader from becoming bored with any one of the topics.

Eventually Poole council provided a draft contract, which proved unacceptable: it would have required Durrell to commit £10,000 (equivalent to £300,000 in 2023), most of which would have been spent on repairs to the property, rather than on building the zoo enclosures and services.

[146] After another short excursion to Mendoza, in search of fairy armadillos, Durrell returned to Buenos Aires, where he met David Attenborough, who at that time was a producer for the BBC, and had been filming and collecting in Paraguay.

Donations came in, and Durrell continued writing: Menagerie Manor was an account of the first four years of the zoo's existence, and he also worked on the scripts for Two in the Bush, the BBC series based on the 1962 trip.

[162] That winter, the zoo was again in desperate financial trouble: Durrell was able to persuade the bank not to foreclose on the property, and Lord Jersey, a local aristocrat, covered the staff's wages for a few months to tide them over to the spring.

Although ostensibly the trip was to learn about conservation activities on the reef and in Australia, it was also intended to give Durrell a long recovery period—they travelled by sea in both directions, and were away for nine months with few obligations and no contact with the day-to-day running of the Trust and the zoo.

[179] Durrell's Fillets of Plaice, a collection of autobiographical anecdotes, was published in late 1971 to good reviews; it was followed in early 1972 by Catch Me a Colobus, which covered the trips to Sierra Leone and Mexico, and some material about the Jersey Zoo.

[197] Durrell's next project was The Amateur Naturalist, co-authored with Lee; it was a handbook for people who wanted to know how to observe nature in their own neighbourhoods and gardens, but it also covered many of the world's ecosystem types, such as tundra, tropical forests, and wetlands.

[225] Espadarana durrellorum, a glassfrog of the family Centrolenidae from the eastern Andean foothills of Ecuador, was named by Diego Cisneros-Heredia in honour of Gerald and Lee Durrell "for their contributions to the conservation of global biodiversity".