Beasts in My Belfry
Jun 2025 · Random House
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‘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.
‘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.
Autoren-Profil
Gerald Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, India, in 1925. He returned to England in 1928 before settling on the island of Corfu with his family. In 1945 he joined the staff of Whipsnade Park as a student keeper, and in 1947 he led his first animal-collecting expedition to the Cameroons. He later undertook numerous further expeditions, visiting Paraguay, Argentina, Sierra Leone, Mexico, Mauritius, Assam and Madagascar. His first television programme, Two in the Bush ̧ which documented his travels to New Zealand, Australia and Malaya was made in 1962; he went on to make seventy programmes about his trips around the world. In 1959 he founded the Jersey Zoological Park, and in 1964 he founded the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. He was awarded the OBE in 1982. Encouraged to write about his life's work by his brother, Durrell published his first book, The Overloaded Ark, in 1953. It soon became a bestseller and he went on to write thirty-six other titles, including My Family and Other Animals, The Bafut Beagles, Encounters with Animals, The Drunken Forest, A Zoo in My Luggage, The Whispering Land, Menagerie Manor, The Amateur Naturalist and The Aye-Aye and I. Gerald Durrell died in 1995.
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