‘A renegade who was right . . . He was truly a man before his time’ SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH

‘An account of Durrell’s very first job, as an animal handler at Whipsnade, just after the end of the Second World War, an experience that helped fashion his philosophy of animal keeping’ GUARDIAN

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.

Republished to celebrate the centenary of his birth, here is Gerald Durrell’s legendary account of his coming-of-age as a reader, writer and budding naturalist at Whipsnade Zoo. He joyfully recaptures the glory of this single formative year where, in the crucible of muck, operatic brown bears, and reading Pliny by night and tending to the lions by day, the passionate worldview of one of the century’s great animal-loving renegades came into full view.

‘One of the finest and most lyrical nature writers in English’ OBSERVER