We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals that Changed T

by Benjamin Mee

  When Katherine came out of the hospital, it was to a TARDIS-like, empty house in an incredibly supportive village. Her parents and brothers and sister were there, and on her first day back there was a knock at the window. It was Pascal, our neighbor, who unceremoniously passed through the window a dining room table and six chairs, followed by a casserole dish with a hot meal in it. We tried to get back to normal, setting up an office in the dusty attic, working out the treatment regimens Katherine would have to follow, and working on the book of my DIY columns, which Katherine was determined to continue designing. Meanwhile, a hundred yards up the road were our barns, an open-ended dream renovation project that could easily occupy us for the next decade, if we chose. All we lacked was the small detail of the money to restore them, but frankly at that time I was more concerned with giving Katherine the best possible quality of life, to make use of what the medical profession assured me was likely to be a short time. I tried not to believe it, and we lived month by month between MRI scans and blood tests, our confidence growing gingerly with each negative result.

  Katherine was happiest working, and knowing the children were happy. With her brisk efficiency she set up her own office and began designing and pasting up layouts, color samples, and illustrations around it, one floor down from mine. She also ran our French affairs, took the children to school, and kept in touch with the stream of well-wishers who contacted us and occasionally came to stay. I carried on with my columns and researching my animal book, which was often painfully slow over a rickety dial-up Internet connection held together with gaffer’s tape and subject to the vagaries of France Telecom’s “service,” which, with the largest corporate debt in Europe, made British Telecom seem user-friendly and efficient.

  The children loved the barns, and we resolved to inhabit them in whatever way possible as soon as we could, so we set about investing the last of our savings in building a small wooden chalet—still bigger than our former London flat—on the back of the capacious hangar. This was way beyond my meager knowledge of DIY, and difficult for the amiable lunch-addicted French locals to understand, so we called for special help in the form of Karsan, an Anglo-Indian builder friend from London. Karsan is a jack-of-all-trades and master of them all as well. As soon as he arrived, he began pacing out the ground and demanded to be taken to the lumber yard. Working for thirty solid days straight, Karsan erected a viable two-bedroom dwelling, complete with running water, a proper bathroom with a flushing toilet, and electricity, while I got in his way.

  With some building-site experience and four years as a writer on DIY, I was sure Karsan would be impressed with my wide knowledge, work ethic, and broad selection of tools. But he wasn’t. “All your tools are unused,” he observed.

  “Well, lightly used,” I countered.

  “If someone came to work for me with these tools I would send them away,” he said. “I am working all alone. Is there anyone in the village who can help me?” he complained.

  “Er, I’m helping you, Karsan,” I said, and I was there every day lifting wood, cutting things to order, and doing my best to learn from this multiskilled whirlwind master builder. Admittedly, I sometimes had to take a few hours in the day to keep the plates in the air with my writing work—national newspapers are extremely unsympathetic to delays in sending copy, and excuses like “I had to borrow a cement mixer from Monsieur Roget and translate for Karsan at the builders’ supply” just don’t cut it, I found. “I’m all alone,” Karsan continued to lament, and so just before the month was out, I finally managed to persuade a local French builder to help, and he, three-hour lunch breaks and other commitments permitting, did work hard in the final fortnight. Our glamorous friend Georgia, one of the circle of English mums we tapped into after we arrived, also helped a lot, and much impressed Karsan with her genuine knowledge of plumbing, high heels, and low-cut tops. They became best buddies, and Karsan began talking of setting up locally, “where you can drive like in India,” with Georgia working as administrative assistant and translator. Somehow this idea was vetoed by Karsan’s wife.

  When the wooden house was finished, the locals could not believe it. One even said, “Sacré bleu.” Some had been working for years on their own houses on patches of land around the village, which the new generation was expanding into. Rarely were any actually finished, however, apart from holiday homes commissioned by the Dutch, German, and English expats, who often used outside labor or micromanaged the local masons to within an inch of their sanity until the job was actually done. This life/work balance with the emphasis firmly on life was one of the most enjoyable parts of living in the region, and perfectly suited my inner putterer, but it was also satisfying to show them a completed project built in the English way, in back-to-back fourteen-hour days with a quick cheese sandwich and a cup of tea for lunch. We bade a fond farewell to Karsan and moved into our new home, in the back of a big open barn looking out over another, in a walled garden where the children could play with their dog, Leon, and their cats in safety, and where the back wall was a full-grown adult’s Frisbee throw away. It was our first proper home since before the children were born, and we relished the space and the chance to be working on our own house at last. Everywhere the eye fell, there was a pressing amount to be done, however, and over the next summer we clad the house with insulation and installed broadband Internet, and Katherine began her own vegetable garden, yielding succulent cherry tomatoes and raspberries. Figs dropped off our neighbor’s tree into our garden, wild garlic grew in the hedgerows around the vine-yards, and melons lay in the fields often uncollected, creating a seemingly endless supply of luscious local produce. Walking the sunbaked dusty paths with Leon every day, through the landscape ringing with cicadas, brought back childhood memories of Corfu, where our family spent several summers. Twisted olive trees appeared in planted rows, rather than the haphazard groves of Greece, but the lifestyle was the same, although now I was a grown-up with a family of my own. It was surreal, given the back-drop of Katherine’s illness, that everything was so perfect just as it went so horribly wrong.

  We threw ourselves into enjoying life, and for me this meant exploring the local wildlife with the children. Most obviously different from the UK were the birds, brightly colored and clearly used to spending more time in North Africa than their dowdy UK counterparts, whose plumage seems more adapted to perpetual autumn than to the vivid colors of Marrakesh.

  Twenty minutes away was the Camargue, whose rice paddies and salt flats are warm enough to sustain a year-round population of flamingos, but I was determined not to get interested in birds. I once went on a “nature tour” of Mull that turned out to be a bird-watchers’ tour. Frolicking otters were ignored in favor of surrounding a bush waiting for something called a redstart, an apparently unseasonal visiting reddish sparrow. That way madness lies.

  Far more compelling, and often unavoidable, was the insect population, which hopped, crawled, and reproduced all over the place. Crickets the size of mice sprang through the long grass entertaining the cats and the children, who caught them for opposing reasons, the latter to try to feed, the former to eat. At night, exotic-looking and endangered rhinoceros beetles lumbered across my path like little prehistoric tanks, each one fiercely brandishing its utterly useless horns, resembling more a triceratops than the relatively svelte rhinoceros. These entertaining beasts would stay with us for a few days, rattling around in a glass bowl containing soil, wood chips, and usually dandelion leaves, to see if we could mimic their natural habitat. But they did not make good pets, and invariably I released them in the night to the safety of the vineyards. Other nighttime catches included big fat toads, always released onto a raft in the river in what became a formalized ceremony after school, and a hedgehog carried between two sticks and then housed in a tin bath and fed on worms, until his escape into the compound three days later. It was only then that I discovered these amiable but flea-ridden and stinking creatures can carry rabies. But perhaps the most dramatic catch was an
unidentified snake, nearly a meter long, also transported using the stick method, and housed overnight in a suspended bowl in the sitting room, lidded, with holes for air. “What do you think of the snake?” I asked Katherine proudly the next morning. “What snake?” she replied. The bowl was empty. The snake had crawled out through a hole and dropped to the floor right next to where we were sleeping (on the sofa bed at that time) before sliding out under the door. I hoped. Katherine was not amused, and I resolved to be more careful about what I brought into the house.

  Not all the local wildlife was harmless. Adders, or les vipères, are rife, and the protocol was to call the fire brigade, or pompiers, who come and “dance around like little girls waving at it with sticks until it escapes,” according to Georgia, who has witnessed this procedure. I once saw a vipère under a stone in the garden, and wore thick gloves and gingerly tapped every stone I ever moved afterward. Killer hornets also occasionally buzzed into our lives like malevolent helicopter gunships, with the locals all agreeing that three stings would kill a man. My increasingly well-thumbed animal and insect encyclopedia revealed only that they were “potentially dangerous to humans.” Either way, whenever I saw one, I adopted the full pompier procedure diligently.

  But the creature that made the biggest impression early on was the scorpion. One appeared in my office on the wall one night, prompting levels of adrenaline and panic I thought only possible in the jungle. Was nowhere safe? How many of these things were there? Were they in the kids’ room now? An Internet trawl revealed that fifty-seven people had been killed in Algeria by scorpions in the previous decade. Algeria is a former French colony. It was nearby. But luckily this scorpion—dark brown and the size of the end of a man’s thumb—was not the culprit, and actually had a sting more like a bee. This jolt, that I was definitely not in London and had brought my family to a potentially dangerous situation, prompted my first (and last) poem for about twenty years, unfortunately too expletive-ridden to reproduce here.

  And then there was the wild boar. Not to be outdone by mere insects, reptiles, and arthropods, the mammalian order laid on a special treat one night when I was walking the dog. Unusually, I was out for a run, a bit ahead of Leon, so I was surprised to see him up ahead about twenty-five meters into the vines. As I got closer, I was also surprised that he seemed jet-black in the moonlight, whereas when I’d last seen him he was his usual tawny self. Also, although Leon is a hefty eight stone, or 112 pounds, of shaggy mountain dog, this animal seemed heavier and more barrel-shaped. And it was grunting, like a great big pig. I began to realize that this was not Leon, but a sanglier, or wild boar, known to roam the vineyards at night and able to make a boar-shaped hole in a chain-link fence without slowing down. I was armed with a dog lead, a mechanical pencil (in case of inspiration), and a lighted helmet, turned off. As it faced me and started stamping the ground, I felt I had to decide quickly whether or not to turn on the headlamp. It would either definitely charge at it or it would find it aversive. As the light snapped on, the grunting monster slowly wheeled around and trotted into the vines, more in irritation than fear. And then Leon arrived, late and inadequate cavalry, and shot off into the vine-yards after it. Normally Leon will chase imaginary rabbits relentlessly for many minutes at a time at the merest hint of a rustle in the undergrowth, but on this occasion he shot back immediately, professing total ignorance of anything amiss, and stayed very close by my side on the way back. Very wise.

  The next day I took the children to track the boar, and they were wide-eyed as we found and photographed the trotter prints in the loose gray earth, and had them verified by the salty farmers in the Café of the Universe in the village. “Il était gros,” they concluded, belly laughing and filling the air with clouds of pastis when I mimicked my fear.

  So, serpents included, this life was as much like Eden as I felt was possible. With the broadband finally installed, and bats flying around my makeshift office in the empty barn, the book I had come to write was finally seriously under way, and Katherine’s treatment and environment seemed as good as could reasonably be hoped for. What could possibly tempt us away from this hard-won, almost heavenly niche? My family decided to buy a zoo, of course.

  2

  The Adventure Begins

  It was in the spring of 2005 that it landed on our doorstep: the brochure that would change our lives forever. Like any other brochure from a real estate agent, at first we dismissed it. But, unlike any other brochure from a real estate agent, here we saw Dartmoor Wildlife Park advertised for the first time. My sister Melissa had sent me a copy in France, with a note attached: “Your dream scenario.” I had to agree with her that although I thought I was already living in my dream scenario, this odd offer of a country house with zoo attached seemed even better—if we could get it, which seemed unlikely. And if there was nothing wrong with it, which also seemed unlikely. There must have been some serious structural problems in the house, or the grounds or enclosures, or some fundamental flaw with the business that was impossible to rectify.

  Yet, even with this near certainty of eventual failure, the entire family was sufficiently intrigued to investigate further. A flight of fancy? Perhaps, but it was one for which, we decided, we could restructure our entire lives.

  My father, Ben Harry Mee, had died a few months before, and Mum was going to have to sell the family home where they had lived for the last twenty years, a five-bedroom house in Surrey set on two acres, which had just been valued at £1.2 million. This astonishing amount not only reflected the pleasant surroundings, but also, most important, its proximity to London, comfortably within the economic security cordon of Route M25. Twenty-five minutes by train from London Bridge, this was the stockbroker belt, an enviable position on the property ladder achieved by my father, who, as the son of an enlightened Doncaster miner, had worked hard and invested shrewdly on behalf of his offspring all his life.

  Ben did in fact work at the stock exchange for the last fifteen years of his career, but not as a broker, a position he felt could be morally dubious. Dad was administration controller, overseeing the administrative duties for the London Stock Exchange, and for the exchanges in Manchester, Dublin, and Liverpool, plus a total of eleven regional and Irish amalgamated buildings. (At a similar stage in my life I was having trouble running my admin as a single self-employed journalist.) So, as a family, we were relatively well-off, though not actually rich, and with no liquid assets to support any whimsical ventures. In 2005, Halifax Bank, with one of the largest real estate agencies in Britain, estimated that there were 67,000 such properties valued at over £1 million in the UK, but we seemed to be the only family who decided to cash it all in and a have a crack at buying a zoo.

  It seemed like a lost cause from the beginning, but one that we knew we’d regret if we didn’t pursue. We had a plan of sorts. Mum had been going to sell the house and downsize to something smaller and more manageable, like a two- or three-bedroom cottage, then live in peace and security with a buffer of cash, but with space for only one or two offspring to visit with their various broods at any time. The problem, and what we all worried about, was that this isolation in old age could be the waiting room for a gradual deterioration (and, as she saw it, inevitable dementia) and death.

  The new plan was to upsize the family assets and Mum’s home to a twelve-bedroom house surrounded by a stagnated business about which we knew nothing. I would abandon France altogether and put my book on hold, Duncan would stop working in London, and we would then live together and run the zoo full-time. Mum would be spared the daily concerns of running the zoo, but would benefit from the stimulating environment and having her family around in an exciting new life looking after two hundred exotic animals. What could possibly go wrong? Come on, Mum . . . it’ll be fine.

  In fact, it was a surprisingly easy sell. Mum has always been adventurous, and she likes big cats. When she was seventy-three, I took her to a lion sanctuary where you could walk in the bush with lions and stroke them in their en
closures; many were captive bred, descended from lions rescued from being shot by farmers. I was awestruck by the lions’ size and frankly terrified, never quite able to let go of the idea that I wasn’t meant to be this close to these predators. Every whisker twitch triggered in me a jolt of adrenaline that was translated into an involuntary flinch. Mum just tickled them under the chin and said, “Ooh, aren’t they lovely?” The next year this adventurous lady tried skiing for the first time. So the concept of buying a zoo was not dismissed out of hand.

  None of us liked the idea of Mum being on her own, so we were already looking at her living with one of us, perhaps on a larger property with pooled resources. Which is how the details of Dartmoor Wildlife Park, courtesy of Knight Frank, a real estate agent in the South of England, happened to drop through Mum’s letterbox. My sister Melissa was the most excited, ordering several copies of the details and sending them out to all her four brothers: the oldest, Vincent; Henry; Duncan; and me. I was in France, and received my copy with the “your dream scenario” note. I had to admit it looked good, but quickly tossed it onto my teetering, “soon to be sorted” pile. This was already carpeted in dust from the mistral, that magnificent southern French wind that periodically blasted down the channel in southwest France created by the mountains surrounding the rivers Rhône and Saône. And then it came right through the ancient lime mortar of my north-facing barn-office wall, redistributing the powdery mortar as a minor sandstorm of dust evenly scattered throughout the office over periods of about four days at a time. Small rippled dunes of mortar dust appeared on top of the brochure, then other documents appeared on top of the dunes, and then more small dunes.