by Benjamin Mee
The call finished, I continued playing with Kevin, warming him up under my coat and marveling at the symmetrical perfection of his head and his pure strength as he gripped my arm. Kevin is strong enough to stop the circulation in your hand, turning it purple, and if your hands were tied there is no doubt he could choke you to death. But he doesn’t want to. He probably thought I was a tree, his natural habitat in the Amazon from which he hangs by his red tail and drops onto his prey (what with jaguars and boa constrictors falling from the trees, it sounds like the best place to look in the Amazon is up). Kevin’s responsiveness to handling and stroking suggested he thought I was at least a very friendly tree. And I was surprised that after our twenty-minute encounter I felt elated for the rest of the day.
This could just have been the novelty of the experience, or perhaps an echo of Professor E. O. Wilson’s biophilia, our positive physiological response to nature. I preferred to think that it was the latter. DNA analysis suggests that dogs broke off from wolves 130,000 years ago, which means they were adapting to human society long before we settled down and began practicing agriculture. During this time dogs perfected that big-eyed baleful look to help them get away with chewing up our slippers and manipulating us into giving them strokes and treats. This is something Kevin’s locked features could not do, but we have certainly spent a formative part of our evolution surrounded by responsive, and not so responsive, animals, and I was delighted that this warm feeling Kevin had given me was something we would one day be sharing with the public. Kevin was part of the Animal Encounters program, Robin informed me, and needed socializing as much as possible, to get him used to being handled by the children and adults, who, ideally, would be flocking around him at Easter, when we were due to open. I was only too happy to oblige, and regularly took Kevin over to the house to warm him in front of the fire—in the only warm room in the house—and introduced him to visiting friends and relatives. I liked this job.
Our two biggest snakes, both pythons over ten feet long, needed at least two people to handle them, because they could definitely get the better of you. I made several attempts to organize a session with these snakes, but in the fraught and hectic first few weeks, interrupting the keepers’ routines too much seemed frivolous. Eventually, both snakes were given away to Paignton Zoo, thirty miles away and a pillar of the zoological community. Having just built a new reptile display, they had nothing to put in it and were grateful for our donation, which also demonstrated goodwill on our part and may help to facilitate future reciprocity. I secretly have my eye on some of their expensive flamingos (straight or gay). Scales for feathers.
The big pythons had to go because we had decided to turn the sparse, cold reptile house into a workshop, and the snakes, along with two four-foot iguanas, lived there in four large built-in vivariums that could not be moved. The concrete floor of the building and big double doors made it ideal for the large-scale heavy work that would be required to get the zoo back on its feet, and another barn, insulated and with a dirt floor ripe for installing under-floor heating, was earmarked as a future reptile house. When we had the money.
The existing workshop was simply unworkable. A cinder-block shack with a leaking, rusted corrugated iron roof, it was strewn with miscellaneous clutter, from elderly broken power tools to coils of rusted wire, and many, many other objects that were impossible to identify beneath what seemed like centuries of grime, the kind of rich, brown, oil-based filth you get beside railway tracks. And it was rat infested. A glance inside usually revealed an arrogant rodent or two, safe in the knowledge that before you could clamber over the detritus to get to them, they could be gone, having ducked into the impromptu tunnels and nooks among the debris that had lain long enough to shelter generations of foragers, and providing an important base camp for raids on the nearby animal food preparation room. The only tool in the whole workshop that actually worked was an old but serviceable bench-mounted angle grinder, though the lack of electrical supply and the position of the grinder, at the far end of the room across yards of grimy, rusting clutter, made it utterly impossible to use.
With relish we gave instructions to clean out the room and relocate the workshop to the reptile house, while relocating the few reptiles to the warmth of the shop. “That’s a bloody good idea,” said John, who was now our eighth member of staff. “I’ve always thought that room would make a good workshop.” A grandson of Ellis Daw, John had been introduced to us by Rob as someone who could fix the floor in the front kitchen of the house. This was the room in which Ellis had for several decades stored his buckets of mackerel and chicks for the herons and jackdaws he fed in the mornings, the leakage from which had permeated the joists from the entrance to the back of the room. That was why it stank so badly, but the floor was also unsafe, so Duncan immediately commissioned John to rip out the floor, burn it, and replace it with new, fresh, sweet-smelling wood—which he did within a week. John was a tall, muscular, grinning man of thirty, whose four upper front teeth were missing and replaced by a dental plate with teeth much shorter than the originals, and whose canines were unusually long and pointed. This gave him a striking vampiric appearance, abetted by his posture, which is unusually erect. First encountering John in the dank mist with wolves howling in the background, I seriously questioned what kind of environment I had brought my children into.
But John turned out to be one of the most skilled, loyal, and levelheaded employees we could have asked for in those early days, able to do plumbing, welding, tree work, and carpentry, and also licensed for firearms, an invaluable skill on the park, and one we were to draw on several times in the coming months. When Rob first put him forward, he said to me, eyes down, “I’ll tell you now, because you’re bound to find out, that John’s my half-brother.” I had no problem with this, but it all added to the atmosphere of secrecy, with whisperings in the village about “things that had happened” at the park in the past, and the general sense that we had moved into the Wicker Man’s backyard.
John, Rob, and Paul, Ellis’s son-in-law, set about clearing out the old reptile house and converting it into a workshop. Again, a big practical change that also had the benefit of being cheap. The loft above was, as most places in the park, crammed with clutter (and rats), but some of it was salvageable. Old agricultural tools were put to one side and two huge workbenches were to be extricated and lowered down, when a path had been cleared for them. I asked John how he was anticipating bringing these enormous objects to ground level, and he held up a massive pulley wheel in one hand. “Rig this up to the roof joists, then call for some muscle,” he said. As a reasonably able-bodied person, I waited for the call, but it never came. The next time I popped my head around the door, the benches were down and already coated with tin sheeting, ready for work. I clearly didn’t count as muscle, which, as a lifelong hands-on sort of person, came as a bit of a shock. I was a director now, and it took a bit of getting used to. A small shantytown of sheds and cages containing rabbits and two ferrets was also cleared and the animals relocated around the park. And suddenly we had a workshop and a clear access yard. All we needed now were some tools.
Duncan masterminded the conversion of the old workshop into a vegetable storeroom. Every day Paul went off in the van to Tesco and Sainsbury’s, collecting past-the-sell-by-date fruit and vegetables in sufficient quantities to reliably feed every herbivore in the zoo. Previously the produce had been stored alongside the meat preparation area, where fallen calves, horses, and occasional sheep were dismembered by Andy Goatman, the knacker man, and Hannah and Kelly, the cat keepers. The problem was that this is illegal, under the secretary of state’s guidelines for modern zoos. Total separation between meat and vegetables is essential, to minimize the risk of cross-contamination, and a site visit from the environmental health officer, or worse, an inspector from DEFRA could close us down before we started. Duncan went into the legislation in detail, guided by Andy, whose encyclopedic knowledge of legislation around his trade has proved invaluable
many times. A local builder repaired the roof with plastic sheeting at cost, and when the room was finally emptied, scrubbed, rewired, and illuminated, it looked huge. The back wall, it turned out, was made from local stone. Rob was impressed. “I haven’t seen that wall since I was a little kid,” he said. The process of accumulation of rubbish and subsequent general decline at the park had been long and gradual. But now we were turning back the tide. It was fantastic to be part of it.
The children were almost immediately absorbed into the local school, as one of our neighbors who had us over for drinks turned out to be one of the governors. They instantly took to the school, which had twenty-seven pupils and was only half the size of the school they attended in France. But the best news of this period was the arrival of Katherine, who had been winding up our affairs in France and then gone on to her sister in Italy. I’d left France around two and a half months before, packing enough clothes for a fortnight, in order to help my mum sell her house, and hadn’t seen Katherine, apart from her fleeting visit to deliver the children to the park, for that entire time. Now she arrived for good, and it was very much as a force for good that her presence was felt throughout the park. Her learning curve was intense, partly through having spoken only French for so long, but also being plunged into a hectic, chaotic business environment which she knew nothing about and where everyone else was already rushing around with, if not absolute confidence, then at least a long way down the road toward discovering what needed to be done. But Katherine had been supportive of the idea of the zoo from a business angle since almost the very beginning. In the first week or so back in April, when I had begun to throw myself into the negotiations wholeheartedly, she had had her doubts. This was just another of my silly dreams that were a distraction from the daily necessity of earning a living and the writing of my book. This was her role in our relationship—I was the dreamer, she was the reality check—though I often argued that preparing only for the worst could become self-fulfilling. But generally she was right, I was wrong, and I was glad to have her wisdom to keep me in check.
Buying the zoo was only the second time in our thirteen years together that I simply overrode her—the first being the purchase of the French barns, which had involved selling our cherished London flat. In both cases I had an absolute certainty of the success of the venture, and was impatient to overleap any naysayers, no matter how well-intentioned. Within a couple of weeks, she confessed to friends, she could see me acquiring new skills in dealing with administrative problems, which were previously a despised terrain for me, and could see that I meant business. She liked this new me—I think she thought that the life I’d engineered for myself writing in the sun with deadlines few and far between was too cushy, particularly for someone with my personality (basically lazy). And as usual, she was probably right.
It’s easy to idolize someone if you love them, but, though unrepentantly uxorious, I was not alone in thinking that Katherine was special. Her background was as a graphic designer, which, as with many professions, involves a period of proving oneself creatively before moving up the ladder into administration. In the world of glossy magazines, this meant becoming an art director. Though she went on to several other titles, ending up at Eve, the women’s magazine, on Men’s Health magazine, the glossy where we met, she was in charge of several staff and freelancers, as well as a budget, in the mid-1990s, of about £130,000 a year. This was more money than I had ever marshaled, but she did it well and diligently. “The thing about Katherine,” a photographer once confided to me on a rare photo shoot where I was working with her, “is that she’s good with other people’s money.” Many art directors succumb to the surface glamour of their industry and overspend on things like expensive lunches or endless rolls of film for costly locations and photographers. Katherine was different, ordering in sandwiches, partly to keep costs down but also to keep everyone in the studio, which charged by the hour, so they didn’t have to be rounded up afterward. And she nurtured new talent. With an unfailing eye she could spot someone just starting out who would go on to greater things, get them cheaply, and then inspire their loyalty, so that they would often work for her in the future at reduced rates.
Her management style was simply to set an impeccable example, which other people felt obliged to follow. She worked harder than anyone else, often putting in twelve- and fourteen-hour days, which in our early time together had been a source of conflict between us. I, the indolent freelancer, though churning out work, would often do so from my “office” on a laptop on the slopes of Primrose Hill with Jasper, my panting assistant. At the end of the day I stopped and prepared our dinner, for which Katherine would invariably be late. I never actually left a note saying “Your dinner’s in the dog,” but many times I ferried in meals to her at 9 or 10 PM to find her doing something like organizing spreadsheets for other departments so that they could comply with new internal accountancy requirements. “THAT’S NOT YOUR JOB,” I would rant, but it was a vital part of her to take up the slack where other people were prepared to let it slide.
Katherine’s presence in the park was galvanizing—not least for me. She cleared a space in the (would you believe cluttered) office, fired up her PowerBook, in those days the most powerful computer at the park, and got down to business. Her roles, we had decided, were as money manager (getting a frivolous purchase past Katherine, as I knew from many years of trying, was physically impossible) and designer. Though we had a capable designer and illustrator in the form of Robin, he had other skills and predispositions, which we were beginning to unearth, and Katherine’s unerring eye for simplicity and homogeneity, I knew, would be key to establishing the identity of this zoo as something separate from the mishmash of local tourist and animal attractions. A well-designed, understated, but slick visual image, homogenous throughout the leaflets, staff uniforms, advertising material, and even the signage for the animals, combined with my enthusiasm and that of the people we had with us, could make this place into a flagship twenty-first-century enterprise. Suddenly it all seemed not just possible, but inevitable, and the goals I had set for the future of the park loomed into the fore ground as part of our business and development plans.
As success grew, the collection could be steered from its current 5 percent endangered animals toward the ultimate ambition of focusing on captive breeding of endangered species for possible reintroduction into the wild, like at Gerald Durrell’s Jersey Zoo. Free-ranging lion tamarins, rare lemurs, Grevy’s zebras, giraffes, and my personal holy grail, large primates. Bonobo chimpanzees are the smallest and most intelligent of the great apes, and also endangered, but gorillas are also clever and endangered, and available to zoos that have the right track record and appropriate facilities. With their habitat under threat and individuals still being killed for bushmeat or even apparently sometimes out of sheer spite by psychopaths in Rwanda and the Congo, these big gentle guys urgently need safe havens. And if we played our cards right, one day (in about ten years) we could provide one.
As an avid student of the work of Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s work with Kanzi the chimp and Dr. Penny Pattersons’s research with Koko the gorilla, I know these big animals are capable of self-recognition, empathy, and arguably, humor and self-awareness. This is exactly what I am most interested in, my genuine “dream scenario,” as my sister Melissa had first described the zoo—looking for language and humor in big apes in your own garden, and calling it work.
This scenario was still a very long way off, but I felt astonishingly fortunate to be at least on a road that could lead to it. With Katherine on board, it felt like we could go down that road. I’d always privately called her my Born Free lady, after Virginia McKenna in the, for me, seminal film Born Free, about how Joy and George Adamson reared and reintroduced Elsa, an abandoned lioness, into the wilds of Africa. That seemed to me like a very good job to have. They lived in tents and log cabins in tropical sunshine, they were doing fascinating and worthwhile work, and they had a Land Rover. With a li
on on the top. As a boy I’d always hoped to do something as exciting and worthwhile with animals in exotic locations. I could see it was a long shot, but also that I would need a special person to do it with me, and when I first met Katherine, I knew that I’d found someone who could meet that challenge. If I could create the appropriate circumstances, I knew she would go with it and be perfect at it, even though it wasn’t, strictly speaking, in her initial life plan. After we got together I repeatedly warned her that one day I would be dragging her off somewhere exotic to do interesting things with animals. France was a staging post. Now we had made it to, er, Devon. But the project was perfect, engaging and harnessing her talents as well as mine.
Having Katherine back was the best thing. Our little family unit was functioning again, and here we were working together, in an environment in which I was fired up and Katherine was keen to engage as a business venture. In the absence of having any money to manage, Katherine set about organizing the office and, clutching at straws from the past to piece together, designing our logo. One big problem with this, however, was that we didn’t yet have a name.
