by Benjamin Mee
Owen and Sarah, who were now the senior keepers, were several times referred to as “stars” by people in the zoo world, such as Nick Lindsay and Mike Thomas. Owen and Sarah were people they had read about in the literature, whose reputations preceded them. Even Peter Wearden, our local environmental health officer, seemed to have heard of them, or at least appreciated the significance of us being able to attract them to work for us. Owen, I’d been told, had turned down a place at San Diego Zoo to work here. San Diego is a world leader in many fields, including his, a place that could offer him almost unimaginable resources to pursue his interests. One day I asked him why he’d chosen this run-down place instead, in an area with one of the highest rainfalls in Britain, and not the resource-rich, sunnier climes of Southern California. “When I walked round the place, I obviously saw the amazing potential of the site,” he said. “But I also saw that there was a great sadness here, and that sadness was something I wanted to reverse.” He wasn’t talking about Katherine, he was talking about the effects of the long, slow, twenty-year decline of the park, on the people, the animals, and the infrastructure—piles of clutter everywhere, hoarded in hope that had gradually ebbed away, leaving a residue of fatalism and algae behind it.
Owen and Sarah may have been stars, but they were not prima donnas. They were physically tough and hardworking. Having both relocated from far-flung UK zoos, they initially had no accommodation and so they camped on site in the interminable rain, doing their laundry and washing up in the rest rooms of the restaurant. I offered them use of the shower in the house, when it worked, but they were happier with their subsistence living—and besides, the hot water was more reliable in the restaurant. Out in the park in all weathers, they led from the front, and both regularly spent many extra hours until dark, mending enclosures, building new ones, and continuing the on going project of the park without the need for constant guidance. And they fulfilled the license requirement of training the existing staff in the ways of modern zoo practices.
This “trickle down” training was something we had been told we needed to do or else close down. Or rather, not open at all. The people we employed to look after the animals—Rob, Kelly, Hannah, Paul, John, and even Robin on occasion—were skilled and experienced, but they were not qualified. For all their hands-on knowledge and years in the trenches, there was barely a diploma among them. And these days, zoo-license-wise, paper qualifications are critical. I was delighted that these trickle-down processes were going on, because it was a vital part of our license requirement that we employed fully trained staff. Increasingly now I roamed the park believing that the impossible, which then became the merely improbable, had now, objectively, become the very likely. In fact, I had never had any doubt that we were going to succeed in opening the park, but increasingly, surrounded by so many pessimistic perspectives, I had begun to understand other people’s perceptions and I hadn’t liked what I saw from the other side. Even though I knew they were wrong, the sheer weight of numbers in the naysaying camp was almost over whelming.
To be fair, they had some good points. For one thing, we needed sixty thousand visitors a year to break even, and at the moment we had nowhere to feed them. The restaurant, supposed to be a going concern, contained barely a single serviceable appliance. The dishwasher, gas hob, ovens, microwaves, and two of the three fat fryers didn’t work. Luckily our new ideas for the menu, involving healthy, locally sourced food, meant that we wouldn’t be needing the two broken fat fryers, but everything else needed to be replaced. I had a dream for the restaurant, which was to get it as smart as a Conran venue and open it in the evenings as a separate entity from the zoo. The figures for the last three years’ trading, though in sharp decline, showed that the restaurant and bar were the engine of the park, accounting for more than a third of its total income. With its grimy Artex ceiling, strip lights, heavy dark-blue carpets and curtains, and a kitchen full of grease-coated scrap, it was going to be a long haul to get there. The other thing that the trading figures showed was that the month of August was absolutely critical, with combined ticket and restaurant sales accounting for approaching half of the annual income. August was make or break, and if we missed it, we were sunk. “I think that this August will provide about sixty percent of your income this year,” Mike Thomas told me on one of his visits, sitting in the uninspiring environs of the restaurant. A quick glance around us left me in no doubt as to the scale of the task ahead. If sixty thousand people arrived over the summer wanting to be fed, we simply couldn’t afford for them to walk out and find somewhere else to eat as we had once done, in the park’s final open days last spring. As well as the requirements for the animals, this was a business, and the customer service side had to be treated with equal importance, or the vet bills wouldn’t get paid and the worthy conservation plans would be unworkable.
So Duncan and I started going to pubs—strictly for research purposes, you understand—to observe catering operations in action. We put in many, many, dedicated, selfless long hours in this quest for catering enlightenment before settling in a carvery down the road in nearby Plympton that had an exceptional catering staff. The other interesting thing about this venue, though far removed from our aspirations for our own facilities, was that it was extremely well run. And always packed. A constant stream of local people came here to eat, so that a good natured line almost always stretched from the restaurant to the bar. This meant that, in order to conduct our reconnaissance effectively, we had to loiter at a part of the bar forbidden to all but diners, which we did. What struck me was that, when a certain manager named Mark was on, we were always asked to move within about five minutes. Initially he was satisfied with our line, “We’re waiting for some friends,” but on about the fourth visit he laughed and said, “Are these friends of yours ever going to turn up?” Mark was everywhere: in the kitchen, amongst the tables, behind the bar, even facing down a gang of towering teenagers who had broken a window the evening before. I warmed to him, confessed that we were actually engaged in mild industrial espionage, and asked if he’d like to help us at the zoo. He didn’t want to leave his job, but he agreed, and worked out some simple menu ideas that could be produced relatively easily using mass-market catering suppliers. These suppliers provided food for several well-known zoos, some of which I’d visited and sampled the food of, and it wasn’t so bad. With minimum intervention we could tidy up the restaurant, provide simple food to get us through the all-important month of August, then re-vamp the place during the quieter winter months. It sounded like a plan, but a plan that worried me. Now we had the money for the redevelopment, though we were running out of time. By the time winter came, at the rate funds were flowing out, it was quite possible that the money would have been spent on other things. Mark visited us several times, brimming with enthusiasm, but because of his full-time job, his suggestions inevitably entailed a lot of legwork on our side. As the weeks inched forward toward crunch time, we had to decide whether to go for the holding strategy or the bold move, orchestrating a full revamp and a “hard” opening, showcasing our radical changes. What we needed was someone to take this problem in its entirety, run with it, and turn it into a solution for the other ills at the park.
And then came Adam. I was in a bad mood when I first met Adam, standing out by the otter enclosure in a large area of the park I had always wanted to dedicate to free-ranging monkeys, and to my father, Ben Harry Mee, who had provided the funds for the park—albeit unwittingly and posthumously, and absolutely certainly (had he been alive) unwillingly. I wanted more tropical trees populated with colorful birds, endangered, people-friendly primates running loose, and a modest monument to my dad somewhere, the Ben Harry Mee Memorial Jungle. It would have been the last thing he’d ever have expected, and I knew that despite his disapproval at the obvious folly of the misuse of his hard-earned capital designated for the future security of his family, he would have been quietly amused by this. I liked to picture him sitting down to read in a tranquil jungle glade
to the sound of kookaburras and birds of paradise, beset by curious little monkeys, before finally snapping his book shut and saying, “It’s bloody ridiculous.” But he’d have kept going back, and one day we’d have found him feeding the monkeys with a stash of something he’d carefully observed that they loved to eat.
All this was constantly under threat from pressures within the zoo for other uses of the land. The petting zoo had to go somewhere, as did the education center involving a nature pond; between them, they would eat at least two-thirds of this space. That morning I had also endured an interminable barrage of phone calls from double-glazing-window salesmen; people who wanted to do marketing, advertising, and building work; and two companies that had a surefire way to reduce our business rates for a small fee (both utterly and obviously spurious), as well as a constant stream of personal callers, usually people who had worked in the park before and wanted their old jobs back, as long as such and such a person wasn’t there anymore. I had had enough. And then Duncan came up the path, accompanied by a tall, fresh-faced man called Adam, who had sent me an e-mail a week or two before to offer his services as a catering manager.
Catering was one of the few areas we more or less had a handle on, it seemed to me at the time (though I was so wrong). “What? Yes, fine. I’ll look at your CV,” or terse words to that effect were probably how I initially responded, making a note to remind Duncan that the last thing we needed was a change of direction now. But Duncan was convinced by Adam. His story was that he had worked in retail and customer services from a young age until very recently, in his thirties, when his father had sold the nearby thriving Endsleigh Garden Center to a national chain, and they had both retired to pursue other avenues. In his father’s case, this meant buying a yellow biplane and setting up another business in the sunnier climes of southern France (bastard). In Adam’s, it meant buying a nice house in the locality and setting up a farm shop on the grounds of the garden center to sell organic produce for the more discerning market.
The more I delved, the more it seemed to make sense. Adam wanted to open the restaurant in the evenings—he had the bearing of the perfect maître d’—and he had excellent customer service credentials and experience of the local market. And he wanted to start right away. After a week of dithering, we took him on, and it was as if a weight had been lifted on that side of the park. Adam wanted to go for the full revamp, and immediately set about pulling in quotes from reliable local tradesmen he had worked with before, ploughing through the administrative processes with the council, and even finding time to take a oneday licensing course so that he could be the named licensee for the bar.
Suddenly this tall man with the enthusiasm of a young pup, impeccably polite and diplomatic at all times, became one of our most valuable assets. Undaunted by the prospect of fitting out the restaurant, shop, and kitchen simultaneously, he also ran a computer business and was eager to fit an electronic point of sale (EPOS) till system which would give us instant feedback on visitor numbers, how much they spent and on what (the critical spend-per-head statistic that we really needed to get above £5 per person on top of their ticket price), and even their postal codes, so we knew where our market was coming from. We came to rely on Adam, and not just for his problem-solving abilities and propensity to take up any slack he saw, even if it didn’t directly concern him. “Can I make a suggestion?” he would say, leaning in like a wine steward about to rescue an ignorant customer from the perils of a complicated wine list, whenever he saw a problem that wasn’t being properly addressed. No, what I began to rely on most from Adam was his optimism. Having someone who said, “Of course, no problem. I’ll get on to it right away,” instead of “It’ll be expensive, and you’ll have to do X and Y first and that’s going to be impossible,” made all the difference. Optimism was undoubtedly Adam’s most valuable contribution.
I once lost quite a lot of blood, about two pints, after a silly accident in a martial arts class (I walked forward when I should have stepped back, and took a precision blow to the nose that ruptured something deep in my nasal cavities). Sitting in the emergency room, dripping prolifically into a series of compressed cardboard trays, I gradually got weaker. Young(ish) men with skinhead haircuts and nosebleeds, particularly inflicted by some sort of violence, take a low priority in Accident and Emergency. There’s always a car crash or a heart attack ahead of you, and it wasn’t until my vision started tunnelling and everything went into black-and-white that I finally staggered up and informed the nearest nurse that I was about to pass out, then lay back on my trolley to do just that. Suddenly I was an emergency, and I was dimly aware of a phalanx of medical professionals bearing down on me, ER style, armed with drips and other bits of reassuring kit. Katherine, who had brought me in, didn’t help by saying “Phwoorr,” because at the head of the phalanx was a bronzed Australian orderly whose half-sleeve white tunic showed off his amply muscled forearms, as she had been pointing out to me for the last two hours. Just as my eyes closed and I started to be sucked into unconsciousness, they fitted a saline drip into my arm and gave me some injections, and the sensation was extraordinary. It was exactly like having an enormous thirst quenched, but instead of the relief spreading outward from the stomach, it was spreading from my arm. That was what it was like having Adam take over the restaurant at this difficult time. A seemingly peripheral piece of the puzzle was infecting the whole place with renewed positivity. The oil tanker of the park was gradually being turned around before it drifted onto the rocks.
The other thing that Adam brought in that cheered me up were builders, and good ones—well kitted out, hardworking, and versatile. Special mention has to go to Tim the carpenter, small but perfectly formed, and head of a small highly skilled team, which laid a solid oak floor in the three hundred square meters of the restaurant, built a curvy service counter based on a whimsical sketch I drew in three minutes on the back of an envelope, and clad the revolting bar in the leftover pieces of oak, on budget, and all in about six weeks.
During this time, materials were arriving, electricians were fiddling with new sunken spot lighting, and plasterboard gradually blotted out the Artex, that decorating crime against humanity, on the ceiling. There was floor sanding going on, painting, the first and second fix, all things I knew about and had witnessed many times, sure indicators of ongoing progress. Whenever I passed through the restaurant, it felt good, and I was drawn into discussions with conscientious experts in fields I also actually knew something about. Hell, I was a DIY expert, officially in print. I genuinely could make informed decisions in a familiar field, instead of having to learn everything from scratch as an outsider. Whenever I got the chance, I would join in a bit, usually during the lunch hour (even good builders have lunch hours, but I couldn’t seem to justify the time). I remember one happy afternoon smashing the execrable tiles off the wall behind the counter with a large hammer and a bricklayer’s bolster, and another using a belt sander to put a snub-nosed radius on the edge of the beautiful new oak-clad bar. These were fleeting visits to a simpler life, and I always had to reenter the general fray beyond sooner than I would have liked. But, like all good and righteous DIY interventions, they were good for the soul.
Peter Wearden made several visits to the park in the early days to see how things were going, give advice, and usually drop off interminable piles of unappetizing matter—I mean, essential reading—such as turgid ring binders entitled “Secretary of State’s Handbook for Modern Zoo Practice,” and “The Zoo Forum’s Handbook.” These, along with the health and safety literature, and food, drinks, and entertainment licensing forms, really are essential but not tempting reading. Perfect for dipping into relevant paragraphs in support of some application, or rapidly bringing on sleep at the end of a busy day.
But then one day he passed me something that nearly brought me to tears: a paper from the journal Biologist about why we need zoos. I really nearly could have cried. The big folders of nonsense merely added to the already enormous unfamil
iar workload, joining pressing material from banks, lawyers, and creditors, which already overfilled my day. Suddenly, here was an academic paper I needed to read and digest, in support of future media interviews, press releases, or public debates.
Fifteen years earlier, I had taken a master’s course at Imperial College London in science journalism, and since then I had been making my living to a greater or lesser degree by translating into English science papers exactly like this one, and many much more impenetrable, for publications in glossy magazines and newspapers and occasional broadcasts on radio and television. Seeing the paper felt like home, far more than the house we were sitting in. It was even presented on a stapled black-and-white A4 photocopy, a format very familiar, and handy for my pencil notes in the margin. For the last ten months I don’t think I’d looked at or even thought about a scientific paper amidst the pressing urgencies of zoo acquisition. Though I was by now already mentally, physically, and emotionally pretty drained, at last I was being asked to move back (at least a tiny bit) onto familiar territory, and this rare ray of positivity was not just a reminder of how life used to be, but an indication of how it could be again.
