by Benjamin Mee
In the meantime, I went along with this and other, to me, quite radical measures, simply because there wasn’t time to contest everything, and nor was it wise to challenge the orthodoxy on everything I felt uncertain about. Zookeepers are a little bit like paramilitaries. They wear big boots and combat trousers, they communicate with walkie-talkies, and they do a dangerous job that sometimes involves firearms. To come up through their ranks requires a lot of discipline and dedication, as well as conformity to the established orthodoxy. I couldn’t do it. Arguably, I have a modicum of self-discipline (though I can imagine my dad snorting with derision at this assertion), but external discipline often seems to rankle with me. Duncan tried to be a zookeeper once, for about six months in the reptile house at London Zoo, and it wasn’t for him either. “I remember my first day,” says Duncan. “The man in charge of me held up a broom, told me what it was, and then showed me how to use it, by putting the head on the floor and then pushing it out in front of you repeatedly. It took a while for it to dawn on me that I was standing here being shown by a grown man how to sweep a floor.” Having been fully trained, he thought, in these esoteric cleaning arts, after a few days he made an innovation. “The head of the broom kept falling off, so I popped a nail into it and trebled the efficiency. But the bloke was livid. ‘Who told you to do that?’ he yelled, and with good reason, it turned out.” Apparently the head was left loose because it was sometimes necessary to go in with the alligators to clean around these slow-moving throwbacks, and the broom was the keeper’s main defense. “The idea is that if an alligator ever made a move for you, you offered it the broom and it would bite the head off and retreat, thinking it had got something. And then at least you still had the handle, instead of it being yanked out of your hand and thrashing about the place.” So there was method in this apparent madness (though this arguably most important part of the training had been lacking), but some of what Duncan encountered just seemed like plain madness.
“The Galapagos tortoises had beak rot and weren’t breeding, so I decided to use my lunch hours to look into it,” he says. London Zoo is home to one of the most comprehensive zoological libraries in the world, but as a trainee keeper in the early 1980s, Duncan wasn’t allowed access to it. “They made it really hard, and it was as if they genuinely didn’t understand what I wanted to do in there.” Eventually Duncan got in, and found that the only zoo to successfully breed these huge, long-lived reptiles—one at London at the time was thought to have been brought back by Charles Darwin—was San Diego. Reading their papers and contacting their staff, he learned that the beak rot was caused by eating bananas, which stick to the lower part of the jaw. In the wild, such matter is brushed off by the long grass through which the tortoises walk, but in London they weren’t, so the beak rots. Duncan took his findings to the senior keeper in charge of the reptiles, expecting to be able to implement the necessary changes, and possibly even be thanked for his efforts. In fact, the old man said, “I’ve been doing this job for twenty years. Who are you to tell me how to do my job?
Fuck off.” Science, they say, advances funeral by funeral. Duncan isn’t the type to wait around, so he left to become his own boss, importing marine fish from the tropics.
Now we both found ourselves running a zoo—or trying to—and while we knew we had to listen to and closely follow what we were told by our advisors, from keepers to curator to council, we also knew that there would be times when we would be able to innovate. Business managers know that often the best innovators are not insiders. Our trouble was that we weren’t really business managers either. But at least we were outsiders.
We also knew that, for now, we all had to work together, and to use the Environmental Health officer Peter Wearden’s phrase, “ticking the right boxes,” was what counted most in the run-up to the inspection. Sometimes those boxes could be ticked, after a struggle, via a different chain of events from those prescribed or recommended, like with the wolf dispute, or the monkeys, but this always took time, and invariably, during the hiatus before resolution, our fragile credibility would be eroded. Until the box was actually ticked, when it became an invisible issue, and everything moved toward the next box. Time we did not have, and we had to get as many boxes ticked as possible before our inspection, now set firmly for 4 June. We had to enter into a box-ticking frenzy, otherwise the bankers and the lawyers would gleefully produce their own clipboards, offering much less room to maneuver, and with much less friendly boxes.
There was an exhilarating sense of teamwork—a truly flexible, skilled, and dedicated team working together to achieve a common aim. On paper, this was our business, and everyone was an employee contriving, in the long run, to produce profits for us. In actuality, I don’t think anyone thought like this—least of all us. Day in, day out, it felt like we were all battling to save a beleaguered public resource, and most important, a collection of beleaguered animals, safe for the future. And if we failed, the consequences were unthinkable. Tourette Tony did an excellent job, swearing his way through countless setbacks, dancing his digger through ridiculously skillful and efficient maneuvers, and working himself and his team as hard as was humanly possible. Anna and Steve were absolutely invaluable, Anna handling the complicated paperwork, feeding back to us exactly which boxes we needed to tick, and exactly how, while Steve deployed himself as laborer, keeper, supervisor, roller driver—whatever he needed to be. Hannah, Kelly, Paul, John, and Rob alternated between keeping and maintenance tasks, and a crew of temporary laborers got stuck with unpleasant tasks like dredging slimy moats, sweeping acres of wet leaves, and tensioning hundreds of meters of new fence mesh, which bites into the hands, made more painful by the chilly breeze. Owen and Sarah led their troop of junior keepers from the front, working incredibly hard, leading, training, and instilling appropriate modern practices, though a little harshly it seemed to me at times—Owen told me that to train a novice you had to “break them down and build them up again, sometimes.” This didn’t chime with my preferred (though admittedly made-up-as-I-went-along) management technique, but then I wasn’t from that culture. Inevitably, this on going process had its occasional rows and threatened walkouts, but the overall atmosphere was of everyone knuckling down and doing whatever was necessary. It was going as well as it could. And then came the rain.
After the exceptionally sunny and buoyant May, we entered the wettest June in the UK for a hundred years. The Southwest suffered just over twice the average precipitation since records began in 1914, but it felt like it rained every single day. The gnawing doubts of whether we could accomplish the task in the allotted time returned. Working in waterproofs, many tasks like fencing and barrier replacements could still be achieved. But things like welding outside, concreting, chain-saw work, and often, using the digger, were out of the question.
The peacocks, so recently a symbol of hope, now looked bedraggled. One female sat on the grass verge outside the toilets for several weeks, and when I asked the keepers if she was okay, it turned out that she was roosting some eggs. In the rain. Within a few yards of where she sat was a perfectly viable bush, which would at least have provided some cover from the elements and, at least as important, foxes. But this dumb-assed bird—apparently the only one to succumb to the male’s elaborate, evolutionarily expensive spring display—persisted in trying to rear her delicate brood fully exposed to the elements and predators. Eventually three eggs hatched, and she wisely moved her little ones around each night, but as they grew and she roamed further afield—she and her little trio of actually quite pretty chicks, desperately trying to keep up with their mum—we gradually lost track of them, and I can’t honestly say whether any of them survived or not.
Even in the rain there was much to do, both inside and out, and I threw myself into work. By now, less than three months after Katherine’s death, I could notice significant physiological changes in my response. Mainly, I didn’t feel so leaden, as if the life had been sapped out of me with her passing—though my Stella Arto
is diet, much reduced but still a significant part of my routine to get to sleep after putting the kids to bed, was expanding my waistline so that, in reality, my physical leadenness was actually increasing. But the energy within was beginning to return. The many daily triggers were becoming more recognizable and more bearable, I was much less likely to be wrong-footed by something unexpected, and the amount of crying I needed to do gradually reduced. I would occasionally be overwhelmed by dipping into the enormity of what we had lost. A couple of brief but necessary trips to London, every part of which I seemed to have visited with Katherine, during this period were particularly horrible. But generally, I could feel it was getting better. And the children seemed to be thriving at the new school, and adapting with the malleable resilience of the very young.
Obviously they were still profoundly affected, and I made sure that I kept talking to them whenever they wanted me to. Increasingly, though, they seemed to be protecting me—and themselves—from my grief, which must have been alarming for them, but was impossible (and I thought, inadvisable) to hide in the early stages. They confided occasionally to friends and neighbors, and Amelia, who trickled their concerns back to me. Once they both came up with the idea of wearing one of Katherine’s jumpers in bed, and as I rummaged through her drawers of neatly folded clothes, last visited during those all too memorable weeks of dressing and undressing her, I felt myself becoming increasingly upset. Milo, watching closely, smiled and wagged his figure at me, saying good-naturedly, “Uh, uh, uuh, Daddy. Don’t turn on the tears.” It cheered me up no end and I promised him that I wouldn’t, and reassured him again that whenever he wanted to talk about Mummy I wouldn’t cry. Which is where we are now.
Outside in the park, the inspection date loomed, and the rain often made it impossible to see farther than a few yards. We persevered, and even a few weeks before the inspection, the mood on the ground was lifting; the consensus seemed to be that we had “ticked enough boxes” to show willingness. It is almost unheard of for a zoo that has had its license withdrawn to haul itself back from the abyss, but the feeling was that we were probably going to do it—though we couldn’t afford to slack off for an instant. Our short resumé looked good. We had the right people, the right intentions, and if not quite the right amount of money, at least we were spending it in the right way. One of the most important parts of our license requirement was the conservation measures we were going to implement. Steve and Anna have good contacts with an endangered species program in Sri Lanka, and Owen and Sarah’s back catalog of successes was filtering through to us with promises of breeding programs for the future, which also scored us points. As did creatures like Ronnie, the officially “Vulnerable” tapir, and Sovereign, our prize stud-book jag. But increasingly, local conservation measures are seen as at least equally important. Fortunately, we were in a good position to implement many. On the edge of Dartmoor, itself a thriving habitat of many species that are declining nationally, we were perfectly placed to help endangered animals of the much less glamorous variety. Like dormice, horseshoe bats, vulnerable ground-nesting birds, newts, snails, and even certain mosses and lichens. One species I already knew a tiny bit about was a certain kind of fritillary butterfly thought to have one of its last toeholds in the country in Dartmoor, which I happened to have written about briefly for the Guardian. I called the Butterfly Conservation Society (“Butterfly Conservay-shun, how can we help you?” they cooed), who informed me that we could work to provide habitats on our land that could be suitable for butterflies. We already had a couple of acres of dedicated conservation woodland, but the requirements for specific plants may have been detrimental to what was already there. They would welcome a donation. Er, maybe one day.
Another thwarted effort was the Dartmoor pony, down to fewer than nine hundred breeding mares (making it even rarer than that conservation figurehead the giant panda), and subject of a concerted local campaign to protect them from ruthless landowners who sometimes shoot them or sell them for meat rather than pay the newly introduced £20 fee for a horse passport, now required under European law. The idea is to register animals that may pass into the human food chain so that any veterinary drugs they have consumed can be monitored. The reality is that a Dartmoor pony can be sold for as little as a pint of milk, and many hard-pressed farmers simply can’t afford to comply with the passport law. Charities are looking for landowners who can offer paddocks to small herds of ponies, who are periodically transported back to certain areas of the moor to graze and manage it as only these tough little indigenous critters can. My sister Melissa researched and promoted the scheme, having once kept a Dartmoor pony—Aphrodite—who had a stubborn but gentle temperament. I remember Aphrodite fondly, nonchalantly standing outside in the snow, with icicles clinking from her whiskers, trying to reassure a namby-pamby semi-Thoroughbred in its heated stable, wearing a thick horse coat, who had caught a cold. This local project sounded perfect, and I brought up plans to devote eight acres, which would support about eight to twelve small ponies, to this admirable aim. But I hit a brick wall: it didn’t tick any boxes. Dartmoor ponies may be endangered, but the actual species, Horse (Caballus), can only be described as thriving. Dartmoor ponies were artificially bred by humans a few centuries ago, probably to work in the local tin mines, and count as a breed, rather than an endangered species. It’s like trying to save the Siamese cat, or the Staffordshire bull terrier. Of interest to local breeders perhaps, but zoologically insignificant. This seemed to me a particularly irritating pill to swallow, but again, time was not on our side, and we had to do what was necessary to get our license, rather than what we thought we might like.
One local scheme, which I did manage to include as a central plank of our conservation strategy, was reinstating hedgerows. There are an estimated couple of kilometers of hedgerow bordering and crisscrossing our thirty acres, most of it depleted and sparse, providing little of the rich habitat for local wildlife it once did. Some hedgerows (though not, it has to be said, ours) are more than seven hundred years old. Properly maintained, hedgerows are giant elongated ecosystems in their own right, acting as corridors for wildlife to pass along, and protecting many wildflowers, plants, insects, birds, and mammals that experience difficulties when out in the open. We also had pockets of different kinds of hawthorn, which could be transplanted from other parts of the site, and this project, fortunately, was given an enthusiastic thumbs-up by the authorities. It also ticked my own personal box for a long-term, slow intervention, a gradual enhancement of the broader ecosystem of the park, unlikely to provide shocks, but very likely to provide long-term benefits and educational opportunities—and security, as thick hedgerows are a good barrier against intruders, as well as certain errant exotic animals. And—AND—where we took out hawthorn, it freed up space for other uses, like public viewing areas. It went into the plan, and we set about putting out feelers for those wise in the ways of the hedgerow to train us up. Fortunately, in this area of Devon, these old countryside practices still go on, and I looked forward to one day being able to lose myself in the ancient art of coppicing for a few hours a day before too long.
Meanwhile, over at the restaurant, the ringmaster Adam was gradually drawing everything together, though it took an experienced eye to discern through the chaos that some coherence was emerging. The kitchen was still “shambolic,” as was the eating area and the shop—covered in sawdust and work tools—which somehow had to be transformed into clear public access or commercial space. But there were signs that it was changing for the better. The vile ceiling had been covered with crisp new plasterboard, then skimmed with plaster to an almost ethereal smoothness by three men in less than a week, which at four hundred square meters was pretty good going. Mind you, it had to be. It had to dry, be painted, and have the lovely, new, brushed-chrome flush spotlights (Katherine would have approved) installed.
There had been much talk of off-whites, even strong colors, being used on the walls, but Mum and I stuck to our guns: everything was g
oing to be white. With the oak floor, oak counter and bar, and brushed-steel details, this vast room was going to give posh London restaurants a run for their money.
Remember that design meeting I was in when the wolf escaped? We didn’t use those people for our leaflets in the end, as their mock-ups were much too fussy. (Instead a friend from London volunteered to finish off what Katherine had started, much more in her style; thanks, Paul.) But something good did come out of the meeting. When I outlined my ideas for the overall aesthetic for the restaurant, and ultimately the park, mentioning Terence Conran as a guiding principle, one of the designers came up with the excellent description “Conran meets Out of Africa.” I jumped on it readily. (Pretentious? Moi?) However pompous this model may sound, if we could pull it off I was certain it would work in the market we were aiming for. Good design is becoming more mainstream, and modern buildings are springing up in zoos as fast as they are anywhere else. Bristol Zoo recently spent £1,000,000 on a new monkey house that looks like it could feature in a Swedish Grand Designs program. People who regularly eat at McDonald’s won’t actually be put off by understated good taste (well, “good taste” in my humble subjective opinion anyway), nor will they be put off by good food, as long as it is reasonably priced. Besides, my most optimistic interpretation of our business plan was that we (and the surrounding roads) could probably only support a maximum of 200,000 to 220,000 visitors a year, and one day we may have to raise prices to limit the numbers. Why not prepare for that market now? It was easy to get ahead of yourself (our most pressing aspiration, to just break even, with 60,000 visitors, was thought by many to be optimistic) in the upbeat atmosphere of the restaurant, particularly with Adam in “can do” mode, still juggling quotes and materials, and interviewing catering staff on a very tight timeline. Looking at the progress, and looking at Adam, I knew he was going to succeed. This was absolutely vital, as the restaurant was going to be the financial engine of the zoo—and, ideally, somewhere I could eat without having to worry about cleaning up for the next twenty-five years.
