Menagerie Manor

by Gerald Durrell

  I am not quite sure when the rift in this happy friendship appeared, or for what reason, but one morning we saw Trumpy fly over into the penguin enclosure and proceed to beat up Dilly and Dally in the most ferocious manner. He flew at them, wings out, feathers bristling, pecking and scratching, until the two penguins (who were twice his size) were forced to take refuge in the pool. Trumpy stood on the edge of the pond and cackled triumphantly at them. We chased Trumpy out of the enclosure and scolded him, where-upon he shuffled his feathers carelessly and stalked off nonchalantly. After that we had to watch him, for he took advantage of every opportunity to fly over the wire and attack poor Dilly and Dally who, at the sight of him, would flop hysterically into the water. One morning he did this once too often. He must have flown over very early, before anyone was about, intent on giving Dilly and Dally a bashing, but the penguins had grown tired of these constant assaults, and rounded on him. One of them, with a lucky peck, must have caught him off balance and knocked him into the pool, from which - with his waterlogged feathers - he could not climb out. This was the penguins’ triumph, and as Trumpy floundered helplessly, they circled round, pecking at him viciously with their razor-sharp beaks. When he was found, he was still floating in the pond, bleeding profusely from a number of pecks, and with just enough strength to keep his head above water. We rushed him into the house, dried him and anointed his wounds, but he was a very sick and exhausted bird, and black depression settled on the Zoo, for we all thought he would die. The next day there was no change, and I felt it was touch and go. As I was sipping my early morning tea on the third day, I suddenly heard, to my amazement, a familiar thrumming cry. I slipped out of bed and looked out of the window. There, by the lavender hedge in the courtyard, was Trumpy, a slightly battered and tattered trumpeter who limped a little, but still with the same regal air of being the owner of the property. I saluted him out of the window, and he cocked a bright eye at me. Then he shuffled his torn feathering to adjust it to his liking, gave his loud, cackling laugh and stalked off towards his beat in the Mammal House.

  Another new arrival that caused us a certain amount of trouble, one way and another, was Delilah. She was a large female African crested porcupine, and she arrived up at the airport in a crate that looked suitable for a couple of rhinoceros. Why she had been crated like this became obvious when we peered into the crate, for even in that short air journey she had succeeded in nearly demolishing one side with her great yellow teeth. When she saw us looking into the crate, she uttered a series of such fearsome roars and gurks that one would have been pardoned for thinking it contained a pride of starving lions. She stamped her feet petulantly on the floor of the crate, and rattled and clattered her long black and white quills like a crackle of musketry. It was quite obvious that Delilah was going to be a personality to be reckoned with.

  On our return to the Zoo we had to chivy her out of her rapidly disintegrating crate and into a temporary cage, while her permanent home was under construction. During this process she endeared herself to at least one member of the staff by backing sharply into his legs. The experience of having several hundred extremely sharp porcupine quills stabbed into your shins is not exactly an exhilarating one. By the time Delilah was installed in her temporary home there were several more casualties, and the ground was littered with quills, for Delilah, like all porcupines, shed her quills with gay abandon at the slightest provocation.

  The old fable of a porcupine being able to shoot its quills out like arrows is quite untrue. What actually happens is this. The quills, some of them 14 inches long, are planted very loosely in the skin of the back. When the animal is harried by an enemy, what it does it to back rapidly into the adversary (for all the quills point backwards), jab the quills into him as deeply as possible, and then rush forward again. This action not only drives the quills into the enemy, but pulls them loose from the porcupine’s skin, so the enemy is left looking like a weird sort of pincushion. This action is performed so rapidly that, in the heat of battle, as it were, you are quite apt to get the impression that the porcupine has shot its adversary full of quills. This delightful action Delilah used to indulge in with great frequency, and, therefore, at feeding and cleaning times you had to be prepared to drop everything and leap high and wide at a moment’s notice.

  Porcupines are, of course, rodents, and the giant crested species - since it spreads from Africa into parts of Europe - has the distinction of being the largest European rodent, bigger even than the beaver. It is also the largest of the porcupines, for, although there are many different species scattered about the world, none of them comes anywhere near the size of the crested one. In North and South America the porcupines are, to a large extent, arboreal, and the South American kind even have prehensile tails to assist them in climbing. The other porcupines found in Africa and Asia are rather small, terrestrial species, that generally have fairly long tails ending in a bunch of soft spines like the head of a brush, and this they rattle vigorously in moments of stress. Without doubt, as well as being the biggest, the great crested porcupine is the most impressive and handsome member of the family.

  It was not long before we had Delilah’s new home ready, and then came the great day on which we had to transport her to it from one end of the Zoo to the other. We had learnt from bitter experience that trying to chivy Delilah into a crate was worse than useless. She simply put up all her spines, gurked at us fiercely and backed into everything in sight, parting with great handfuls of quills with a generosity I have rarely seen equalled. The mere sight of a crate would send her off into an orgy of foot-stamping and quill-rattling. We had learnt that there was only one way to cope with her: to let her out of the cage and then two people, armed with brooms, to chivy her along gently. Delilah would stride out like one of the more muscular and prickly female Soviet athletes, and as long as you kept her on a fairly even course by light taps from the brushes you could keep her going for any distance.

  This was the method we decided to employ to transfer her to her new quarters, and to begin with all went well. She started off at a great lick down the main drive, Jeremy and I panting behind with our brushes. We successfully made her round the corner into the courtyard, but once there a suspicion entered her head that she might be doing exactly what we wanted her to do. Feeling that the honour of the rodents was at stake, Delilah proceeded to run round and round the courtyard as though it was a circus ring, with Jeremy and me in hot pursuit. Then, whenever she had got us going at a good pace, she would suddenly stop and go into reverse, so that we would have to leap out of the way and use our brushes as protection. After a few minutes of this, there appeared to be more quills sticking in the woodwork of the brushes than there were in Delilah. Eventually, however, she tired of this game, and allowed us to guide her down to her new cage without any further ado.

  She lived very happily in her new quarters for about three months before the wanderlust seized her. It was a crisp winter’s evening when Delilah decided there might be something in the outside world that her cage lacked, and so setting to work with her great curved yellow teeth she ripped a large hole in the thick interlink wire, squeezed her portly form through it and trotted off into the night. It so happened that on that particular evening I had gone out to dinner, so the full honours of the Battle of the Porcupine go to John.

  At about midnight my mother was awakened by a car which had driven into the courtyard beneath her bedroom window and was tooting its horn vigorously. Mother, leaning out of the window, saw that it was one of our nearest neighbours from the farm over the hill. He informed Mother that there was a large and, to judge by the noises it was making, ferocious creature stamping about in his yard, and would we like to do something about it. Mother, who always has a tendency to fear the worst, was convinced that it was Leo who had escaped, and she fled to the cottage to wake John. He decided from the description that it must be Delilah, and pausing only for a broom, he leapt into the Zoo van and drove up to the farm. There, sure enough, was D
elilah, stamping about in the moonlight, gurking to herself and rattling her quills. John explained to the farmer that the only way to get Delilah back to the Zoo was to brush her, as it were, along the half mile or so of road. The farmer, though obviously thinking the whole procedure rather eccentric, said that if John would undertake that part of it, he would undertake to drive the Zoo van back again.

  So John set off, clad in his pyjamas, brushing a snorting, rattling Delilah down the narrow moonlit road. John said he had never felt such a fool in his life, for they met several cars full of late-night revellers, and all these screeched to a halt and watched in open-mouthed astonishment the sight of a man in pyjamas brushing along a plainly reluctant porcupine. Several of them, I am quite sure, must have hurried home to sign the pledge, for after all, the last thing you expect to find wandering about a respectable parish is an infuriated porcupine pursued by a highly embarrassed man in night attire. But at last John brought her safely back to the Zoo and then, to her great indignation, locked her up in the coal cellar. For, as he explained, it had a cement floor and two-foot thick granite walls, and if she could break out of that she deserved her freedom and, as far as he was concerned, she could have it.

  Not long afterwards, Delilah caused trouble in quite another context. As the Zoo needs every form of publicity it can obtain, television was clearly one of the best mediums, and so I tried to popularise it by this means whenever possible. A television producer once said to me that if he could produce a programme without a television personality or professional actor he would be a happy man. I could see his point, but he did not know that there could be something infinitely more harrowing than putting on a programme with a television personality or a professional actor. He had never undertaken one with live wild animals, the difficulties of this making the strutting and fretting of television personalities and actors fade into insignificance. When making a programme with animals, they either behave so badly that you are left a jittering mass of nerves in the end, or else they behave so well that they steal the show. Whichever way it is, you cannot win, and anyone (in my considered opinion) who undertakes to do such a job, should be kindly and firmly conducted by his friends to the nearest mental home. If you let him do the programme, he will end there anyway, so you are merely anticipating.

  One of the first programmes I did was devoted to the primates, or monkey family, of which the Zoo boasted a rather fine collection. For the first time, live, on television, I could show the great British public a splendid array of creatures ranging from the tiny, large-eyed bushbabies, through the lorises, the Old and New World monkeys, to the gorilla and chimpanzee, with myself thrown in as an example of Homo sapiens. I had no qualms about this: the monkeys and apes were all extremely tame, the bushbabies would be confined in glass-fronted cases, and the lorises would be on upright branches where, I knew, they would simply curl up and sleep until awakened by me during the programme. At least, that is how it should have worked, but unfortunately I had not taken into consideration the effects of the journey, for the Island of Jersey is an hour’s flying time from the City of Bristol where the programme was to be recorded. By the time the animals had been crated, flown to Bristol and unloaded in the dressing-room which had been put at their disposal, they were all in a highly neurotic state of mind. So was I.

  When the time for the first rehearsal approached, all the monkeys had to be removed from their travelling crates, have belts and leashes attached to them, and be tethered (one to each compartment) on a construction that resembled a miniature cow stall. The monkeys, hitherto always tame, placid and well-behaved, took one look at the cow stall and had what appeared to be a collective nervous breakdown. They screamed, they bit, they struggled; one broke his leash and disappeared behind some piled scenery, from which he was extracted – yelling loudly and covered with cobwebs – after about half an hour’s concentrated effort. Already rehearsal was 15 minutes overdue. At last we had them all in position and more or less quiet. I apologised to the producer and said that we would be ready in next to no time, for all we had to do was to put the lorises on their respective tree trunks, and this – with such lethargic animals – would be the work of a moment. We opened the cage doors, expecting to have to chivy the sleepy lorises out on to their trees, but instead they stalked out like a couple of racehorses, their eyes blazing with indignation, uttering loud cat-like cries of disgust and warning. Before anyone could do anything sensible, they had rushed down their tree trunks and were roaring across the studio floor, their mouths open, their eyes wide. Technicians departed hurriedly in all directions, except a few of the bolder ones who, with rolled-up newspapers as weapons, endeavoured to prevent the determined lorises from getting among the scenery, as the monkey had done. After further considerable delay we managed to return the lorises to their travelling crates, and the Props Department was hurriedly summoned to attach to the bottom of each tree a cardboard cone that would prevent the creatures from getting a grip and so climbing down on to the floor. Rehearsals were now an hour overdue. At last we were under way, and by this time I was in such a state of nerves that the rehearsal was a shambles: I forgot my lines; I called most of the animals by the wrong names; the slightest sound made me jump out of my skin, for fear something had escaped, and to cap it all Lulu, the chimp, urinated copiously, loudly and with considerable interest in her own achievement, all over my lap. We all retired to lunch with black circles under our eyes, raging headaches and a grim sense of foreboding. The Producer, with a ghastly smile, said she was sure it would be all right, and I, trying to eat what appeared to be fried sawdust, agreed. We went back to the studio to do the recording.

  For some technical reason that defeats me, it is too expensive or too complicated to cut a tele-recording. So it is exactly like doing a live programme: if you make a mistake it is permanent. This, of course, does not help to bolster your confidence in yourself; when you are co-starring with a number of irritated and uninhibited creatures like monkeys you start going grey round the temples before you even begin. The red light went on, and with shaking hands I took a deep breath, smiled a tremulous smile at the camera, as if I loved it like a brother, and commenced. To my surprise, the monkeys behaved perfectly. My confidence started to return. The bushbabies were wonderful, and I felt a faint ray of hope. We reached the lorises and they were magnificent. My voice lost its tremolo and, I hoped, took on a firm, manly, authoritative note. I was getting into my stride. Just as I was launching myself with enthusiasm into the protective postures of a potto – believe it or not – the Studio Manager came over and told me that there had been a breakdown in the tele-recording and we should have to start all over again.

  Of course, after an experience like this, one is mental to even try to do any more television. But I had agreed to do five more. The five I did, I must admit, were not quite as trying as the monkey programme, but some of the highlights still live vividly in my memory, and occasionally I awake screaming in the night and have to be comforted by Jacquie. There was, for example, the programme I did on birds. The idea was to assemble as many different species as possible, and show how their beaks were adapted for their varying ways of life. Two of the birds were to be ‘star’ turns, because they did things to order. There was, for instance, Dingle the chough. This member of the crow family is extremely rare in Great Britain now, and we are very lucky to have him. They are clad in funereal black feathering, but with scarlet feet and a long, curved scarlet beak. Dingle, who had been hand-reared, was absurdly tame. The second ‘star’ was a cockatoo named – with incredible originality by its previous owner – ‘Cocky’. Now, this creature would, when requested, put up its amazing crest and shout loudly, a most impressive sight. All the other birds taking part in the programme did nothing at all: they were all, very sensibly, content to just sit there and be themselves. So my only problems were Dingle and Cocky, and I had great faith in both of them.

  The programme was to open with me standing there, Dingle perched on my wrist, while I
talked about him. During rehearsals this worked perfectly, for if you scratch Dingle’s head he goes off into a trance-like state, and remains quite still. However, when it came to the actual recording. Dingle decided that he had been scratched enough, and just as the red light went on he launched himself off my wrist and flew up into the rafters of the studio. It took us half an hour with the aid of ladders and bribes in the shape of mealworms, meat and cheese (of which he is inordinately fond) to retrieve him, whereupon he behaved perfectly and sat so still on my wrist that he appeared to be stuffed. All went smoothly until we came to Cocky. Here I made the mistake of telling my audience what to expect, which is the one thing not to do with animals. So, while five million viewers gaped expectantly waiting to see Cocky put up his crest and scream, I made desperate attempts to persuade him to do it. This went on for five soul-searing minutes, while Cocky just sat on his perch as immobile as a museum specimen. In despair I eventually moved on to the next bird, and as I did so Cocky erected his crest and screamed mockingly.

  There was the occasion, also, of the programme devoted to reptiles. Here I felt I was on safer ground, for, on the whole, they are fairly lethargic creatures and easily handleable. The programme, however, was a chore for me, as I was just in the middle of a bout of influenza, and my presence in the studio was entirely due to the efforts of my doctor who had pumped me full of the most revolting substances to keep me on my feet for the required time. If you are nervous anyway – which I always am – and your head is buzzing under the influence of various antibiotics, you tend to give a performance closely resembling an early silent film. During the first rehearsals all the technicians realised that I was feeling both lousy and strung up, and so when it came to a break they each took it in turn to back me into a corner and try to restore my morale, with little or no effect. We came to the second rehearsal and I was worse than before. Obviously something had to be done, and somebody was inspired enough to think of the answer. During my discourse on members of the tortoise family I mentioned how the skeleton of the beast was, as it were, welded into the shell. In order to show this more clearly I had a very fine tortoise shell and skeleton to demonstrate. The bottom half of the shell was hinged, like a door, and upon opening it all the mysteries and secrets of the tortoise’s anatomy were revealed. Having done my little introduction on the tortoise family, I then opened the under-side of the shell and, to my susprise, instead of just finding the skeleton therein, I found a piece of cardboard on which the words ‘NO VACANCIES’ had been carefully printed. It was a few minutes before order was restored in the studio, but I felt much better, and the rest of the rehearsal went off without a hitch.