The Old Men at the Zoo

by Angus Wilson

  Beard smiled, “The article certainly seems to have had its effect on you, Carter. I’ve never seen you so worked up. If that means I shall get more co-operation from you, it’s not been at all a bad thing.”

  “Will you allow me to get police guard?”

  He said, “I don’t like it.”

  I took this as permission. I telephoned to the local inspector and he agreed to send a small detachment of guards. Half an hour later, he telephoned, to say that he could not spare the men. I then telephoned to the Police headquarters, but they confirmed his view. Either, I thought, the London situation was less stable than the Government allowed us to know, or they were not unwilling to allow a discontented population to find scapegoats. In either case it was not a good look out for us. It seemed to me that our first duty was to see that no member of the staff should run an impossible risk. Beard was too occupied with what he now called ‘final evacuation plans’ to pay any attention to my views. I took it upon myself to inform the staff. I telephoned to all the head keepers in the absence of the Curators ordering them to withdraw all night staff and to put all the animals under lock in inner cages from that night on. No animal was to be left in an open enclosure or paddock. It was the maximum safety we could ensure for the beasts without danger to the staff. I did not give the head keepers my reasons for these orders; but to Matthew, the only remaining active Curator, I explained the situation. His voice on the telephone was always peculiarly shrill, it came now to interrupt me as ear-splitting as the shriek of any of his parrots.

  “Thank you, Simon. I think I know what to do.”

  He sounded offended; but I felt that this was too important to neglect. I tried to reach him with some recollection from the last war, though I found it difficult to take all that officer side of him seriously.

  I said, “Matthew, you do understand that this is not a time for suicide pilots?”

  “Oh, God! I’m not Japanese, you know.”

  I was relieved to hear him chuckle; beneath all his absurdities, he was a very down to earth person. I was sorely tempted to put Rackham on a lone night watch. But perhaps he had anticipated trouble, for he suddenly went sick.

  I worked late in the board room above the restaurant that night, disregarding the sirens which now sounded at dusk to send Londoners to shelters against dread raids that never came. I sorted out and collected Society minutes and correspondence that seemed to me essential for future historians. After all history had as high a claim as anatomy. I had a cold coming on, and with the low diet, I was finding it hard to fight off. I dozed over my work. My head seemed filled all at once with a roaring sound. I was back in my room at Oxford, shut in, but why? I must have sported my oak. Then it came to me, it must be bump supper night—the roar was that of the college celebrating victory, going perhaps to wreck some poor wretch’s rooms. Then I was wide awake and rushing to the window. There across the Gardens coming from Regent’s Park I could see a mass of electric torch flashes and great petrol flares, sweeping towards me, some moving steadily, others in sudden rushes, now bobbing low, now flashing up against the sky. Here and there the outlines of some square white objects showed up in the darkness. Soon the distant roar neared and split up into drunken songs and shouts, and into a sort of wild wordless yelling; and then again changed, perhaps at some commanding words, into a rhythmic chorus of slogans. Now I thought that I could distinguish the words—they could be ‘We want Peace’. Perhaps it was some orderly anti-Government demonstration. But then I could hear more clearly—’Men not Beasts’. The white squares no doubt carried similar slogans. Coming from men, the words had an ugly sound. I turned out my light. Now I could hear the thudding of steps, almost marchlike in their precision. Then for some moments all sounds ceased and the lights seemed concentrated into one glow. The silence was broken as suddenly by a loud clang of metal. Then came shouts of triumph and the glow shattered again into a hundred points of light bobbing towards me and the rhythmic march broke into a clattering, deafening, uneven run. The hoarse roar seemed to engulf the silence of the Zoo, though here and there the cry or scream of an animal or bird joined the human din. At least, I congratulated myself, there was no human to suffer, and, with luck, the crowd would reach very few of the animals. Then suddenly I was gripped with a terror of fire, perhaps my safety measures for the staff and the animals would prove my own roasting. The white gibbon—sole remnant of its tribe—started its melancholy howling. Immediately the crowd was diverted from its rush, away from my window. I crossed the room to follow its glow and, looking three storeys down to the ground below, I saw across the ornamental beds a tall blond figure standing in a feeble pool of light from a small torch. The man held himself as erect as his swaying willowy figure would allow him and held —God help him!—a stick. Matthew stood alone in defence of his parrots. I opened the window, but my voice could not carry above the crowds’ nearing roar. I could see that Matthew had raised his stick above his head and was attempting to harangue the crowd. I thought I heard that familiar voice screech, ‘impermissible trespass”, but it was probably only a sudden rush of wind. I ran from the window and down three flights of stairs, stumbling, even falling once in my haste. At the entrance I cracked my head hard against Beard’s. Stars exploded their pale silver lights before my eyes. Through thick cotton wool I could just hear Beard ask,

  “For God’s sake, Carter, can you drive?” or so it seemed.

  But I brushed him aside, fell over a low stone balustrade, cutting my knee. I was up in a second and across the flower beds to find myself part of the straggling tail of the crowd. Next to me was a heavily built but baby-faced teenager who was shouting hysterically,

  “Do ‘im! Do them! Kick the bastards in the balls!”

  Part of the crowd was calling, ‘Men not Beasts’, but some others chanted, ‘We want Peace’. Then through the slogans came a battering, hammering noise; and a sudden whisper that rushed back through the crowd.

  “Parrots.”

  A big blond woman turned to me, “Parrots, dear,” she said, “I can’t see my lot making much of them.”

  But a bobbing, cheering mass in front of me moved on. On the ground, trampled and crushed into the gravel lay Matthew’s body. Blood frothed from his mouth, streamed from his ears and nostrils. I bent down and began to unloose his silk shirt, I took out my little pocket mirror and held it to his mouth; but he was dead. I tried to lift him, but dizziness overcame me. So I dragged his body under a clump of mahonias. A deep and jagged wound in his temple suggested that he had been killed by a stone. I hoped so. As I pushed his long, dangling legs, under the shiny, prickly leaves, I remembered suddenly Harriet Leacock’s dog Rickie. I drew myself up straight and ran away from the shouting crowd and the shrieking birds into the darkness back towards Beard.

  He was standing still, blinking in the doorway.

  “Where on earth have you been, Carter? Can you drive a lorry?”

  I must have seemed quite uncomprehending, for he suddenly shook me.

  “Good Heavens, Carter! Pull yourself together. This is vital. That driver’s not turned up. We must get the lorry away. Can you drive the thing?”

  From behind us, out of the darkness came the shrieks of the birds sounding like a witches’ sabbath, or perhaps with the shouts of the crowd, a holocaust of witches. I rubbed my hands on my trouser legs to rid myself of the feel of Matthew’s sagging body. I was breathing hardly now, and suddenly I began to shake involuntarily. I wanted to run away from Beard, to go to Martha; I loved her more than anything in the world and now this senseless violence was going to separate us forever. But I had taken on the Zoo job; to give up now would be to make nonsense of all proper order, of anything I believed in. Under my breath I begged Martha to understand why I had to go away from her. The roar and tramp of the crowd was now shifting across towards the Lion House from which came the answering roar of lions and leopards. There was little the mob could do there; for their own sakes I hoped they would not succeed in doing even that.
There was little they could do anywhere in the Gardens, and that little we could not stop. I turned to Beard.

  “I can drive,” I said and followed down through the Tunnel across the canal and out of the North Entrance where the lorry stood. I hoisted myself up into the driver’s seat. As we left, some squawking, gaily-coloured macaws and lories flew across to the trees on Primrose Hill, and a flight of five or six cockatoos passed like a small, chattering cloud overhead.

  At one time I had driven a motor car regularly, but a heavy lorry was quite another thing. It seemed to take all my strength to operate the wheel and the gears. My head was spinning, I felt hot and flushed, and my stomach ached so that I had often to stop and bend double in my seat. I wondered if the dysentery, so frequently announced by the doctors to be ‘positively the last’, was about to make one of its squalid reappearances. Beard said nothing, except to give me uncertain directions from a map which he held against the dashboard light and at which he squinted myopically. We got clear of Pentonville and then Walthamstow, districts that were deserted, but untouched by the raid. Then as the road climbed up to the edge of Epping Forest, the lorry swayed and jolted across holes, and I twisted and turned until my arms seemed ready to break avoiding craters that the headlights picked out before me. Ahead of us towards Epping we saw a cluster of lights across the road.

  Beard said, “Police! We must turn off.”

  But I saw that he had no idea where to turn. I knew the area a little from a time when my mother had lived in an Essex cottage and I had driven to see her at weekends in the days before Home Counties private motoring came to an end. I turned the lorry off by side roads towards Chigwell. There had been bomb damage among the housing estates of this area, too, or could it have been looting and burning? We had constantly to turn off the main road but by a zigzag route we came at last into the flattish open country that stretches for some miles to the village of Abridge. Alone of all the immediate environs of London, this rich farming land had never been swallowed up by housing. Now it would be some time before it was farmed again. For miles the green spring shoots of wheat and oats had been charred black; the scattered farmhouses, too, seemed to have been gutted. Yet, by twisting off into side roads, I was able to drive on. I had grown more used to the lorry now. To turn my mind from the griping pain in my stomach, I spoke to Beard. I had meant to talk of other things, but I said:

  “Matthew was there. Matthew Price! He tried to save his parrots. But the mob killed him. He had been trampled on when I found him, but I think he was already dead before they came to him.”

  Beard sat muttering. I think, perhaps, that he was praying.

  At last he said, “Suffering is an impossible thing to measure, Carter.” Then he added, “I had all these specimens to pack into the van myself. Not one of the night staff was on duty.”

  I made no comment.

  He said, “You were rather a friend of Price’s. It should help you to think that his being there may have deflected that mob from surging across to the North Side. I’m not at all sure that in that case we could ever have got away.” Later he said, “You seem to have studied politics a good deal to have foreseen tonight’s troubles as you did. I wonder you didn’t go in for that sort of thing instead of mixing yourself up with zoology. You’re the only untrained chap I’ve come across in our work.”

  I wanted to break the silence between us. I needed desperately to make contact with another human being, but when I tried once or twice to speak, the words died away before I had voiced them. It was as though I were throwing a rope bridge across a chasm into a void.

  In the high street of Abridge my pains became unbearable and I had to stop driving. I got down from the lorry and leaned against the bow fronted window of a pub. I was bent double. In the headlights of the lorry I could see that there were two or three other people slumped against the walls of the houses —an old woman, her legs spread wide across the pavement, a boy with his mouth adenoidally open, and a fat man, whose neck and cheeks looked oddly green instead of flushed. I knew that I was entering a deluded world peopled by my fever and I shut my eyes.

  Beard said, “I’d better see if I can get something hot for that cramp of yours. We can’t afford to hang around here.”

  I heard him move away down the street. Hours later, as it seemed to me, he returned.

  “The place is deserted,” he said. “Those who are not dead are dying. You’ll have to pull yourself together.”

  I groaned that I was dying. I heard Beard give a prim little laugh.

  “Oh, I’m afraid your sort of dying is in quite another category. That’s just how you feel. But there’s a young chap lying in the street here who really is dying. They’ve been without food in these parts for a week or more, I think. That’s why we must get moving. Hunger makes people rather desperate and they may not be at all as near death as the people here.”

  I found it difficult to focus my thoughts on what he was saying, but when at last I had done so, I was revolted.

  “Surely there must be something we can do for them.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  I groaned with a sudden surge of pain. He misunderstood.

  He said, “I’m afraid I’m very used to the impossibility of doing anything to relieve pain.”

  He put his hands under my armpits and began to drag me to my feet. I felt as though my arms were being torn from their sockets.

  “Leave me alone, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Christ attends to his own concerns, but you must help me to get these specimens to Dunmow. All my optic work is there. And I’ve got material for work on the comparative histology of primates’ testes that I can probably never amass again.”

  His voice carried such urgency that I forced myself to my feet, but the pain made me cry out. “Oh, God, oh God, let me die!”

  “I’m afraid God doesn’t send death to order. No bombs fell on Broadmoor or Cromwell Road to release me from my incumbrances. His mercy and his justice are beyond our understanding, Carter.”

  Now suddenly as I stood straight I voided in my trousers and the pain died temporarily away. When we returned to the lorry, I opened the door at the back. Beard had not been entirely truthful: there ranged along one side were a row of cages from which stared great round living eyes. I flashed my torch —chocolate, black, cinnamon grey, ring-tailed, the graceful lemurs crouched, legs bent and tails coiled like a row of long nosed cobblers; above them, greater eyed, were the more absurd tarsier, potto and loris. But on the other side of the lorry the huge orange gorilla himalayensis lay dead, last monument to Robert Falcon, the end of the yeti, and sprawled above the carcase the dead body of a young African gorilla and staring at me, like a coconut ritual god, the fibrous fringed mask of an ourangoutang. At the sight of the lemurs’ beauty I almost refused to go on—but where else could I go? I got in the driving seat again. Soon our way became more impassable, and we had constantly to turn off by side roads. As we travelled it came to me that we could have fed the starving at Abridge. But we bumped on. At last it was clear that neither Beard nor I knew where we were. We turned off a cratered main road, lurching across a track through a charred field, and, twisting again, were suddenly confronted by the lamps and torches of a little group of people. In the headlamps I could see a tall, stout white haired woman with some sort of heavy woollen shawl over her head and her shoulders. She was leaning on a stick. A thin young man in a hacking coat and breeches, two other, older men, and a long necked, pale-faced, blond girl in jeans, completed the group. Behind them a large farm house loomed out of the thickening white mist. I shouted to them for directions, but Beard gripped my arm tightly and said, “Drive straight past them.”

  Answering me, the old woman stepped forward. She said, “You’re not far from Chipping Ongar, but there’s no way of getting there. All the roads are blocked.”

  She spoke authoritatively in a deep contralto, redolent of garden fêtes, point to points and the country magistrates’ bench. She said, as th
ough she were searching for a phrase that would give a peace-time normality to life,

  “They could stay here tonight, couldn’t they, Harry? But I’m afraid there’s nothing to eat.”

  The young man, equally grand but gruff voiced, redolent of the County Show and the Hunt, said, “Depends who they are, Gran.”

  The girl now spoke, in the voice of the Pony Club.

  She said, “Perhaps they’ve got something edible in there.” She moved forward but one of the older men held her back.

  “That don’t do, Miss Ann, to go mixing up with what you don’t know about. Where do you come from?” he called.

  The girl struggled with him, “I’m hungry,” she cried, “I’m hungry.”

  Before I could answer, Beard had leapt from the lorry and was standing before them with a revolver in his hand.

  “I shall shoot anyone who comes near.” His voice sounded higher than usual but even more prim.

  I called, “Really, Beard. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  With difficulty I lowered myself from the lorry, and stood behind him. The old woman was obviously relieved by the everyday tone of my voice.

  She said, trying to sound as conversational as she could, “The wireless said there would be helicopters from Norwich dropping food on isolated houses. But that was some days ago...”

  As she was talking, I saw that her son and one of the older men had begun to move out of the circle. Beard had seen it too, his body stiffened. I could not take any risks; I flung myself upon him and we fell hard on to the ground. His revolver flew from his hand, scudding across the ground to come to rest at the old woman’s feet. She picked it up and came towards us. For a moment I thought that she was going to kill us, but, instead, she hit Beard sharply across the side of his head with her stick. He moaned and his head fell back on to the ground.

  “That’ll put him out,” she said, “until we know where we are. Such a lot of people lose control at a time like this. Poor man.”