The Old Men at the Zoo

by Angus Wilson

  Martha reported throughout that winter that Sophie Englander was working like a carthorse on the Relief Committee. “She really can pull strings without their breaking and she’s genuinely fine with the people, if only she would arrive a little less dripping in mink . . .”

  I, too, sometimes wished when we were interviewing the many needy people who applied for uniformed keepers’ posts, that Englander would exude a slightly less solid comfort; but otherwise he was a model of competence, good sense, and, above all, moderation. It had been agreed that the Zoo would reopen on April 21st, on what, now that the European Federation was finally established, was to be called European Day. I could not but think of Leacock’s lost opening day and Bobby’s Day of Wrath, but our new Director was determined that we should present a modest but solidly interesting collection.

  “This is not a time for show,” he said, “but it is a time to give an impression of the serious future of the Society’s work and of the civilized, European essence of the Gardens as a show place for the public.”

  The exhibition on opening day was to be divided into two sections, he decided. The first was to consist of a series of demonstrations showing the research work of the Society in terms comprehensible to the general public. Here our trouble was that, following the raids and the disastrous attempted evacuations by the Prosector, the material for research work had severely diminished. Only Englander’s own work could be fully set out with living experiments as well as in diagrammatic or photographic form. His investigations into the undulating propulsion of snakes was to occupy pride of place. It would not, in fact, have been difficult with the willing assistance of European zoos, to have replaced the material for most of our other research workers. And, at first, these offers had been welcomed.

  “This old chap Englander seems to be slightly more on the beam than all those duds we’ve suffered from recently,” Pattie told me on the phone, “Nutting’s frightfully bucked with the new grant he’s getting and even Newton says the old boy almost understood what his work’s about.”

  But shortly afterwards they all three mysteriously and abruptly announced that they would not be contributing work to the opening exhibition. At first the Director was angry and distressed; but so many excellent zoologists from Europe had asked to show their work that he could afford to neglect this defection. In explanation Pattie would only say to me, “It’s simply no good questioning me because your name’s not yet in the clear.”

  In any case I was too busy with the other side of the ceremony which was to be, as the Director said, “something to give you a chance, Carter, to show what you’re good for”. It was—and this was Englander’s sensible limiting idea—to consist of an exhibition of European fauna only, but of every kind, grouped geographically, with informatory films and lectures upon migration, breeding, general demography, adaptation to human environments, relation to human economy. It was also to contain a special palaeozoological section. Englander, in fact, hoped in this part of the exhibition to assert a claim to incorporate in the future Zoological Gardens many of the former functions of the Natural History Museum which had been totally destroyed in the raid.

  I found my work taxing but extraordinarily interesting. Through Englander I made contact with every West European zoo and natural history museum. Donations came in not only from the great zoos at Hamburg and Copenhagen and Rome and Paris, but from all sorts of small collections in provincial towns. Europe was on her toes to reward capitulation. Through Harmer we received lavish grants from the federated West European industries; through Tillotson we drew upon the new pooled labour resources. The Italian architect chosen by Englander to rebuild the houses was a man of striking originality and great charm. It was a winter of slush, sleet, insufficient food and sudden power cuts, but nothing could chill the warmth I generated in my cocoon of busyness. Only, indeed, the voice of Sanderson unintentionally jarred me to the realization of a changing world outside. He had entered into the new régime with zeal—I did not tell him that the Director had said, “We must hang on to that chap until we can get someone better to replace him”—and we spent a lot of time together devising exhibitions of pests and demonstrations of the interdependence of European insects and European flora. He was knowledgeable, helpful, but always naïve.

  One day he said to me, “Of course, I was very glad to see that war come to an end, Carter. I know some people thought differently. But then they probably weren’t in touch with old people as I am. Mrs Blessington, of course, is an old devil. She’d have been for going on fighting, I think, but Miss Delaney felt the horror of it terribly. The blind have a sixth sense about these things. In any case this Government seems to be doing some fine things, especially since the changes of last week.”

  Looking up from a pile of papers about potato blight, I asked, “What changes?”

  “Oh, they’ve taken in some of the Uni-European chaps. I think they’re right. After all they did all the sabotage work. In any case they’re all unknown men, people who’ve come up from nowhere. It’s nice to see the little chaps taken notice of. And they’ll think about the other little chaps, of course. This new law about putting the vagrant and the old and so on into special government homes is a magnificent idea really. There are so many lost people wandering about since the war and it only distresses everyone to see them. Old Mrs B’s very fierce, of course; she says it should be voluntary. But I’m not sure the Government is not being kinder by taking the decision out of the old peoples’ hands.”

  It was typical of him that upon the very same morning, he told me with some admiration about the Jackley letter.

  “It seems,” he said, “that it’s only one of many letters tha these chaps from abroad are sending to the various places where they worked. Mind you, I don’t know that I agree with their hostile attitude to our Government. In fact I think they ought to come back and pull their weight. All the same, there’s something rather fine about this letter of Jackley’s. I don’t know how it got smuggled in, but it urges people not to cooperate now and sets out his plans for the future of the Zoo. It’s had a tremendous effect on Miss Henderson, I think. She’s been circulating duplicated copies. But you mustn’t say anything to Englander, of course. He might get upset about it. I don’t think it’s to be taken seriously myself, but it cheers some people up. And I admire Jackley’s simplicity of style. He begins, ‘Dear Colleagues, as y ou know I have been for over a year in prison .. .’ I thought the simplicity of that was very moving . . .”

  If the Uni-Europeans were going to take over, then I had no wish to hinder Pattie Henderson’s resistance work; on the other hand, if Englander could continue his wise régime, I had no wish to help make way for Jackley. In such a dilemma, I found it best to bury myself in getting a really good show put on. Until ten days before the Opening Day I forgot all else; then suddenly it was announced that Mr Blanchard-White had been appointed to advise the Government on public exhibitions —museums, parks, art galleries, zoos and so on. Englander was most distressed. He taxed Harmer and Tillotson with not preventing such an absurdity. “I can’t think what men of your standing could be doing letting them appoint a chap like that, a man who’s never had a proper position, a man without any scientific training. Heaven knows what cranky nonsense he may bother us with!”

  Harmer said, “It’s a worrying time, Englander.”

  Tillotson said, “The only thing with incompetents is to give them enough rope to hang themselves.”

  Mr Blanchard-White at his first Committee meeting was all smiles and few words.

  “I just want to feel my way,” he said. But he did ask if he might participate on European Day. “I know it’s late,” he said, “but if I could have a little corner just to try an idea of mine and then I think the Minister wants me to say a few words. After the important speeches of the day, of course. Just a post-scriptum or perhaps we should say obiter dictum.”

  April 21st was warm; the daffodils waved their golden and ivory and orange in a soft southerly
breeze; the first lilacs had been tempted out and filled the air with their heavy, sensual perfume. Gates were opened at eleven in the morning. Dr Englander, old fashioned and solid in his view of entertainments, had procured the band of the Grenadier Guards to play selections and marches; the food which promised to be excellent was to come from Gunters. The first hundred or so visitors to arrive were the core of society that supported the Government—only different from those that would have come to Bobby Falcon’s opening in its preponderance of foreign embassy staff and business magnates, and in the absence of country gentry. Many of the cosmopolitan set indeed were the very same stage stars and television personalities who had helped Bobby and Jane to put up the Victoriana. The end of the war had brought its usual reaction against utility—rich women’s clothes that season trailed the ground in trains, nipped the ankles in hobbles, swayed in paniers, did everything in fact to make female movement a luxurious difficulty. Sophie Englander had not attempted such chic.

  “Emile prefers to see me in something solid, my dear,” she told me and she indicated her emeralds and her furs, which were indeed uncomfortably hot for the day. “But anyhow the pretty frocks look nicer on the pretty girls,” she added, taking Martha under her wing. “You come with me, dear, and look pretty. And don’t talk about hungry people and miseries because this is Emile’s big day and we girls have got to look like a bouquet of flowers. That’s what the old music master used to say at my convent school. ‘You girls are like a bouquet of flowers.’ We hated him! Poor old thing, I don’t expect he was paid enough to keep body and soul together. Now you’ve got to be at Emile’s right hand, Mr Carter, so off you go.”

  The scientific demonstrations had been arranged in a series of temporary buildings between the Mappin Terrace and the Restaurant. The crowd here seemed to grow thicker as I made my way. The same types of chic women and of prosperous, important looking men—a good number of them foreign. Here and there I saw well known zoologists, though there were many others I looked for in vain. Many members of the Zoological Society whom I recognized there—country colonels or parsons and their wives—were, I felt sure, quite out of sympathy with the times and showed it by the careful dowdiness of their dress. The largest crowd, as I had expected, had gathered round the booth where routine experiments with the conceptual vision of two chimpanzees were taking place. It was here that I came on Sanderson with an old lady on each arm. They proved, in fact, to be tough splendid old Mrs B. and the noble blind Miss D. In the fashionable throng they looked noticeably eccentric. Miss Delaney in a rather skimpy, short sleeved black silk dress, had a mane of uncovered yellowish white hair and a cigarette in the corner of her puckered tobacco-stained old mouth. She had also the senseless, very blue eyes that I had often seen in the blind. Mrs Blessington had more prétentions to be called dressy; her short cut hair was frizzed and over-purple in the conventional style of very old ladies of today, and her make-up was as crazy but less orange than Sophie Englander’s. She wore a battered ancient flowerpot hat. As soon as we were introduced, she said,

  “Shockin’ crowd, isn’t it? Of course, I told Mr S. when he suggested comin’, a big crowd like that always hums a bit. What with that and the stink of the animals. Anyway monkeys smell something chronic! Doin’ their business everywhere! Nasty things!” Her voice was shaky and cracked. Her head quavered as she talked.

  Sanderson beamed. “Mrs B’s in fighting form,” he said, “Now Miss Delaney loves the animals, don’t you?”

  “She can’t see ‘em,” Mrs Blessington said angrily.

  Miss Delaney whispered into the air, although I think she intended her speech as a confidence to me.

  “I’m blind,” she said, “but I do love animals. I had some guinea pigs when I was a girl. And our dog killed them. And when my father saw how upset I was, he told me that we are all God’s creatures. It’s in Genesis you know, ‘and every living thing that dwelleth upon the earth’.”

  Mrs B. turned on me, “Are you a Bible readin’ man?” she asked savagely. But before I could answer, Strawson came up to us with a number of printed leaflets in his hand.

  “Well, Sir,” he said, “Jupiter Pluvius has withheld his inclement gaze from our festive day. I don’t know whether I may persuade you to purchase a copy of this small poem I’ve written upon the occasion—hardly poetry, perhaps, but the traditional rhyme the day demands. The money will go to the staff fund for retiring messengers.”

  “How very, very fine,” Sanderson said, and he read aloud, “Upon European Day at the London Zoo, by Joseph Strawson, alias Elephant Joe—

  Peace shall come to this house

  When the hoopoe lies down with the grouse.

  “Yes, that’s a very fine way of looking at it. You’ve done very well, Strawson.”

  The two lines read in Sanderson’s poetic voice caused me to guffaw into my handkerchief.

  Mrs Blessington meanwhile had sternly demanded of Strawson, “Are you a poet?” adding, “you don’t look like one. Poets look like this,” she sucked in her rouged old cheeks to represent hungry, Romantic fervour, “you look like this,” she blew out her cheeks in a passable imitation of Strawson’s fat, floppy face.

  Sanderson said, “Mrs B’s properly on the warpath today.”

  Miss Delaney leaned forward, “I shall look forward to hearing your poem later. I’m blind, you see. But I’m very fond of poetry. I used to write little poems as a girl. My father . . .”

  But we never knew what her father said, for suddenly with shouts and with singing a procession of people came through the main gates and, as the fashionable crowd parted to form a tightly packed bank on either side, it streamed down to the central gardens where the speeches of the opening ceremony were to be given. The newcomers marched in groups, each carrying the gay patchwork flag of Uni-Europe and the name of its district. Some, but only a few, were also gaily clothed in European peasant dresses made up in eclectic mixture of Bavarian, Piedmontese, Breton, Basque, Andalusian or any other combination that appealed to the wearer; otherwise they presented an extraordinary spectacle of defiantly sombre drabness. I knew at once instinctively who they all were—these sad faced men and women of every age; they were the handicapped or handicap prone in all their many kinds, the ranks of those who had been our proles ever since the end of the Hitler war. Here they were—all the people who didn’t quite qualify for grants or pensions; all the people who failed to get the professional qualifications or to pass the required psychological tests; all the women who couldn’t get their alimony paid to them; all the men who’d mistakenly thought that luck was the easy road to affluence; all the people who’d emigrated and come back; all the people who’d immigrated and wanted to leave again; the ranks of those who were too obstinately individual to fit in, yet too weakly individual to make their mark. At their head, in feeble assertion of personality, strode their white-maned, sixth rate leader, Mr Blanchard-White. The important people drawn up on either side looked amused, yet faintly apprehensive.

  “They deserve their march,” said a woman near to me, “they did invaluable work.”

  But her friend said, “I can’t think where they’ve found them all from. I hope we shan’t see them march about too often.”

  And now it was announced over the loudspeaker that the speeches were to begin. I struggled to get through the crowds to the rostrum where Harmer and Englander and Tillotson, and even Sophie Englander had already taken their places, but the crowd was too tightly packed about me. The Uni-Europeans, too, had formed solid lines in front of the crowd in order to cheer Mr Blanchard-White as he took his seat; indeed they seemed to be acting as police for the occasion. Or rather as additional police, for the recently reconstituted police were also there in large numbers. Indeed this was the first time I got a distasteful impression of them, for despite all my assertions of my position as Secretary, I could not get them to let me through. I think I should have been able to see the comic side of this had they not pushed me so roughly that my shirt was torn.
In any case if I was the most important, I was certainly not the only ‘notable’ kept from the centre of things that morning. A smart woman near to me kept protesting that she was a sister of Mr Harmer’s.

  “Mr Harmer’s the President,” she cried; and a group of Dutch Embassy officials waved their invitations in vain.

  The Uni-Europeans, in front, turned and hushed us, and one dreary woman dressed in an Arlesian cap and a Scots tartan waistcoat, called back,

  “This isn’t a private party. It’s for the peoples of Europe.”

  It was obvious that the policemen’s sympathies were with them, for one near us ignored our demands entirely and another, turning on Miss Harmer said,

  “I can’t help who you are, madam, we’re here to see that the people have a chance to hear their leaders.”

  I could see my chair empty and conspicuous among the celebrities on the rostrum; and I could see Martha looking distressed. And now the band stopped playing its potpourri from some ancient musical and Dr Englander rose to his feet.

  “Your Excellencies, my Lords, Ladies, and gentlemen, you will see here today the beginnings of a new London Zoo, a zoo that will not stand as an old landmark in a single capital city of a now vanished empire, but as one of a group of scientific institutions playing its part in the revival of European learning . . .”

  I heard no more of his speech, for the word ‘European’ had brought deafening applause and here and there a dissenting cry of “The London Zoo for ever!” Near me a jolly looking middle aged woman in ear-rings cried in cockney,

  “Don’t you touch the London Zoo”, and a member of the Society, who was, I knew, a wealthy Norfolk landowner, cried,

  “Quite right, Madam. A London Zoo and a free England.”