Page 12 of Beasts in My Belfry


  I was lucky enough to be still working on this section when Teddy’s two wives had babies. Harry knew that they were pregnant but the exact date they were due to give birth was guesswork. Then we saw them collecting leaves for their dens and we knew that the births must be imminent. The dens, which were scattered among the bramble bushes that filled the enclosure, were beehive-like rondavels of stone covered with earth and turf. The females squatted down a few yards from their respective dens and with curved arms started to drag the leaves and the grass in the vicinity towards themselves, cherishing the bundles against their fat bellies. When the supply of bedding gave out in one spot they retreated, shuffling on their behinds, and started on a new patch of ground. When they had collected almost more than they could hold, they backed carefully into the dens to deposit their loads. The nests thus constructed were about a foot or eighteen inches deep and some five feet across. After this nest making, some time elapsed. Then one day Harry and I were passing the bear enclosure and Harry suddenly stopped and cocked his head to one side.

  ‘’Ear that, boy?’ he said. I listened and heard a high-pitched noise emanating from one of the dens – the sort of squeak a rubber toy would make.

  ‘They’ve ’ad ’em,’ said Harry with satisfaction.

  To celebrate, I went down to the pub on the village green and bought two bottles of beer to drink with our elevenses. I was very excited by the whole event and I asked Harry over our celebratory pint when we could see the cubs.

  ‘’Ave to wait till their eyes open, boy,’ he said.

  ‘When’s that?’ I asked eagerly, whipping out my notebook to record the vital fact.

  ‘Three weeks or thereabouts,’ said Harry. ‘Three weeks and then we can go in and see ’em and sex ’em.’

  I could hardly wait. If I had known what was in store for me I would not have been so eager. But at last the great day dawned.

  ‘We’ll go in with them bears today,’ said Harry casually that morning.

  Naturally I thought he meant the babies.

  ‘To sex the cubs?’ I asked.

  ‘Right, boy,’ said Harry. ‘There’s a photographer chap coming down from one of the London newspapers about ten-thirty so you get a couple of ladders down there and lock Teddy up in one trap and the females up in the other. Understand, boy?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Mine not to reason why, though I longed to know what we were to do with two ladders.

  I managed to get Teddy into one trap with the aid of some blackberries and a chorus from ‘On the Isle of Capri’. His wives were more suspicious and reluctant but eventually they succumbed to their greed when bribed with fat, sticky dates. Eventually Harry’s diminutive figure appeared with a tall, gangling photographer in tow and Denis, a keeper from another section.

  ‘Everything right, boy? You got ’em separated like I said?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Everything under control,’ I replied.

  Harry checked the locks of the traps and then rubbed his hands together briskly.

  ‘Now, boy,’ he said, ‘get them ladders over the side.’

  I must explain at this point that the bear enclosure, which covered about an acre of land, was bounded on three sides by a twelve-foot, iron-barred fence with a pointed overhang. On the fourth side the earth had been banked up and cemented so that here you went up some steps and then looked down on the bears twelve feet below you. This also gave you a panoramic view over the whole enclosure. It was here that Harry wanted the two ladders put down. I was still puzzled as to why we needed them but I dutifully lowered them over the side and made sure they were secure.

  ‘Right, boy, come on,’ said Harry, and he vaulted over the rail and scuttled down one ladder as rapidly as a cockroach. I followed him down the other.

  The female bears, seeing us inside the enclosure and walking towards the dens, started roaring unpleasantly – a sort of snarling moan that told us in no uncertain terms what they would do to us if they could get out. When we got to the first den Harry got down on all fours and crawled inside. There was a moment’s silence and then he crawled out again awkwardly, dragging with him two yarring, reluctant little animals that took my breath away. To my astonished eyes they looked like two electric blue Teddy-bears from some toy shop. On closer inspection of the infants, however, I saw that their fur was not electric blue but was certainly a sort of Persian cat blue. Their claws, like their father’s, were very long, sharp and a pale amber colour, and their circular eyes were bright China blue. With all these fairy-tale qualities to commend them you would have thought that they would have had the most charming and diffident of characters; but no, they snarled shrilly, slashed at us with their long claws as anchor-like as blackberry thorns, and snapped at us with fragile, needle-sharp white teeth.

  ‘’Ere, boy,’ said Harry, holding up these two enchanting but lethal bundles, ‘get ’old of these and I’ll get the other two.’

  He shoved them unceremoniously into my arms. It was rather like trying to embrace a couple of muscular fur coats full of fish-hooks. Eventually, when Harry had extracted more of these babies from the other den we made our way back to the ladders. I had never realised until then (such are the limitations of a sheltered life) how difficult it is to climb a ladder while carrying two malevolently inclined bear cubs. Both Harry and I arrived at the top scratched, bitten, bloody but more or less unbowed. Here we stood trying to look debonair while the cubs were photographed from every angle. I discovered then – and I have had no reason since to change my view – that photographers are a callous and insensitive species. A demand to ‘move his head round a little so we can get a profile’ may seem a simple enough request to them but could mean the loss of a couple of fingers to you.

  Eventually the photographer finished – at least I thought he had. But then he turned to Harry and said,

  ‘How about that shot of the mothers with them?’

  ‘Oh, that’s all fixed,’ said Harry. ‘We’ll do it now.’

  I remember thinking that Harry was being a bit overconfident, for once the cubs were released I knew they would make a bee-line for the shelter of the bramble bushes and once ensconced in there photography would be impossible.

  ‘Down you go, boy,’ said Harry, ‘and don’t let those cubs go until I tell you.’

  After a balancing act that would have won me applause in any circus, I got down into the enclosure again and placed the cubs thankfully on the ground, retaining a firm grip on the scruff of their necks. Harry joined me with his two squirming babies and plonked them down alongside mine.

  ‘Now, boy,’ said Harry, ‘this is what we do, see? We’ll ’old the cubs ’ere while Denis lets the females out of the traps.’

  I stared at him in disbelief, holding my cacophonous twin cubs in an iron grip. He was not joking – he meant it.

  ‘Harry,’ I said, ‘you’re nuts. When those bloody bears get out with these cubs yelling they’ll . . . they . . .’

  My voice died away, paralysed at the thought of what they would do, but Harry was not listening.

  ‘Denis,’ he yelled, ‘you ready?’

  ‘Yus,’ came Denis’s voice faintly from the direction of the traps. ‘Harry . . .’ I began frantically.

  ‘Now, boy,’ said Harry soothingly, ‘you ’old them cubs till I tell you to let them go, see? Them bears won’t touch us once they get the cubs.’

  ‘But Harry . . .’ I started again.

  ‘It’s quite all right, boy. We’ve got two ladders, see? When I says let go, you let go and nip up your ladder. Nothing to it,’ said Harry. ‘Now you ready, boy?’

  ‘But, Harry . . .’

  ‘All right, Denis, let ’em out,’ yelled Harry.

  The next few moments were crowded.

  To say that I thought Harry and I were behaving like lunatics is putting it mildly. A she-bear robbed of her whelps – in this case two she-bears – God! Even Shakespeare would have had more sense. At that moment the two females in the traps stopped their roaring nois
e; there was the clanging sound I knew so well – the sound of the sliding doors on the trap being raised. Then came an ominous silence. We could not see the traps because of the bramble bushes.

  ‘Any moment now, boy,’ said Harry cheerfully.

  ‘Harry . . .’ I tried once again.

  ‘Ah!’ said Harry with satisfaction, ‘here they come.’

  I had never realised until that moment that two determined and muscular bears could walk through a complicated, twelve-year-old bramble thicket as though it were tissue paper. It made the same fragile tearing noise, too. And then, at a distance of about twenty feet, Harry and I and the four bear cubs were face to face with the irate mothers. The babies, seeing their parents, started wriggling madly and squealing greetings at the top of their lungs. The mothers paused, orientating themselves, gave a couple of outraged sniffs worthy of Stephenson’s Rocket, and then charged us, growling in a raucous manner. They did not run towards us; they bounced, like two great, hairy balls, and somehow this method of approach added menace to the whole thing. Their turn of speed was amazing and they loomed larger and larger. They got to about twelve feet away and I began to think that all was lost.

  ‘Righto, boy. Let ’em go,’ said Harry; and he released his two cubs.

  Never have I let go of an animal with such speed and thankfulness. In fact, in my enthusiasm I almost flung the cubs at their mothers. Then I made for the ladder behind me and skimmed it up with simian-like speed and skill. At the top I paused and looked back. Sure enough, as Harry had predicted, the two bears had come to a halt when they got to the cubs and were too intent on licking and fussing them to worry about us. We pulled the ladders up and I wiped the sweat from my face.

  ‘Harry,’ I said firmly as we made our way back to the zebra sheds, ‘I wouldn’t do that again for a thousand quid.’

  ‘Well, you did it for two pounds ten,’ said Harry, chuckling.

  ‘What d’you mean, I did it for two pounds ten?’

  ‘That’s what the photographer tipped me,’ said Harry. ‘A fiver. You can have ’alf of it, boy.’

  It did enable me to take my current girlfriend out to the cinema but I still didn’t think it was worth it.

  7. A Loom of Giraffe

  A very gentle beast, and of a good conscience.

  Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Just after the Baileys had, to my infinite regret, left and I had moved into the stark, reformatory-like atmosphere of the bothy I was also put on a new section. This was known as the giraffe section. It was presided over by one Bert Rogers, a quiet, kindly man with a face like a cherry, wind-polished, and chicory blue eyes. In spite of his somewhat shy and retiring nature he answered all my endless questions about the animals with great patience and humour and he was immensely proud of the animals in his charge.

  The centre-point of the section was rather unfortunately in the middle of Bluebell Wood. This wood, so charming in spring, left a lot to be desired at this time of the year. It was surrounded by large areas of grassland and the wind whipped across it at us bitingly. The name Bluebell Wood was, at the time I joined the section, a euphemism. It conjured up a picture of green oaks with the misty smoke of a million flowers about their roots; instead of which, the tree trunks shone with rain and a bright green mould spread like a stain upon them. It was a dismal, dripping wood at the beginning of winter, where the wallabies squatted in disgruntled groups and the muntjaks stole by humbly, diminutive in the cathedral of great trunks.

  It was of course Peter, the beringo giraffe, who loomed over the rest of the section in every sense of the word. He occupied the largest, best-designed and most handsome animal house in Whipsnade. It was built out of wood in the shape of a half-moon and the interior had a beautiful parquet floor. Attached to this, of course, was a large paddock but, owing to the vagaries of the English climate at all times of the year but in the early winter months in particular, Peter spent most of his waking hours pacing up and down the length of his ballroom-like establishment.

  The first morning I joined the section Bert, having explained our multifarious activities to me, said:

  ‘Now, lad, first job we’ve got to do is to clean out Peter.’

  ‘Do you, er . . . go in with him?’ I inquired cautiously.

  ‘’Course,’ said Bert, faintly surprised.

  ‘He’s, um . . . tame, then?’ I said, liking to get things straight and with the episode of the bears still fresh in my memory.

  ‘Who? Old Peter?’ said Bert. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  And, so saying, he handed me a brush, opened the door and ushered me into the echoing Albert Hall-like structure which was Peter’s home.

  Peter’s mate had died long before I came to the park and without her Peter had become fretful and gone off his food. In order to give him the companionship he obviously missed, a kid of curious colour and doubtful ancestry had been introduced into his house. By the time I joined the section this kid – inevitably christened Billy – had grown into a large goat, rather ugly but with considerable personality and charm. When we went into Peter’s house that first morning Peter stood in the far corner, a wisp of hay hanging from his mouth, his jaws moving rhythmically, and a faraway look in his eyes. He resembled nothing so much as a regency buck trying to make up his mind which cravat he would wear that morning. Billy, acting as he always did as a sort of cross between a P.R.O. and a social secretary for the giraffe, uttered a welcoming bleat and came bustling forward to investigate me and to see whether either I or any of my wearing apparel was by any remote chance edible.

  ‘You just take it nice and easy, lad,’ said Bert. ‘Just go on sweeping up gentle-like. Don’t make any sudden movements – he doesn’t like sudden movements – they frighten him, then he might kick. He’ll probably come up and say hallo presently.’

  Looking at the towering, spotted form at the other end of the house, I had no particular desire to get on a more intimate footing with him.

  ‘Well, I’ll go and feed them buffalo,’ said Bert.

  ‘What? Aren’t you staying?’ I asked, startled.

  ‘No,’ said Bert, ‘it doesn’t take two of us to sweep out this place. ‘’Spect you’ll have it done in a jiffy.’

  I will, I thought, if I’m not kicked to death in the process.

  So Bert left me incarcerated in the house, with Peter musing at one end and Billy endeavouring to extract one of my shoelaces and consume it. Bert had given me no time limit for the cleaning of the house and parquet flooring made it an easy surface to sweep, so I thought I would devote a few minutes to making my mark with Billy and just let Peter get used to the idea of a stranger in his midst. I found some lumps of sugar in my pocket and with the aid of these put my friendship with Billy on a firm footing. He fell upon them with such enthusiasm you would have thought he had never had a square meal in his life, yet his Shetland-pony sized body with its curious gingery-yellow fur was exceedingly well covered. It was while I was feeding Billy sugar lumps that Peter decided to move. He swallowed the last bit of hay and then came pacing down the length of the house towards me. It was really rather eerie: one got the same sense of unreality one would get if one suddenly saw a tree uproot itself and drift across the landscape. For Peter did drift. The mechanism that controlled those vast limbs was incredible for here was the tallest mammal on earth coming towards me and yet he moved as casually and as gracefully as a deer and as silently as a cloud. He was not ungainly; he was completely unhurried, and his beauty of movement did not allow you to notice his disproportionate limbs or his great height. Giraffes are, after all, built for clumsiness, but there was no ugliness here. He came to a stop some twelve feet away from me (by which time his head was directly above me) and then slowly lowered his head and peered into my face. The length and thickness of his eyelashes had to be seen to be believed, as did the liquid beauty of his enormous dark eyes gazing at me with a spirit of gentle inquiry. He sniffed at me with the utmost delicacy and politeness. Then, h
aving apparently decided that I was harmless, he turned and sauntered off. His tail was a long, sweeping pendulum of ivory silken hair and he swished it gently from side to side; his complicated pattern of honey-brown and cream was a unique and beautiful mosaic. From that moment on, Peter and, indeed, every giraffe that ever lived had me under its spell.

  As I worked on the section I was fascinated to watch the relationship that had grown up between Peter and Billy. That Peter had a tremendous affection for this unattractive beast was quite obvious, and that the goat cared about as much for Peter as he did for anything else in this world was quite obvious. Billy had an all-consuming – if I may use the phrase – hobby, and that was his perpetual search for anything that was remotely edible. Peter would gaze down at his friend’s squat, pinky, straw-coloured body with limpid eyes, nuzzle him with the utmost gentleness and affection and step over him with great care. Billy, on the other hand, should he wish to get to a spot and find that Peter was in the way, had much more forth-right tactics. He would simply put his head down and butt one of the great spotted legs until Peter, with an air of nervous apology, stepped out of the way. Billy had humorous yellow eyes, a short, dapper beard and a very ungainly, almost square body about the size of a Shetland pony. There could have been no greater contrast between the two animals; Peter looked every inch the aristocrat, the well-mannered dandy, whereas Billy was quite obviously nothing but a common, voracious goat. But Peter had all the humour and the unflinching audacity of his breed to carry him through life, combined with an ability to make the best of things. There was absolutely no doubt who was boss in Peter’s house. I am sure that if placed in the same quarters with a rhino Billy would have had it at his mercy inside twenty-four hours.