‘Go ’way!’ roared the captain, making noises like fourteen frightened hippos trying to extricate themselves from a garden pond. ‘Go ’way. I’m bathing.’
‘Hurry up,’ shouted Billy. ‘We’ve got a fox with a broken leg.’ There was a pause and one could hear the water lapping softly. ‘What d’you say?’ asked the captain suspiciously.
‘A fox with a broken leg,’ repeated Billy.
‘No peace!’ roared the captain. ‘There’s no peace in this place. All right . . . put it in the office and I’ll be there.’ So we went into the captain’s office and waited. We could hear the captain clearly.
‘Gladys! Gladys! Where are my slippers? . . . Oh, it’s all right, they’re here . . . They’ve brought in a fox with a broken leg. Get that new plaster bandage ready . . . Well, how do I know where it is? Look for it. It must be somewhere. And, Gladys, where are my underpants?’
Eventually, rosy from his bath, he lumbered into the office followed by Mrs Beale carrying a huge tin.
‘Ah, Durrell, it’s you, heh?’ he rumbled. ‘A fox, heh? Let’s have a look.’
The fox, who had more or less accepted his fate and was lying quiescent in my arms, was alarmed at Captain Beale’s size, proximity and rich voice. It opened its mouth and gave a long, warning, yarring snarl. The captain stepped back hurriedly.
‘Hold it,’ he barked at me. ‘Get a good grip on its neck.’
‘I have, Captain,’ I pointed out.
Short of decapitating the poor animal I could not have held it more firmly.
I slid my hand gently under the broken leg and lifted it slightly so that the captain could see the extent of the damage.
‘Heh,’ he said, straightening his spectacles and peering. ‘Nice clean break. That’s something. Now to work. Billy, get me scissors.’
‘Where do I find scissors?’ inquired Billy helplessly.
Where the hell do you think?’ snarled the captain. ‘Use your head! In your mother’s work-basket of course.’
Billy disappeared in search of scissors.
‘And tell Laura we want her,’ shouted the captain. ‘We need all the help we can get.’
I gazed at the slender, diminutive creature in my arms and wondered what the captain’s reaction would have been if it had been something bigger – a blackbuck or a giraffe, for example.
‘Laura’s doing her homework,’ said Mrs Beale. ‘Can’t we manage, dear?’
‘No,’ said the captain decisively, taking the tin from her hands. ‘This is new stuff. I need help.’
‘But I’m helping, dear.’
‘I need everybody’s help,’ said the captain austerely.
Billy returned with the scissors and his sister.
‘Now,’ said the captain oratorically, sticking a thumb under his braces. ‘This is what we’ve got to do. First, we cut the hair off the leg, understand?’
Why?’ asked Billy, obtusely.
‘Because the bloody plaster won’t stick on hair,’ said the captain, exasperated by such lack of perception.
‘Don’t shout, William – you’re frightening the fox,’ said Mrs Beale anxiously.
‘If you’re all going to argue, can I go back and finish my homework?’ inquired Laura.
‘You stay here,’ snapped the captain. ‘You might be a vital link in the chain.’
‘Yes, Daddy.’
‘Now, Durrell,’ said the captain, ‘this plaster bandage is new stuff, d’you see?’
He slapped the tin with his hand and a pale cloud of plaster of Paris puffed out and spread over his desk.
‘Is it, sir?’ I asked. I was genuinely interested.
‘Yes,’ said the captain, hooking his thumbs back behind his braces. ‘In the old days, d’you see, you had to splint, bandage and then muck about with plaster of Paris. Messy. Took a long time.’
I knew that it was time-consuming, messy and in a lot of ways unsuccessful, for I had used this method on more than one occasion for birds with broken wings and legs, but it was not for me to say so. Apart from anything else it was obvious that the captain was going to show me a modern method of splinting that would be quick, non-messy and foolproof. This, after all, was what I had come to Whipsnade for – the acquisition of knowledge.
‘Now,’ said the captain, ‘this is the modern method.’
He lifted the tin and peered at it, shifting his glasses down to the end of his nose and drawing his mouth down in a sneer of disbelief.
‘Rmm . . . rmm . . . nnm . . . umble . . . umble . . . umble,’ he murmured, reading to himself. ‘Yes, that’s clear. Lukewarm water, Gladys. And now you, Billy, cut the hair off the leg.’
‘Can’t I go back to my homework?’ asked Laura plaintively.
‘No!’ barked the captain. ‘You’re to . . . to . . . to sweep up the hair off the floor. Hygiene.’
The captain had now got everybody at action stations. Mrs Beale was clattering about in the kitchen producing the water, Billy and I were struggling in a fox-shearing contest to which the fox took grave exception, and Laura was mutinously sweeping the floor. Having thus deployed his forces, the captain took the lid off the tin and rather uneasily unravelled a yard or two of bandage heavily impregnated with plaster of Paris. He paced to and fro as he examined this with interest. Most of the plaster of Paris fell on the floor, making the office look as though it was suffering a light but clinging snowfall, while the finer particles of plaster floated in the air like a faint mist and made us all cough.
‘What will they think of next?’ marvelled the captain to himself, spreading plaster of Paris like a hoar-frost as he paced up and down.
Mrs Beale reappeared with a saucepanful of warm water.
‘Good,’ said the captain, starting to organise. ‘Now, Billy, Laura, Gladys, get hold of this bandage.’
In a cloud of plaster he unravelled some sixteen feet of bandage and handed it to his family.
‘Hold it out straight,’ he commanded. ‘Out straight, Gladys! you’re drooping . . . that’s right . . . you ready, Durrell?’
‘Yes, sir, I said.
‘Got a good grip on its neck, heh? Don’t want it breaking loose at the crucial moment.’
‘Yes, sir, I’ve got it tight.’
‘Good,’ said the captain, and, seizing the saucepan, he made his way down the length of bandage slopping water on it. ‘D’you see how it works, Dunell?’ he asked, seizing the dripping end of the bandage and waving it at me. ‘No more splints, d’you see? The bandage acts as a splint.’
He wound several inches of the bandage round his forefinger to demonstrate.
‘No mucking about with splints,’ he said, wagging his finger at me. ‘None of the old-fashioned mess, d’you see?’
The captain’s desk and the floor of the office looked like a badly concocted ski slope but it was not for me to point this out.
It was at this moment that things started to become confused. Whether the captain had misread the instructions, I am not sure, but the bandage round his finger solidified with astonishing rapidity and firmness.
‘Bloody hell,’ said the captain vehemently.
‘William, dear!’
‘Where are the scissors? Who’s taken the blasted scissors?’
The scissors were found and the captain cut himself loose from the tenacious bandage. During the process he got a considerable quantity of plaster smeared on his spectacles.
‘Now, Durrell,’ he said, squinting owlishly at the fox, ‘hold its leg out.’
Dutifully I held its leg out and the captain wound several turns of bandage round the break, slopping more water about as he did so. The fox, Captain Beale and I all started to look distinctly aquatic.
‘More bandage!’ rumbled the captain, intent on his work.
It was then that another snag made itself apparent. Without constant moistening, the length of bandage held by Mrs Beale, Laura and Billy had solidified, sticking firmly to their hands and linking them together like a daisy-chain.
‘You’re all bloody useless,’ shouted the captain as he cut them loose. ‘You’re supposed to help! Now, unwind some more bandage.’
Billy, in an effort to assuage his father’s wrath, knocked the tin on to the floor and it rolled across the office, shedding bandage and plaster of Paris in equal quantities. The place was beginning to look like an advanced casualty station in one of the fiercer Napoleonic battles. Everyone and everything appeared to be covered in a fine layer of plaster and loops of bandage.
‘Useless!’ roared the captain. ‘Bloody useless, the lot of you! Look at you all . . . look at the bandage. You’re all a lot of . . . a lot of . . . a lot of nincompoops!’
At length the captain was calmed down by Mrs Beale and then, while Laura and Billy unravelled some more bandage, Mrs Beale moistened it and the captain, his face still pucecoloured, his breathing stertorous, wound it round the fox’s leg. At last he stood back.
‘That should do,’ he said.
It was not the most professional piece of splinting I had ever seen but the captain seemed satisfied. He stood there beaming, his glasses covered with a white rim of plaster, his bald head as white as though powdered, bits of bandage solidified on his clothing, and a long strip wound inextricably round his slipper.
‘There you are, Durrell,’ he rumbled in a self-satisfied way. ‘These modern things make all the difference to the job . . . simplify things, d’you see?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
10. Beasts in My Belfry
Some beasts be ordained for man’s mirth, as apes and marmosets and popinjays; and some be made for exercitation of man, for man should know his own infirmities and the might of God. And therefore be made flies and lice; and lions and tigers and bears be made that man may by the first know his own infirmity, and be afeard of the second. Also some beasts be made to relieve and help the need of many manner infirmities of mankind – as the flesh of the adder to make treacle.
Bartholomew (Berthelet),
Bartholomeus de Proprietatibus Rerum
I had been at Whipsnade a little over a year when I decided to leave. This was no hasty decision; I was still as determined as ever to go animal collecting and eventually to own my own zoo, but I knew that I would not be hastening the achievement of either ambition by staying any longer at Whipsnade. I could have stayed on indefinitely being odd-beast boy, but I had other plans.
At the age of twenty-one, a date that was not too far distant, I knew I was to inherit three thousand pounds – not a fortune, but in those days one could do a lot more with three thousand than one can today – so every evening in the cold, echoing confines of the bothy I would sit in my little cell-like room and write carefully-composed letters to all the animal collectors who were then functioning. I outlined my experience and then went on to say that if they would consider taking me on an expedition I would pay all my own expenses and work free. Eventually, back came the replies, courteous but definite. They appreciated my offer but as I had had no collecting experience it was impossible for them to consider taking me on a trip; if I could get some collecting experience, however, I was to approach them again. As my whole reason for wanting to go on an expedition was to gain experience, this argument was, to say the least, unhelpful. It was the egg and chicken all over again; they would not take me unless I had the experience and I could not get the experience unless they took me.
It was at that point in my life, depressed and frustrated, that I had a brilliant idea. If I used some of my inheritance to finance an expedition of my own then I could honestly claim to have had experience and then one of these great men might not only take me on an expedition but actually pay me a salary. The prospects were mouth-watering.
My decision to leave was greeted with disappointment. Phil Bates tried to persuade me to stay on, as did Captain Beale.
‘You’ll never get anywhere, Durrell, if you keep leaving like this,’ he grumbled aggrievedly at my farewell curry supper, as if I had made a habit of giving in my notice once a week during my time at Whipsnade. ‘You should stay on . . . give you a section of your own eventually . . . could lead to big things . . .’
‘It’s very kind of you, sir, but I’ve got my heart set on going collecting.’
‘No money in it,’ said the captain dolefully. ‘You’ll be chuckin’ money away, mark my words.’
‘Don’t depress the boy, William,’ said Mrs Beale. ‘I’m sure he’ll make a success of it.’
‘Fiddy faddy!’ said the captain glumly. ‘Nobody ever made money collecting.’
‘What about Hagenbeck, sir?’ I inquired.
‘Those were the good old days,’ said the captain. ‘Money was money then . . . gold sovereigns you could dig your teeth into . . . not a lot of useless lavatory paper like we’ve got now.’
‘William, dear!’
‘Well, it’s true,’ said the captain truculently. ‘In those days money was worth money. Now it’s a lot of loo paper.’
‘William!’
‘Anyway, come back and see us, won’t you?’ said the captain. ‘Yes, you must,’ said Mrs Beale. ‘We shall miss you.’
‘I’ll earmark all the best animals in my collection for you, sir,’ I said.
As I lay in bed on my last night at Whipsnade I tried to assess how important my being at Whipsnade had been to me. What had I learnt?
It seemed to be mostly negative. True, I had learnt the best way to cany a bale of hay on a pitchfork, how to use a besom and spade for cleaning out, and the fact that a docile-looking wallaby could, when cornered, jump at you, slash down with its hind feet and rip the front off an extremely tough mackintosh; but it seemed that it was the ‘how not to’ I had learnt that was important.
I had, however, come to realise that one of the most vital things in a zoological garden was the keepering staff. Without them nothing is achieved, so, therefore, it is of the utmost importance to give status to a hard and dirty job and, what is more important, to pick these people carefully. The keepering staff at Whipsnade when I was there were, in the main, farm labourers who had been employed originally to put up the great perimeter fence and the paddock fencing. The result was that I found myself working with men of forty and fifty who did not know as much about the animals in their care as I did at twenty. This was not their fault; they had no desire to be zoological experts. As far as they were concerned it was just a job of work and they did it as efficiently as they could but with an almost total lack of interest. This was brought home to me very forcibly my first day on the giraffe section.
At about four o’clock Bert had instructed me to light a fire under a great cauldron of water and this I had dutifully done. When it was boiling he carefully mixed hot and cold water together to make a couple of buckets of tepid water and then told me that we were going to give the giraffe his drink. As I watched the giraffe gulping down the water I asked Bert why it was necessary for its drinking water to be warm.
‘Dunno, boy,’ said Bert. ‘When ’e came they told me to give ’im ’ot water . . . dunno why.’
Careful inquiry on my part solved the mystery. Six or seven years before, when the giraffe had first arrived, it had developed a chill; it was thought that warm water would be more soothing to drink than cold and so instructions were given – but never countermanded. The result was that the giraffe had been drinking hot water for seven years quite unnecessarily. Bert, who was very fond and proud of his animals, had nevertheless lacked sufficient interest to find out if warm water was essential to the giraffe’s welfare.
Lack of interest or lack of knowledge breeds lack of observation, and of all the qualifications needed when looking after wild animals this is the most important. Wild animals are past masters at concealing the fact that they are ill, for example, so that unless you know your creatures intimately and observe them most carefully you will miss the tiny signs that tell you what is going on.
Another point which became very obvious to me at Whipsnade was that the idea that an animal was happier,
and therefore lived better, in a larger cage or enclosure than a small one was totally erroneous. ‘I don’t mind zoos if they’re like Whipsnade,’ was the remark that was so frequently made by those well-meaning and ignorant animal lovers that I met. The answer was, of course: ‘You should have worked there – and experienced the difficulty of trying to keep a close daily check on a herd of animals in a thirty-five-acre paddock, making sure they were developing no illness, that some of them were not being bullied to starvation level by others, and that the whole group was getting enough to eat.’
If anything went wrong and you had to catch up an individual member of the herd you would have to pursue it round thirty-five acres and when you had finally caught it – you hoped, without its dying of heart failure or breaking a leg – you had to treat it not only for whatever was wrong with it but for acute shock as well. Nowadays, of course, things are made much easier by the use of such refinements as dart guns but in the days when I worked at Whipsnade the size of the paddock was ultimately detrimental to the animals.
The only useful function they fulfilled was as a salve to the anthropomorphic souls of those animal lovers who did not like to see animals imprisoned. Unfortunately, this attitude towards zoos is still rife among the well-intentioned but basically ignorant who insist on talking about Mother Nature as though she were a benevolent old lady instead of the harsh, unyielding and totally rapacious monster that she is.
It is hard to argue with these people; they live in a euphoric state where they believe that an animal in a zoo suffers as though it were in Dartmoor and an animal in its natural surroundings is living in a Garden of Eden where the lamb can lie down with the lion without starting in friendship and ending up as dinner. It is useless to point out the ceaseless drudgery of finding adequate food supplies each day in the wilds, of the constant strain on the nerves of avoiding enemies, of the battle against disease and parasites, of the fact that in some species there is more than a fifty per cent mortality rate among the young in the first six months. ‘Ah,’ these bemused animal lovers will say when these things are pointed out to them, ‘but they are free!’ You point out that animals have strict territories that are governed by three things: food, water and sex. Provide all these successfully within a limited area and the animal will stay there. But people seem to be obsessed with this word ‘freedom’, particularly when applied to animals. They never seem to worry about the freedom of the bank clerks of Streatham, the miners of Durham, the factory hands of Sheffield, the carpenters of Hartley Wintney, or the head waiters of Soho, yet if a careful survey were conducted on these and other similar species you would find that they are confined by their jobs and by convention as securely as any zoo inmate.