So at six that evening I put on my only pair of respectable trousers, a coat and tie, and presented myself at the Beale establishment, which occupied one end of the administration block in the park. Although I had learnt from other members of the staff that Captain Beale’s gruff exterior hid a heart of gold, I was still slightly apprehensive for, after all, he was the superintendent of the place and I was the lowest of the low.
The door was opened to me by Mrs Beale, who was a charming, handsome woman with an air of unruffled calm.
‘Do come in,’ she said, smiling at me sweetly. ‘May I call you Gerry? Billy keeps calling you Gerry. Come into the drawing room . . . the captain’s there.’
She ushered me into the large, pleasant living room, where in one corner, lying supine in an enormous chair, was the vast bulk of Captain Beale, almost completely obliterated by the Evening News. Faint rumblings as from an incipient Krakatoa emanated from beneath the newspaper and it crackled and rustled as it rose and fell with the captain’s breathing.
‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Beale, ‘I’m so sorry, he’s dropped off. William! William! Gerry Durrell’s here.’
There was a noise like several freight trains colliding, and the captain singed up from under the newspaper like a leviathan surfacing.
‘Hmmph,’ he croaked, straightening his spectacles and glaring at me owlishly. ‘Durrell, eh? Durrell? Glad to meet you. I mean, glad to have you.’
He got to his feet, shedding pages of newspaper like autumn leaves falling off an enormous oak.
‘Gladys,’ he barked, ‘give the boy a drink. Don’t keep him standing there!’
Mrs Beale treated this curt order as though it had never been uttered.
‘Do sit down,’ she said, smiling. ‘What would you like to drink?’
At that time, just after the war, spirits were still as precious as gold and although I longed for something like a whisky and soda to give me courage to talk with the captain, I knew it would be impolite to say so.
‘I’ll just have a beer, if I may,’ I said.
While Mrs Beale was fetching my drink the captain rumbled over to the fire and was prodding it vigorously, obviously in the hopes of coaxing it into some sort of action. Several large glowing pieces of log fell out into the hearth and what little flame there had been, withered and died. The captain flung down the poker aggrievedly.
‘Gladys!’ he roared. ‘The fire’s out!’
‘Well, stop poking it, dear,’ said Mrs Beale. ‘You know you always put it out.’
The captain hurled himself into the chair and the springs screeched protestingly.
‘Bloody awful stuff, this wartime beer, don’t you think, Durrell?’ he observed, eyeing the glass Mrs Beale was handing to me.
‘Don’t swear, dear,’ said Mrs Beale.
‘Bloody awful stuff,’ said the captain defiantly, glaring at me, ‘don’t you agree, Durrell?’
‘Well, I didn’t drink beer before the war so I don’t really know,’ I said.
‘Not a hop in it,’ said the captain. ‘Mark my words, not a hop in it.’ Just at that moment Billy loped into the room as disjointedly as a giraffe.
‘Hallo,’ he said, grinning at me inanely. ‘You’ve arrived, have you?’
‘Where have you been?’ barked the captain.
‘Out with Molly,’ said Billy, waving his arms about. ‘Tra la la, tra la la, she’s my girlfriend now.’
‘Ha!’ said the captain with satisfaction; ‘out with girls, eh? That’s the spirit! You a ladies’ man, Durrell?’
‘Well, I think so,’ I said cautiously not being sure what Captain Beale’s definition of a ladies’ man was.
Glancing round to make sure that Mrs Beale had left the room, the captain leant forward in his chair.
‘Used to be a bit of a gay dog with the ladies myself,’ he rumbled in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘before I met Gladys, of course. Gad! Once you’d done a tour on the West Coast you needed the company of a good woman!’
‘Were you very long in Africa?’ I asked.
‘Twenty-five years . . . twenty-five years. The blacks loved me,’ he said, with a sort of innocent boastfulness. ‘’Course, I always treated them fairly; they appreciate that. Uncle Billy, they used to call me.’
Billy, for some reason best known to himself, went off into peals of hysterical giggles at this.
‘Uncle Billy!’ he sputtered. ‘Fancy calling you Uncle Billy!’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ snarled the captain. ‘Sign of affection. They had respect for me, I can tell you.’
‘Can I have a beer?’ asked Billy.
‘Only one,’ snapped the captain. ‘You’re too young to drink. Tell him he’s too young to drink, Durrell. Too young for drinking, smoking and lechery.’
Billy screwed up his face and winked at me and then disappeared from the room in search of his beer.
‘How are you getting on with the zebras?’ asked Captain Beale suddenly.
He barked it out with such vehemence that I almost dropped my beer.
‘Um . . . well, I have seen them,’ I said; ‘as a matter of fact, I’m on the lions.’
‘Ah,’ said the captain, ‘that’s where you got to, is it? Well, how are you getting on with the lions?’
‘Very well, I think,’ I said cautiously.
‘Good,’ said the captain, dismissing this as a topic of conversation. ‘Do you like curry?’
‘Um . . . yes, I do.’
‘Hot curry?’ inquired Captain Beale, glaring at me suspiciously. ‘Yes. My mother makes very hot curries.’
‘Good,’ said the captain with satisfaction. ‘Come to dinner . . . Thursday. I’ll make a curry. Never let Gladys do it . . . she never makes it hot enough . . . wishy-washy stuff. There’s nothing like a good sweat.’
‘It’s very kind of you, sir.’
‘Gladys!’ roared Captain Beale with a stentorian bellow that made the walls shake. ‘Durrell’s coming to dinner Thursday. I’ll make a curry.’
‘Very well, dear,’ said Mrs Beale, coming back into the room. ‘Come about seven, Gerry.’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ I said again.
‘Excellent,’ said the captain, getting to his feet, ‘Thursday, then, ay?’
It was obvious that I was bidden to go.
‘Well, thank you very much for the drink, sir.’
‘Pleasure,’ rumbled the captain, ‘pleasure. Watch out for those zebras, mind; they can be nasty devils, you know. Good night.’
4. A Plash of Polars
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
Kipling, ‘The Female of the Species’
The polar bears, Babs and Sam, were really the star performers of the section as far as the public were concerned. ‘Once you’ve seen them polars,’ Jesse would say to a visitor, ‘you’ve seen everything worthwhile in the place.’ The public liked to shudder over the real or imaginary fierceness of the lions and tigers, but once having seen them they lost interest. The polars, however, they never tired of watching, for the bears made them laugh. With the lions and tigers you had to watch them carefully for lengthy periods to exact any item of interest from their private lives, and most of the visitors had not the time to watch sleeping animals for hours in the hopes that their patience would be rewarded by some display of primitive passions or other example of the wonders of nature. But the polar bears were different; they were always on show, and people would stand by the hour and watch them. Sam would stand in one corner of the cage, swaying gently, or else he would lie prostrate on the concrete in the way you sometimes see dogs lying, with the hind legs splayed out, eyeing the public with considerable scorn. Babs, his wife, would dive and swim for bits of bread and biscuit in the pool or else stick her long nose through the bars and open her mouth wide to have these titbits thrown into it.
The difference between Babs and Sam was very marked, even at a cursory glance. Sam was huge and shaggy, with a tremendous rolling behind; h
is mate was sleek and slim. Sam’s head was very broad across the skull, with small neat ears, and the extraordinary bulge of flesh across the muzzle, the Roman nose of the old male polar. This fleshy protuberance would have made him look cunning if it had not been for the small good-humoured eyes deep set in his fur. Babs’s head was long and narrow, balanced like an icicle on the sinuous length of her neck. Her expression was cunning and the whites of her eyes were tinged with yellow, an unprepossessing colour that gave her the look of a jaded old woman on the morning after a hectic party. Sam, being the elder of the two, took life very slowly and sedately, plodding heavily round the cage like a benign and absent-minded old man. He never took two steps where one would do and, for the most part, did nothing very much except sleep in the sun. To contrast this, Babs was never still; if she was not waltzing about aimlessly she was crouched up by the bars, hooking at bits of biscuit and interesting bits of paper left by her admirers or else splashing in the green waters of the pool.
At feeding time Babs would come to the bars and open her long mouth full of curved yellow teeth so that Jesse could throw bits of meat into it. Sam would never do anything so undignified; he would take the meat carefully in his amazingly prehensile lips and then drop it on the cement for examination. If the meat was encrusted with fat he would place a large paw on it and then, with his front teeth, he would delicately pull the rustling fat off and eat it with great clops of his jaws and much lip-smacking. At feeding time Babs would always give a wonderful swimming display but she could never persuade Sam to join in. She liked nothing better than a good audience whose shouts and laughter would incite her to even greater heights of artistry; Sam did not give a damn whether there were people round the cage or not.
Babs would always spend half her day in the pool, regardless of weather conditions, rollicking about and making the green waters slop and splash. Sometimes she would lie on her back in the water for minutes at a time, examining her paws with intense concentration. I could never discover the reason for this strange habit. Most of the time she would swim the length of the pool as a dog would, all four feet thrusting the water; when she reached the end she would turn on her back and, with a strong kick from her hind legs against the side, she would push herself off again, a crumple of foam about her neck and shoulders. Sam, as I say, was oblivious of everyone and everything (with the possible exception of the food bucket) but Babs was always at her best with a crowd to admire her; at these times the pool was never free of her and she would play to the gallery with all the ogling archness of a third-rate pantomime dame. Her great belly-flops in pursuit of bread scraps would send the water showering over the sleeping Sam until, in disgust, he would be forced to move to a less vulnerable portion of the cage.
Sam, strangely enough, did not seem to like the water. Even if food was thrown into the pool he would not go after it but would stand at the edge of the concrete and try to hook it out with his paw. If this failed he would ignore it. Twice, however, I saw him venture into the pool to play with his wife and it was a sight worth watching. Babs on her own carried out every action with a complete lack of humour; she had a set, intent look about her, as though she were performing something very objectionable but would do it whatever the cost. The only time I saw her look as though she was enjoying herself was when Sam joined her in the water; only then did her expression seem pleasant and good-humoured. Sam would sit waist deep in the water and hug and bite his mate very gently, a benign kindliness shining from his eyes. Babs, on the other hand, would sometimes get so excited that she would bite him quite hard and he would be forced to admonish her with a skull-splitting slap. They would duck each other by the simple method of grabbing a mouthful of the loose skin of the neck and then sinking below the surface, dragging their mate with them. Their huge behinds would bob on the surface of the water like white pincushions while down in the green depths their fore-quarters would be slapping and biting in an ecstasy of high spirits. They would stay submerged for lengthy periods and then suddenly burst to the surface hissing and snorting, the water running bright from their fur.
Babs was childlike in her whole-hearted enjoyment of any toy that was given to her. Anything would do – an old motor tyre, a log of wood, a tuft of grass or a bone. She preferred to have something that could be easily managed in the water and that would not sink too rapidly. One morning I inadvertently left a bucket in the cage after we had cleaned out and we did not notice it until we had let the bears out of the traps, by which time, of course, it was too late to do anything. We tried to retrap them so that we could remove the bucket but they ignored our efforts. Sam, having assured himself that there was no food in it, took no further notice of it. Babs, being of a more boisterous nature, obviously regarded it as a gift from heaven, sent to relieve the monotony of captivity. She chivvied it around the rocks, banging it with one great paw, apparently enjoying the blood-curdling screeches it produced as it grated on the cement. Eventually it rolled noisily down the slope into the pool, where it floated lopsidedly. Babs stood at the edge of the water trying to reach it with her paw, but it had floated too far away. At last she dived in after it and the miniature tidal wave this action produced filled the bucket which promptly sank into the green depths. Undaunted, Babs turned upside-down and searched the bottom for it. In a minute or two she reappeared with the bucket hanging from her arm by its handle; she looked ludicrously like a milkmaid. Having recaptured her prize she was not going to risk losing it again so she lay on her back in the water with the bucket balanced on her stomach, patting it lovingly with her paws and occasionally tipping it up to sniff ponderously into the tinny, echoing interior.
After a time she grew careless again, and once more the bucket sank in a flurry of bubbles. She dived after it and this time she reappeared wearing it like a hat, the handle under her chin, to the almost hysterical delight of Joe. She had some difficulty in removing it from her head, which gave us a few anxious moments and this convinced her that the bucket could do with a lesson. Taking the handle in her mouth, she carried it out of the pool and dropped it on the concrete. With the air of one carrying out an absorbing experiment, she placed one paw on the side of the bucket and pressed. This simple, and apparently ineffectual, gesture made the bucket look as though it had been caught beneath a pile-driver; the sides were squashed in and the bottom bulged out like a blister. Having thus exhausted its possibilities, Babs lost interest in it and slouched off for a quiet swim.
Periodically Babs would be afflicted with a species of blind boil that would appear between the toes of her front foot. These were very worrying as they took some time to burst and would cause her great pain. Joe would stand hunched over the barrier rail watching her limp round the cage, his face puckered with sorrow.
‘Poor old thing, then,’ he would commiserate softly. ‘Poor old girl.’
We could do nothing except watch her painful progress round the cage until such time as the boil, bulged with its own poison, would burst and leave a smear of yellow pus on the white fur of her paw, a process which took two days. While her paw was swollen and throbbing Babs would never go into the pool, but as soon as it burst – almost before it had completely drained of pus – she would have plunged back into the water.
On one occasion the boil did not burst on the second day as usual; on the third morning her paw was still swollen tight as a drum and we noticed the swelling was spreading up her leg towards the elbow. This was serious, and so we went into action. We cajoled her into the traps and then gave her some M & B tablets crushed up and concealed in a piece of meat. Then we boiled a bucket of water on the little black stove in ‘The Haven’ and mixed disinfectant with it. Our idea was to foment her paw in the hopes of bursting the boil, but Babs was not at all keen to participate in this scientific experiment. The traps were long, and as soon as we approached one end of them with the steaming bucket Babs would hastily hobble off to the other end. Eventually, with the aid of two planks, three forks and a spade, we got her cornered at one en
d, where she sat hissing like a steam engine and giving warning growls. Then we threw a splash of hot water over the swollen paw and Babs lifted it up quickly, hissing with rage and pain, and tried to break through the barrier of planks and forks. Luckily, these held; we threw some more water over her paw and this time she only complained mildly. Gradually as the warmth crept through her fur, she became quieter and eventually lay down and closed her eyes. Before the bucket was empty the boil burst, spouting a stream of pus across the concrete, and Babs gave a sigh of relief. Two more buckets of water were used to clean away the matter as it dribbled from the shilling-sized hole in her paw. Half an hour later we let her out of the traps, and within a minute she was rolling and splashing in the pool as though there was nothing at all wrong with her.
Before working with Babs and Sam, I had never considered that a polar bear could move with any speed, and so I was surprised, to say the least, when Babs proved that she could move with the alacrity of a tiger. The only time she produced these bursts of speed was when she was sufficiently annoyed to make an attempt on one’s life. Sam rarely hurried and never seemed to get dangerously annoyed; if he was ruffled he would let you know it by giving a warning hiss through protruded lips. Babs gave no warning and needed very little excuse to attack. The first time she gave me a demonstration of what she could do was one morning when she was in a foul temper for some reason known only to herself. She hissed and growled when we trapped them up so that we could clean out the cage, and when we let them out again she shambled around muttering to herself and growled at Sam if he ventured too close. She was at the far side of the cage when I accidentally kicked over a bucket, and the noise it made gave her something to focus her rage upon. She twisted round in a sudden spasm of anger and then charged towards me at a rolling gallop. This ended, when she reached the bars between us, in four enormous bounces, as though she were a giant ball; she covered the ground so quickly and stuck her back-breaking paw through the bars with such speed that I only just stepped back in time. Disappointed at having missed me, she shambled off hissing to herself and went and sulked in the sun.