I had no meat left with which to bribe her, and retreat was impossible with the audience outside – my public, as it were. Neither could we stand there indefinitely staring at one another. I felt desperately in my pockets and with great pleasure discovered a very elderly and dirty date, one of a handful I had filched from the stores that morning. With this hairy relic I knew I could do anything I wanted with Wops, for of all food-stuffs dates were her special weakness. She accepted it with every symptom of delight and while her attention was occupied in eating it I picked her up quickly and walked to the wire with her. Keeping my face well away from her jaws, I explained her anti-social conduct to the audience by saying that she was a little off-colour that week, accompanying this outrageous fabrication with a look of becoming modesty. This had the effect of embarrassing everybody except Wops and me; a few of the younger audience were led hurriedly away to forestall questions. Wops was extraordinarily heavy so I replaced her on the ground. There she shook herself like a dog, sniffed round hopefully to see if there was another date and, finding that there was not, heaved a reproachful sigh and waddled off.
Wops, towards winter, grew a tremendously thick coat and her tail assumed twice its normal proportions, but she never showed any signs of wanting to hibernate, a habit which in the wild state makes these creatures unique in the dog family. She did grow a little more lethargic and show a disinclination to come out of her hut when there was snow on the ground, but that was all. Although I could find no reference to these animals building nests to hibernate in, Wops did something which may have been an attempt to build a nest. I noticed one morning that she had been very busy among the bushes in her cage. There were branches and leaves, freshly broken, littering the ground when I went in. After my normal tribute of food to her I sat and watched her for some considerable time before she suddenly stopped trotting about and started breaking branches. She went into her hut and after a moment or so came out again and then peered around into the branches above her. Selecting a twig which was hanging within reach, she grasped it in her mouth and pulled hard, all four fat legs braced against the ground. When she had wrenched it off she proceeded to carry it about the cage in an aimless fashion, occasionally tripping over it. At last she grew tired of it and dropped it on the ground and then started to search for a new one. While I watched she broke three twigs and treated each one in the same way, then she returned to her hut for a snooze. It seemed as though she were trying to accomplish something but something which eluded her memory at the last moment. I never found any twigs inside her hut, but this may have been due to the fact that it was small and Wops was so fat that there was only room for her inside it.
Whilst, as I say, I met with a certain success in gaining the confidence of the racoon-like dogs and the Arctic foxes, Peter the wombat still remained elusive. By trying out a selection of foods I discovered that he, like Wops, had a passion for dates. So one day I deliberately delayed feeding him until the late evening. When I got to his enclosure I found that altering his timetable had had the desired effect, for he was standing by the wire looking forlorn and lost, like a teddy-bear in search of a nursery. He was a most attractive little animal, standing about one foot six in height, with a round, compact body that made him look very bear-like. His hind quarters sloped down suddenly and his legs were short and stubby and turned inwards; his face was very similar to that of a koala bear except that the latter’s eyes are large and fringed with fur while Peter’s were small and set close to his head. He had, however, the same egg-shaped patch of skin on his nose covered with sparse bristles, and his eyes were round and black like the koala’s. The main difference, I felt, was in the expression: the koala looks – even if it is not – alert and questioning, whereas Peter looked dazed and bewildered. Quite frankly, he looked as though someone had just hit him on the head with a brick. His fur was a delicate shade of grey, paling a bit towards his stomach – the nice cool grey of a wood-pigeon. To my surprise, he made no fuss when I entered the cage, and came forward quite readily to take dates from my hand, but he would not let me touch him and, having eaten his fill, he waddled off and wedged himself into his burrow in the chalk. After that, he would come out every day at mealtime, accept food from my hand and then disappear back into his burrow.
Since the chalk pit he inhabited was on a slope of the downs, the mouth of his burrow had to face the direction from which we got our worst weather, but Peter had evolved a novel and interesting method of keeping his bedroom dry. His tunnel was some four feet long and ended in a small circular chamber. Peter would shuffle into this and, as the diameter was exact, his bottom blocked the mouth of this bedroom as though it were a door. So he stayed, letting snow, wind and rain blow up the tunnel, keeping warm and dry by presenting the least vulnerable part of his anatomy to the inclemencies of the weather. Once he was wedged in like that, with his claws embedded in the chalk, it would have taken a gang of men with spades to dislodge him, so his action was two-fold: it not only protected him from the weather but also from any enemies that might creep down the tunnel in pursuit of him. Both disturbances would meet the furry, hard buttocks, on which they would leave little impression.
It was the day that Jesse put me in charge of my own animals that I was due to go to the Beales’ for dinner. Needless to say, Mrs Bailey took the news of my promotion with equanimity; she was much more concerned with what I was going to wear to the Beales’, for she treated my invitation rather as though it were a summons to Buckingham Palace.
‘And,’ I said triumphantly over tea, ‘I’m sure that eventually I can get those foxes to eat out of my hand.’
‘Fancy,’ said Mrs Bailey, not listening. ‘I’ve darned your blue socks. I’ve decided that you’re to wear your blue shirt; it goes nicely with your eyes.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You see, this wombat will be a bit of a problem . . .’
‘And your clean hankies are in the left-hand drawer. I’m only sorry you haven’t a blue one.’
‘Leave the boy alone, can’t you?’ said Charlie mildly. ‘He’s not entering a beauty contest.’
‘That’s not the point, Charlie Bailey, as well you know. This might lead to things. The boy must look nice. Apart from anything else, what would people say if I let him go out looking like a gypsy? They’d say I was letting him to go to the dogs. They’d say I was taking his money under false pretences. He comes here, away from his mother and home, away from people who can guide him . . . well, it’s up to us. And you may do as you wish, Charlie Bailey, but I for one am going to see that the boy goes out clean and decent and a credit to himself and us. How would it be if Captain Beale . . .’
‘What were you saying about wombats, boy?’ said Charlie, turning his back on this flood.
Eventually, after I had washed, shaved, cleaned my teeth, dressed and been inspected by Mrs Bailey with a fiercely critical eye, as though I were a guardsman about to take part in the Trooping of the Colour, I was allowed to go.
On arrival at the Beales’ the door was opened for me by Mrs Beale, who was looking pale and harassed. I discovered she always looked pale and harassed when the captain was cooking.
‘Good evening, Gerry,’ she said. ‘So glad you could come. Do go into the drawing room. Billy and the girls are there and Billy will give you a drink.’
The hall was redolent with the smell of curry. From the direction of the kitchen came a sound like a trainload of copper pans falling over a cliff. Mrs Beale winced.
‘Gladys! Gladys!’ roared Captain Beale from behind the kitchen door.
It sounded as though he were thrashing about waist-deep in broken china.
‘Gladys!’
‘What’s the . . . matter, William?’ called Mrs Beale.
‘The salt! Where the hell’s the salt? Why do people always move things when I’m cooking? Where’s the bloody salt?’
‘I’m coming, dear,’ said Mrs Beale, giving me a long-suffering smile. ‘Go into the drawing room, Gerry, I won’t be a minute.’
In the drawing room I found Laura, Billy’s sister, and the two plump young Jewesses who, having escaped from the Continent earlier in the war, were now billeted with the Beales. Billy was pouring beer into a glass as I entered.
‘Hallo, have a drink,’ he said, grinning. ‘Dad’s cooking – did you hear him?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it smells delicious.’
We sat in the drawing room making desultory conversation while the sounds of Captain Beale’s culinary activities were wafted to us like a fifteenth-century battle with plenty of armour. There would be a prolonged crash and rattle reminiscent of sixteen knights falling off their horses simultaneously and then the captain’s voice.
‘Coriander! No, no, the brown jar! Now. . . . chilli. Where’s the chilli? Oh . . . yes . . . well, I didn’t put it there. Hot? Too hot? What do you mean, too hot? Of course it’s not too hot . . . it’s not bloody hot enough! I’m not swearing. More coriander! Now look what you’ve done . . . you’ve let the rice boil over.’
Eventually the captain and Mrs Beale appeared. She was still looking harassed, whereas the captain, his face scarlet and perspiring, had the righteous and self-satisfied air of one who had vanquished a particularly malevolent and recalcitrant foe.
‘Ah, Durrell,’ he greeted me. ‘Just been cooking.’
‘He heard you,’ said Billy.
‘It smells delicious,’ I said hastily.
‘Not bad, not bad,’ said the captain, gulping his beer thirstily. ‘A good hot one this time. Curries are like women, Durrell. Some mild, some hot . . . never can tell until you . . . er . . . er . . . um . . . um . . .’
‘William, dear!’ said Mrs Beale quellingly. ‘Come along, girls, let’s go and lay the table.’
Presently, the table laid, we trooped into the dining room and the first course was served. Great bowls of mulligatawny soup, the virulent yellow of a jaundice epidemic and of a piquancy that left you feeling faintly surprised that your lips did not burst into flame.
At this point Captain Beale took from his pocket a large red handkerchief and draped it over his bald head so that the edge hung down as far as his eyes. It made him look like a particularly blood-thirsty pirate.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, William,’ said Mrs Beale. ‘What will Gerry think?’
‘Think? Think?’ said the captain, glaring out from under his handkerchief. ‘He’ll think I know what’s bloody what. Sops up the sweat . . . always used to do it on the Coast . . . Had a towel there, Durrell, d’you see? What with the temperature in the tropics and the curry, you got a real good sweat on . . . sweat horse-troughs. Sit there in the evening . . . nice pink gin . . . sit there, mother naked, with a curry and a towel and have a good sweat.’
‘William, dear.’
‘Of course you weren’t mother naked when you had guests,’ explained the captain hastily. ‘No, no, with guests you wore underpants.’
Eventually, the last searing spoonful of soup had been imbibed and the captain lumbered out into the kitchen and reappeared bearing a monstrous tureen.
‘Can’t get enough meat for a decent curry with this damned rationing,’ he grumbled, ‘so you’ll have to put up with this. This is rabbit.’
He removed the lid of the tureen and a cloud of curry-scented steam enveloped the table like a London fog. It seized hold of your throat with a hard, cunning, oriental grasp and built up in thick layers in your lung cavities. We all coughed furtively. The curry was delicious, but I thanked heaven that I came from a household which specialised in hot dishes; otherwise, my tongue and vocal chords would never have survived. After the first few mouthfuls everyone, their larynxes shrivelled and twisted, was mouthing incoherently and grasping at the water jug like drowning men at a straw.
‘Don’t drink water!’ roared the captain, the sweat pouring in cascades down his face, his spectacles misting with the heat. ‘Water makes it worse.’
‘I told you that you were making it too hot, William dear,’ remonstrated Mrs Beale, her face scarlet.
The two Jewesses were making strange, unintelligible, middle-European noises, Billy’s face was the colour of his hair, and Laura’s normally pale face was congested.
‘Nonsense,’ said the captain, mopping his head, face and neck with his handkerchief and undoing his shirt down to the waist, ‘it’s not too hot. Just a decent heat, eh, Durrell?’
‘Well, it’s all right for me, sir, but I can imagine it would be a little too hot for some people.’
‘Fiddy faddy!’ said the captain, waving a spade-shaped hand in dismissal. ‘People don’t know what’s good for them.’
‘It can’t be good for you to have it this hot,’ said Mrs Beale in a strangled voice, gulping water.
‘Of course it is,’ roared the captain belligerently, glaring at her through misty spectacles. ‘It’s a well-known medical fact that hot curry is good for you.’
‘But not this hot, dear, surely?’
‘Of course this hot. And this is not hot . . . this is a namby-pamby curry compared to what I could have made.’
An involuntary shudder ran round the table at the thought of what the captain could have made.
‘Why, on the Coast,’ the captain went on, shovelling curry into his mouth, ‘we had curry so hot that it was like swallering red hot coals.’
He beamed at us triumphantly and did a rapid mopping up operation on his face and head.
‘It can’t be good for one,’ said Mrs Beale, clinging to her original premise.
‘Of course it is, Gladys!’ said the captain impatiently. ‘Why do you think curry was invented in the tropics, hm? To burn out disease. That’s why. Why d’you think I never got beriberi or yaws, eh? Why d’you think I never fell to bits with leprosy?’
‘William, dear!’
‘Well, it’s true,’ said the captain truculently. ‘All due to curry. Goes in one end and comes out the other . . . burns you right through . . . sort of cauterises you, d’you see?’
‘William, please.’
‘All right, all right,’ the captain rumbled, but I don’t know what’s the matter with you all. I make you a decent curry and you all carry on as if I’d tried to kill you! If you had a curry like this every day you wouldn’t get colds in the winter.’
Here, I must say, I was inclined to agree with the captain. With one’s body incandescent with his curry, one felt that the humble cold germ would not stand a chance. As it was, as I walked home that night over the dark common I felt I ought to be leaving a coruscating trail of curry glowing behind me like the tail of a comet. Apparently, the fact that I could face his curry with equanimity endeared me to the captain and so, after that, every Thursday I went to dinner at the Beales’, and very pleasant evenings they were for me.
5. A Gallivant of Gnus
Indulge the loud unseemly jape
And never brush their hair.
Belloc, Bad Child’s Book of Beasts
After I had been working for a couple of months on the lions Phil Bates met me one morning and told me that he wanted me to start on a new section. I was delighted; not that I was not happily ensconced on the lions and working very happily with Jesse and Joe but I had, after all, come to Whipsnade to obtain experience and the more sections I worked on, the more scope it would give me. My new section was known as the bears. It contained, as its name implied, all the large bumbling, biscuit-coloured brown bears in the Whipsnade collection together with a giant paddock full of zebras and herds of gnu and other antelope, ending up with the small fry in the shape of wolves and warthogs.
The section was run by one Harry Rance, a diminutive, stocky individual with a broken nose and a pair of twinkling gentian-blue eyes. I found him sitting in a small room behind the zebra sheds sipping meditatively at a large battered tin mug of cocoa and whittling at a hazel twig.
‘’Lo, boy,’ he greeted me. ‘I hear you’re working along with me.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m glad they’ve shifted me to this section
because you’ve got a lot of nice stuff.’
‘Nice enough stuff, boy,’ he said, ‘but you want to watch it. Most of that stuff you’ve been dealing with on the lions you didn’t go in with: with our stuff you’ve gotta go in with it, so you’ll have to watch your step. They can look tame enough but they can catch you bending.’
He jerked his thumb at a stall where a fat, dazzling, black and white zebra stallion was standing placidly chewing at a wisp of hay.
‘Take ’im,’ said Harry. ‘Looks as calm as a baby, doesn’t ’e?’
I examined the zebra carefully. He reminded me of nothing more or less than a rather outsized, overweight donkey that someone had got at with a couple of pots of paint. I felt it would be the work of a moment to slip into the stall and saddle him up.
‘Just go up to the stall,’ said Harry.
I walked up to the stall and the zebra swung his head round and focused his ears on me. I walked a little closer and his nostrils widened into black velvety pools as he absorbed my scent. I moved still closer and still he made no move.