For many years a certain Mrs Boizard had come to our flat twice a week to sweep through it like a tornado and leave it sparkling bright. Mrs Boizard’s younger daughter, Betty, had come straight from school to work for the Trust and, over the years, had taken over the zoo accounts office and now rules it with a rod of iron. When Mrs Boizard came to the flat, Betty would always pop up and have five minutes ‘gossip’ with her mother. On this particular occasion, Mrs Boizard said, ‘I see Leonard du Feu his put his house on the market’ Betty looked incredulous, as well she might. Leonard was our nearest and most long-suffering neighbour, never complaining when animals made strange noises at night, not even protesting mildly when our South American tapir, Claudius, escaped, trampled a field of just blooming anemones into a pulp and then proceeded to Leonard’s garden and broke all his cloches. Leonard was a neighbour we prized above rubies. His Jersey property had been in his family for ever (something like five hundred years) and his fields, as they say, marched with ours. His house lay two minutes’ walk from the manor and was really three houses in one, with a small worker’s cottage, a huge coolroom and massive granite outbuildings. We had never, in our wildest dreams, imagined that Leonard would sell the family home, but once children are grown up and have moved away a house that is three houses in one takes a lot of upkeep.
Breathlessly, Betty descended to the office and gave the news to the astonished John Hartley, who immediately phoned me at my house in Provence, where I was busy writing a book. I told John to get on to Leonard and just hoped and prayed we were not too late. When John got hold of our erstwhile neighbour he said that the property had been on the market for a month and he could not, for the life of him, imagine why he had not thought of us as possible purchasers. On the face of it the whole thing sounded straightforward, but it proved to be anything but, for since the days of setting up the zoo times had changed. It took no less than three States of Jersey Committees to give their blessing before we could purchase the property and put it to the use we wanted. The States had just passed stringent laws relating to the ways in which properties (particularly agricultural properties) were used and, needless to say, none of the purposes for which we wanted to use Les Noyers fitted any of the categories delineated by the law. However, Jersey is proud of us and the work we do, and on this occasion (as they had done on previous occasions) they showed a massive vote of confidence in us. I do not say for one moment that the law was bent, but finally it was perhaps a little out of true and Les Noyers was ours.
To say we were delighted would be wholly inadequate. Instead of the massive concrete block we were contemplating for our training centre we had an elegantly beautiful old Jersey farmhouse with massive outbuildings and eight acres of land. There were some restrictions as to what use we could put the land to, but this did not matter for it was the house and outbuildings that we really wanted. So, as soon as the property was ours, we started renovations. Part of the house was used as student dormitories and living quarters, part converted into a flat for a housekeeper. We set up an elegant library called the William Collins Memorial Library, for before he died Sir William (my publisher) most generously gave us every zoological and natural history book that Collins had published or would publish in the future. In the huge outbuildings we had a lecture theatre constructed to seat sixty-four, with all the latest audio-visual aids. Above it were offices, a small museum, a graphics and photography area, a darkroom and a video suite, and we had still only taken up one half of the giant granite barn.
Once we had the training centre, of course, we needed a training officer. We knew this would have to be a very special sort of animal, someone biologically qualified but who could deal with a great variety of people from all over the world with tact and sympathy – someone in fact who could be both a father confessor and a father figure. To get the best, we felt we had to advertise the job. Naturally, we were inundated with candidates and from this pile we had to sort out the impossible ones, such as the lady from Penge who loved animals, had fourteen cats and had spent a holiday in Majorca, and the eighteen-year-old schoolboy from Somerset who said he had always liked foreigners in spite of them being different and had always wanted to teach them. So out of the flood we extracted some fourteen possibles and the interviews took place in London.
I know it is probably a nerve-racking task to go for an interview, but people who apply for jobs should spare a kind thought for the interviewers, because choosing people sight unseen is a gruelling task. You have their curriculum vitae in front of you, but for a job like this you are looking for a special personality, because we are a very small organization and from the point of view of personality we cannot afford a rotten apple in our barrel. Sometimes, if the candidate is nervous, it is difficult to make an assessment. Fortunately, there is a strictly adhered-to procedure as to the length of time that can be spent, the rules being that everyone who sits on the board must not waffle and must be able to drink unlimited quantities of bad coffee without flinching or having it impair their judgment. On this occasion, we were fairly speedy in eliminating candidates, especially the young man who came shambling into the room with his fly undone, waved us all a genial ‘good-day’ and asked if anyone had a light for his cigarette. We were of the strong opinion that his CV might have been forged. Suddenly, so swift had we been in the elimination process, we realized that we had only one candidate left. There were one or two faintly possible among the ones we load seen, but nothing that had stirred our enthusiasm. John went out to the anteroom and came back with the news that the last candidate had not turned up.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘there’s nothing for it. We’ll have to advertise again.’
‘And this time let’s put in a bit about having fifteen cats not being the same as having a PhD in biology,’ said John.
‘Yes, and that though foreigners are not English, a good training officer must try to overlook it,’ said Lee. ‘After all, I’m an American.’
‘Well, I suggest we all go somewhere to get the foul taste of this coffee out of our mouths with a good, old-fashioned non-foreign drink, like brandy and ginger ale,’ I suggested.
Fate has always played a sly game in the history of this Trust. She has waited until the very last minute before coming to our rescue. As we were shuffling our papers together, there was a knock at the door and at our unanimously shouted ‘Come in’, Dr David Waugh entered, the missing candidate, who had missed his bus, his train and everything else he could miss, but had come nevertheless. We could do no less than give him a cup of cold coffee and proceed to question him as deeply as if we were the CID and he was suspected of being Jack the Ripper. As he answered us, it became apparent that this, the last candidate, was the one we wanted. With light hearts we sent him on his way, congratulated ourselves on our brilliance and found our way to a convenient hostelry.
So David took up his post and his first job was to plan our training programme. This he did speedily and with great flair, because it is necessary for a programme as complex as this to be supple. I had a friend once who used to say of some programme or other, ‘What is needed is rigid flexibility’. Although the terms are opposed to each other, they make a wild sort of Alice in Wonderland sense, and so we have always striven for ‘rigid flexibility’ and this is what David produced. But while he was doing this, we knew that we would have to have (to aid David with his minor United Nations) someone that Americans, with their occasionally deft choice of terms, call a House Mother. Her terms of reference were as stringent as the ones David had to live up to: she had to control a mixed bag of people from all over the world, love them, be firm with them and, above all, be capable of coping with what you could describe as idiosyncrasies but which were merely differences of understanding because of linguistic failure, different culture or religion or simply the fact that they were far from home and lonely.
Olwyn, if she will excuse me saying so, is my perfect idea of a House Mother. A substantial woman, alwa
ys impeccable, she exudes the air of a farmer’s wife, one who has to cook the meals for ten children, a husband and eight field hands. One who milks the cow, gathers eggs from the hens, feeds the pigs, and is up at dawn or before to bake her own bread. A person, in fact, of great sympathy who could take anything in her stride. And, indeed, she and David have had to.
Olwyn’s cooking abilities are fabulous but she has that rare quality of a great cook, to be able to orchestrate her meals to her audience. She has, without batting an eyelid, been able to cope with a student from Pakistan whose great passion was sandwiches of tuna fish, fried potatoes, tomato ketchup and marmalade, and with students who requested sardines and lemon curd or marmite and lemon curd. In the face of such demands, a lesser woman would have quailed, but not Olwyn. She even resigned herself to the Californian who received every week an enormous care package consisting entirely of chocolate and candy of brands that backward Jersey did not have, and the Uruguayan girls who wandered around asking constantly for refills of hot water for their maté pots – which they clung to with the tenacity of babies to their dummies – and one of them insisting on eating no less than fourteen oranges a day.
Nor were Olwyn’s problems purely culinary, but only particularly so. We had a student from Nigeria who persisted – quite rightly in my view – in calling Olwyn ‘Mama’. He came to her some two days after arrival and said ‘Mama, I get terrible burning pain for belly’. Fearing the worst, Olwyn questioned him closely and discerned that he was only acutely constipated. Firmly but kindly, she give him a suppository and explained how to use it, and that in half in hour he would get relief, so he ought to be within handy range of the lavatory. It shows how, even if you think a person understands you, it is wise to make sure. He came back within the hour and told her that the suppository had not worked.
‘What did you do?’ asked Olwyn.
‘Mama, I go for latrine, I push this up and I pull it down. I do it for thirty minutes as Mama said. Still I have pains in my belly.’
David also had his problems. One day, giving an English lesson to a Malagasy student to improve his rather tenuous grasp on the language, David made up a story in which a man acquired a broken arm. The students were then asked what the man had broken. The Malagasy student, obviously thinking a broken arm too effete, gave as the list of things the man had broken as eyes, liver, lungs, stomach, ear, heart and tongue. When asked why he had listed all these unbreakable parts of the human anatomy, he replied that it was because he remembered the words and was extremely proud of this.
On another occasion, David was asking each of the students their National Bird. Things went well until he reached the student from Ghana who pondered with furrowed brow.
An eagle, sah,’ he said at last.
‘What sort of eagle?’ David asked.
The student again thought long and deeply.
An extinct eagle, sah,’ he said at last, triumphantly.
Then there were the two students from Thailand who arrived during a particularly savage winter when the snow lay deep and crisp and even. They were fascinated by this commodity which they had never seen before. It was perhaps unfortunate that most of their studies had to be done out of doors where they felt the cold most grievously After a week or so they complained to David of having itchy feet. Investigation showed that the moment they got back in the house the first thing they did was whip their shoes and socks off and put their feet against the nearest radiator. It was not to be wondered at that they were suffering from chilblains, but it is also not to be wondered at that chilblains are unknown in Thailand.
I had never thought to see this, our mini-university come into being during my lifetime, but it seemed no time at all before I was playing croquet on the back lawn of Les Noyers with students from Brazil, Mexico, Liberia, India and China, and that they kindly allowed me to win was in no way the only reason I felt proud. As a matter of fact, we have more applications worldwide from students wanting to come for training than we have room for (which is about thirty a year), and it is heartbreaking for them and for us to have to put them on our ever-lengthening waiting list. We have, quite literally, applications from all over the world, for as well as South America, Africa, Asia, Indonesia and Japan we have students in Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia wanting to come and benefit from our training scheme. These, for the most part, are youngsters who are looking for career training and who can pay their way over and afford our modest tuition fees, so we have to be very careful that they do not swamp the students from poorer countries, for our space is limited. But this mix of people from all nations has worked out very well indeed, I think because our trainees passionately share a common purpose, which is the saving of endangered species. It is good for them to meet one another and suddenly realize, with surprise, that all countries have conservation problems, not just their own, and they can help one another by exchanging ideas and information.
While the broad facets of the Trust’s approach to species conservation were being cut and polished over the years, there were many other facets that were being refined. The day-to-day routine in the manor grounds had to be attended to and improved, to keep the whole machinery of our over-expanding organization functioning. For example, take the veterinary side of maintaining a large collection of priceless endangered species.
Having gone on record as saying that the two most dangerous animals to let loose unsuperintended in a zoo are an architect and a veterinary surgeon, I am quite inured to architects approaching me with ill-concealed expressions of loathing as if I were Boris the Impaler of Bulgaria, and veterinarians edging round me with all the caution they would afford a mad bull or a rabid dog. I suppose the only comforting thing about this was that it proved they were literate or at least had taken the trouble to have the book read to them.
I remember the first time I asked both our veterinary surgeon and our doctor to attend a sick ape. I caused a considerable amount of embarrassment which I, in my innocence, could not understand. In Europe, among the major zoos, and in America as well, they unhesitatingly made use of the skills of a doctor should they be necessary or, indeed, a dental surgeon. In the work of trying to diagnose and mend the myriad wonderful machines, from man to mouse, there have been three separate meandering streams of knowledge: the exploration of the human being, the garnered knowledge about the function and illnesses of the domestic animal, and the last stream (until recently a veritable trickle), the study of wild animals in captivity. Naturally, the human being was paramount and therefore research in that area was the most comprehensive. But because the three streams were not intermingled, the veterinary sciences lost out. Although learning to apply the increasingly developed skills of human medicine, the veterinary surgeon was taught only about domestic animals and thus viewed the arrival in his surgery of a baby chimpanzee or a giant otter from Guyana with a certain amount of trepidation. Because of this limited approach to the reaching of veterinary surgery, zoological collections suffered.
I remember in my youth attending innumerable post mortems when the animal’s corpse was hacked to pieces and the inevitable diagnosis was TB. It never seemed to occur to anyone why so many diverse creatures, from ostriches to antelope, should suffer only from this malady, nor did it seem to occur to anyone that there might be a cure or a preventative. Fortunately, at long last, those days are over. Now there is a free interchange of knowledge and manipulative skills.
It was a few years ago that Tony Allchurch made his appearance in our midst. As an enthusiastic young veterinary surgeon he had taken up a partnership with Nick Blampied who, like his father before him, had given us stalwart service over the years. I think that Tony – like most veterinarians of worth – was fascinated by the wide variety of clients we provided him with, and all the irritating and convoluted methods they employed to make his life intolerable but nevertheless interesting.
One of Tony’s first jobs, long before we had ou
r sophisticated hospital, was to participate in an operation on Oscar, one of our large and potentially lethal Orangutans. Oscar had a bad tooth and, not surprisingly, Jack Perry, our local dentist, was unhappy about examining the offending molar until the animal was well and truly asleep. In those days we did not know much about the mysteries of anaesthesia of these creatures and for everyone’s peace of mind, and to keep our insurers happy, we had to press into service the local constabulary. A large bucolic sergeant was sent to us armed with a double-barrelled shotgun, in order to stand guard over Tony while he put Oscar under and Jack completed the dental operation. Tony said later that he was so thankful that Oscar showed no sign of coming round, for if he had he was quite sure that he would have received the benefit of both barrels of the gun and Oscar would have escaped unharmed.
‘I don’t trust Orangs’, Tony explained, ‘but I trust large policemen with guns even less.’
Tony has now joined our ranks as General Administrator as well as veterinarian, and during a comparatively normal day has to deal with anything from a caesarean operation on a gorilla to a blocked pipe in the ladies’ toilets.