The Ark's Anniversary

  ‘Because I’m a fine, upstanding fellow of high moral principles,’ I said.

  ‘If she said that, you can tell she’s never met you,’ said Lee crushingly.

  But I remained uncrushed. I was aglow. She might well have chosen that cad Attenborough, or that bounder Peter Scott, but no, she had chosen me. So a dozen carefully chosen yellow roses, unblemished by greenfly, black fly, earwigs, death-watch beetles or similar pests were purchased and sent around to the stage door with a card saying, ‘The one clapping the loudest will be me. Can I see you after the performance?’ Back came the answer ‘Yes’.

  The wit of Coward combined with a glittering performance by Dinah made an unforgettable evening. Later, drinking Scotch in her dressing room, I confessed my adoration of many years’ standing, and we decided to meet frequently in spite of Lee. When she related this to her husband Jack, he sent me a stiff note accusing me of alienating his wife’s affections with over-fulsome adulation and yellow roses, and challenged me to a duel at dawn in Hyde Park. I accepted, but pointed out that as he had challenged me mine was the choice of weapons. I suggested champagne corks at fifty paces. It was on this happy note that our friendship began, and so when we were looking for the actress for our Festival of Animals, Dinah was the obvious choice.

  I had first met Yehudi Menuhin in France when he had come to stay with my elder brother Larry. Our little house lies some twenty-five miles away from the village where my brother lives (twenty-five miles is the requisite distance to keep between yourself and an elder brother) and so Lee and I drove over to have lunch with Larry and the Menuhins, an occasion which was joyous because Yehudi and his wife were charming. Lunch was lengthy, with ample food and wine, and about four o’clock we all began to think wistfully of bed and the word ‘siesta’ began to be mumbled. Fortunately, Larry’s house is huge, with an amplitude of bedrooms, so Lee and I chose one and were soon asleep. When we awoke we heard the sound of a violin.

  ‘Who’s playing the gramophone?’ asked Lee.

  ‘That’s Yehudi practising,’ I said.

  We crept out on to the landing and from a bedroom not far away came the sweet song of the violin, played by a master. I have in my life been woken from a siesta by many sounds – the song of birds, the crash of thunder, the purr of a stream and the silken sound of a waterfall – but never had I been woken as beautifully as that.

  Of course we asked the Menuhins and Larry to lunch with us the following day and, having discovered that Yehudi liked lentils, rice, peas and such things, I created a special Menuhin curry of colossal proportions. We were going to eat at our long table on our patio. There had to be innumerable side dishes and, to save time when laying the table, Lee had carefully arranged all the spoons, knives, forks, ladles and so on in special order on a large tray. Our guests arrived and, after a few drinks, Lee went off to the kitchen to put the finishing touches to the lunch. After a short while, Yehudi followed her and surveyed her, busy in the kitchen.

  ‘Do let me help,’ he said and, without waiting for Lee’s reply, his eye fell on the tray of cutlery which he seized and carried out to the patio before she could stop him. Beaming he approached the table and emptied the carefully arranged trayful of cutlery on to it in a great, gleaming, clattering, tangled pile. I saw Lee’s expression of horror, so I shepherded Yehudi back to the chairs, gave him another drink and went to help my distraught wife disentangle the feeding instruments.

  ‘I spent so much time on this,’ she whispered.

  ‘Never mind. Look on the bright side. It’s not every hostess who can say she has had her table arranged by Yehudi Menuhin,’ I pointed out.

  So I wrote to Yehudi and he, generous and kindly man that he is, said he would be glad to give his services to our cause and play something with the Jersey Youth Orchestra.

  So now we had a famous actor and actress to read poetry, an orchestra and a violinist of renown. But there were still many other ways in which the animal world touches and enriches our lives that I wanted to illustrate. In dance, for example; in song, in television and in painting. A friend of ours, Jeremy James Taylor, who had agreed to produce the show, had contacts with the Royal Ballet and, to my delight, they agreed to send over a band of up-and-coming students to perform for us.

  A few years previously, I had done a spot on a children’s television show with vivacious Isla St Clair. During rehearsals she had talked a lot about our activities and had seemed deeply interested in what we were doing, so interested indeed that she made a fatal mistake. She said that if, at any time in the future, I needed her help I had only to let her know. Having heard her sweet and lovely voice and been enchanted with it, I felt she would be the ideal person to represent animals in song. I phoned her, reminded her of her promise and asked her to come to Jersey. She said she would be delighted and, in fact, knew an attractive little song about a zoo.

  I then had a pause for thought. What, I said to myself, about plants? After all, without plants animals could not survive. Of course, there was only one roaring uninhibited champion of the plant world and that was David Bellamy. Then a wicked thought crossed my mind. Flanders and Swann, in their brilliant two-man shows, At the Drop of a Hat, had done a song called ‘Misalliance’. It was about a honeysuckle and a bindweed who fall in love but, because one turns clockwise and the other anti-clockwise they can never marry and so ‘they pulled up their roots and just withered away’. By dint of bribery and corruption I got Isla and David to sing this as a duet – a most unlikely combination, as David has – and I am sure he will not be insulted by this – a voice like the mating call of a romantic bull walrus.

  The choice for animals on television was easy, for who could be better than David Attenborough?

  I had known David since he was a lowly BBC producer. We were introduced in a pub, where we spent a convivial morning discussing animals and travel. Some years after this, David phoned and asked if I could do a radio programme with him in the zoo. I said I would be delighted, and so a date was fixed.

  In those days we still possessed Chumley and Lulu, our pair of chimpanzees of uncertain virtue. When you went to visit him, Chumley, after his hysterical morning greeting, which consisted of bared teeth, loud maniacal screams and swinging to and fro around the cage, would sit down and dissect an orange with the deep concentration and delicacy of a famous Harley Street specialist performing a lobotomy on a Prime Minister. Lulu, well aware of her husband’s impeccable manners when it came to the weaker sex, took no chances; while her husband was busy with his display she stuffed her mouth full of grapes, gathered together as much fruit as she could and sat on it in the hope that it would escape the attention of her spouse. Chumley, having completed his surgery on the orange, ate the contents and threw the skin at Lulu, generally hitting her on the back of the head. Chumley was an underarm bowler but his skill and accuracy were remarkable. Having thus informed Lulu of his devotion, he leapt on her when she least expected it, cuffed her over the back of the head and dragged her, screaming, off the pile of fruit she was hiding. He then sat down, stuffed a banana into his mouth, masticated it into a suitably pulpy condition, and spat it into his hand to investigate it with a fat forefinger, like somebody sorting out change for a vending machine.

  The one thing you could always rely on Chumley to do was to cause you the maximum amount of embarrassment. Take a party of exalted visitors around and Chumley was ready for you. He seemed to know that the people were important and that he was supposed to be on his best behaviour. A malevolent gleam would appear in his eye as he summed up the situation and thought out the best strategy for causing havoc. He generally began by beating up Lulu, pulling her hair or knocking her over and jumping up and down on her. He did this for two reasons. First, Lulu had the loudest and most penetrating scream of any chimp I have ever heard: a cross between a demented train whistle and a knife blade on a plate. Second, he had discovered that there was nothing quite
like a little domestic upheaval to focus the interest of his audience. Having assured himself of their undivided attention, he then continued his act by raping his wife or else he sat on a branch doing unmentionable things to himself with great gusto, so that the ladies in the group would go quite pink and fan themselves with their guide books. Then, when everyone had been more or less lulled into a sense of false security by this temporary immobility, he would regurgitate a great handful of masticated fruit and scatter this largesse over the crowd, who would run screaming from the cage with gobbets of glutinous fruit adhering to their clothes. To force a crowd to break and scatter like this made Chumley feel good: he knew he had achieved the height of his ambition and life could offer nothing more exquisitely pleasurable.

  Despite the many years I have spent taking important people round the zoo, I always approached Chumley’s cage with a feeling of extreme trepidation, which always proved to be well founded. So I remember vividly the day that David Attenborough came over to do the radio programme with me.

  It was a very simple programme, with David and me ambling from cage to cage telling anecdotes about the animals we had met in various parts of the world. It was not the sort of programme you could get away with now, for your audience demands technicolour and huge close-ups of the animals you are talking about. But in those happy, far-off days of steam radio audiences were less demanding. The first thing was to take David around the collection, so that we could decide which species to have in the programme and who was going to say what about which. It was his first visit and although we were still in our primitive stages he was infectiously enthusiastic about our animals and our aims. We were enjoying ourselves so much that we approached Chumley’s abode without a tremor of doubt sullying my mind. As soon as David saw the apes, he uttered a delighted cry and hurried to the front of the cage. It just so happened that in that particular week we had been inundated by a flood of exotic fruits. The chimps had engulfed their share of this bounty with vociferous enjoyment, but it had brought havoc and disaster to their bowels. In consequence, to say that the cage was well stocked with throwable material of the more adhesive kind is an understatement. Chumley, seeing his victim approach in all innocence, was delighted. He scooped up two great handfuls of ammunition and, as David reached the barrier rail, released them with unerring accuracy. They hit David amidships, as it were, and his immaculate white shirt became a midden. David stood aghast while Chumley, encouraged by his success, loosed off another two handfuls, which hit their target with equal accuracy. David was beginning to resemble a walking manure heap when I rescued him. Apologizing profusely, I whisked him into the manor, where he could wash, and lent him a clean shirt. After a very large drink he seemed slightly mollified, but for the rest of our tour I noted that he approached all cages with circumspection and where possible, allowed me to precede him.

  Hoping the years had dimmed his memory, I phoned David, reminded him that he had never returned my shirt, and said I would like him to come and show that enchanting sequence from Life on Earth where he sat surrounded by mountain gorillas in the forest, one of the most moving sequences in the series. To clinch it, I said that our mutual friend of long standing, Chris Parsons (who had been boss man of the BBC Natural History Unit when Life on Earth was made) had agreed to come over to handle the technical problems of projection and so on. David agreed at once and was as good as his word, even though he did not bring me a replacement for my shirt.

  As with animals in television, animals in art presented no problems, for who better to illustrate this than David Shepherd? As a superb painter, David had long since lost his heart to the wildlife of Africa, particularly the elephant. His vivid and magical paintings of pachyderms and other beasts had earned him a worldwide following and he used the money he earned from his work to create his own foundation for the protection of African wildlife. Before I met him for the first time, I was told that I was bound to get on with him as we were each as mad as the other. When we met, I grant you there were certain similarities but I still maintain that David has the edge over me, for I would not be so idiotic as to go palette in hand, trailing a BBC film crew, in an effort to paint an original portrait of an elephant in the wild. I forgot how many times they were charged in this ridiculous and dangerous process but I know Chris Parsons, who produced it, came back from Africa with grey streaks in his hair and a haunted look in his eyes. However, David agreed to come along and show the piece of film of him being pursued by an elephant and to talk about the importance of wildlife generally and its importance in art.

  Johnny Morris had for years represented the rather gormless Victorian-type zoo keeper in a series on TV called Animal Magic. I had known him for years – a gentle, kindly man whose powers of mimicry were extensive and incredibly funny. Once, when he was making a film in the Scilly Islands, I had lent him my dog (also called Johnny) as a prop-cum-mini-star and so I felt that one good turn deserved another. Johnny said he would be delighted to come and tell a funny story of him (in his keeper role) having trouble with an elephant.

  So now everything was more or less in place, but still Simon was running around like one demented. Hotels had to be booked, flowers put in rooms and a host of other details attended to. His job was not made any easier by the harsh truths of meteorology. We knew, from bitter experience, that if there was a gale anywhere in the Atlantic (say down near the Falklands) it would invariably turn up at Jersey to discomfort us. If there was so much as a wisp of fog anywhere between the South Polar ice-cap and the English Channel, it would make its way with unerring accuracy to settle on Jersey like an opaque teacosy, so that planes could not get in or out. This generally happened when we had been entertaining a bore we were desperate to get rid of, or looking forward to the arrival of a loved friend. On this occasion, it was savage crosswinds, and a few hours before the show David Attenborough and another piece of vital equipment were being blown to and fro over the island, the pilot saying he could not land and Simon telling him he just had to. Finally, they did, before Simon’s red hair turned white.

  Now he had all the VIPs on the ground and tucked away in various hotels, Simon had to issue them with special passes to allow them access to the giant hall in Fort Regent, for the security surrounding the princess was, naturally, comprehensive. So eager was Simon to make sure he got all these multifarious details right that he omitted to give himself a pass, and while all the stars were allowed into the hall Simon was stopped by the security people. For some time he pleaded that he was the organizer of the show, but they were stone-faced and adamant. He could not enter without a pass. Finally, when he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, somebody identified him and, with the greatest reluctance, he was allowed in.

  At last, the Festival started. I introduced it, explaining that what we were trying to do was to show the importance of the other animals on the planet and how they influenced our lives in so many ways. I was flanked as I spoke by Simon’s adorable identical twin daughters (then four years old), both dressed as Dodos in elaborate costumes, which I feared, might suffocate them under the heat of the lights. Before leading them off, I explained that, as our symbol was the Dodo, it was appropriate that two Dodos were on the stage with me, but unfortunately they were not a breeding pair.

  The evening went with a swing and it was obvious that our stars were enjoying themselves as much as the audience was enjoying them. As I sit watching all my friends give so joyously and generously of their many talents, I reviewed the day. It had been long and complicated, and the weather had not been kind. Whenever we are lucky enough to be visited by our patron, the island is immediately lashed by howling gales and rains such as are normally never found outside a serious monsoon. This, of course, meant the last-minute rejigging of events which were supposed to be out of doors, and had to take place indoors. But apart from the inclemencies of the weather there had been other and greater horrors, which had not been vouchsafed to me.

  There was ?
?? to choose just one – the case of Motaba’s head. You would think that the complexities of a royal visit were enough to cope with without having a gorilla’s head inserted into it, but, as I explained at the beginning of this book, when you are living among fifteen hundred animals, practically anything can happen at any time. One learns to live with it; one tends to accept it as a normal pattern of life. But when you get a princess inextricably entwined with a gorilla’s head, you feel that life is dealing you a very unfair body blow.

  This is what happened, and I am glad that I did not know it while I was taking the princess around: the rain had paused to draw breath while we opened our Training Centre and the princess met some of our multi-coloured, multi-lingual and multi-orientated students from all corners of the earth. After this, it was planned that we went to the manor house so that the princess could sign the visitors’ book and then have a tour of the zoo ending up at the gorilla complex at precisely eleven o’clock. Royal visits have to be stop-watched to an exact degree and if we did not reach the gorilla complex at eleven exactly it would throw into disarray all the ensuing events.

  Richard Johnstone-Scott, without doubt the best and most experienced ape keeper in the world, had looked at the weather and decided that he was not having the princess view his deeply cherished charges dripping with rain in their spacious outdoor area. They would have to be shown in the inside bedroom area. So, with a flash of genius, Richard created what could be called ‘instant jungle’. With branches from our oak trees, our sweet chestnuts and limes, he piled the bedrooms high. The effect was spectacular and when the gorillas were let in they rumbled and growled like volcanoes, as gorillas do when they approve of something.

  At that moment, Princess Anne was being ushered into the manor house and the visitors’ book was being brought out. We were due at the gorilla complex in four minutes’ time.