Bebita then put on her long white gloves, which she had removed at the outset of bargaining, the better to gesticulate, and left the shop in regal fashion, followed humbly by me leading Claudius on a rope. She hailed a passing taxi, but when the taxi driver discovered that it was Bebita’s intention to have Claudius accompany us, he expressed horror.
‘Senora, bichos are not allowed in taxis,’ he said.
Bicho is a useful South American word meaning any sort of wild creature.
Bebita gave him the look Queen Victoria was supposed to give people when she was not amused.
‘It is not a bicho,’ she said coldly, ‘it is a tapir.’
‘It is a bicho,’ said the taxi driver, stubbornly, ‘a wild and savage bicho.’
‘It is neither wild, savage, nor a bicho,’ said Bebita. ‘However, if you don’t want to earn the thirty pesos for carrying him, I am sure we can find a taxi that will.’
‘But the police . . .’ said the taxi driver, cupidity struggling with self-preservation.
‘You may leave the police to me,’ said Bebita, and thus we rescued Claudius.
Now he was a father twice over and as handsome a tapir as I had seen. As I was scratching his ears he suddenly gave a loud sigh and fell on his back as if shot. This was the signal for me to scratch his tummy. As I was doing this, Nero, always on the lookout for food, tried to eat one of his father’s ears, which made Claudius leap to his feet snorting with indignation. Jeremy told me he was having difficulty in finding a suitable zoo which had room for Claudius and his family, and, though I looked suitably depressed, I was secretly rather pleased.
Next we stopped at the peccary paddock. Here Juanita was the founder mother of the herd of these South American pigs. I had obtained her as a baby in the province of Jujuy in northern Argentina, and the moment I had got the animal collection by train back to Buenos Aires Juanita developed what appeared to be pneumonia. The animals were housed in the grounds of the Natural History Museum while I bedded down in a friend’s flat; naturally Juanita had to be bedded down in the flat too, so that she could be nursed. She was in desperate straits and I was sure I was going to lose her. Between the Museum and the flat lay the red-light quarter of Buenos Aires and a street called Venti Cinco de Marzo. Here, between our chores at the Museum and nursing Juanita, we used to drop into a cafe called Olley’s Music Bar for a few fortifying jars of wine. Olley’s girls soon found out what my friend David and I were doing and of the sad plight of Juanita. Every evening, with the utmost tenderness, they would enquire after her progress and vie with one another in bringing her small presents (I assume bought with what people would call their ‘ill-gotten gains’) – a box of chocolates, some figs or avocado pears or perhaps some boiled baby sweet corn. There was great rejoicing when I told them that Juanita had turned the corner and would live. One girl burst into tears and had to be revived with a large brandy, and Olley himself gave free drinks all round. All I can say is, fallen ladies or not, if I were ill in hospital I would like to be sustained by the genuine love and sympathy of Olley’s ladies. I was glad to hear that Jeremy was having difficulty in finding a new home for the peccary herd.
Next we came to the abode of a palm civet called Potsil. These civets look like small, gingery-brown cats with long ringed tails; the coats covered with blurred darker blotches, and curious protuberant amber-coloured eyes with vertical pupils, which give them a faintly reptilian look. I had collected Potsil in West Africa when he was newly born and still blind. As soon as his eyes opened and he got his milk teeth, I realized I was rearing a monster. Potsil lived to eat and would fall upon anything, living or dead, that came within reach. He carried the textbook definition of ‘omnivorous’ to untold lengths. There was nothing be would not throw himself on to with screams of joy, even if it were some revolting titbit rejected by every other species as being inedible. His greatest ambition in life was to consume a human being – a task he did not feel was beyond his abilities. This made cleaning out his cage a hazardous occupation, for though he looked lethargic he could move like lightning when spurred on by his gastric juices. One of my more impressive scars had been donated by Potsil, so I had no mixed feelings about sending him away. I was passing his abode one morning when I came upon a new member of the staff cleaning out Potsil’s cage. Seeing that Potsil looked so catlike, the innocent youth had merely picked the animal up by the scruff of the neck and clasped him to his bosom, so that he could clean out the cage with his other hand. Innocence of this sort sometimes protects as the animal is so taken aback. Foolishly, I decided to help.
‘Here, let me hang on to the animal,’ I said, ‘he knows me.’
I bent forward and grabbed Potsil by the scruff of the neck. My next action was going to be to grab his tail. This method kept one from his mouth and claws. Before I could get a hold, however, a voice from behind me said, ‘You must be Mr. Durrell,’ in delighted tones. Distracted by the voice, I gave Potsil his chance. Dangling from my hand like a hanged man from a gibbet, he twisted himself lithely, sank his sickle-sharp retractile claws into my wrist and followed them with his full set of teeth, dentures that would have done credit to a baby Sabre-toothed tiger. I suppose one is always surprised at the amount of blood in one’s body, because one does not normally splash it about more than necessary. As soon as Potsil’s fangs sank into my wrist, like hot razor blades into butter, I appeared to be losing some three pints of this vital fluid per second. Somehow, I stifled my cry of agony and turned it into ‘Good morning’, as I turned to face two little old ladies, both wearing pixie hats and wreathed in smiles.
‘We are so sorry to interrupt when you are playing with your animals,’ said the first pixie, ‘but we felt we must tell you how much we’re enjoying our visit to your zoo.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, hoarsely.
‘All the animals look so happy and well fed,’ she went on.
‘We try to give them the best of everything,’ I said, as Potsil, uttering yarring noises of delight, proceeded to eat his way from my wrist down my hand. I was now losing more blood than any heroine in a Dracula movie, but I managed to hold the animal in such a way that the pixies could not see.
‘You play with them all every day?’ asked number two with quavering interest.
‘No, no, not all of them,’ I said.
‘Just your favourites, like this one?’ suggested the elder pixie.
‘Yes,’ I said, wondering how much blood you had to lose before fainting.
‘How lovely – how they must love it. And love you too, of course,’ said the younger.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, as Potsil’s teeth grated on my knuckles, ‘they . . . er . . . get very attached to you.’
Well, we won’t keep you, we know you’re busy,’ said the elder pixie. ‘We have enjoyed ourselves. Thank you so much.’
As they mercifully moved away, I could hear one say to the other, ‘You can see he’s a true animal lover, can’t you, Edith?’ Had they known my feelings about Potsil at that moment, they would unhesitatingly have called in the RSPCA.
I said to Jeremy: ‘We can definitely get along without Potsil, though to be fair I suppose we will have to divulge his anthropophagic nature.’
‘They are very anxious to have him,’ said Jeremy.
‘Did you tell them he was a ravening monster, compared to which a Bengal tiger suffering from rabies was a mere kitten?’
‘No,’ said Jeremy, who had the grace to blush, ‘but I told them he was a fine specimen.’
‘With your command of euphemism and prevarication we should soon get rid of all the more dangerous creatures,’ I said hopefully.
Gradually, hardening our hearts, we continued with the process of elimination but it was a job fraught with difficulties, for not only were my feelings and Jeremy’s involved, but those of everyone connected with the zoo. It was bad enough to have to make
the decision to part with in animal but, having done so, to discover that the creature had its own fan club among the office or other staff was disastrous. Dictation was taken by tight-lipped secretaries, red-eyed, sniffing into their handkerchiefs, shooting cold glances of hate as if you were a reincarnation of Attila the Hun. Strong maintenance men whom you would have thought would not have a sentimental bone in their bodies gazed at you with loathing, their eyes misty with unshed tears. It was an extremely trying time for all concerned but we managed to get through it without a flurry of resignations.
Another task for the young Trust was to start our filing system. We already kept notes on our charges but these were fairly primitive. What we needed was something much more comprehensive, for I felt that having any large collection of exotic creatures without a proper, detailed filing system was like having a library without a catalogue. This meant cards which recorded where they came from, their age, sex and other details normally vouchsafed on an average passport. But in addition we had to evolve cards which covered all the many day-to-day observations. Within a short space of time, we had amassed a huge fund of information on general behaviour, feeding habits, breeding habits and sicknesses and veterinary treatment. Much of this information had never been recorded before, so we were gradually building up unique archives of the utmost importance. We were – believe it or not, it was the early 1960s – ahead of our time, at least in the United Kingdom.
It was about then that I attended a conference at London Zoo on ‘The Role of the Zoo and its Importance’. The best paper given, to my mind, was by Caroline Jarvis, now Countess of Cranbrook. In it she succinctly and dearly set out what zoos should be and what they should do to make themselves better. I was particularly delighted because many of the things she suggested zoos should be doing (but were not) we had already had in operation for several years, and one of the most important of these, of course, was our filing system. It was housed in four massive wooden filing cabinets (we could not afford the luxury of metal ones), a much-appreciated gift from a member, and this treasure trove was housed in Jeremy’s office.
One night, I was awoken by the sound of feet running across the gravel of the forecourt. Running feet at three in the morning denote a crisis of some sort and in a zoo the possibilities are unimaginable. I was out of bed and halfway down the stairs before I was fully awake. The big room below our flat – in those days the Offices, now reception – was full of smoke. I ran through to the corridor, which led to Jeremy’s office, and the smoke and heat grew more intense. It is quite surprising how stupidly one can behave in a crisis. My one thought was that in Jeremy’s office there was a baby Colobus monkey we were hand rearing (for we had not the hospital facilities we have now) and all our precious files, both of which had to be saved. I flung open the door of the office and a wall of flame leapt at me, tiger bright, removing in a casual fashion a lot of my hair, my eyebrows and bits of my beard. I staggered back and managed to shut the door. It was obvious that in that inferno the baby Colobus and, so I thought, all our files would be destroyed. We could only wait until the fire brigade arrived, which it did, as usual with the slickness and speed of an eel. Within a short time, they had reduced what looked like the Great Fire of London to the size and fearsomeness of a homely, gently smoking Guy Fawkes bonfire. Eventually, I was allowed to step into the acrid, blackened ruins of the office, the oily water swirling around the floor smelling like the interior of a coalmine.
The poor Colobus was dead, of course, and in the midst of this ugly scene stood our four filing cabinets, charred and black as surviving tree stumps after a forest fire. Gingerly, I pulled open a drawer in one of these crumbling pillars of charcoal. To my utter astonishment the contents, apart from being singed around the edges and a bit damp, were quite undamaged.
‘Ah, yes,’ said a burly fireman who, with blackened face, stood holding a dribbling hose, ‘lucky you had all them papers in there or you’d have lost ’em.’
‘What d’you mean?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘These are wood, see,’ he explained, ‘thick wood. Taken a while to burn through. If you’d had them in one of these here modern files, the metal would have got red hot and every paper would have been burnt to a cinder. The wood saved ’em see? Slow burning.’
So it was our antediluvian filing cabinets that had saved our valuable records. Sometimes it does not pay to be too modern.
We were now growing apace and beginning to get organized but we were still, I think, a bit of a puzzle to most of the zoo fraternity. We did not follow the rules. What were we up to? It was ridiculous to think captive breeding would ever be taken seriously by the bulk of the conservative conservation world. At that time, of course, this was true to a certain extent, but there were glimmerings of intelligence in both the zoo and conservation worlds – but they were still two worlds and the glimmers were only glow-worm bright. There is a very old adage which, when people are in some confusion about an idea, instructs you to tell them what you are going to say, say it, and then tell them what you have said. Bearing these useful instructions in mind, we decided to organize and host, with the aid of the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society, the first ‘World Conference on the Breeding of Endangered Species in Captivity’. As a conference it was a great success but looking back at it now it seems a bit of a hotchpotch. This was to be expected since captive breeding was a patchwork quilt of endeavour as yet unstitched. But it did, I think, give the conception a morale boost in the right direction. It is wonderful that this conference, first held in Jersey in 1972, has become a regular thing, hosted by different zoos and organizations in different parts of the world, a conference for the gathering and dissemination of information.
It was right at the time of the conference that we had two incredible pieces of luck. We had two half-grown gorillas, N’pongo and Nandi, who were causing us problems. First, since they had no male, they were becoming very butch and this was worrying if we hoped to breed them. Second, they were rapidly outgrowing their accommodation. Then, miraculously, both problems were solved. Brian Park, a Jersey resident, later to become a Trust Council member and later still our chairman, came forward with the munificent sum of £10,000 after he had seen me on local television bemoaning (as I always was in those days) lack of funds for development. We used this windfall to build spanking new accommodation for our gorilla girls, which was splendid but did little to help with their increasingly entangled sex lives. Then Ernst Lang, the director of Basle Zoo, came to our rescue as, if you like, a sort of zoological marriage guidance counsellor. Ernst had been the first man to breed a gorilla in captivity and to get the mother to rear it instead of taking it away and hand rearing it, which had often been the case in zoos lucky enough to breed these wonderful apes. He had visited us in Jersey and approved of what we were doing, and so he now phoned up and said he would let us have Jambo, first mother-reared gorilla in captivity, a proven breeder himself, to ease the delicate situation between our virgin girls. To have a young adult male gorilla, a proven father, offered to you is as rare as having the key to Fort Knox enclosed with your American Express card.
Now we had this whole problem solved, or so it seemed. There was only one thing to plan: that we should make as much publicity out of our new gorilla quarters and the arrival of Jambo as possible. Who were we going to get to open them? At that time there were a handful of well-known conservationists who seemed to open everything. However, what I wanted was someone outside the conservation movement to show that there were people other than biologists and naturalists who were concerned about the plight of the world’s wildlife. But of course it had to be a name for the sake of the publicity. After some thought and with considerable trepidation, I decided on David Niven, a consummate actor whom I had long admired. Whether somebody of his international reputation would feel it worthwhile to come to Jersey to open accommodation for gorillas was a moot point. I phoned my agent for advice and he put me in touch with Niven’s so
n, who worked in London. Would his father, I asked tentatively, take kindly to the idea of acting as best man at a gorilla’s wedding?
‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ was the amused reply, ‘but he likes doing mad, unusual things. Why don’t you write and ask him?’
So I did, and in due course received the following telegram: ‘Delighted to officiate at gorilla wedding on condition I am at no time left alone with the happy couple. David Niven.’
I met David and his delicious wife at the airport and, though they landed in a howling gale and pouring rain, David was in fine fettle. Over dinner he displayed the urbane wit and scintillating charm for which he was famous and the best thing about it was that it was natural charm and not an act. He told me a number of hilarious and unprintable stories about Errol Flynn, for whom he obviously had a regard bordering on adoration.
‘But nevertheless,’ said David seriously, ‘whatever one says about Flynn, there was one thing you could rely on him for absolutely. In a crisis he would always let you down.’
The next morning before ten o’clock when the gates opened I took the Nivens around to meet the animals and they were fascinated. Eventually, we ended up at the Orangutans and I introduced them to Bali, heavily pregnant, the sweetest of apes, beautiful, bulging and benign. She lay in the straw, her beautiful little dark almond shaped eyes regarding us with the placidity of a Buddha, her stomach protuberant in orange fur, her breasts, heavy with milk, obvious in a way that would undoubtedly have won her first prize in a Miss Orangutan contest.
‘There you are,’ I said to David, ‘don’t you think she looks like the orangutan’s answer to Lollobrigida?’