Menagerie Manor

1 MENAGERIE MANOR

It is one thing to visit a zoo as an ordinary member of the public but quite another to own one and live in the middle of it; this at times can be a mixed blessing. It certainly enables you to rush out at any hour of the day or night to observe your charges, but it also means that you are on duty twenty-four hours a day, and you find that a cosy little dinner party disintegrates because some animal has broken its leg, or because the heaters in the reptile house have failed, or for any of a dozen reasons. Winter, of course, is your slack period, and sometimes days on end pass without a single visitor in the grounds and you begin to feel that the zoo is really your own private one. The pleasantness of this sensation is more than slightly marred by the alarm with which you view the mounting of your bills and compare them to the lack of gate-money. But in the season the days are so full and the visitors so numerous that you hardly seem to notice the passing of time, and you forget your overdraft.

The average zoo day begins just before dawn; the sky will be almost imperceptibly tinged with yellow when you are awakened by the birdsong. At first, still half asleep, you wonder whether you are in Jersey or back in the tropics, for you can hear a robin chanting up the sun, and, accompanying it, the rich, fruity, slightly hoarse cries of the touracos. Then a blackbird flutes joyfully, and as the last of his song dies the white-headed jay thrush bursts into an excited, liquid babble. As the sky lightens, this confused and cosmopolitan orchestra gathers momentum, a thrush vies with the loud, imperious shouts of the seriemas, and the witches’ cackle from the covey of magpies contrasts with the honking of geese and the delicate, plaintive notes of the diamond doves. Even if you survive this musical onslaught and can drift into a doze again you are suddenly and rudely awakened by something that resembles the strange, deep vibrating noise that a telegraph pole makes in a high wind. This acts upon you with the same disruptive effect of an alarm clock, for it is the warning that Trumpy has appeared, and if you have been foolish enough to leave your window wide open you have to take immediate defensive action. Trumpy is a grey-winged trumpeter, known to his more intimate ornithologist friends as Psophia crepitans. His function in the zoo is threefold—combined guide, settler-in, and village idiot. He looks, to be frank, like a badly made chicken, clad in sombre plumage as depressing as Victorian mourning: dark feathers over most of his body and what appears to be a shot-silk cravat at this throat. The whole ensemble is enlivened by a pair of ash-grey wings. He has dark, liquid eyes and a high, domed forehead arguing a brain­power which he does not possess.

Trumpy, for some reason best known to himself, is firmly convinced that his first duty of each day should be to fly into one’s bedroom and acquaint one with what has been going on in the zoo during the night. His motives are not entirely altruistic, for he hopes to have his head scratched. If you are too deeply asleep, or too lazy, to leap out of bed at his greeting cry, he hops from the window-sill onto the dressing-table, decorates it extravagantly, wags his tail vigorously in approval of his action, and then hops onto the bed and proceeds to walk up and down, thrumming like a distraught ’cello until he is assured that he has your full attention. Before he can produce any more interesting designs on the furniture or carpet, you are forced to crawl out of bed, stalk and catch him (a task fraught with difficulty, since he is so agile and you are so somnambulistic), push him out onto the window-ledge, and close the window so that he cannot force his way in again. Trumpy now having awakened you, you wonder sleepily whether it is worth going back to bed, or whether you should get up. Then from beneath the window comes a series of five or six shrill cries for help, apparently delivered by a very inferior soprano in the process of having her throat cut. Looking out into the courtyard, on the velvet-green lawns by the lavender hedge, you can see an earnest group of peahens searching the dewy grass, while around them their husband pirouettes, his burnished tail raised like a fantastic, quivering fountain in the sunlight. Presently he will lower his tail, throw back his head, and deafen the morning with his nerve-shattering cries. At eight o’clock the staff arrive, and you hear them shout greetings to each other, amid the clank of buckets and the swish of brushes, which all but drown the birdsong. You slip on your clothes and go out into the cool, fresh morning to see if all is right with the zoo.

In the long, two-storied granite house—once a large cider-press and now converted for monkeys and other mammals—everything is bustle and activity. The gorillas have just been let out of their cage while it is being cleaned, and they gallop about the floor with the exuberance of children just out of school, endeavouring to pull down the notices, wrench the electric heaters from their sockets, or break the fluorescent lights. Stephan, broom in hand, stands guard over the apes, watching with a stern eye, to prevent them from doing more damage than is absolutely necessary. Inside the gorillas’ cage Mike, rotund and perpetually smiling, and Jeremy, with his Duke of Wellington nose and his barley-sugar-coloured hair, are busy, sweeping up the mess that the gorillas’ tenancy of the previous day entailed and scattering fresh white sawdust in snowdrifts over the floor. Everything, they assure you, is all right; nothing has developed any malignant symptoms during the night.

All the animals, excited and eager at the start of a new day, bustle about their cages and shout “Good morning” to you. Etam, the black Celebes ape, looking like a satanic imp, clings to the wire, baring his teeth at you in greeting and making shrill, chuckling noises. The woolly-coated, orange-eyed mongoose lemurs bound from branch to branch, wagging their long thick tails like dogs, and calling to each other in a series of loud and astonishingly pig-like grunts. Further down, sitting on his hind legs, his prehensile tail wrapped round a branch, and surveying his quarters with the air of someone who has just received the freedom of the city, is Binty, the binturong, who suggests a badly made hearthrug, to one end of which has been attached a curiously Oriental-like head with long ear-tufts and circular, protuberant, and somewhat vacant eyes. The next-door cage appears to be empty, but if you run your finger along the wire a troupe of diminutive marmosets come tumbling out of their box of straw, twittering and trilling like canaries. The largest of these is Whiskers, the emperor tamarin, whose sweeping snow-white Colonel Blimp moustache quivers majestically as he gives you greeting by opening wide his mouth and vibrating his tongue rapidly up and down.

Upstairs, the parrots and parakeets salute you with a cacophony of sound: harsh screams, squeakings resembling unoiled hinges, and cries that vary from “I’m a very fine bird” of Suku, the grey parrot, to the more personal “Hijo de puta” squawked by Blanco, the Tucuman Amazon. Further along, the genets, beautifully blotched in dark chocolate on their golden pelts, move like quicksilver through the branches in their cage. They are so long and lithe and sensuous that they seem more like snakes than mammals. Next door, Queenie, the tree ocelot, her paws demurely folded, gazes at you with great amber eyes, gently twitching the end of her tail. A host of quick-footed, bright-eyed, inquisitive-faced mongooses patter busily about their cages, working up an appetite. The hairy armadillo lies supine on its back, paws and nose twitching and its pink and wrinkled stomach heaving as it dreams sweet dreams of vast plates of food. You reflect, as you look at it, that it is about time it went on a diet again, otherwise it will have difficulty in walking, and you make a bet with yourself as to how many visitors that day would come to tell you that the armadillo was on its back and apparently dying; the record to date has been fifteen visitors in one day.

Outside, the clank of a bucket, the burst of whistling heralds the approach of Shep, curly-haired and with a most disarming grin. His real name is John Mallet, but his friends called him Shepton Mallet—the name of a town near Bath—which, in turn, degenerated into Shep. You walk up the broad main drive with him, past the long twelve-foot-high granite wall ablaze with the flowering rock plants, and down to the sunken water-meadow, where the swans and ducks swim eagerly to welcome him as he empties out the bucket of food at the edge of the water. Having ascertained from Shep that none of his bird charges have sickened or died or laid eggs during the night, you continue on your tour.

The bird house is aburst with song and movement. Birds of every shape and colour squabble, eat, flutter, and sing, so that the whole thing resembles a market or a fairground alight with bright colours. Here a toucan cocks a knowing eye at you and clatters his huge beak with a sound like a rattle; here a black-faced love-bird, looking as though he had just come from a minstrel show, waddles across to his water dish and proceeds to bathe himself with such vigour that all the other occupants of the cage receive the benefit of his bathwater; a pair of tiny, fragile diamond doves are dancing what appears to be a minuet together, turning round and round, bowing and changing places, calling in their soft, ringing voices some sort of endearments.

You pass slowly down the house to the big cage at the end where the touracos now live. The male, Peety, I hand reared while in West Africa. He peers at you from one of the higher perches and then, if you call to him, he will fly down in a graceful swoop, land on the perch nearest to you, and start to peck eagerly at your fingers. Then he will throw back his head, his throat swelling, and give his loud, husky cry: “Caroo… Caroo… Caroo…coo…coo…coo… “ Touracos are really among the most beautiful of birds. Peety’s tail and wings are a deep metallic blue, while his breast, head, and neck are a rich green, the feathering so fine and shining that it looks like spun glass. When he flies, you can see the undersides of his wings, which flash a glorious magenta red. This red is caused by a substance in the feathers called turacin, and it is possible to wash it out of the feathers. If you place a touraco’s wing feather in a glass of plain water, presently you will find the water tinged with pink, as though a few crystals of permanganate of potash had been dissolved in it. Having dutifully listened to Peety and his wife sing a duet together, you now make your way out of the bird house.

Dodging the exuberant welcome of the chimpanzees, who prove their interest in your well-being by hurling bits of fruit—and other less desirable substances—with unerring accuracy through the wire of their cage, you walk to the reptile house. Here in a pleasant temperature of eighty degrees the reptiles doze. Snakes regard you calmly with lidless eyes, frogs gulp as though just about to succumb to a bout of sobs, and lizards lie draped over rocks and tree trunks, exquisitely languid and sure of themselves. In the cage which contains the Fernand’s skinks that I had caught in the Cameroons, you can dig your hands into the damp, warm soil at the bottom and haul them out of their subterranean burrow, writhing and biting indignantly. They had recently shed their skins, and so they look as though they have been newly varnished. You admire their red, yellow, and white markings on the glossy black background, and then let them slide through your fingers and watch as they burrow like bulldozers into the earth. John Hartley appears, tall and lanky, bearing two trays of chopped fruit and vegetables for the giant tortoises. The previous night had been a good feeding one, he tells you. The boa constrictors had had two guinea-pigs each, while the big reticulated python had engulfed a very large rabbit, and lies there bloated and lethargic to prove it. The horned toads, looking more than ever like bizarre pottery figures, had stuffed themselves on baby chickens, and the smaller snakes were busily digesting white rats or mice, according to their size.

Round the back of the house are some more of the monkey collection that have just been let out into their outdoor cages: Frisky, the mandrill, massive and multi-coloured as a technicoloured sunset, picks over a huge pile of fruit and vegetables, grunting and gurgling to himself; further along, Tarquin, the cherry-crowned mangabey, with his grey fur, mahogany-coloured skullcap, and white eyelids, goes care­fully through the fur of his wife, while she lies on the floor of the cage as though dead. Periodically he finds a delectable fragment of salt in her fur and pops it into his mouth. One is reminded of the small boy who had witnessed this operation with fascinated eyes and had then shouted, “Hi, Mum, come and see this monkey eating the other one.”

Up in their paddock the tapirs, Claudius and Claudette, portly, Roman-nosed, and benign, play with Willie, the black and white cat, who guards the aviaries nearby from the rats. Willie lies on his back and pats gently at the whiffling, rubbery noses of the tapirs as they sniff and nuzzle him. Eventually tiring of the game, he rises and starts to move off, whereupon one of the tapirs reaches forward and tenderly engulfs Willie’s tail in its mouth and pulls him back, so that he continues the game. In the walled garden the lions, butter-fat and angry-eyed, lie in the sun, while near them the cheetahs are languidly asprawl amid the buttercups, merging with the flowers so perfectly that they become almost invisible.

At ten o’clock the gates open and the first coachloads of people arrive. As they come flooding into the grounds, everyone has to be on alert, not, as you may think, to ensure that the animals do not hurt the people, but to ensure that the people do not hurt the animals. If an animal is asleep, they want to throw stones at it or prod it with sticks to make it move. We have found visitors endeavouring to give the chimpanzees lighted cigarettes and razor-blades; monkeys have been given lipsticks which, of course, they thought was some exotic fruit and devoured accordingly, only to develop acute colic. One pleasant individual (whom we did not catch, unfortunately) pushed a long cellophane packet full of aspirins into the chinchilla cage. For some obscure reason one chinchilla decided that this was the food it had been waiting for all its life, and ate most of it before we came on the scene; it died the next day. The uncivilized behaviour of some human beings in a zoo has to be seen to be believed.

Now, there might be any one of fifty jobs to do. Perhaps you go to the workshop where Les, with his bruiser’s face and bright eyes, is busy on some repair work or other. Les is one of those people who are God’s gift to a zoo, for no job defeats him and his integrity is incredible. He is like a one-man building firm, for he can do anything from welding to dovetailing, from cementing to electrical maintenance. You discuss with him the new line of cages you are planning, their size and shape, and whether they should have swing-doors, or whether sliding doors would be more convenient.

Having thrashed out this problem, you remember that one of the giant tortoises has to have an injection. On your way to deliver this, you pass an excited crowd of north-country people round the mandrill cage, watching Frisky as he stalks up and down, grunting to himself, presenting now his vivid, savagely beautiful face, and now his multi-coloured rear to their eyes. “Ee,” says one woman, “you can’t tell front from back!”

Lunch-time comes, and so far the day has progressed smoothly. As you sit down to eat, you wonder if there will be a crisis during the afternoon: will the ladies’ lavatories overflow, or, worse still, will it start to rain and thus put off all the people who are intending to visit the zoo? Lunch over, you see that the sky is, to your relief, still a sparkling blue. You decide to go down and look at the penguin pond, for which you have certain ideas of improvement.

You scuttle surreptitiously out of the house, but not surreptitiously enough, for both your wife and your secretary catch you in rapid succession and remind you that two reviews and an article are a week overdue and that your agent is baying like a bloodhound for the manuscript you promised him eighteen months previously. Assuring them, quite untruthfully, that you will be back very shortly, you make your way down to the penguins.

On the way you meet Stephan grinning to himself. He tells you that he was in one of the lions’ dens, cleaning it out, when, glancing over his shoulder, he was surprised to see a visitor standing there, using the place as a lavatory.

“What are you doing?” inquired Stephan.

“Well, this is the gents’, isn’t it?” said the man peevishly.

“No, it isn’t. It’s the lions’ den,” replied Stephan.

Never had an exit been so rapidly performed from a public convenience, he tells me.

Having worked out a complicated but very beautiful plan for the penguin pool, you then have to work out an equally complicated and beautiful plan for getting the scheme passed by Catha, the administrative secretary, who holds the zoo’s purse-strings in a grip so firm it requires as much ingenuity to prise money out of it as it would to extract a coin from a Scotsman’s pibroch. You march to the office, hoping to find her in a sunny, reckless mood, instead of which she is glowering over an enormous pile of ledgers. Before you can start extolling the virtues of your penguin-pond idea, she fixes you with a gimlet-green eye and in a voice like a honey-covered razor-blade informs you that your last brilliant idea came to approximately twice what you had estimated. You express bewilderment at this and gaze suspiciously at the ledger, implying, without saying so, that her addition must be wrong. She obligingly does the sum in front of you, so that there will be no argument. Feeling that this moment is not perhaps the best one to broach the subject of the penguin pond, you back hastily out of the office and go back into the zoo.

You are spending a pleasant ten minutes making love to the woolly monkeys through the wire of their cage when suddenly your secretary materializes at your elbow in the most unnerving fashion, and before you can think up a suitable excuse she has reminded you once more about the reviews, the article, and the book, and has dragged you disconsolately back to your office.

As you sit there racking your brains to think of something tactful to say about a particularly revolting book that has been sent to you for review, a constant procession of people appears to distract your attention.

Catha comes in with the minutes of the last meeting, closely followed by Les, who wants to know what mesh of wire to put on the new cage. He is followed by Shep, who wants to know if the meal-worms have arrived, as he is running short, and then Jeremy appears to tell you that the dingoes have just had eleven pups. I defy any writer to write a good review when his mind is occupied with the problem of what to do with eleven dingo pups.

Eventually, you manage to finish the review and slip once more into the zoo. It is getting towards evening now and the crowds are thinning out, drifting away up to the main drive to the car park, to wait for their buses or coaches. The slanting rays of the sun floodlight the cage in which the crowned pigeons live: giant powder-blue birds with scarlet eyes and a quivering crest of feathers as fine as maidenhair fern. In the warmth of the setting sun they are displaying to each other, raising their maroon-coloured wings over their backs, like tombstone angels, bowing and pirouetting to one another and then uttering their strange booming cries. The chimpanzees are starting to scream peevishly, because it is nearing the time for their evening milk, but they pause in their hysterical duet to utter greetings to you as you pass.

Up in the small mammal house the night creatures are starting to come to life, creatures that all day have been nothing but gently snoring bundles of fur. Bushbabies, with their enormous, perpetually horrified eyes, creep out of their straw beds and start to bound about their cages, as silent as thistle-down, occasionally stopping by a plate to stuff a handful of writhing meal-worms into their mouths; pottos, looking like miniature teddy bears, prowl about the branches of their cage, wearing guilty, furtive expressions, as though they were a convention of cat-burglars; the hairy armadillo, you are relieved to see, has roused itself out of its stupor and is now the right way up, puttering to and fro like a clockwork toy.

Downstairs, with growls of satisfaction, the gorillas are receiving their milk. Nandy likes to drink hers lying on her stomach, sipping it daintily from a stainless-steel dish. N’Pongo has no use for this feminine nonsense and takes his straight from the bottle, holding it carefully in his great black hands. He likes to drink his milk sitting up on the perch, staring at the end of the bottle with intense concentration. Jeremy has to stand guard, for when N’Pongo has drained the last dregs he will simply open his hands and let the bottle drop, to shatter on the cement floor. All around, the monkeys are gloating over their evening ration of bread and milk, uttering muffled cries of delight as they stuff their mouths and the milk runs down their chins.

Walking up towards the main gate you hear the loud ringing cries of the sarus cranes: tall, elegant grey birds with heads and necks the colour of faded red velvet. They are performing their graceful courting dance in the last rays of the sun, against a background of blue and mauve hydrangea. One of them picks up a twig or a tuft of grass, and then, with wings held high, twirls and leaps with it, tossing it into the air and prancing on its long slender legs, while the other watches it and bows as if in approval. The owls are now showing signs of animation. Woody, the Woodford’s owl, clicks his beak reprovingly at you as you peer into his cage, and over his immense eyes he lowers blue lids with sweeping eyelashes that would be the envy of any film star. The white-faced scops owls that have spent all day pretending to be grey decaying tree stumps now open large golden eyes and peer at you indignantly.

Shadows are creeping over the flower-beds and the rockery. The peacock, as exhausted as an actor at the end of a long run, passes slowly towards the walled garden, dragging his burnished tail behind him and leading his vacant-eyed harem towards their roosting place. Sitting on top of the granite cross that surmounts the great arch leading into the courtyard is our resident robin. He has a nest in a crevice of the wall, half-hidden under a waterfall of blue-flowered rock plants. So, as his wife warms her four eggs, he sits on top of the cross and sings his heart out, gazing rapturously at the western sky, where the setting sun has woven a sunset of gold and green and blue.

As the light fades, the robin eventually ceases to sing and flies off to roost in the mimosa tree. All the day noises have now ceased and there is a short period of quiet before the night cries take over. It is started inevitably by the owls—beak-clicking and a noise like tearing calico from the white-faced scops owls, a long tremulous and surprised hoot from the Woodford’s owl, and a harsh, jeering scream from the Canadian horned owls. Once the owls have started, they are generally followed by the Andean fox, who sits forlornly in the centre of his cage, throws back his head, and yaps shrilly at the stars. This sets off the dingoes in the next cage, who utter a series of gentle melodious howls so weird and so mournful they make you want to burst into tears. Not to be outdone, the lions take up the song—deep, rasping, full-throated roars tailing off into a satisfied gurgle that sounds unpleasantly as though the lions have just found a hole in the wire.

In the reptile house, snakes that have been lethargic all day now slide round their cages, bright-eyed, eager, their tongues flicking as they explore every nook and cranny for food. The geckos, with enormous golden eyes, hang upside-down on the roof of their cage, or else with infinite caution stalk a dishful of writhing meal-worms. The tiny yellow and black corroboree frogs (striped like bulls’-eyes and the size of a cigarette butt) periodically burst into song; thin, reedy piping that has a metallic quality about it, as if someone were tapping a stone with a tiny hammer. Then they relapse into silence and gaze mournfully at the ever-circling crowd of fruit flies that live in their cage and form part of their diet.

Outside, the lions, the dingoes, and the fox are quiet; the owls keep up their questioning cries. There is a sudden chorus of hysterical screams from the chimpanzees’ bedroom, and you know that they are quarrelling over who should have the straw.

In the mammal house the gorillas are now asleep, lying side by side on their shelf, pillowing their heads on their arms. They screw up their eyes in your flashlight beam and utter faint growls, indignant that you should disturb them. Next door, the orang-utans, locked passionately in each other’s arms, snore so loudly that it seems as though the very floor vibrates. In all the cages there is deep, relaxed breathing from sleeping monkeys, and the only sound apart from this is the steady patter of claws as the nine-banded armadillo, who always seems to suffer from insomnia, trots about his cage, making and remaking his bed, carefully gathering all the straw into one corner, smoothing it down, lying on it to test its comfort, then deciding that the corner is not suitable for a bedroom, removing all the bedding to the opposite end of the cage, and starting all over again.

Upstairs, the flying squirrels gaze at you with enormous liquid eyes, squatting fatly on their haunches, while stuffing food into their mouths with their delicate little hands. Most of the parrots are asleep, but Suku, the African grey, is incurably inquisitive, and as you pass never fails to pull his head out from under his wing to see what you are doing. As you make your departure, he shuffles his feathers—a whispering, silken noise -and then in a deep, rather bronchial voice says, “Good night, Suku” to himself in tones of great affection.

As you lie in bed, watching through the window the moon disentangling itself from the tree silhouettes, you hear the dingoes starting again their plaintive, flute-like chorus, and then the lions cough into action. Soon it will be dawn and the chorus of birds will take over and make the cold air of the morning ring with song.