Chapter 4 The Lean Months

After that hectic first week, we had a little time to reflect. Ispent my days on the phone standing on the spot in front ofthe house—a scene I had constantly imagined from France—with the walk-in enclosure sloping away in front of medown to the flamingo lake (albeit currently populated by onlytwo elderly flamingos and a couple of rickety pelicans), andthe tree line merging with the perfect rural English vista ofrolling hills beyond, stretching like an organic quilt for fivemiles in all directions. The feel-good factor was—as I hadtold myself it would be—immense. But not quite enough tocompensate for the content of those endless rounds ofphone calls. Council officials, advisors, more lawyers, morebanks and brokers, but above all, now, creditors, drip-fedmy ear with increasingly bad news. With my feet plantedfirmly on my favorite spot, the thrilling and invigorating newzoo at my back, my mind raced ahead, scanning thepossibilities and ever-decreasing options before me.
If my friends had been incredulous when I made the—admittedly surreal—announcement that my family and Iwere soon to live in and try to reinvigorate a run-down zoo,their bewilderment was nothing compared with our own inthe first weeks we introduced ourselves to our newneighbors.
Back in France, the children hadn’t quite believed it whenI’d told them what I was trying to do. With the phone stuck tomy ear I was constantly shushing them away, for six months,with the same refrain: “Quiet. Daddy’s trying to buy a zoo.” Icould see that they thought I was deluded—silly Daddymakes us live in a barn in a foreign country and now hethinks he’s buying a zoo. The trouble was, their naiveinsight struck a chord with a great many other people—pretty well everyone I knew—apart from my immediatefamily of brothers, sister, and mum. “I’ve got a really badfeeling about this zoo idea,” one close friend had called toconfide. “Are you still going on about that?” said another.
“Les tigres? Sacré bleu, c’est pas possible!” said the entirevillage, in whose eyes my eccentricity had reached newheights. The trouble was that, having finally arrived, insteadof being the smooth transition to spending our prearrangedmortgage on clearly defined objectives, we were crisismanaging on a shoestring.
But when the children eventually got there, after a coupleof days of tiptoeing wide-eyed around the place, theyadjusted much more quickly and fully than I did to the newlife. Katherine brought them over from France after acouple of weeks, stayed for two days of huge culture shock(I already felt like a relatively old hand by this stage), andthen had to leave for Italy for two weeks to be with hersister, Alice, who was having her first baby there. At first thechildren were tentative, and frankly a little afraid. Iremember leaving them in the office playing with someremaindered stock toys while I cleared rubbish, and as Ilooked in at them through the window they were bothsquare mouthed, howling with fear at being left alone. It wasquite a scary place at first, particularly for them. But theysoon adapted.
When I decided to gently break the news to Milo that, oneday, the park would be open and we’d have to share all thiswith hundreds of visitors, he replied, “Yes, but Daddy, they’llpay to come round.” At last that naive insight was workingwith me.
My mum’s two domestic cats, Pandit and Jow-jow, bigblack Bengals imported from Surrey, however, took muchlonger to see the wonder in our new life. Could it be thehowling of wolves that troubled them? The bellowing ofSolomon, our huge African lion, whose roar has beenknown to strike fear into golfers happily playing their courseover two miles away? Or perhaps it was the time that theyjumped up on a wall to discover the slobbering faces ofthree big brown bears staring back? Exploding into puffballparodies of frightened cats, they shot off back to thehouse at full speed.
Duncan, who had brought the cats down in his car, saidthat their first sighting of an ostrich was a uniqueopportunity to watch a process firsthand: their small,complacent brains burst with an overload of new stimuli asthey desperately tried to adjust to the new concept of a birdbigger than a man. “Their necks stretched out as far as I’veever seen them go, and they darted their heads from sideto side urgently scanning for as much information as theycould gather from inside the car,” said Duncan. “I sat withthem for a while to let them get used to it, but they were stilljust as agitated twenty minutes later, when I took them intothe house.” The twenty or so peacocks who roam thegrounds presented another psychological problem for thecats, who quickly developed a tactic of total denial of theexistence of all these unsettlingly large and confidentexamples of a class of creatures they had only ever knownas prey.
Of all the animals, my favorites initially became the threehand-reared Siberian tigers, Blotch, Stripe, and big Vlad, amale, and at more than three hundred kilos one of thebiggest cats in the country. As I went around the back of thehouse in their enclosure for the first time, all three came upto try to cadge a stroke through the fence. No chance!
Tigers don’t growl or roar, they chuff, which is a noisethat sounds a bit like blowing a raspberry using just your toplip. But if you chuff at them, they chuff back, and having athree-hundred-kilo cat a foot away trying to be friendly is auniquely uplifting experience.
For Milo and Ella, it was the otters that captured theirimagination. Quickly they became smitten with thecreatures, who make the most ridiculous squeaky-toynoises whenever you go past. This, naturally, elicitedequally high-pitched squeals of delight from the children,who jumped up and down with glee until the otters realizedthey didn’t have any food and scampered away.
Sometimes the children do help feed them, but it’s hard tofit in with the routines, which are varied to prevent theanimals from habituating. The ferrets, Fidget and Wiggle,however, fit around the children. Katy, our first educationofficer, was getting them used to being handled, and soseveral times a week she fitted them with dinky little ferretharnesses and walked them around the park with Milo andElla.
But it was standing on my favorite spot looking outacross the valley in the first few days that I began to homein on the smell. A terrible odor hung over the park, the smellof rotting carcasses, which I recognized from occasionallyhelping drag them out of enclosures. Operating with a“skeleton crew” for so long, the amount of old bones in withthe carnivores on the park had accumulated so that everyenclosure was littered with rib cages, hooves, andmiscellaneous bits of fur and skin, which it seemed werethe root of the problem. Decomposing vegetable matterand uncleaned feces from the herbivores surely didn’t help,but in fact the source was more systemic. It was the offalbins.
For food for the carnivores, the park relies on fallen stock— calves culled by local farmers, stillborn lambs, horsesthat have been hit by cars—brought to us and oftenprepared by the local “knacker” man, Andy Goatman, in our“meat room.” This is basically a concrete loading bay with asink, backing onto a walk-in deep freezer. The carcassesare stripped expertly by Andy, often assisted by butterwouldn’t-melt-in-their-mouths cat keepers Hannah andKelly. To see these two mild-mannered, animal-loving girlsstraddling a giant carcass, boot-deep in entrails,brandishing big, bloodied knives and cheerfully chatting asthey shuffle a horse’s head into a freezer bin, was tounderstand fully that we had entered into a different world.
The bits that can’t be fed to the animals—intestines,spines, and general entrails—are classed as Type I Matterand stored in offal bins, three large stainless steel hoppers,which are collected weekly and incinerated by a locallicensed firm. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been paid for quitesome time, and wouldn’t even pick up the phone to uswithout cash up front. The last time the bins were emptiedwas six weeks before we arrived, and the stenchemanating from them was all pervading. Worse, for Hannahand Kelly, and everyone else who had to work in theyard, were the maggots. These writhing white grubs spilledout in a self-dissipating arc around the bins, crawling offtoward the decaying matter around the gullies. Opening thelids of the bins, which I did a few times while helping to loadthem, facilitated the distribution of these maggots andopened up a world that Dante would have been proud toconjure. Empty skulls swam in a blue-gray fetid mushswarming with larvae, while the stench entered your bones.
The keepers’ work in these circumstances was truly heroic,though having gradually acclimatized over several yearsthey wore their burden lightly. “This is nothing. It’s muchworse in the summer,” John reassured me. Our flimsydomestic-pressure washer was, gratefully, deployed, but anindustrial version was added to our wish list of essential butunaffordable machinery.
The dampness didn’t help, coming up through the floor ofthe house via an ancient well—the ancient hand pump forwhich was now, sadly, defunct—to form mini-lakes on theworn topography of the stone floors. Many feet over severalcenturies had eroded the stones along the well-usedpathways, and scuffed off the softer deposits to createvalleys and dips, which now became tributaries and lakesin our living area. Water, and the effects of it, waseverywhere. Overflowing cracked gutters, filled with yearsof mulch from overhanging trees, spread dampness into thewalls. Mildew and algae blanketed everything outside thehouse with a dank frosting of green grime, symbolizing, andalso actually indicating, profound decay.
And then there were the rats. “A plague of rats” would notbe an overstatement. Everywhere you looked, even indaylight, big fat, gray rats scurried out of sight, andsometimes, arrogantly, didn’t even bother. Right in front ofyour eyes they would dart into an enclosure and steal thefood left out for the monkeys. Satisfyingly, these intrudersreceived a terrible revenge exacted upon them by one ortwo of the enclosed animals, particularly Basil, thecoatimundi (an amiable South American climbing animalrelated to the raccoon), whose powerful omnivorous jawsspecialized in cracking the skulls of rats unfortunate enoughto get caught in them. But this was an imperfect solution tothe infestation. Rats carry disease, and also may bepoisoned, if not by us perhaps by a neighboring farm. A fewyears previously an otter had died from eating a poisonedrat, so we had to tackle the problem carefully. We gotquotes from three different pest-control firms, offering threedifferent methods of gassing and poisoning, but the sheerscale of our problem—at least forty well-established nestsover thirty acres, with a constant supply of food—wasprohibitively expensive to address. Nine thousand poundswas the bottom line for the most thorough and exoticanimal-friendly method, and this was money we simplydidn’t have.
Peter Wearden and others regularly reminded me thateradicating the rats was an urgent requirement for gettingour zoo license. But they didn’t have to. I like all animals,including rats, particularly the ones in pet shops or those Iworked with at university, studying social learning forchocolate rewards. Lab rats— at least the ones notexposed to vivisectionists—generally lead a happy andfulfilling life solving problems for rewards, and die with asubstantially thicker cortex than their sewer-dwellingbrethren. But wild rats give me the shudders. In my firstencounter, in a flat in Peckham, I was filled with horror ondiscovering a big, brown, plague-infested rodent in akitchen cupboard. And here they were again: in the kitchen,running over my mum’s hand on the stairs one night, andeven once jumping onto her bed. Luckily, Mum’s cats,Pandit and Jow-jow, were also on the bed at the time, andthe resulting commotion woke the entire household.
But I doubt they caught it. Those two stupid cats werenuzzling my legs one night as I moved in on some rustlingemanating from a lower kitchen cupboard. With two felinepredators at my feet I felt sure that if I flushed out a rat, theywould catch it. Species-typical pest control. But it didn’twork out like that. I crept stealthily in stocking feet on thehard-tiled floor, positioned myself carefully by the door, triedto attract the attention of the swirling, purring cats withoutalerting the rat, and then snapped the door open. The ratshot out and glanced off my leg, just as the blissfullyoblivious, moronic, purring brother cats made anothereyes-shut circumnavigation of my shins. It bolted under thedishwasher (which didn’t work due to the low waterpressure), at least revealing one of their entry points, acircular hole drilled through the two-and-a-half-foot-thickgranite wall to accommodate a flue. John blocked this offwith some balled-up chicken wire, but the rats stilloccasionally came into the house, and the effect wasdepressing. With systemic plumbing problems, sporadicelectricity, disapproving friends and relatives, creditors, nomoney, responsibility for endangered animals and keepers’
jobs, filth, decay and the smell of death wafting through thegrim weather, the rat infestation probably completed thecircle of psychological siege. It’s fair to say that those firstweeks passed like a dream. A very strange dream filledwith fighting monkeys, severed heads, and carrion shippedin from local farms—but a dream nevertheless.
But it wasn’t all bad news. For a start, we had the park.
We’d finally overcome all the obstacles, seen andunforeseen, that had stood between us and this (withhindsight) slightly bizarre objective. And for once, DonaldRumsfeld, in the news at the time over the Iraq war, madesense to me: “As we know,” he said, famously, “there areknown knowns—things we know we know. We also knowthere are known unknowns—things we know we don’tknow. But there are also unknown unknowns—things wedon’t know we don’t know.” I knew exactly what he meant,and so far, we had navigated our known and unknownunknowns successfully. I only hoped that our strategy ofsending a light force into a difficult operational area wentbetter than his.
In addition, we had got the park against odds absolutelystacked against us, against the “better judgment” andexpectation of almost everyone involved. But this feelingwas nothing compared with the invigorating thrill of actuallywalking around the park itself. The huge trees weresheathed with lush moss and ancient lichens that could onlygrow in an environment with good air quality (and highrainfall), and this pure, clean air filled our nostrils and lungs(when the wind was blowing the stench of death the otherway) like a long-lost antidote to urbanism and stress.
I felt myself really coming alive as I moved around this—yes—species-typical environment for Homo sapiens.
Merely showing a picture of a tree to an accountant in anoffice block has a small but measurable effect in reducinghis or her blood pressure. Actually moving about amongtrees soothes us far more deeply.
Howard Frumkin is a professor of Environmental andOccupational Health at the Rollins School of Public Health,in Atlanta, and in between advising local governments onthe use of public spaces, Frumkin researches the effectthat the natural environment has on us. And in metaanalysesof countless studies, Frumkin has found that thenatural world has a measurable beneficial effect on humanphysical and mental health. Prisoners in cells facing aprison courtyard, for instance, have 24 percent more sickvisits than those in cells with a view over farmland.
Postoperative patients with a view of trees need less painmedication than patients facing a brick wall, and weredischarged one day earlier.
This all stems from the Pulitzer Prize–winning scientistProfessor E. O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology andgeneral god of evolutionary thinking. Wilson’s “BiophiliaHypothesis” suggests that as a species we feel reassuredin an environment that the animal within us recognizes. “Itshould come as no great surprise to find that Homosapiens at least still feels an innate preference for thenatural environment that cradled us,” says Wilson. Over thelast few hundred thousand years this environment hasmainly been areas of sparse woodland, backing ontosavannah, which has probably hardwired us with apreference for this particular kind of setting, the one we“grew up” with. “Early humans found that places with openviews offered better opportunities to find food and avoidpredators,” says Frumkin. “But they needed water to surviveand attract prey, and groups of trees for protection.
Research has shown that people today, given the choice,prefer landscapes that look like this scenario.”
That was now our scenario. Open spaces, groups oftrees, watering holes stocked with exotic beasts. By someamazing coincidence, it turns out that almost all urbanparks contain precisely the ratio of trees to shrubs to grassas the African grasslands of our ancestry. Big trees nearby,a scattering of shrubs, and open grassland into thedistance, with occasional lakes thrown in for goodmeasure. With some small part of your brain you arelooking out for deer on the horizon, or a saber-toothed tigeramongst the trees—no wonder it heightens mentalalertness.
The most amazing thing about our new environment oftrees, open spaces, and lakes was that we actually didhave tigers, lions, and wolves peeping through the foliageat us, giving us precisely that mix our ancestors grew up in.
To be responsible for this uniquely intellectually, physically,and even spiritually invigorating environment—plus fulfill amission to open it up and share it with the public foreducational and conservation purposes (and get a freelunch in our own restaurant when it opened, as part of thedeal)—seemed like a utopian quest.
And so we began to get to know our individual animals.
Ronnie the Brazilian tapir seemed a good place to start.
Ronnie is like a big pig, with the aforementioned wibblynose, and while technically regarded as a Class 1dangerous animal—the same category as a lion—is ahuge softy. Keepers showed me photographs of otherkeepers from around the world who had been killed bythese deceptively amiable creatures. Tapir means “strong”
in Indonesian, and though usually placid, tapirs have areputation for being able to power through chain-link fencesas if they weren’t there. This ability stems from theirdefense strategy against their major predator, the jaguar,who hunt them by dropping from the trees and hanging ontothe backs of their necks. Evolution has furnished the tapirwith a large gristle-filled scruff to absorb this bite, and alsoa propensity to charge forward through anything in its pathin order to reach water to shake the jaguar off. Now,jaguars can also swim, so I have no idea how this strategyeventually plays out, but I suppose trying to fight jaguars ondry land has to be worse. Perhaps Ronnie, shouldSovereign ever get out again and decide to come for him,was planning to crash through his fence to the emu lakeand use his mini-trunk as a snorkel.
My first lengthy encounter with Ronnie was to help checkhis eyes for conjunctivitis, which he definitely had.
Expensive medication from the vet—to whom we werealready indebted by several thousand pounds—was apossibility, but so was bathing his eyes in a mild saltwatersolution, something I had done countless times over manyyears with cats, dogs, and children, with equally effectiveresults. The difference was that none of those creaturescould suddenly decide to kill me if they didn’t like it. ButRonnie was a pussycat. After we slipped him a fewbananas and cooed to him in that way he seemed to elicit,Ronnie went along with his treatment stoically, even thoughhe didn’t like it, blinking and holding his head upright untilI’d sponged the gunk from his eyes and expunged thetraces around them. The trick, I learned, was to scratch himon the side of the neck so that he turned his head to theside, or—and this is a secret—to scratch his bum until hesat down.
Up close, Ronnie reminded me of a Staffordshire bullterrier, Jasper, I’d had for fifteen years: strong and solid buthopelessly soppy. Jasper was incontrovertibly andirrefutably gay. Early on in his adulthood he pushed past abitch in heat to mount one of her male pups from a previouslitter, and thereafter demonstrated a lifelong inclination as a“friend of Dorothy.” Ronnie minced around his enclosure,which at the time was a narrow strip of almost entirelychurned mud, with periodic access to the enclosure below,which contained a lake where he liked to defecate andmingle with the emus. As an ungulate—one of the clovenhoofedpersuasion—Ronnie didn’t like treading in mud,which got stuck between his toes (Jasper was the samewith snow, and would come limping up to me, paws packedwith ice, which, once cleared, would send him speeding onhis way again). Ronnie didn’t have that option, and hisnarrow strip of an enclosure made it uncomfortable for himto walk around pretty well anywhere, except the hard earthsurrounding his meager house. Even a trip down to the emulake, which he was allowed every now and then by meansof a gate at the bottom of his enclosure, was spoiled forhim by the mud on the way there and back. I resolvedstraight away that we would give Ronnie permanent accessto the lake, though this would require planning permissionand relatively expensive new posts and fencing, and was alonger-term solution. Meanwhile, however, a simple answerwas to dismantle the fence into the adjacent enclosure,which contained six miniature muntjac deer and wasroughly twice the size of Ronnie’s. These small deer wereapproachable and friendly, and could be left to roam thepublic access walk-in enclosure (containing the flamingoand pelican lake), which at the time was populated with agreat gaggle of wild geese, strutting Bantam cockerels,and guinea fowl, who milled noisily, sticking roughly to theirethnic groups within the overall swarming population.
I asked Rob and John what they thought of this idea andthey said they’d been waiting to do it for years, and also totake the fence away from the adjacent epic turkey oak treeto increase the size of the walk-in by a similar amount. Thisbecame a common theme: thinking of an innovation andfinding that it was already on a wish list but that nobody hadsuggested it. This was basically because none of the sevenstaff we had inherited were used to being consulted—quitethe reverse, in fact: they seem to have been trained to keeptheir mouths shut. I repeatedly reiterated that we were allears, but this kind of cultural shift, naturally, takes time tosink in.
When Ronnie was let back into his new, triple-sizeenclosure, he tiptoed around exploring everythingtentatively with his highly motile hooter. He seemeddelighted, almost overawed, and it was a lovely feeling tohave been able to implement such a simple but beneficialinnovation. With fewer fences, the whole bottom area of thepark looked better too.
Ronnie’s one mishap was when he urinated on a newlypositioned strand of electric fence, receiving about seventhousand volts (at a very low current) up the stream andprobably into his bladder, via his most sensitive organ. Thepoor bloke apparently hopped and bucked around hispaddock for half a morning, but he learned well from hismistake, as he has never peed incautiously near the fenceagain. In time we would take down the bottom fence and lethim have permanent access to the flamingo lake, whichwould give him an enclosure many times the size of theindustry standard laid down by BIAZA (the British and IrishAssociation of Zoos and Aquaria, formerly the ZooFederation) for tapirs. Then we could start thinking aboutgetting him a breeding female—or, if my animal gaydarwas at all reliable, a boyfriend.
The subject of gay animals was one I had raisedtentatively from the start, even with Nick Lindsay as we didour first walk around, and with Peter Wearden and MikeThomas as I’d discussed our plans for the zoo in the earlydays. I’d read about a zoo in Holland that exclusivelyexhibited gay animals, and a recent exhibition at a museumin Oslo claims to have identified 1,500 species wherehomosexuality was clearly apparent—some opportunistic,like the notoriously randy (and highly intelligent) bonobochimpanzee and bottlenose dolphin, while many others pairfor life. Darwinian evolutionary theory has had difficulty withthe topic of homosexuality, and from a sociobiologicalperspective it seems hard to explain. This apparent voidhas left the far-right homophobes and various religiousextremists to be able to declare that it is a “crime againstnature and God.” In fact, theorists have built a compellingargument that a proportion of gay adults in a population—roughly one in seven humans, and about one in tenpenguins, for instance—actually helps with group securityand child rearing, because nonreproductive adults bolsterthe breeding efforts of the group as a whole. Two gay maleflamingos, for instance, have been shown to be able toprotect a larger territory and raise more successful chicks(albeit from pilfered eggs) than a heterosexual pair. Thisraises a tricky possibility of group, rather than “selfishgene,” selection, but what is undeniable is thathomosexuality exists almost universally across the animalkingdom. Having lived with a gay dog for fifteen years, overthe course of which I met many owners of other gay dogs(roughly 5 to 10 percent of the randomly selected caninepopulation of London parks), I am absolutely convinced thathomosexuality has at the very least a strong geneticcomponent, is perfectly natural, and nothing to get excitedabout. Unless you’re gay, of course—or a homophobe.
I was encouraged that my proposals for some gay animalexhibits, for educational purposes, were listened to politelyby all the zoo professionals I spoke to, including our ownkeepers, and not dismissed out of hand, though a bemusedsmirk often greeted them. But nobody said it couldn’t orshouldn’t be done, and several people were activelyencouraging. I think they thought that if you’re crazy enoughto want to buy a zoo, you’re going to have weird ideas. Butas long as the result was educating the public about thenatural world, it was okay.
Coco was another character who took me by surprise.
Coco is a caracara, a large bird of prey with the coloring ofa golden eagle. She stands majestically, almost haughtily,and her call is a rapid-fire staccato version of the laughingkookaburra, but delivered with an extraordinary head flip, inwhich her cranium jerks backward suddenly through 180degrees until her throat is exposed to the sky and her eyesare momentarily upside down and pointing backward. Theevolutionary origins of this call are hard to discern, otherthan that it throws the sound out in an arc above her,perhaps reaching a wider audience. All I knew was that itmade my neck ache to watch her do it.
But according to a visiting falconer, Coco was probablythe most intelligent bird in the park; she was once used inthe falconry display, but quickly learned that by ignoring herlure and flying over to the restaurant, she could make abetter living cadging french fries and sausages. Obviously,this brought her display career to a premature conclusion,but she remains a socialized and charming presence.
The falconer showed me that if you called her over shewould come to the wire and bow her head to be stroked atthe back of her skull. I wasn’t surprised that her neckneeded soothing with her surely spinally maladaptive call,but I was surprised at just how friendly and personable shewas. Birds registered pretty low on my snooty animalintelligence perspective, though crows and some otherbirds have demonstrated problem-solving abilities and tooluse that rivals the higher primates. This seems to bebecause they can deploy their entire brains onto a singleproblem, but the taxonomy of birds—which are among thefew modern descendants of dinosaurs, and the eponymousinspirers of the term birdbrain—had previously been of littleinterest to me. Peacocks are definitely named for theirbrain size, and chickens and herbivorous birds do seem tobe cursed (or blessed) with a very limited outlook on theworld. But Coco has personality, and as Samuel L.
Jackson said in Pulp Fiction, “Personality goes a longway.”
Coco’s dinosaur heritage is paradoxically coming hometo roost, as caracaras, though effortless flyers, tend to hunttheir prey by chasing them on the ground, like a mini T. rex,which is why her talons are not as pronounced as an owl’sor an eagle’s, who hunt by seizing from above. Cocospends a lot of time walking on the ground in her aviary,with delicate rather than overtly predatory feet. But her beakis formidable, curved like an Arabian dagger and designedfor plunging into the vital parts of other animals. She is araptor, pure and simple, and if you happen to be a smallground-foraging animal, she’ll get you if you stray onto herpatch. I once found her with a severed robin in her beak,chatting animatedly about it and looking pretty wild, but shestill came over for a stroke. It was disconcerting venturing adigit through the wire to stroke a bird with bloodiedevidence dangling from her beak; should she misinterpretthe stimulus, I could be down to nine. “Coco’s another onewhere you don’t have to worry about rats getting in,” saidKelly with some pride. “They don’t come out again.” Cocoalso tracks small children who run up and down in front ofher, including my four-year-old Ella. At first I thought thiswas some display of affinity, but, learning more aboutCoco, Ella probably triggers an interest less benign.
Kevin also impressed me with an apparent personalitywhere I had expected none. Kevin is a five-foot red-tailedboa constrictor whom we had moved from the unheatedreptile house into the shop, which is heated and located inbetween the offices and the restaurant. Walking past himevery day, I noticed he seemed depressed, if that’s not tooanthropomorphic. He was certainly lackluster, spending allhis time curled up in his water bowl. Once, while on hold onthe phone with some infernal institution, I asked Robin—thegray-ponytailed graphic designer, one of the seven staff wehad inherited with the park—if I could get him out. He gladlyobliged, and gave me a quick course in how to handle him.
“Hold him gently but firmly, be assertive but don’t make anysudden movements. Constrictors don’t usually bite, but ifthey do he’ll give you plenty of warning first, darting hishead around. If he starts to do that, just stay still, and thenpop him back in the vivarium.” As Robin hung Kevin overmy shoulder and free arm and made sure I wasn’t going topanic— this was the first time I had ever touched a snake—the switch-board on the other end of the phone put methrough. “And try not to let him get round your neck,” saidRobin over his shoulder as he went back to his work. So Ibegan a slightly surreal conversation with someone nodoubt suited and sitting at a desk, while I was wanderingaround draped in a snake whose muscular coils hadinstantly come to life. Kevin’s head naturally probed for thedark warm folds inside my coat, but he also responded well—surprisingly well, I thought, for a reptile—to having hischin stroked.
The call finished, I continued playing with Kevin, warminghim up under my coat and marveling at the symmetricalperfection of his head and his pure strength as he grippedmy arm. Kevin is strong enough to stop the circulation inyour hand, turning it purple, and if your hands were tiedthere is no doubt he could choke you to death. But hedoesn’t want to. He probably thought I was a tree, hisnatural habitat in the Amazon from which he hangs by hisred tail and drops onto his prey (what with jaguars and boaconstrictors falling from the trees, it sounds like the bestplace to look in the Amazon is up). Kevin’s responsivenessto handling and stroking suggested he thought I was atleast a very friendly tree. And I was surprised that after ourtwenty-minute encounter I felt elated for the rest of the day.
This could just have been the novelty of the experience,or perhaps an echo of Professor E. O. Wilson’s biophilia,our positive physiological response to nature. I preferred tothink that it was the latter. DNA analysis suggests that dogsbroke off from wolves 130,000 years ago, which meansthey were adapting to human society long before we settleddown and began practicing agriculture. During this timedogs perfected that big-eyed baleful look to help them getaway with chewing up our slippers and manipulating us intogiving them strokes and treats. This is something Kevin’slocked features could not do, but we have certainly spent aformative part of our evolution surrounded by responsive,and not so responsive, animals, and I was delighted thatthis warm feeling Kevin had given me was something wewould one day be sharing with the public. Kevin was part ofthe Animal Encounters program, Robin informed me, andneeded socializing as much as possible, to get him used tobeing handled by the children and adults, who, ideally,would be flocking around him at Easter, when we were dueto open. I was only too happy to oblige, and regularly tookKevin over to the house to warm him in front of the fire—inthe only warm room in the house—and introduced him tovisiting friends and relatives. I liked this job.
Our two biggest snakes, both pythons over ten feet long,needed at least two people to handle them, because theycould definitely get the better of you. I made severalattempts to organize a session with these snakes, but inthe fraught and hectic first few weeks, interrupting thekeepers’ routines too much seemed frivolous. Eventually,both snakes were given away to Paignton Zoo, thirty milesaway and a pillar of the zoological community. Having justbuilt a new reptile display, they had nothing to put in it andwere grateful for our donation, which also demonstratedgoodwill on our part and may help to facilitate futurereciprocity. I secretly have my eye on some of theirexpensive flamingos (straight or gay). Scales for feathers.
The big pythons had to go because we had decided toturn the sparse, cold reptile house into a workshop, and thesnakes, along with two four-foot iguanas, lived there in fourlarge built-in vivariums that could not be moved. Theconcrete floor of the building and big double doors made itideal for the large-scale heavy work that would be requiredto get the zoo back on its feet, and another barn, insulatedand with a dirt floor ripe for installing under-floor heating,was earmarked as a future reptile house. When we had themoney.
The existing workshop was simply unworkable. A cinderblockshack with a leaking, rusted corrugated iron roof, itwas strewn with miscellaneous clutter, from elderly brokenpower tools to coils of rusted wire, and many, many otherobjects that were impossible to identify beneath whatseemed like centuries of grime, the kind of rich, brown, oilbasedfilth you get beside railway tracks. And it was ratinfested. A glance inside usually revealed an arrogantrodent or two, safe in the knowledge that before you couldclamber over the detritus to get to them, they could begone, having ducked into the impromptu tunnels and nooksamong the debris that had lain long enough to sheltergenerations of foragers, and providing an important basecamp for raids on the nearby animal food preparationroom. The only tool in the whole workshop that actuallyworked was an old but serviceable bench-mounted anglegrinder, though the lack of electrical supply and the positionof the grinder, at the far end of the room across yards ofgrimy, rusting clutter, made it utterly impossible to use.
With relish we gave instructions to clean out the roomand relocate the workshop to the reptile house, whilerelocating the few reptiles to the warmth of the shop. “That’sa bloody good idea,” said John, who was now our eighthmember of staff. “I’ve always thought that room would makea good workshop.” A grandson of Ellis Daw, John hadbeen introduced to us by Rob as someone who could fixthe floor in the front kitchen of the house. This was the roomin which Ellis had for several decades stored his buckets ofmackerel and chicks for the herons and jackdaws he fed inthe mornings, the leakage from which had permeated thejoists from the entrance to the back of the room. That waswhy it stank so badly, but the floor was also unsafe, soDuncan immediately commissioned John to rip out thefloor, burn it, and replace it with new, fresh, sweet-smellingwood—which he did within a week. John was a tall,muscular, grinning man of thirty, whose four upper frontteeth were missing and replaced by a dental plate withteeth much shorter than the originals, and whose canineswere unusually long and pointed. This gave him a strikingvampiric appearance, abetted by his posture, which isunusually erect. First encountering John in the dank mistwith wolves howling in the background, I seriouslyquestioned what kind of environment I had brought mychildren into.
But John turned out to be one of the most skilled, loyal,and levelheaded employees we could have asked for inthose early days, able to do plumbing, welding, tree work,and carpentry, and also licensed for firearms, an invaluableskill on the park, and one we were to draw on several timesin the coming months. When Rob first put him forward, hesaid to me, eyes down, “I’ll tell you now, because you’rebound to find out, that John’s my half-brother.” I had noproblem with this, but it all added to the atmosphere ofsecrecy, with whisperings in the village about “things thathad happened” at the park in the past, and the generalsense that we had moved into the Wicker Man’s backyard.
John, Rob, and Paul, Ellis’s son-in-law, set aboutclearing out the old reptile house and converting it into aworkshop. Again, a big practical change that also had thebenefit of being cheap. The loft above was, as most placesin the park, crammed with clutter (and rats), but some of itwas salvageable. Old agricultural tools were put to one sideand two huge workbenches were to be extricated andlowered down, when a path had been cleared for them. Iasked John how he was anticipating bringing theseenormous objects to ground level, and he held up amassive pulley wheel in one hand. “Rig this up to the roofjoists, then call for some muscle,” he said. As a reasonablyable-bodied person, I waited for the call, but it never came.
The next time I popped my head around the door, thebenches were down and already coated with tin sheeting,ready for work. I clearly didn’t count as muscle, which, as alifelong hands-on sort of person, came as a bit of a shock. Iwas a director now, and it took a bit of getting used to. Asmall shantytown of sheds and cages containing rabbitsand two ferrets was also cleared and the animals relocatedaround the park. And suddenly we had a workshop and aclear access yard. All we needed now were some tools.
Duncan masterminded the conversion of the oldworkshop into a vegetable storeroom. Every day Paul wentoff in the van to Tesco and Sainsbury’s, collecting past-thesell-by-date fruit and vegetables in sufficient quantities toreliably feed every herbivore in the zoo. Previously theproduce had been stored alongside the meat preparationarea, where fallen calves, horses, and occasional sheepwere dismembered by Andy Goatman, the knacker man,and Hannah and Kelly, the cat keepers. The problem wasthat this is illegal, under the secretary of state’s guidelinesfor modern zoos. Total separation between meat andvegetables is essential, to minimize the risk of crosscontamination,and a site visit from the environmentalhealth officer, or worse, an inspector from DEFRA couldclose us down before we started. Duncan went into thelegislation in detail, guided by Andy, whose encyclopedicknowledge of legislation around his trade has provedinvaluable many times. A local builder repaired the roof withplastic sheeting at cost, and when the room was finallyemptied, scrubbed, rewired, and illuminated, it lookedhuge. The back wall, it turned out, was made from localstone. Rob was impressed. “I haven’t seen that wall since Iwas a little kid,” he said. The process of accumulation ofrubbish and subsequent general decline at the park hadbeen long and gradual. But now we were turning back thetide. It was fantastic to be part of it.
The children were almost immediately absorbed into thelocal school, as one of our neighbors who had us over fordrinks turned out to be one of the governors. They instantlytook to the school, which had twenty-seven pupils and wasonly half the size of the school they attended in France. Butthe best news of this period was the arrival of Katherine,who had been winding up our affairs in France and thengone on to her sister in Italy. I’d left France around two anda half months before, packing enough clothes for afortnight, in order to help my mum sell her house, and hadn’tseen Katherine, apart from her fleeting visit to deliver thechildren to the park, for that entire time. Now she arrived forgood, and it was very much as a force for good that herpresence was felt throughout the park. Her learning curvewas intense, partly through having spoken only French forso long, but also being plunged into a hectic, chaoticbusiness environment which she knew nothing about andwhere everyone else was already rushing around with, if notabsolute confidence, then at least a long way down theroad toward discovering what needed to be done. ButKatherine had been supportive of the idea of the zoo from abusiness angle since almost the very beginning. In the firstweek or so back in April, when I had begun to throw myselfinto the negotiations wholeheartedly, she had had herdoubts. This was just another of my silly dreams that were adistraction from the daily necessity of earning a living andthe writing of my book. This was her role in our relationship—I was the dreamer, she was the reality check—though Ioften argued that preparing only for the worst could becomeself-fulfilling. But generally she was right, I was wrong, and Iwas glad to have her wisdom to keep me in check.
Buying the zoo was only the second time in our thirteenyears together that I simply overrode her—the first beingthe purchase of the French barns, which had involvedselling our cherished London flat. In both cases I had anabsolute certainty of the success of the venture, and wasimpatient to overleap any naysayers, no matter how wellintentioned.
Within a couple of weeks, she confessed tofriends, she could see me acquiring new skills in dealingwith administrative problems, which were previously adespised terrain for me, and could see that I meantbusiness. She liked this new me—I think she thought thatthe life I’d engineered for myself writing in the sun withdeadlines few and far between was too cushy, particularlyfor someone with my personality (basically lazy). And asusual, she was probably right.
It’s easy to idolize someone if you love them, but, thoughunrepentantly uxorious, I was not alone in thinking thatKatherine was special. Her background was as a graphicdesigner, which, as with many professions, involves aperiod of proving oneself creatively before moving up theladder into administration. In the world of glossymagazines, this meant becoming an art director. Thoughshe went on to several other titles, ending up at Eve, thewomen’s magazine, on Men’s Health magazine, the glossywhere we met, she was in charge of several staff andfreelancers, as well as a budget, in the mid-1990s, of about￡130,000 a year. This was more money than I had evermarshaled, but she did it well and diligently. “The thingabout Katherine,” a photographer once confided to me on arare photo shoot where I was working with her, “is that she’sgood with other people’s money.” Many art directorssuccumb to the surface glamour of their industry andoverspend on things like expensive lunches or endless rollsof film for costly locations and photographers. Katherinewas different, ordering in sandwiches, partly to keep costsdown but also to keep everyone in the studio, whichcharged by the hour, so they didn’t have to be rounded upafterward. And she nurtured new talent. With an unfailingeye she could spot someone just starting out who would goon to greater things, get them cheaply, and then inspiretheir loyalty, so that they would often work for her in thefuture at reduced rates.
Her management style was simply to set an impeccableexample, which other people felt obliged to follow. Sheworked harder than anyone else, often putting in twelveandfourteen-hour days, which in our early time togetherhad been a source of conflict between us. I, the indolentfreelancer, though churning out work, would often do sofrom my “office” on a laptop on the slopes of Primrose Hillwith Jasper, my panting assistant. At the end of the day Istopped and prepared our dinner, for which Katherinewould invariably be late. I never actually left a note saying“Your dinner’s in the dog,” but many times I ferried in mealsto her at 9 or 10 PM to find her doing something likeorganizing spreadsheets for other departments so that theycould comply with new internal accountancy requirements.
“THAT’S NOT YOUR JOB,” I would rant, but it was a vitalpart of her to take up the slack where other people wereprepared to let it slide.
Katherine’s presence in the park was galvanizing—notleast for me. She cleared a space in the (would you believecluttered) office, fired up her PowerBook, in those days themost powerful computer at the park, and got down tobusiness. Her roles, we had decided, were as moneymanager (getting a frivolous purchase past Katherine, as Iknew from many years of trying, was physically impossible)and designer. Though we had a capable designer andillustrator in the form of Robin, he had other skills andpredispositions, which we were beginning to unearth, andKatherine’s unerring eye for simplicity and homogeneity, Iknew, would be key to establishing the identity of this zooas something separate from the mishmash of local touristand animal attractions. A well-designed, understated, butslick visual image, homogenous throughout the leaflets,staff uniforms, advertising material, and even the signagefor the animals, combined with my enthusiasm and that ofthe people we had with us, could make this place into aflagship twenty-first-century enterprise. Suddenly it allseemed not just possible, but inevitable, and the goals Ihad set for the future of the park loomed into the foreground as part of our business and development plans.
As success grew, the collection could be steered from itscurrent 5 percent endangered animals toward the ultimateambition of focusing on captive breeding of endangeredspecies for possible reintroduction into the wild, like atGerald Durrell’s Jersey Zoo. Free-ranging lion tamarins,rare lemurs, Grevy’s zebras, giraffes, and my personal holygrail, large primates. Bonobo chimpanzees are thesmallest and most intelligent of the great apes, and alsoendangered, but gorillas are also clever and endangered,and available to zoos that have the right track record andappropriate facilities. With their habitat under threat andindividuals still being killed for bushmeat or even apparentlysometimes out of sheer spite by psychopaths in Rwandaand the Congo, these big gentle guys urgently need safehavens. And if we played our cards right, one day (in aboutten years) we could provide one.
As an avid student of the work of Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s work with Kanzi the chimp and Dr. PennyPattersons’s research with Koko the gorilla, I know thesebig animals are capable of self-recognition, empathy, andarguably, humor and self-awareness. This is exactly what Iam most interested in, my genuine “dream scenario,” as mysister Melissa had first described the zoo—looking forlanguage and humor in big apes in your own garden, andcalling it work.
This scenario was still a very long way off, but I feltastonishingly fortunate to be at least on a road that couldlead to it. With Katherine on board, it felt like we could godown that road. I’d always privately called her my Born Freelady, after Virginia McKenna in the, for me, seminal filmBorn Free, about how Joy and George Adamson rearedand reintroduced Elsa, an abandoned lioness, into thewilds of Africa. That seemed to me like a very good job tohave. They lived in tents and log cabins in tropical sunshine,they were doing fascinating and worthwhile work, and theyhad a Land Rover. With a lion on the top. As a boy I’dalways hoped to do something as exciting and worthwhilewith animals in exotic locations. I could see it was a longshot, but also that I would need a special person to do itwith me, and when I first met Katherine, I knew that I’d foundsomeone who could meet that challenge. If I could createthe appropriate circumstances, I knew she would go with itand be perfect at it, even though it wasn’t, strictly speaking,in her initial life plan. After we got together I repeatedlywarned her that one day I would be dragging her offsomewhere exotic to do interesting things with animals.
France was a staging post. Now we had made it to, er,Devon. But the project was perfect, engaging andharnessing her talents as well as mine.
Having Katherine back was the best thing. Our littlefamily unit was functioning again, and here we wereworking together, in an environment in which I was fired upand Katherine was keen to engage as a business venture.
In the absence of having any money to manage, Katherineset about organizing the office and, clutching at straws fromthe past to piece together, designing our logo. One bigproblem with this, however, was that we didn’t yet have aname.
Mike Thomas, the reassuring voice of wisdom on thephone, finally materialized at the park, and ended uphelping out considerably with this. It was great to meet Mikein the flesh, to shake his hand, and thank him for all his helpin getting the park, without which it quite simply wouldn’thave been possible. Mike and his lovely wife, Jen, had thesolid, comforting air of people who knew what they weretalking about. With his white beard, ready smile, and fadeddenim shirt, Mike looked like a cross between the Britishwildlife TV programmer Bill Oddie and the BBC’s AnimalHospital host, Rolf Harris. In fact Mike’s animal pedigreewas far more impressive than those of these keenamateurs, as we were to find out.
Jen looked like a real “Born Free lady,” someone whocould bottle-feed a baby chimpanzee while getting on withher daily routine unfazed. Mike and Jen had both beenthrough a similar experience to ours, more than a decadebefore, at Newquay Zoo. Now that we had time to chat, Iasked Mike how he had managed taking over Newquaywith no experience of running a zoo, as his backgroundwas in design and teaching. “Oh, I just called Gerry, and hewas very helpful.” Gerry? “Gerald Durrell at Jersey Zoo.
You’ve heard of him, I hope?” Heard of Gerald Durrell? Oneof my heroes, as well as being a superbly evocative writer.
My Family and Other Animals alone has probablyengaged as many people with the natural world as DavidAttenborough. Durrell was the premier conservationist ofhis, or possibly any, generation. Founding Jersey Zoo in theteeth of opposition from the zoological world, Durrell thenused it to change the center of gravity of that world towardactive conservation, as opposed to simply exhibitinganimals. Astonishingly, captive breeding programs ofendangered species for reintroduction to the wild, and forlearning about their breeding habits to inform ourconservation and management of them in the wild, were stillsometimes actually considered a bad idea as recently asthe 1960s and 1970s.
According to Lord Zuckerman, president of theZoological Society of London, addressing the WorldConference on Captive Breeding of Endangered Speciesheld at London Zoo in July 1976, because extinction is partof natural selection we shouldn’t interfere but merelydocument the process for the benefit of zoological science.
“Species have always been disappearing,” he said. “Therewill always be rare species.” I remember that year’sfantastic, sticky summer of glam rock, skateboards, andCalifornia sunshine making everything seem perfect, as aneleven-year-old at primary school, happily oblivious to thepresident of London Zoo’s almost nihilistic perspective onanimals. But even as a child I would have known he waswrong. I was probably sitting sweating and fidgeting inassembly as Zuckerman addressed the zoologicalcommunity. Gerald Durrell was sitting, writhingapoplectically, in that audience. He was already a man witha zoo, and a man with a mission, and I expect that onhearing those words, from that source in that place, GeraldDurrell would have simply renewed his vows to himself forthe thousandth time. When other people simply gave up, hejust dug in deeper. He saw it through, against a lifetime ofpeople telling him it wasn’t possible. He was aconservation giant, a maverick, and a writer on a grandscale. And now it transpired that one of the main guidinglights on our final approach to buy the zoo, Mike Thomas,was a receptacle of Gerald Durrell’s teachings. Wow. I’mnot a religious person, but it did seem like the clouds hadopened up a bit and our flimsy efforts were being endorsedfrom on high.
Mike and Jen helped us a lot in those crucial few weeks,as they had done when they steered us through thenegotiations. This time they were more hands-on, frequentlydriving up from Cornwall to give advice and unpack endlessboxes with Mum. One evening, around the old trestle tablein the stone-flagged kitchen, with the dilapidated rustedrange in the background, a legal document needed to beprocessed, which absolutely required us to come up with aname for the park. I have blocked from my mind most of themore depressing suggestions, but many were generated inthe need to find something that echoed the mostly positiveforty-year history and brand recognition of DartmoorWildlife Park, while distancing us from the bad publicity ofthe more recent past.
Staying “Dartmoor Wildlife Park” was not a good ideabecause of the previous prosecutions, and, shall we say,perceptions of it on the part of the wider zoo world and localsuppliers. We needed a relaunch, and quickly. DartmoorZoo was ruled out because all our neighbors had alreadymonopolized that, some would say predictable, format;Exmoor, Paignton, Newquay, and Bristol have already welltested the concept of local area plus Zoo as their title—which works for them. But we wanted to explore newpossibilities. South West Wildlife Park, Dartmoor WildlifeConservation Park, and all sorts of unsuitable horrorssurfaced and floated around before finally being puncturedby Mike, at our kitchen table, almost certainly with a glassof wine in hand. He suggested, “Why don’t you call itDartmoor Zoological Park?” It had continuity with the past,but also a clear reference to serious scientific activity in thefuture. I liked it; we all liked it, and that is the trading namewe entered into Companies House, the official governmentregister of UK companies. I was particularly pleasedbecause, as well as establishing a new identity and ethospointing toward the world of science, this gave us a Z in themiddle of our logo.
Katherine seemed less impressed with thistypographical development, and politely ignored mysuggestions about how the Z could be used at three timesthe size of the D and the P, creating a Zorro-like dash.
Katherine set to work with the brisk certainty of a skilledexpert on home ground. She’d chosen her colors andcollected examples of other logos from successful zoos,we’d discussed the broad outline of the brief, and I watchedher go into her familiar routine of pasting up swatches ofcolors and fonts, fretting, squinting at things from arm’slength, and working to tight print deadlines.
We had a “definite” lender in our sights, and, throughMike, even Gerald Durrell’s vicarious blessing. DZP, as wenow jauntily called ourselves, was going to work.
But in those weeks before the money arrived, thingswere still very strained indeed. The cold, wet winter weatherexacerbated the feelings of despair and unreverseddecline that we were supposed to be addressing. Very littlereal progress could be made because even the smallesttasks required some money. Everything we had or couldborrow from credit cards was used to pay staff wages. Mysmall income from my Guardian column and another inGrand Designs magazine was the only actual income forthe park, and nowhere near enough to pay the wages of ournot-so-happy little band.
Staff morale worsened, and the uncertainty that had beencreeping in was now a full-time presence. I spoke to theNFU Mutual mortgage company every day, and theirrepresentatives assured me that everything was in hand,but the lawyers were taking their time drawing up thedocuments. The problem was that if they took much longer,the business wouldn’t be there to lend to anymore, andwe’d have to put it back on the market. There was a verytangible feeling that the lawyers behind the scene reallydidn’t care whether this happened or not. They weren’tgoing to be rushed, and if in the meantime the transactionmoved from the active to the receivership pile, it just meantmore paid work for them, or their kind.
Three days before the money finally arrived, a newsecretarial employee on a month’s trial opened up astatement from Lloyds, who had promised us a loan threetimes, only to withdraw the offer each time at the lastminute. In the course of this charade, Lloyds had set upaccounts in the name of Mee Conservation Ltd. (the nameof our newly formed company), issued checkbooks, andbegun sending us monthly statements. The problem wasthat the statements said things like 0.00, nil, etc., in rowafter row of austere columns, which, to the untrained eye ofsomeone worrying about their job security, looks bad. Thissecretarial wannabe screamed across the office “They’vegot no money. Look! Look!” etc., waving the apparentlyincriminating paper around for everyone to see. The effectwas not calming, and at about eleven that morning anunusually strained Steve, our brand-new curator of animals,visited me in the kitchen of the house, where I had justfinished clearing away breakfast. “I’m really sorry to botheryou,” said Steve, and he clearly was sorry but also deeplyconcerned. “I think you’d better come over to the restaurant.
Everybody is there.” I looked longingly at my unsippedcoffee, and headed over with him.
Everybody was indeed there, from Paul the van driver togentle Robin the draftsman, all the keepers, and the newsecretarial tryout, Sarah. They sat in a circle of chairs, armsfolded, with an empty chair for me. It was an uncannymoment, with these normally polite and compliant peopleturning into inquisitors, and the unusualness of the situationemphasized its gravity. I wasn’t nervous, but I knew I had toproject myself or be overwhelmed by the sheer weight ofuncertainty in the room. I explained as openly and honestlyas I could about the promised money from the NFU, how Iwas expecting final confirmation any day now, that we’dsigned the last of the last documents, and were now justwaiting for lawyers to finish dithering. My frustration with thesituation was every bit as intense as theirs, but more so, asI was privy to the intricacies of the mechanisms ofprocrastination. I told them that I was regularly promised thefunds by a particular date, but that these arrangementswere regularly broken. That previous Monday, for instance,had been a firm promise cast in stone, but had passedwithout even a communication from the bank. I hadn’tbelieved the promise, so I hadn’t told the staff about it, as itwas frustrating enough for me without having to apologizefor the bank to everyone else every time they let me down. “Ididn’t tell you about that deadline because I didn’t believe itwould happen,” I said. “I will only believe it when I see themoney in the account—and I do believe that it will come, butwhen, I can’t tell you. But I will tell you when it’s there. Myfeeling is that it will be within the next week. That’s the best Ican say to you.”
I looked around the room. They were all looking intently atme, making economic decisions. Who was this young jokerwho had bought the place without having enough money torun it? Could he be trusted? What were the alternatives?
The secretarial assistant had a question about her ownwages, which I suggested was a separate issue for aprivate meeting. Her end-of-month review was coming up,and it was not going to go well. I looked everyone in the eyein turn and asked if they had any more questions. In the endI think it was John who stood up and said something like,“That seems fair enough.” Other chairs scraped back aspeople got to their feet. The spell was broken. Theinquisition was over. I’d got through by the skin of my teeth.
Now I just needed to convince myself. I had been convincedbefore the meeting, and also during it as I’d managed toconvince the others to hang in there. But afterward, the factthat I had been put in the position where the business wason the absolute brink of disintegration, by a bank, made mequestion whether they really were actually going to come upwith the goods. I had believed Barclays, I had believedLloyds, three times. I’d believed Arbuthnots, the Royal Bankof Scotland, and a host of others who had ultimately, utterlywithout compunction, let us down. I thought about the NFU.
Their contact, Andrew Ruth, was clearly a nice, honest, andconscientious man, but he had no control over thebackroom boys, who in this case were not the riskassessmentteam, but the lawyers.
When institutions behave badly, it’s easy for the littlepeople like us to get caught in the machinery, which will notslow down as it grinds you up, repossesses your house,and sends the bailiffs in to evict your children. They arechilling people. All smiles when preparing to lend money,as long as your spread sheets are in order, and you signover all your assets as security. And their expressionsbarely change as they watch the prospect of you gettingsnarled up in the small print and everything ebbing away.
One problem we encountered was that we weren’tborrowing enough. The amount, ￡550,000, seemed like alot to me, but apparently that officially made us small fry.
“Anything under a million takes time,” we were told by onebank. “It’s the highest risk sector there is.” I toyed franticallybut briefly with the idea of asking for three million, but evenmy economically naive brain quickly realized that we wouldencounter spreadsheet difficulties quite quickly going downthat route.
Having eventually found understanding lenders in theNational Farmers’ union was reassuring, but the terribleuncertainty of having money promised but not actuallyavailable lasted for three agonizing months and had amassive impact on the business plan, the staff, and theidea of opening for Easter in April. When the NFU finallycame up with the money, on 8 February 2007, our elationwas tainted by the knowledge of the unnecessary damagealready done by the delay, caused by our own brother’sactions and the nature of financial institutions, which hadmade our target of opening for the all-important Easterbank holiday virtually impossible.
But far, far worse than this, for me, was the knowledgethat the good news of the money arriving had beencompletely over shadowed by the very worst news of all.