Dear Mr Durrell,
I would like to join one of your expeditions. Here are my qualifications and faults:
36 years old, single, good health, a sport, understand children and animals, except snakes; devoted, reliable, excellent; young in character. My hobbies are playing the flute, photography, and writing stories. My nerves are not too steady; am disagreeable if anybody insults my country or my religion (Catholic). In the event of my accompanying you, it would be everything paid—on the other hand if you are a snob and you don’t mean what you write, I regret to say I do not wish to know you. Hoping to hear from you soon…
I soon found, to my relief, that Jersey appeared to have taken us to its heart. The kindness that has been shown to us during the five years of our existence is tremendous, both from officials and from the islanders themselves. After all, when living on an island eight miles by twelve you may be pardoned for having certain qualms when someone wants to start a zoo and import a lot of apparently dangerous animals. You have vivid mental pictures of an escaped tiger stalking your pedigree herd of Jersey cows, of flocks of huge, savage deer browsing happily through your fields of daffodils, and gigantic eagles and vultures swooping down on your defenceless chickens. I have no doubt that a lot of people thought this, especially our nearest neighbours to the manor, but nevertheless they welcomed us without displaying any symptoms of unease.
In a zoo of five or six hundred animals the variety and quantity of food they consume are staggering. It is one thing that must not be stinted if they are to be kept healthy and happy; and, above all, the food must be not only plentiful but good. Cleanliness and good food go a very long way to cutting down disease. A creature that is well-fed and kept in clean surroundings has, in my opinion, an eighty per cent better chance of escaping disease, or if it contracts a disease, of recovering. Unfortunately, a great many people (including, I am afraid, some zoos) still suffer from the extraordinary delusion that anything edible but not fit for human consumption is ideal for animals. When you consider that most animals in the wild state—unless they are natural carrion feeders—always eat the freshest of food, such as fresh fruit and freshly killed meat—it is scarcely to be wondered at when they sicken and die if fed on a diet that is ‘not fit for human consumption’. Of course, in all zoos a lot of such food is fed, but in most cases there is nothing at all wrong with it. For example, a grocer opens a crate of bananas and finds that many of the fruit have black specks or blotches on the skin. There is nothing wrong with the fruit, but his customers demand yellow bananas, and will not buy discoloured ones. If a zoo did not buy it, the fruit would be wasted. Sometimes the grocer has fruit or vegetables which have reached that point of ripeness where after another twenty-four hours in the shop the whole lot will have to be thrown away. In that case they are sold to a zoo that can use them up rapidly.
Some time ago a grocer telephoned us, inquiring whether we would like some peaches. He explained that his deepfreeze had gone wrong and that it contained some South African peaches which had gone black just round the seed. There was absolutely nothing wrong with them, he assured us, but they were unsaleable. We said we would be delighted to have them, thinking that a couple of crates of peaches would be a treat for some of the animals. A few hours later, a huge lorry rolled into the grounds, stacked high with boxes. There must have been up to thirty or forty, and the financial loss this represented to the grocer must have been staggering. They were some of the largest and most succulent peaches I have ever seen; we tipped cratefuls of them into the cages, and the animals had a field day. Within half an hour all the monkeys were dripping peach juice and could hardly move; several members of the staff, too, were surreptitiously wiping juice off their chins. There was, as I say, nothing wrong with the peaches: they were just unsaleable. But it might happen that someone else, in the most kindly way, would bring us a whole lorry load of completely rotten and mildewed peaches, and be hurt and puzzled when we refused them on the grounds that they were unfit for animal consumption. One of the biggest killers in a zoo is that rather nebulous thing called enteritis, an infection of the stomach. This in itself can cause an animal’s death, but even if it is only a mild attack it can weaken the creature and thus open the door to pneumonia or some other deadly complaint. Bad fruit can cause enteritis quicker than most things; thus care must be taken over the quality fed to the animals.
As soon as the people of Jersey knew what our requirements were in the matter of food, they rallied round in the most extraordinarily generous way. Take the question of calves, for instance. In Jersey most of the bull calves are slaughtered at birth, and until we arrived they were simply buried, for they were too small to be marketable. We discovered this quite by accident, when a farmer telephoned us and asked rather doubtfully, if a dead calf was any use to us. We said we would be delighted to have it, and when he brought it round he asked us if we would like any more. It was then that we found out there was this wonderful source of fresh meat: meat which—from the animal point of view—could not have been more natural, for not only was it freshly killed (sometimes still warm), but it also included the hearts, livers, and other internal organs which were so good for them. Gradually, the news spread among the farmers; before long—at certain times of the year—we were receiving as many as sixteen calves a day, and farmers were travelling from one end of the island to the other, delivering them to us. Others, not to be outdone, offered us tomatoes and apples, and would bring whole lorry loads round, or let us go to collect as many as we would take away. One man telephoned to say he had a ‘few’ sunflowers, the heads of which were now ripe—would we like them? As usual we said yes, and he turned up in a small open truck piled high with gigantic sunflower heads, so that the whole thing looked like a sun chariot. The heads were not fully ripe, which meant that the kernel of each seed was soft and milky; we simply cut up the heads as if they were plum cakes and put big slices in with such creatures as the squirrels, mongooses, and birds. They all went crazy over the soft seeds and simply gorged themselves.
But these are all the more normal types of food. In a zoo you can use many very unusual items of diet, and in acquiring these we were again helped by the local people. There was one elderly lady who used to ride up to the zoo once or twice a week on an antediluvian bicycle and spend the afternoon talking to the animals. Whenever she saw me she would back me into a corner and for half an hour or so tell me what tricks her favourite animals had been up to that day. She was, I discovered, a lavatory attendant in St Helier. One day I happened to meet her when I had been out collecting some acorns for the squirrels. She watched entranced while the squirrels sat up on their hind legs, twirling the acorns round and round in their paws as they chewed them. She then told me that she knew of a great many churchyards in which fine oak trees grew, and vowed that she would herself bring some acorns for the squirrels at the end of the week. Sure enough, she appeared on the next Sunday pedalling strenuously up to the zoo on her ancient bicycle, the front basket of which was filled to the brim with plump acorns, and there was another large carrier bagful strapped—somewhat insecurely—to the back of her vehicle. Thereafter, she used to bring us a supply of acorns every week, until the squirrels became quite blase about them and even started to store them in their beds.
Another item for which we are always grateful is what could be loosely called ‘live food’, that is to say, earwigs, wood-lice, grasshoppers, moths, and snails. Here a great many people come to our rescue, and they turn up at the zoo with jam-jars full of woodlice and other creatures, and biscuit-tins full of snails, of which they are, of course, only too glad to see the last. The earwigs, woodlice, and so on are fed to the smaller reptiles, the amphibians, and some of the birds. The snails we feed to the larger lizards, who scrunch them up with avidity, eating shell and all as a rule.
In order to pad out the collection of animals that I had brought back from West Africa and South America, we had, of course, to acquire from different sources several other creatures. The most amusing of these was, undoubtedly, the bird I mentioned before, Trumpy, the trumpeter. Not only had he appointed himself the zoo’s clown but also the zoo’s settler-in. As soon as we got a new creature, Trumpy managed to hear of it, and would come bouncing along, cackling to himself, to settle it in. He would then spend twenty-four hours standing by the cage (or preferably in it, if he could) until he thought that the new arrival was firmly established, whereupon he would bounce back to his special beat in the mammal house. Sometimes Trumpy’s settling efforts were on the risky side, but he seemed to be too dim-witted to realize the danger. When Juan and Jauntier, the white-collared peccaries, were first released into their paddock, Trumpy was there to settle them in. The pigs did not seem to mind in the slightest, so Trumpy did his twenty-four hour stint and departed. But later on, when Juan and Juanita had just had their first litter, and had brought them out into the paddock for the first time, Trumpy flew gaily over the fence to settle in the babies. Now, Juan and Juanita had not minded this for themselves, but they thought that Trumpy’s efforts on behalf of their piglets held some hidden menace. They converged on Trumpy (who was standing on one leg and eyeing the piglets benignly), their fur bristling, their tusks clattering like castanets. Trumpy woke out of his trance with a start, and only a skilful bit of dodging and a wild leap saved him. It was the last time he attempted to go into the peccary paddock. When we dammed up the little stream in the sunken water-meadow and constructed a small lake for the black-necked and coscoroba swans I had brought back from South America, Trumpy was there to supervise the work, and when the swans were eventually released he insisted, in spite of all our entreaties, in standing up to his ankles in water for twenty-four hours to settle them in. It did not appear to have any effect on the swans, but Trumpy enjoyed it.
Another new acquisition was the fine young male mandrill, Frisky. With his blue and red behind, and his blue and red nose, Frisky was a fine sight. If you went near his cage he would peer at you with his bright, amber-coloured eyes, lift his eyebrows up and down as if in astonishment, and then, uttering throaty little grunts, turn round and present his backside to you, peering over his shoulder to see what effect his sunset rear was achieving. Frisky was, of course, exceedingly inquisitive, like all members of his family, and one bright spring day this was his undoing. We were having the tops of the monkey cages repainted in a pleasant shade of mushroom, and Frisky had been watching this operation with keen interest. He was obviously under the impression that the paint pot contained some delicious substance, probably like milk, which would repay investigation. He had not had a chance to find out, however, for the painter, in the most selfish and boorish manner, had kept the paint pot close beside him. But patience is always rewarded, and after a few hours Frisky had his chance. The painter left the pot unguarded while he went to fetch something, and Frisky seized the opportunity. He pushed his arm through the wire, grabbed the edge of the pot, and pulled. The next moment he was spluttering and choking under a waterfall of mushroom-coloured paint, and almost instantly, he discovered, he had turned into a mushroom-coloured mandrill. There was really not much that we could do, for you cannot take a half-grown mandrill out of its cage and wash it as though it were a poodle. However, when the paint had dried as hard as armour on his fur, he looked so miserable that we decided to put him into the cage next door, which contained a female baboon and two female drills, in the hope that they would clean him. When Frisky was let in with them, they viewed him with alarm, and it was some time before they plucked up enough courage to approach him. When they did, however, and found out what was the matter with him, they gathered round enthusiastically and set about the task of giving Frisky a wash and brush-up. The trouble was that the paint had dried so hard on the fur that the three females had to use a great deal of force, and so, although at the end of two days they had removed all the paint, they had also removed a vast amount of Frisky’s fur with it. Now, instead of a mushroom-coloured mandrill, we had a partially bald and slightly shamefaced-looking one.
Another newcomer was our lion, who went under the time-honoured name of Leo. He was one of the famous Dublin Zoo lions, and was probably about the fiftieth generation born in captivity. On his arrival he was only about the size of a small dog, and so he was housed in a cage in the mammal house, but he grew at such a pace that it was soon imperative that we find him more spacious quarters. We had just finished construction on a large cage for the chimpanzees, and decided we would put Leo in that until we could get around to building him a cage of his own. So Leo was transferred, and settled down very happily. I was glad to see, when his mane started to develop, that he was going to be a blond lion, for in my experience the lions with blond manes, as opposed to dark ones, have always nice, if slightly imbecile, characters. This theory has been amply born out by Leo’s behaviour. He had in his cage a large log as a plaything, and a big black rubber bucket in which he received his water ration. This bucket fascinated him, and after he had drunk his fill he would upset the remains of the water and then pat the bucket with his great paws, making it roll round the cage so that he could stalk it and pounce on it. One day I was in the grounds when a lady stopped me to inquire whether we had acquired Leo from a circus. Slightly puzzled, I said, “No,” and asked her why she should think so. “Because,” she replied, “he was doing such clever tricks.” I discovered that he had, by some extraordinary means, managed to wedge the rubber bucket on his head, and was walking round and round the cage proudly, wearing it like a hat.
In his second year Leo decided, after mature reflection, that it was a lion’s duty to roar. He was not awfully sure how to go about it, so he would retire to quiet corners of his cage and practice softly to himself, for he was rather shy of this new accomplishment and would stop immediately and pretend it had nothing to do with him if you came in view. When he was satisfied that the timbre was right and his breath control perfect, he treated us to his first concert. It was a wonderful moonlight night when he started, and we were all delighted that Leo was, at last, a proper lion. A lion roaring sounds just like someone sawing wood on a gigantic, echoing barrel. The first coughs or rasps are quick and fairly close together, and you can imagine the saw biting into the wood; then the coughs slow down and become more drawn out and suddenly stop, and you instinctively wait to hear the thud of the sawnoff piece hitting the ground. The trouble was that Leo was so proud of his accomplishment that he could not wait until nightfall to give us the benefit of his vocal chords. He started roaring earlier and earlier each evening, and would keep it up solidly all night, with five-minute intervals for meditation between each roar. Sometimes, when he was in particularly good voice, you could imagine that he was sitting on the end of your bed, serenading you. We all began to be somewhat jaded. We found that if we opened the bedroom window and shouted, “Leo, shut up,” this had the effect of silencing him for half an hour, but at the end of that time he would decide that you had not really meant it and would start all over again. It was a very trying time for all concerned. Now Leo has learned to roar with a certain amount of discretion, but even so there are nights—especially at full moon—when the only thing to do is to put the pillow over your head and curse the day you ever decided you wanted a zoo.
We also obtained in our first year two South African penguins, called Dilly and Dally. I hasten to add that they were not christened by us, but arrived with these revolting names stencilled on their crate. We had prepared a pool for them in the shade of some trees bordering the main drive, and here they seemed quite content. Trumpy, of course, spent twenty-four hours in their pen with them, and seemed faintly disgruntled that the pool was too deep for him to join Dilly and Dally in it. After settling them in, he took a great fancy to the penguins and paid them a visit every morning, when he would stand outside the wire making his curious booming cry, while Dilly and Dally would point their beaks skywards and bray to the heavens, like a couple of demented donkeys.
I am not quite sure when the rift in this happy friendship appeared, or for what reason, but one morning we saw Trumpy fly over into the penguin enclosure and proceed to beat up Dilly and Dally in the most ferocious manner. He flew at them, wings out, feathers bristling, pecking and scratching, until the two penguins (who were twice his size) were forced to take refuge in the pool. Trumpy stood on the edge of the pond and cackled triumphantly at them. We chased Trumpy out of the enclosure and scolded him, whereupon he shuffled his feathers carelessly and stalked off nonchalantly. After that we had to watch him, for he took advantage of every opportunity to fly over the wire and attack poor Dilly and Dally, who, at the sight of him, would flop hysterically into the water. One morning he did this once too often. He must have flown over very early, before anyone was about, intent on giving the penguins a bashing, but they had grown tired of these constant assaults, and rounded on him. One of them, with a lucky peck, must have caught him off balance and knocked him into the pool, from which—with his water-logged feathers—he could not climb out. This was the penguins’ triumph, and as Trumpy floundered helplessly they circled round, pecking at him viciously with their razor-sharp beaks. When he was found, he was still floating in the pond, bleeding profusely from a number of pecks, and with just enough strength to keep his head above water. We rushed him into the house, dried him, and anointed his wounds, but he was a very sick and exhausted bird, and black depression settled on the zoo, for we all thought he would die. The next day there was no change, and I felt it was touch and go. As I was sipping my early morning tea on the third day, I suddenly heard, to my amazement, a familiar thrumming cry. I slipped out of bed and looked out the window. There, by the lavender hedge in the courtyard, was Trumpy, a slightly battered and tattered trumpeter who limped a little, but still with the same regal air of being the owner of the property. I saluted him out of the window, and he cocked a bright eye at me. Then he shuffled his torn feathering to adjust it to his liking, gave his loud, cackling laugh, and stalked off towards his beat in the mammal house.
Another new arrival that caused us a certain amount of trouble, one way or another, was Delilah, a large female African crested porcupine. She arrived up at the airport in a crate that looked suitable for a couple of rhinoceroses. Why she had been shipped like this became obvious when we peered into the crate, for even in that short air journey she had succeeded in nearly demolishing one side with her great yellow teeth. When she saw us looking into the crate, she uttered a series of such fearsome roars and gurks that one would have been pardoned for thinking it contained a pride of starving lions. She stamped her feet petulantly on the floor of the crate, and rattled and clattered her long black and white quills like a crackle of musketry. It was quite obvious that Delilah was going to be a personality to be reckoned with.
On our return to the zoo we had to chivy her out of her rapidly disintegrating crate and into a temporary cage, while her permanent home was under construction. During this process she endeared herself to at least one member of the staff by backing sharply into his legs. The experience of having several hundred extremely sharp porcupine quills stabbed into your shins is not exactly exhilarating. By the time Delilah was installed in her temporary home there were several more casualties, and the ground was littered with quills, for Delilah, like all porcupines, shed her quills with gay abandon at the slightest provocation.
The old fable of a porcupine being able to shoot its quills out like arrows is quite untrue. The quills, some of them fourteen inches long, are planted very loosely in the skin of the back, and when the animal is harried by an enemy it backs rapidly into the adversary (for all the quills point backwards), jabs the quills into him as deeply as possible, and then rushes forward. This action drives the quills into the enemy and pulls them loose from the porcupine’s skin, so the enemy is left looking like a weird sort of pincushion. This action is performed so rapidly that in the heat of battle, as it were, you are quite apt to get the impression that the porcupine has shot its adversary full of quills. This delightful action Delilah used to indulge in with great frequency, and therefore at feeding and cleaning times you had to be prepared to drop everything and leap high and wide at a moment’s notice.
Porcupines are, of course, rodents, and the giant crested species—since it spreads from Africa into parts of Europe—has the distinction of being the largest European rodent, bigger even than the beaver. It is also the largest of the porcupines, for, although there are many different species scattered about the world, none of them comes anywhere near the size of the crested one. In North and South America the porcupines are, to a large extent, arboreal, and the South American kind even have prehensile tails to assist them in climbing. The other porcupines found in Africa and Asia are fairly small, terrestial species which generally have fairly long tails ending in a bunch of soft spines like the head of a brush, and this they rattle vigorously in moments of stress. Without doubt the great crested porcupine, as well as being the biggest, is the most impressive and handsome member of the family.
It was not long before we had Delilah’s new home ready, and then came the great day on which we had to transport her to it from one end of the zoo to the other. We had learned from bitter experience that trying to chivy Delilah into a crate was worse than useless. She simply put up all her spines, gurked at us fiercely, and backed into everything in sight, parting with great handfuls of quills with a generosity I have rarely seen equalled. The mere sight of a crate would send her off into an orgy of foot-stamping and quill-rattling. We had learned that there was only one way to cope with her: to let her out of the cage and then have two people, armed with brooms, urge her along gently. Delilah would stride out like one of the more muscular and prickly female Soviet athletes, and as long as you kept her on a fairly even course by light taps from the brushes you could keep her going for any distance.
This was the method we decided to employ to transfer her to her new quarters, and to begin with all went well. She started off at a great lick down the main drive, Jeremy and I panting behind with our brushes. We successfully made her round the corner into the courtyard, but once she got there a suspicion entered her head that she might be doing exactly what we wanted her to do. Feeling that the honour of the rodents was at stake, Delilah proceeded to run round and round the courtyard as though it were a circus ring, with Jeremy and me in hot pursuit. Then, when she had got us going at a good pace, she would suddenly stop and go into reverse, so that we would have to leap out of the way and use our brushes as protection. After a few minutes of this, there appeared to be more quills sticking in the woodwork of the brushes than there were in Delilah. Eventually, however, she tired of this game, and allowed us to guide her down to her new cage without any further ado.
She lived very happily in her new quarters for about three months before the wanderlust seized her. It was a crisp winter’s evening when Delilah decided there might be something in the outside world that her cage lacked, and so she got to work with her great curved yellow teeth, ripped a large hole in the thick interlink wire, squeezed her portly form through it, and trotted off into the night. It happened that on that particular evening I had gone out to dinner, so the full honours of the Battle of the Porcupine go to Shep.
At about midnight my mother was awakened by a car which had driven into the courtyard beneath her bedroom window and was tooting its horn vigorously. Mother, leaning out of the window, saw that it was one of our nearest neighbours from the farm over the hill. He informed Mother that there was a large and, to judge by the noises it was making, ferocious creature stamping about in his yard, and would we like to do something about it. Mother, who always has a tendency to fear the worst, was convinced that it was Leo who had escaped, and she fled to the cottage to wake Shep. He decided from the description that it must be Delilah, and pausing only for a broom, he leapt into the zoo van and drove up to the farm. There, sure enough, was Delilah, stamping about in the moonlight, gurking to herself and rattling her quills. Shep explained to the farmer that the only way to get Delilah back to the zoo was to brush her, as it were, with the broom along the half-mile or so of road. The farmer, though obviously thinking the whole procedure rather eccentric, said that if Shep would undertake that part of it he would undertake to drive the zoo van back again.
So Shep set off, clad in his pyjamas, brushing a snorting, rattling Delilah down the narrow moonlit road. Shep met several cars full of late-night revellers, and all these screeched to a halt and watched in astonishment the sight of a man in pyjamas brushing along a plainly reluctant porcupine. Several of them, I am sure, must have hurried home to sign the pledge, for, after all, the last thing you expect to find wandering about a respectable parish is an infuriated porcupine pursued by a highly embarrassed man in night attire. But at last Shep brought her safely back to the zoo and then, to her great indignation, locked her up in the coal cellar. For, as he explained, it had a cement floor and two-foot-thick granite walls, and if she could break out of that she deserved her freedom and as far as he was concerned she could have it.
Not long afterwards, Delilah caused trouble in quite another context. The zoo needs every form of publicity it can obtain, and, as television was clearly one of the best mediums, I tried to popularize the zoo by this means whenever possible. A television producer once said to me that if he could produce a programme without a television personality or professional actor he would be a happy man. I could see his point, but he did not know that there could be something infinitely more harrowing. He had never undertaken one with live wild animals, the difficulties of which make the strutting and fretting of television personalities fade into insignificance. When making a programme, animals either behave so badly that you are left a jittering mass of nerves in the end, or else they behave so well that they steal the show. Whichever way it is, you cannot win, and in my considered opinion anyone who undertakes to do such a job should be kindly and firmly conducted by his friends to the nearest mental home. If you let him do the programme, he will end there anyway, so you are merely anticipating.
One of the first programmes I did was devoted to the primates, or monkey family, of which the zoo boasted a rather fine collection. For the first time, live, on television, I could show the great British public a splendid array of creatures ranging from the tiny, large-eyed bushbabies, through the lorises, the Old and New World monkeys, to the gorilla and chimpanzee, with myself thrown in as an example of Homo sapiens. I had no qualms about this: the monkeys and apes were all extremely tame, the bushbabies would be confined in glass-fronted cases, and the lorises would be on upright branches, where they would simply curl up and sleep until awakened by me during the programme. At least, that is how it should have worked, but unfortunately I had not taken into consideration the effects of the journey, for the Island of Jersey is an hour’s flying time from the city of Bristol, where the programme was to be recorded. By the time the animals had been crated, flown to Bristol, and unloaded in the dressing-room which had been put at their disposal, they were all in a highly neurotic state. So was I.
When the time for the first rehearsal approached, all the monkeys had to be removed from their travelling crates, have belts and leashes attached to them, and be tethered (one to each compartment) in a construction that resembled a miniature cow-stall. The monkeys, hitherto always tame, placid, and well-behaved, took one look at the cow stall and had what appeared to be a collective nervous breakdown. They screamed, they bit, they struggled; one broke his leash and disappeared behind some piled scenery, from which he was extracted—yelling loudly and covered with cobwebs -after about half an hour’s concentrated effort. Already rehearsal was fifteen minutes overdue. At last we had them all in position and more or less quiet.
I apologized to the producer and said that we would be ready in next to no time, for all we had to do was to put the lorises on their respective tree trunks, and this—with such lethargic animals—would be the work of a moment. We opened the cage doors, expecting to have to chivy the sleepy lorises out onto their trees, but instead they stalked out like a couple of racehorses, their eyes blazing with indignation, uttering loud cat-like cries of disgust and warning. Before anyone could do anything sensible, they had rushed down their tree trunks and were roaring across the studio floor, their mouths open, their eyes wide. Technicians departed hurriedly in all directions, except a few of the bolder ones who, with rolled up newspapers as weapons endeavoured to prevent the determined lorises from getting among the scenery, as the monkey had done. After further considerable delay we managed to return the lorises to their travelling crates, and the props department was hurriedly summonsed to attach to the bottom of each tree a cardboard cone that would prevent the creatures from getting a grip and so climbing down to the floor.
Rehearsals were now an hour overdue. At last we were underway, and by this time I was in such a state of nerves that the rehearsal was a shambles. I forgot my lines; I called most of the animals by the wrong names; the slightest sound made me jump out of my skin, for fear something had escaped, and to cap it all Lulu, the chimp, urinated copiously, loudly, and with considerable interest in her own achievement, all over my lap. We all retired to lunch with black circles under our eyes, raging headaches, and a grim sense of foreboding. The producer, with a ghastly smile, said she was sure it would be all right, and I, trying to eat what appeared to be fried sawdust, agreed. We went back to the studio to do the recording.
For some technical reason that defeats me, it is too expensive or too complicated to cut portions out of a television tape. So it is exactly like doing a live programme: if you make a mistake, it is permanent. This, of course, does not help to bolster your confidence in yourself; when you are co-starring with a number of irritated and uninhibited creatures like monkeys you start going grey round the temples before you even begin. The red light went on, and with shaking hands I took a deep breath, smiled a tremulous smile at the camera, as if I loved it like a brother, and commenced. To my surprise, the monkeys behaved perfectly. My confidence started to return. The bushbabies were wonderful, and I felt a faint ray of hope. We reached the lorises and they were magnificent. My voice lost its tremulo and, I hoped, took on a firm, manly, authoritative note. I was getting into my stride. Just as I was launching myself with enthusiasm into the protective postures of a potto—believe it or not—the studio manager came over and told me that there had been a breakdown in the recording and we should have to start all over again.
Of course, after an experience like this, one is mental to even try to do any more television. But I had agreed to do five more. They, I must admit, were not quite as trying as the monkey programme, but some of the highlights still live vividly in my memory, and occasionally I awake screaming in the night and have to be comforted by Jacquie. There was, for example, the programme I did on birds. The idea was to assemble as many different species as possible, and show how their beaks were adapted for their varying ways of life. Two of the birds were to be ‘star’ turns, because they did things on order. There was, for instance, Dingle the chough. This member of the crow family is rare in Great Britain now, and we are extremely lucky to have him. They are clad in funereal black feathering, but with scarlet feet and a long, curved scarlet beak. Dingle, who had been hand reared, was absurdly tame. The second ‘star’ was a cockatoo named—with incredible originality by its previous owner—Cocky. Now, this creature would, when requested, put up its amazing crest and shout loudly, a most impressive act. The other birds taking part in the programme did nothing at all; they were, very sensibly, content just to sit there and be themselves. So my only problems were Dingle and Cocky, and I had great faith in both of them.
The programme was to open with me standing there, Dingle perched on my wrist, while I talked about him. During rehearsals this worked perfectly, for if you scratch Dingle’s head he goes into a trance-like state and remains quite still. However, when it came to the actual recording, Dingle decided that he had been scratched enough, and just as the red light went on he launched himself off my wrist and flew up into the rafters of the studio. It took us some time, with the aid of ladders and bribes in the shape of meal-worms, meat, and cheese (of which he is inordinately fond) to retrieve him, whereupon he behaved perfectly and sat so still on my wrist that he appeared to be stuffed. All went smoothly until we came to Cocky. Here I made the mistake of telling my audience what to expect, which is the one thing not to do with animals. So, while five million viewers gaped, expectantly waiting to see Cocky put up his crest and scream, I made desperate attempts to persuade him to do it. This went on for five soul-searing minutes, while Cocky sat on his perch as immobile as a museum specimen. In despair I moved on to the next bird, and as I did so Cocky erected his crest and screamed mockingly.
There was the occasion, also, of the programme devoted to reptiles. Here I felt I was on safer ground, for on the whole they are fairly lethargic creatures and easy to handle. The programme, however, was a chore for me, as I was just in the middle of a bout of influenza, and my presence in the studio was due entirely to the efforts of my doctor, who had pumped me full of the most revolting substances to keep me on my feet for the required time. If you are nervous anyway—which I always am—and your head is buzzing under the influence of various antibiotics, you tend to give a performance closely resembling an early silent film. During the first rehearsals all the technicians realized that I was feeling both lousy and strung-up, and so when it came to a break they each took turns backing me into a corner and trying to restore my morale, with little or no effect. We came to the second rehearsal and I was worse than before. Obviously something had to be done, and somebody was inspired enough to think of the answer. During my discourse on members of the tortoise family, I mentioned how the skeleton of the beast was, as it were, welded into the shell. In order to show this more clearly I had a very fine tortoiseshell and skeleton to demonstrate. The bottom half of the shell was hinged, like a door, and upon opening it all the mysteries and secrets of the tortoise’s anatomy were revealed. Having done my little introduction on the tortoise family, I then opened the underside of the shell and, to my surprise, instead of just finding the skeleton therein, I found a piece of cardboard on which the words ‘No Vacancies’ had been printed. It was a few minutes before order was restored in the studio, but I felt much better, and the rest of the rehearsal went off without a hitch.
Delilah cropped up in a programme which I did on adaptation. I thought she would be a very good example of the way an animal protects itself, and certainly she showed this off to advantage. When we came to put her into the crate, she charged wildly in all directions, backing into us and the woodwork, and leaving spines imbedded in the sides of the crate and in the end of the brushes. She gurked and roared and rattled her quills throughout the trip to Bristol, and the studio hands, who unloaded her on arrival there, were for some considerable time under the impression that I had brought a full-grown leopard with me. Then we had to transfer Delilah from her travelling box and into the special studio cage that had been built for her. By the time we achieved this, Delilah had stuck so many quills into so much of the studio scenery that I began to wonder whether she would be completely bald for her debut on television. During the actual transmission she behaved perfectly, to my amazement, doing all the things that I wanted: she gurked fearsomely, stamped her feet, and rattled her quills like castanets, as though she were a born television star. By the end of the show I was feeling quite friendly towards her and beginning to think that I may well have misjudged her. Then came the moment of inducing her out of the studio cage back into her travelling crate. It took eight of us three-quarters of an hour. One stage hand received a sharp stab in the calf of his leg, two pieces of scenery were irretrievably damaged, and the entire set was pierced so full of porcupine quills it looked as though we had been fighting off an Indian attack. I was thankful to get a by then quill-less Delilah back to the zoo and into her own cage again.
I suppose the terrible things that occur tend to live in one’s memory more vividly than the pleasant happenings, and so I look back on the television shows I have done with animals rather in a way that one remembers a series of accidents. There is, however, one incident on which I look back with extreme pleasure, and that was the occasion when the BBC wanted our young gorilla N’Pongo to take part in a programme. They even went to the unprecedented length of chartering a small plane to fly us over to Bristol. They also sent a cameraman to cover the trip with his camera—a timid individual who confessed to me that he did not like flying, as it made him sick. We took off in brilliant sunshine, and almost immediately dived into black clouds filled to capacity with air-pockets. N’Pongo, sitting back in his seat like a seasoned traveller, thoroughly enjoyed everything. He accepted six lumps of barley-sugar to counteract the popping in his ears, peered with interest and excitement out of the window, and when the air-pockets began, he fetched out the sick-bag and put it on his head. The poor photographer had become progressively greener while attempting to film N’Pongo’s antics, but when he put the bag on his head this reminder acted in a devastating way; the photographer dived for his own receptacle and treated it in the way for which it was designed.