We Bought a Zoo

Although my mum’s house was not yet even on the market it had been valued at the same as the asking price for the park, so, with some trepidation, we put in an offer at that price in a four-way sealed bid auction, and waited keenly for the outcome. But two days later we were told that we were not successful. Our bid was rejected by Ellis’s advisors on the basis that we were inexperienced, and had no real money. Which we had to admit were both fair points. We sloped back to our lives, with the minimum of regrets, feeling that we had done what we could, had been prepared to follow through, but now it was out of our hands. Melissa went back to her family in Gloucestershire; Duncan was busy in London with his new business, Vincent, our eldest brother at 54, had a new baby; Mum went back to the family home in Surrey, preparing it to put on the market. All relatively comfortable, successful and rewarding. My life in particular, I felt, was compensation enough for missing out on this chance. Having spent nearly a decade manoeuvring into a position of writing for a living with low overheads in a hot country, watching the children grow into this slightly strange niche, I was content with my lot, and anxious to get back to it.

But after all the excitement, I couldn’t help wondering about what might have been. Sitting in my makeshift perspex office in the back of my beautiful derelict barn with the swallows dipping in and out during the day and the bats buzzing around my head at dusk, I couldn’t stop thinking about the life we could have built around that zoo.

Katherine was getting stronger every day, wielding my French pick-axe-mattock in her vegetable garden with increasing vigour, and her muscle tone and body mass, wasted to its furthest extreme by the chemotherapy so that she went from looking like a catwalk model to an etiolated punk rocker with her random tufts of hair, improved throughout the summer. Her neurologist, Madame Campello, a fiercely intelligent and slightly forbidding woman, was pleased with her progress and decided on shifting her monthly MRI scans to once every two months, which we saw as a good sign. It gave us longer between the inevitable anxiety of going into Nîmes to get the results, a process both of us, particularly Katherine, found pretty daunting.

Mme Campello was obviously compassionate, and I’m sure I saw her actually gasp when she first saw Katherine, the children and myself for Katherine’s initial post-operative consultation. From that moment she fast forwarded almost every part of the treatment, and I could see that this lady was going to do everything she could to make sure that Katherine survived. In her normal clinical consultations, however, Mme Campello was rather like a strict headmistress, which made Katherine, always the good girl, feel unable to question her too closely about treatment options. I, however, with one or two school expulsions under my belt, have never been overly intimidated by school heads, and felt quite entitled to probe. Mme Campello turned out to be extremely receptive to this, and several times I called her after speaking to Katherine once we had got home, and we decided on an adjustment to her medication.

My nighttime excursions with Leon continued to yield interesting creatures, like fireflies from impenetrable thickets who never produced the goods in daylight in front of the children, scorpions towards whom I was beginning to habituate but was still jittery, and probably the most surprising for me, a longhorn beetle. Never before or since have I seen such a beetle in the wild, and I was convinced he was on the wrong continent. Long – perhaps three inches – with iridescent wing casings, a small head, and enormous antennae from which, I assume, he gets his name. I took great pleasure in identifying him with the children in our voluptuously illustrated French encyclopedia bought from a book fair in Avignon, and photographing him standing on the page next to his template self, though he was inordinately more impressive and colourful.

Katherine was well and in capable hands, the children were blooming, and I was writing about DIY for the Guardian, even occasionally doing some, and gradually making contact with professors around the world on topics like chimpanzee predation of monkeys for sexual rewards, elephant intelligence and the dolphin’s capacity for syntax. It was close to heaven, with local friends popping in for mandatory glasses of chilled rosé from the vines on our doorstep, and me able to adjust my working hours around the demands of the village and family life relatively easily. Apart from all that rosé.

But still I kept thinking about the zoo. The two days I had spent in the lush South Hams region of Devon would not go away. The park sat on the edge of Dartmoor, surrounded by the lush woodland and beautiful beaches of South Hams. Our family had enjoyed their stay, but it was more than that, somehow enchanting, something I could only very reluctantly let go of, even though I knew it was already lost.

Standing in my Health-and-Safety-free French hay-loft door, the ancient portals bleached like driftwood by the sun and sand-blasted by the Mistral, dripping rusted door furniture, some of it reputedly dating back to the Napoleonic era, it was the zoo which kept coming back to me. When Napoleon passed through our village of Arpaillargues in 1815 he famously killed two local dissenters – known (admittedly among a relatively select few local French historians) as the ‘Arpaillargues Two’. In 2005 the Tour de France passed through the village causing no deaths, but quite a lot of excitement, though not enough for the local shopkeeper, Sandrine, to forgo her three-hour lunch-break to sell cold drinks to the hundreds of sweltering tourists lining the route. So in two centuries, two quite big things had happened in the village. In the meantime it settled back into being baked by the sun, and blasted by the Mistral. And, only slightly wistfully, I settled back into that too.

A year passed, with the zoo as a mournful but ebbing distraction. Those big trees, so unlike the parched scrub of southern Europe, the nearby rivers and sea, and the ridiculously magnificent animals, so close to the house, so foolishly endangered by mankind and yet right there in a ready-made opportunity for keeping them alive for future generations.

Partly because the whole family was in a bit of a daze about my father’s death, mum’s house was still not on the market, so we were unprepared for what happened next. As an expat without satellite TV (that’s cheating), I nevertheless craved English news and probably visited the BBC news online two or three times a day. Suddenly, on 12 April 2006, there it was again. Ellis had released a statement saying that the sale had fallen through yet again, and that many of the animals would have to be shot if a buyer wasn’t found within the next 11 days.

It didn’t give us long, but I knew exactly what I had to do. I called Melissa and Duncan who had been the main drivers of the previous attempt, and told them that we had to try again. I was not entirely surprised, however, when neither of them seemed quite as excited as I was. Both had delved deeply into the machinations required for the purchase, and Duncan in particular had been alarmed by a demand for a ‘non-refundable deposit’ of £25,000 to secure a place at the head of the queue. ‘If you can get it in writing that he will definitely sell it to us, and we can sell the house in time, I’ll back you up,’ he said. In the meantime he felt it was just an endless time-sink, but gladly gave me all the information he had. Brother-in-law Jim, too, had a list of contacts and offered his help preparing spreadsheets for a business plan should it get that far.

Peter Wearden was the first call. As Environmental Health Officer for the South Hams district, Peter was directly responsible for issuing the zoo licence. ‘Can a bunch of amateurs like us really buy a zoo and run it?’ I asked him. ‘Yes,’ he said, unequivocally. ‘Providing you have the appropriate management structure in place.’ This structure consists primarily of hiring a Curator of Animals, an experienced and qualified zoo professional with detailed knowledge of managing exotic animals, who is responsible for looking after the animals on a day to day basis. Peter sent me a flow chart which showed the position of the curator beneath the zoo directors, which would be us, but still in a position to allocate funds to animal management at his discretion. ‘You can’t just decide to buy a new ice-cream kiosk if the curator thinks there is a need for, say, new fence posts in the lion enclosure,’ said Peter. ‘If you haven’t got money for both, you have to listen to the curator.’ That seemed fair enough. ‘There is, by the way,’ he added, ‘a need for new fence posts in the lion enclosure.’ And how much are those? ‘No idea,’ said Peter. ‘That’s where you’ll have to get professional advice. But that’s just one of many, many things you’ll need to do before you can get your zoo licence.’ Peter explained a bit about the Zoo Licencing Act, and that Ellis was due to hand in his licence to operate a zoo within a couple of weeks, hence the 11-day deadline for the sale.

In fact the animals would not have to be dispersed by then as they would be held under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act (DWA) as a private collection. It just meant that visitors were not allowed, so the park’s already seriously faltering finances would reach a crunch point. But not absolutely necessarily an 11-day crunch point, it seemed. If we could mount a credible bid there was every chance that we could carry on negotiating for a few weeks after the park closed. Already, there was scope to hope that this apparently hopeless task was not necessarily impossible.

‘Is it viable?’ I asked Peter. This time he took longer to respond. ‘Erm, I’m sure it is,’ he said. ‘With the right management, a lot of money invested in the infrastructure, and a hell of lot – and I mean a hell of a lot – of hard work, it should be viable, yes. For a long time it was one of the area’s most popular attractions. It’s declined over the last few years due to lack of investment and not keeping up with the times. But until quite recently it was a thriving business.’

I was deeply suspicious that there must be more to it than this, and that there was some sort of black hole in the whole fabric of the place which meant that it couldn’t work. Why had the other sales fallen through? So many industry professionals had cruised up to this project and somehow not taken the bait. Were we going to be the suckers who bought it and then discovered the truth?

Clearly I needed professional help, which came in the form of a text from a friend whose sister-in-law Suzy happened to be a fairly senior zoo professional, easily equivalent in fact to the rank of Curator, currently working in Australia. I had met Suzy once at a wedding a long time ago and liked her instantly. I was impressed with the way that even in a cocktail dress, with her wild mane of blonde hair she managed to give the impression she was wearing work boots, leggings and a fleece. Her job at the time had involved educating Queensland cattle farmers about the need for conservation of local wildlife, a tough-enough sounding proposition for a bare-knuckle prize fighter, I would have thought. But not for Suzy, who was now working as head of animal procurement for the three zoos in the State of Victoria, including the flagship Melbourne Zoo where she was based. Suzy offered any help she could give, and said she would even consider taking a sabbatical for a year in order to act as curator. ‘I can’t guarantee it,’ she said. ‘But you can put me down as a candidate until we see how things develop. In the meantime, before you go any further, you need to get a survey done by a zoo professional who can tell you whether it works or not.’ Suzy shared my concerns about the possibility of a black hole, having read about Dartmoor’s decline through the zoo-community literature. Did she have anyone in mind for this inspection? ‘There’s someone I used to work with at Jersey who could give you a pretty definitive opinion,’ said Suzy. ‘He’s a bit too senior to do that sort of thing now I think, but I’ll see what he thinks.’

And that’s how we came to meet Nick Lindsay, Head of International Zoo Programs for the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), in the car park of Dartmoor Wildlife Park a few days later. Melissa and myself, who was now about eight months pregnant, shook hands with this tall slightly avuncular man and agreed that we should walk up the drive along the normal visitor access route, to get a feel for how the park works. We had commissioned a report from ZSL and Nick kindly agreed to carry out the inspection himself, as he too had been following the plight of the zoo, and as a local boy had an interest in it. He’d even stayed with his mum down the road so that we didn’t have to pay a hotel bill.

On the way up the drive we were as candid as we could be. ‘We know nothing about zoos, but if this really is a viable zoo do you think it’s possible for us to do it?’ ‘Oh there’s no reason for you to know about zoos in order to buy one,’ laughed Nick. ‘You’d have to be a bit mad but I assume you’ve got that part covered. Let’s just see if it really is a viable zoo first.’

Our first stop was Ronnie the tapir, whose enclosure runs parallel to the drive. Nick bent down and called him over, and to my surprise he came. I had never seen a tapir this close before, and was impressed that this large strange-looking animal was so biddable and friendly. Resembling a large pig with a hump on its back and a miniature elephant’s trunk for a nose, the Indonesians say that God made the tapir from the parts left over when all the other animals were finished.

Nick held his fingers through the mesh, and Ronnie wib-bled his extended proboscis onto it, and then onto our hands, happy to make our acquaintance. With this charming encounter, however, came the first of the things that would need addressing. ‘This fence should have a stand-off barrier,’ said Nick. ‘We have to be sure his house is heated in the winter, and it looks a bit muddy in there for him. He’s an ungulate so his feet are quite delicate.’ I’d been determined to take notes all day to keep track of the kind of expenditure we would be looking at, but already I’d run into an unforeseen problem. Tapir bogey, all over my hand and notepad. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Nick. ‘I’ll put everything in the report.’

The day went well, and we were halfway around the park when we were intercepted by Robin, a strained-looking man with a long grey ponytail, who introduced himself as a member of staff, clearly prepared to undergo the unpleasantness of seeing us off the park, though not relishing it. Though we had made an appointment to view, we should be escorted at all times for legal and security reasons, he told us, and was our guide for the rest of the outside tour. It soon became clear that there was no question about the park that Robin could not answer. History, attendance figures, animal diets, names of plants, he knew it all. And then something happened which gave him a tricky one. A huge shot boomed out, echoing across the valley. It could only have been a gunshot, and from something big, the kind of sound you generally only hear in films. We stopped in our tracks. ‘Er, bit of trouble with the tigers?’ I asked. Robin paused, looked a bit more strained but now tinged with sadness, and said. ‘No it’s one of the lionesses, actually. She had lung cancer.’ He turned to lead us on and I looked at Nick, utterly agog. I had never been anywhere where they had shot a lion within fifty metres of where I was standing. Was this OK? Are they allowed to do that? Does it sound justified? Is this somehow connected with the black hole? Nick looked slightly taken aback, but seemed to take it in his stride. ‘If she had lung cancer and the vet says it’s time, it’s completely justified,’ he said. And the use of a gun rather than an injection was also quite normal, if the animal was difficult or dangerous to dart. So it was all OK, everything normal, just that a lion had been shot. If the Head of International Zoo Programmes at ZSL said it was alright, it must be, but I confess I found it slightly unsettling.

So did Rob, the man who pulled the trigger. We met him later in the Jaguar Restaurant, along with Ellis, and Ellis’s sister Maureen. Ellis was also unsettled, by a toothache he said, which is why he was holding a glass of whiskey. There was a difficult, tense atmosphere as the edifice of a once successful family business lay in ruins, creditors circled and emotions were near the surface. But there were questions we and Nick needed to ask Ellis, and he also had questions for us. Rob seemed almost close to tears after his ordeal of shooting the lioness, Peggy, an animal he had known for 13 years, and was reluctant to come to the table at first, but Maureen persuaded him it might be necessary as he now held the licence to keep the collection on site under the DWA. Ellis paced the room, cursing, not quite under his breath.

Eventually we all sat down and Nick said hello to Ellis as a teacher might greet a former student, expelled but at the reunion, as was only right. They knew each other from various Zoo Federation meetings over the years, and Ellis nodded, acknowledging that here was a man with whom he needed to cooperate. Nick began his line of questions for his report, and everything went well until he mentioned the name of Peter Wearden, the South Hams Environmental Health Officer. ‘Peter Wearden? Peter Wearden? I’ll kill him, I will. I’ll cut his head off with a sword and stick it on a spike at the top of the drive. That’ll show them what I think of him.’ He went on for a while, explaining how he had killed men before in the war – ‘I’m good at killing men’ – as well as every kind of animal on the planet. He wouldn’t make a fuss about shooting a lion, like Rob.

At this point I interjected, and said I personally didn’t think it was unreasonable for Rob to be upset, but we needed to talk about Peter Wearden. ‘I’d kill him without a thought, just like the lion,’ he said, looking me in the eye. Not sure what to say, I thought I’d try to claw back towards some references to reality. ‘Well, that would at least sort out your accommodation problems for the next few years,’ I said. He weighed this remark, looked at me again and said, ‘I’ve got his coffin ready for him up here before.’ And it was true. A coffin with a picture of Peter Wearden in it had been in the restaurant for a period of about six months, even while the park was open to the public. ‘Now then, Ellis,’ said Nick, moving seamlessly on, ‘what about those stand-off barriers?’

Ellis was polite but perceptibly preoccupied as he took us on the tour of the house again, even more briskly than last time, and I was surprised to see that it seemed in significantly worse condition than I remembered it. Whether this was cosmetic due to an increase in mess, or me misremembering the fabric of the place it was hard to tell, but the impression was strong enough to cause a new entry in my mental spreadsheet of expenditure.

The first warning was the increase in the strength of the odour in the kitchen at the front of the house. This was Ellis’s entry point, and obviously one of the key rooms he used, but it stank. Last time it stank badly, but this time the stench was like a fog which you felt was clinging to your clothes. Women in Melissa’s condition are particularly sensitive to smells, and she nearly gagged as she passed through, pressing her hand to her mouth in case she had to forcibly suppress some sick – it is impolite after all, when someone is proudly showing you round their home, to vomit in it.

The main source of the smell seemed to be a bucket in the corner containing raw mackerel, and dead day-old chicks to be fed in the mornings to the heron and jackdaw population. It was an ancient, yellowed plastic vessel and there had to be some doubt about its structural integrity, as a large, ancient, multicoloured stain rippled outwards from its base like a sulphur bog, but more virulent. Even Ellis was moved to comment; ‘Bit whiffy in here. But you don’t have to keep that there,’ he added, gesturing towards the bucket. ‘You’ll be moving things around, I suppose.’ Somehow I didn’t think that simply repositioning the bucket would expunge this odour. I vowed on that threshold that, if we got the park, no food would ever be prepared in this room again.

The rest of the house seemed more dishevelled than we remembered it, and we still didn’t have time to get a full picture of how the floor plan worked. Half the house had been used for students, and this section was coated in plastic signs declaring, ‘No Smoking’, ‘Turn Off the Lights’, and oddly, ‘Being Sick on the Stairs is Forbidden’. But it mostly seemed like a standard rewiring, re-plumbing and plastering job would make it good. The other half of the house, with a grand galleried staircase and stone-flagged kitchen was marred by decades of clashing wallpapers, patchwork surface rewiring which snaked wildly like the tendrils of an aggressive giant creeper gradually taking over the house. And of course the all-pervading smell coming from the front kitchen.

The stone-flagged kitchen had not been used for this purpose for decades, and in the fireplace, behind a ragged dusty sheet hanging on a string nailed to the high mantel above it, lay a rusted hulk of an ancient range, a door hanging off, clogged inside with what appeared to be bird droppings from the chimney above. ‘My grandma used to cook on that,’ said Ellis. ‘Bit of work would get it going again. Worth a few bob, that.’ I wasn’t so sure. But this room looked out over an old cobbled courtyard, now overgrown with weeds, which looked across to the cottage opposite, above the ‘stables’/junk depository. Melissa, who is good at spotting potential and visualizing a finished house, lit up. ‘This is the best bit of the house,’ she said. Really? ‘I can imagine doing the breakfast in here, looking across the courtyard, waving to Katherine or mum in their kitchen in the cottage.’ At that time Melissa was still seriously considering selling up and moving in too, five kids and Jim included. It sounded good. But in the time allowed, and with enough clutter to fill a hundred jumble sales strewn about, it was hard to gauge what it might be like to live in this house. Except that it, like the park, would require a lot of (expensive) work.

We came back out of the house and met Nick in the restaurant again, thanked our hosts, and strolled down the drive. By now our objective and impartial advisor had become a little partisan. ‘I think it’s a great place,’ enthused Nick. ‘Much better than I thought it would be from all the stories. You’ll need proper site survey to be sure, but as far as I can see this could be a working zoo again without too much trouble.’ As an advisor on zoo design, Nick also had a few ideas to throw in at this stage. ‘Get the customers off the drive [which runs up the centre of the lower half of the park for a fifth of a mile] and into the paddock next to it. You could put a wooden walkway through it, meandering so that they don’t notice the climb, and get something striking in there like zebras, and maybe some interesting antelopes, so that as soon as they pass through the kiosk they enter a different world.’ Could we get zebras, I asked? ‘Oh, I can get you zebras,’ said Nick casually, as if they were something he might pick up for us at Tesco. This I liked. Spoken almost like a wholesome Arthur Daley: video recorders, leather jackets, zebras, roll up, roll up. But there was more to this glimpse into the workings of the zoo world which appealed. Nick was painting with the animals, as well as designing a serious commercial layout in his head. ‘You need more flamingos,’ he said. ‘Flamingos look good against the trees. The lake up there with the island has trees behind it, so if you put a few more in it they’ll look marvellous when the punters reach the top of the path. Then, having climbed that hill, they’ll be hot. So that’s where you sell them their first ice cream.’ Wow. Unfortunately, flamingos are one of the few animals which don’t usually come free from other zoos, costing anything from £800 to £1,500 each. Which is a lot of ice creams. And with the prospect of bird flu migrating over the horizon there was the possibility of a mass culling order from DEFRA shortly after we took delivery of these beautiful, expensive birds. Our flamingo archipelago might have to wait.