We Bought a Zoo

BENJAMIN MEE

The amazing true story of a broken-down zoo,

and the 200 animals that changed a family forever

Copyright

HarperNonFiction

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008

© Benjamin Mee 2008

Benjamin Mee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007274864

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007283767

Version: 2017-05-16

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

1 In the Beginning …

2 The Adventure Begins

3 The First Days

4 The Lean Months

5 Katherine

6 The New Crew

7 The Animals are Taking Over the Zoo

8 Spending the Money

9 Opening Day

Epilogue

About the Publisher

Prologue

Mum and I arrived at Dartmoor Wildlife Park in Devon for the first time as the new owners at around six o’clock on the evening of 20 October 2006, and stepped out of the car to the sound of wolves howling in the misty darkness. My brother Duncan had turned on every light in the house to welcome us, and each window beamed the message into the fog as he emerged from the front door to give me a bone-crushing bear hug. He was more gentle with mum. We had been delayed for an extra day in Leicester with the lawyers, as some last-minute paperwork failed to arrive in time and had to be sent up the M1 on a motorbike. Duncan had masterminded the movement of all mum’s furniture from Surrey in three vans, with eight men who had another job to go to the next day. The delay had meant a fraught stand-off on the drive of the park, with the previous owner’s lawyer eventually conceding that Duncan could unload the vans, but only into two rooms (one of them the fetid front kitchen) until the paperwork was completed.

So the three of us picked our way in wonderment through teetering towers of boxes, and into the flag-stoned kitchen, which was relatively uncluttered and we thought could make a good centre of operations. A huge old trestle table I had been hoarding in my parents’ garage for twenty years finally came into its own, and was erected in a room suited to its size. It’s still there as our dining-room table, but on this first night its symbolic value was immense. The back pantry had just flooded onto some boxes and carpets Duncan had managed to store there, so while he unblocked the drain outside I drove to a Chinese takeaway I’d spotted on the way from the A38, and we sat down to our first meal together in our new home. Our spirits were slightly shaky but elated and we laughed a lot in this cold dark chaotic house on that first night, and took inordinate comfort from the fact that at least we lived near a good Chinese.

That night, with mum safely in bed, Duncan and I stepped out into the misty park to try to get a grip on what we’d done. Everywhere the torch shone, eyes of different sizes blinked back at us, and without a clear idea of the layout of the park at this stage, the mystery of exactly what animals lurked behind them added greatly to the atmosphere. We knew where the tigers were, however, and made our way over to one of the enclosures which had been earmarked for replacement posts, to get a close look at what sort of deterioration we were up against. With no tigers in sight, we climbed over the stand-off barrier and began peering at the base of the structural wooden posts holding up the chain link fence by torchlight. We squatted down and became engrossed, prodding and scraping at the surface layers of rotted wood to find the harder core, in this instance, reassuringly near the surface. We decided it wasn’t so bad, but as we stood up were startled to see that all three tigers in the enclosure were now only a couple of feet away from where we were standing, ready to spring, staring intently at us. Like we were dinner.

It was fantastic. All three beasts – and they were such glorious beasts – had manoeuvred to within pawing distance of us without either of us noticing. Each animal was bigger than both of us put together, yet they’d moved silently. If this had been the jungle or, more accurately in this case, the Siberian Tundra, the first thing we’d have known about it would have been a large mouth round our necks. Tigers have special sensors along the front of their two-inch canines which can detect the pulse in your aorta. The first bite is to grab, then they take your pulse with their teeth, reposition them, and sink them in. As they held us in their icy glares, we were impressed. Eventually, one of these vast, muscular cats, acknowledging that, due to circumstances beyond their control (i.e. the fence between us), this had been a mere dress rehearsal, yawned, flashing those curved dagger canines, and looked away. We remained impressed.

As we walked back to the house, the wolves began their fraught night chorus, accompanied by the sound of owls – there were about 15 on site – the odd screech of an eagle, and the nocturnal danger call of the ververt monkeys as we walked past their cage. This was what it was all about, we felt. All we had to do now was work out what to do next.

It had been an incredible journey to get there. Though a new beginning, it also marked the end of a long and tortuous road, involving our whole family. My own part of the story starts in France.

Chapter One

In the Beginning …

L’Ancienne Bergerie, June 2004, and life was good. My wife Katherine and I had just made the final commitment to our new life by selling our London flat and buying two gorgeous golden-stone barns in the heat of the south of France, where we were living on baguettes, cheese and wine. The village we had settled into nestled between Nîmes and Avignon in Languedoc, the poor man’s Provence, an area with the lowest rainfall in the whole of France. I was writing a column for the Guardian on DIY, and two others in Grand Designs magazine, and I was also writing a book on humour in animals, a long-cherished project which, I found, required a lot of time in a conducive environment. And this was it.

Our two children, Ella and Milo, bilingual and sun burnished, frolicked with kittens in the safety of a large walled garden, chasing enormous grasshoppers together, pouncing amongst the long parched grass and seams of wheat, probably seeded from corn spilled from trailers when the barns were part of a working farm. Our huge dog Leon lay across the threshold of vast rusty gates, watching over us with the benign vigilance of an animal bred specifically for the purpose, panting happily in his work.

It was great. It was really beginning to feel like home. Our meagre 65 square metres of central London had translated into 1200 square metres of rural southern France, albeit slightly less well appointed and not so handy for Marks & Spencer, the South Bank, or the British Museum. But it had a summer which lasted from March to November, and locally grown wine which sells for £8 in Tesco cost three and a half euros at source. Well you had to, it was part of the local culture. Barbeques of fresh trout and salty sausages from the Cévennes mountains to our north, glasses of chilled rosé with ice which quickly melted in the heavy southern European heat. It was idyllic.

This perfect environment was achieved after about ten years of wriggling into the position, professionally and financially, where I could just afford to live like a peasant in a derelict barn in a village full of other much more wholesome peasants earning a living through honest farming. I was the mad Englishman; they were the slightly bemused French country folk, tolerant, kind, courteous, and yet inevitably hugely judgemental.

Katherine, whom I’d married that April after nine years together (I waited until she’d completely given up hope), was the darling of the village. Beautiful and thoughtful, polite, kind and gracious, she made a real effort to engage with and fit into village life. She actively learned the language, which she’d already studied at A level, to become proficient in local colloquial French, as well as her Parisian French, and the bureau-speak French of the admin-heavy state. She could josh with the art-gallery owner in the nearby town of Uzès about the exact tax form he had to fill in to acquire a sculpture by Elisabeth Frink – whom she also happened to have once met and interviewed – and complain with the best of the village mums about the complexities of the French medical system. My French, on the other hand, already at O-level grade D, probably made it to C while I was there, as I actively tried to block my mind from learning it in case it somehow further impeded the delivery of my already late book. I went to bed just as the farmers got up, and rarely interacted unless to trouble them for some badly expressed elementary questions about DIY. They preferred her.

But this idyll was not achieved without some cost. We had to sell our cherished shoebox-sized flat in London in order to buy our two beautiful barns, totally derelict, with floors of mud trampled with sheep dung. Without water or electricity we couldn’t move in straight away, so in the week we exchanged contracts internationally, we also moved locally within the village, from a rather lovely natural-stone summer let which was about to treble in price as the season began, to a far less desirable property on the main road through the village. This had no furniture and neither did we, having come to France nearly two years before with the intention of staying for six months. It would be fair to say that this was a stressful time.

So when Katherine started getting migraines and staring into the middle distance instead of being her usual tornado of admin-crunching, packing, sorting and labelling efficiency, I put it down to stress. ‘Go to the doctor’s, or go to your parents if you’re not going to be any help,’ I said, sympathetically. I should have known it was serious when she pulled out of a shopping trip (one of her favourite activities) to buy furniture for the children’s room, and we both experienced a frisson of anxiety when she slurred her words in the car on the way back from that trip. But a few phone calls to migraine-suffering friends assured us that this was well within the normal range of symptoms for this often stressrelated phenomenon.

Eventually she went to the doctor and I waited at home for her to return with some migraine-specific pain relief. Instead I got a phone call to say that the doctor wanted her to go for a brain scan, immediately, that night. At this stage I still wasn’t particularly anxious as the French are renowned hypochondriacs. If you go to the surgery with a runny nose the doctor will prescribe a carrier bag full of pharmaceuticals, usually involving suppositories. A brain scan seemed like a typical French overreaction; inconvenient, but it had to be done.

Katherine arranged for our friend Georgia to take her to the local hospital about twenty miles away, and I settled down again to wait for her to come back. And then I got the phone call no one ever expects. Georgia, sobbing, telling me it was serious. ‘They’ve found something,’ she kept saying. ‘You have to come down.’ At first I thought it must be a bad-taste joke, but the emotion in her voice was real.

In a daze I organized a neighbour to look after the children while I borrowed her unbelievably dilapidated Honda Civic and set off on the unfamiliar journey through the dark country roads. With one headlight working, no third or reverse gear and very poor brakes, I was conscious that it was possible to crash and injure myself badly if I wasn’t careful. I overshot one turning and had to get out and push the car back down the road, but I made it safely to the hospital and abandoned the decrepit vehicle in the empty car park.

Inside I relieved a tearful Georgia and did my best to reassure a pale and shocked Katherine. I was still hoping that there was some mistake, that there was a simple explanation which had been overlooked which would account for everything. But when I asked to see the scan, there indeed was a golf-ball-sized black lump nestling ominously in her left parietal lobe. A long time ago I did a degree in psychology, so the MRI images were not entirely alien to me, and my head reeled as I desperately tried to find some explanation which could account for this anomaly. But there wasn’t one.

We spent the night at the hospital bucking up each other’s morale. In the morning a helicopter took Katherine to Montpellier, our local (and probably the best) neuro unit in France. After our cosy night together, the reality of seeing her airlifted as an emergency patient to a distant neurological ward hit home hard. As I chased the copter down the autoroute the shock really began kicking in. I found my mind was ranging around, trying to get to grips with the situation so that I could barely make myself concentrate properly on driving. I slowed right down, and arrived an hour later at the car park for the enormous Gui de Chaulliac hospital complex to find there were no spaces. I ended up parking creatively, French style, along a sliver of kerb. A porter wagged a disapproving finger at me but I strode past him, by now in an unstoppable frame of mind, desperate to find Katherine. If he’d tried to stop me at that moment I think I would have broken his arm and directed him to X-ray. I was going to Neuro Urgence, fifth floor, and nothing was going to get in my way. It made me appreciate in that instant that you should never underestimate the emotional turmoil of people visiting hospitals. Normal rules did not apply as my priorities were completely refocused on finding Katherine and understanding what was going to happen next.

I found Katherine sitting up on a trolley bed, dressed in a yellow hospital gown, looking bewildered and confused. She looked so vulnerable, but noble, stoically cooperating with whatever was asked of her. Eventually we were told that an operation was scheduled for a few days’ time, during which high doses of steroids would reduce the inflammation around the tumour so that it could be taken out more easily.

Watching her being wheeled around the corridors, sitting up in her backless gown, looking around with quiet confused dignity, was probably the worst time. The logistics were over, we were in the right place, the children were being taken care of, and now we had to wait for three days and adjust to this new reality. I spent most of that time at the hospital with Katherine, or on the phone in the lobby dropping the bombshell on friends and family. The phone-calls all took a similar shape; breezy disbelief, followed by shock and often tears. After three days I was an old hand, and guided people through their stages as I broke the news.

Finally Friday arrived, and Katherine was prepared for theatre. I was allowed to accompany her to a waiting area outside the theatre. Typically French, it was beautiful with sunlight streaming into a modern atrium planted with trees whose red and brown leaves picked up the light and shone like stained glass. There was not much we could say to each other, and I kissed her goodbye not really knowing whether I would see her again, or if I did, how badly she might be affected by the operation.

At the last minute I asked the surgeon if I could watch the operation. As a former health writer I had been in operating theatres before, and I just wanted to understand exactly what was happening to her. Far from being perplexed, the surgeon was delighted. One of the best neurosurgeons in France, I am reasonably convinced that he had high-functioning Asperger’s Syndrome. For the first and last time in our conversations, he looked me in the eye and smiled, as if to say, ‘So you like tumours too?’, and excitedly introduced me to his team. The anaesthetist was much less impressed with the idea and looked visibly alarmed, so I immediately backed out, as I didn’t want anyone involved underperforming for any reason. The surgeon’s shoulders slumped, and he resumed his unsmiling efficiency.

In fact the operation was a complete success, and when I found Katherine in the high-dependency unit a few hours later she was conscious and smiling. But the surgeon told me immediately afterwards that he hadn’t liked the look of the tissue he’d removed. ‘It will come back,’ he warned. By then I was so relieved that she’d simply survived the operation that I let this information sit at the back of my head while I dealt with the aftermath of family, chemotherapy and radiotherapy for Katherine. Katherine received visitors, including the children, on the immaculate lawns studded with palm and pine trees outside her ward building. At first in a wheelchair, but then perched on the grass in dappled sunshine, her head bandages wrapped in a muted silk scarf, looking as beautiful and relaxed as ever, like the hostess of a rolling picnic. Our good friends Phil and Karen were holidaying in Bergerac, a seven-hour drive to the north, but they made the trip down to see us and it was very emotional to see our children playing with theirs as if nothing was happening in these otherwise idyllic surroundings.

After a few numbing days on the internet the inevitability of the tumour’s return was clear. The British and the American Medical Associations, and every global cancer research organization, and indeed every other organization I contacted, had the same message for someone with a diagnosis of a Grade 4 Glioblastoma: ‘I’m so sorry.’

I trawled my health contacts for good news about Katherine’s condition which hadn’t yet made the literature, but there wasn’t any. Median survival – the most statistically frequent survival time – is nine to ten months from diagnosis. The average is slightly different, but 50 per cent survive one year. 3 per cent of people diagnosed with Grade 4 tumours are alive after three years. It wasn’t looking good. This was heavy information, particularly as Katherine was bouncing back so well from her craniotomy to remove the tumour (given a rare 100 per cent excision rating), and the excellent French medical system was fast forwarding her onto its state-of-the-art radio therapy and chemotherapy programmes. The people who survived the longest with this condition are young healthy women with active minds – Katherine to a tee. And, despite the doom and gloom, there were several promising avenues of research, which could possibly come online within the timeframe of the next recurrence.

When Katherine came out of hospital, it was to a Tardislike, empty house in an incredibly supportive village. Her parents and brothers and sister were there, and on her first day back there was a knock at the window. It was Pascal, our neighbour, who unceremoniously passed through the window a dining-room table and six chairs, followed by a casserole dish with a hot meal in it. We tried to get back to normal, setting up an office in the dusty attic, working out the treatment regimes Katherine would have to follow, and working on the book of my DIY columns which Katherine was determined to continue designing. Meanwhile, a hundred yards up the road were our barns, an open-ended dream renovation project which could easily occupy us for the next decade, if we chose. All we lacked was the small detail of the money to restore them, but frankly at that time I was more concerned with giving Katherine the best possible quality of life, to make use of what the medical profession assured me was likely to be a short time. I tried not to believe it, and we lived month by month between MRI scans and blood tests, our confidence growing gingerly with each negative result.

Katherine was happiest working, and knowing the children were happy. With her brisk efficiency she set up her own office and began designing and pasting up layouts, colour samples and illustrations around her office, one floor down from mine. She also ran our French affairs, took the children to school, and kept in touch with the stream of well-wishers who contacted us and occasionally came to stay. I carried on with my columns and researching my animal book, which was often painfully slow over a rickety dial-up internet connection held together with gaffer tape, and subject to the vagaries of France Telecom’s ‘service’, which, with the largest corporate debt in Europe, makes British Telecom seem user friendly and efficient.

The children loved the barns, and we resolved to inhabit them in whatever way possible as soon as we could, so set about investing the last of our savings in building a small wooden chalet – still bigger than our former London flat – in the back of the capacious hanger. This was way beyond my meagre knowledge of DIY, and difficult for the amiable lunch-addicted French locals to understand, so we called for special help in the form of Karsan, an Anglo-Indian builder friend from London. Karsan is a jack of all trades and master of them all as well. As soon as he arrived he began pacing out the ground and demanded to be taken to the timber yard. Working solidly for 30 days straight, Karsan erected a viable two-bedroom dwelling complete with running water, a proper bathroom with a flushing toilet, and mains electricity, while I got in his way.

With some building-site experience, and four years as a writer on DIY, I was sure Karsan would be impressed with my wide knowledge, work ethic and broad selection of tools. But he wasn’t. ‘All your tools are unused,’ he observed. ‘Well, lightly used,’ I countered. ‘If someone came to work for me with these tools I would send them away,’ he said. ‘I am working all alone. Is there anyone in the village who can help me?’ he complained. ‘Er, I’m helping you Karsan,’ I said, and I was there every day lifting wood, cutting things to order, and doing my best to learn from this multi-skilled whirlwind master builder. Admittedly, I sometimes had to take a few hours in the day to keep the plates in the air with my writing work – national newspapers are extremely unsympathetic to delays in sending copy, and excuses like ‘I had to borrow a cement mixer from Monsieur Roget and translate for Karsan at the builder’s merchants’ just don’t cut it, I found. ‘I’m all alone,’ Karsan continued to lament, and so just before the month was out I finally managed to persuade a local French builder to help, who, three-hour lunch breaks and other commitments permitting, did work hard in the final fortnight. Our glamorous friend Georgia, one of the circle of English mums we tapped into after we arrived, also helped a lot, and much impressed Karsan with her genuine knowledge of plumbing, high heels and low-cut tops. They became best buddies, and Karsan began talking of setting up locally, ‘where you can drive like in India’, with Georgia doing his admin and translation. Somehow this idea was vetoed by Karsan’s wife.

When the wooden house was finished, the locals could not believe it. One even said ‘Sacré bleu.’ Some had been working for years on their own houses on patches of land around the village, which the new generation was expanding into. Rarely were any actually finished, however, apart from holiday homes commissioned by the Dutch, German and English expats, who often used outside labour or micromanaged the local masons to within an inch of their sanity until the job was actually done. This life/work balance with the emphasis firmly on life was one of the most enjoyable parts of living in the region, and perfectly suited my inner potterer, but it was also satisfying to show them a completed project built in the English way, in back-to-back 14-hour days with a quick cheese sandwich and a cup of tea for lunch.

We bade a fond farewell to Karsan and moved in to our new home, in the back of a big open barn, looking out over another, in a walled garden where the children could play with their dog, Leon, and their cats in safety, and where the back wall was a full adult’s Frisbee throw away. It was our first proper home since before the children were born, and we relished the space, and the chance to be working on our own home at last. Everywhere the eye fell there was a pressing amount to be done, however, and over the next summer we clad the house with insulation and installed broadband internet, and Katherine began her own vegetable garden, yielding succulent cherry tomatoes and raspberries. Figs dripped off our neighbour’s tree into our garden, wild garlic grew in the hedgerows around the vineyards, and melons lay in the fields often uncollected, creating a seemingly endless supply of luscious local produce. Walking the sun-baked dusty paths through the landscape ringing with cicadas with Leon every day brought back childhood memories of Corfu where our family spent several summers. Twisted olive trees appeared in planted rows, rather than the haphazard groves of Greece, but the lifestyle was the same, although now I was a grown-up with a family of my own. It was surreal, given the backdrop of Katherine’s illness, that everything was so perfect just as it went so horribly wrong.

We threw ourselves into enjoying life, and for me this meant exploring the local wildlife with the children. Most obviously different from the UK were the birds, brightly coloured and clearly used to spending more time in North Africa than their dowdy UK counterparts, whose plumage seems more adapted to perpetual autumn rather than the vivid colours of Marrakesh.

Twenty minutes away was the Camargue, whose rice paddies and salt flats are warm enough to sustain a year-round population of flamingoes, but I was determined not to get interested in birds. I once went on a ‘nature tour’ of Mull which turned out to be a twitchers’ tour. Frolicking otters were ignored in favour of surrounding a bush waiting for something called a redstart, an apparently unseasonal visiting reddish sparrow. That way madness lies.

Far more compelling, and often unavoidable, was the insect population, which hopped, crawled and reproduced all over the place. Crickets the size of mice sprang through the long grass entertaining the cats and the children who caught them for opposing reasons, the latter to try to feed, the former to eat. At night exotic-looking, and endangered, rhinoceros beetles lumbered across my path like little prehistoric tanks, fiercely brandishing their utterly useless horns, resembling more a triceratops than the relatively svelte rhinoceros. These entertaining beasts would stay with us for a few days, rattling around in a glass bowl containing soil, wood chips, and usually dandelion leaves, to see if we could mimic their natural habitat. But they did not make good pets, and invariably I released them in the night to the safety of the vineyards.

Other nighttime catches included big fat toads, always released on to a raft in the river in what became a formalized ceremony after school, and a hedgehog carried between two sticks and housed in a tin bath and fed on worms, until his escape into the compound three days later. It was only then I discovered that these amiable but flea-ridden and stinking creatures can carry rabies. But perhaps the most dramatic catch was an unknown snake, nearly a metre long, also transported using the stick method, and housed overnight in a suspended bowl in the sitting room, lidded, with holes for air. ‘What do you think of the snake?’ I asked Katherine proudly the next morning. ‘What snake?’ she replied. The bowl was empty. The snake had crawled out through a hole and dropped to the floor right next to where we were sleeping (on the sofa bed at that time) before sliding out under the door. I hoped. Katherine was not amused, and I resolved to be more careful about what I brought into the house.

Not all the local wildlife was harmless here. Adders (les vipères) are rife, and the brief is to call the fire brigade, or pompiers, who come ‘and dance around like little girls waving at it with sticks until it escapes’, according to Georgia who has witnessed this procedure. I once saw a vipère under a stone in the garden, and wore thick gloves and gingerly tapped every stone I ever moved afterwards. Killer hornets also occasionally buzzed into our lives like malevolent helicopter gunships, with the locals all agreeing that three stings would kill a man. My increasingly well-thumbed animal and insect encyclopedia revealed only that they were ‘potentially dangerous to humans’. Either way, whenever I saw one I adopted the full pompier procedure diligently.

But the creature that made the biggest impression early on was the scorpion. One appeared in my office on the wall one night, prompting levels of adrenaline and panic I thought only possible in the jungle. Was nowhere safe? How many of these things were there? Were they in the kids’ room now? An internet trawl revealed that 57 people have been killed in Algeria by scorpions in the last decade. Algeria is a former French colony. It’s nearby. But luckily this scorpion – dark brown and the size of the end of a man’s thumb – was not the culprit, and actually had a sting more like a bee. This jolt, that I was definitely not in London and had brought my family to a potentially dangerous situation, prompted my first (and last) poem for about twenty years, unfortunately too expletive ridden to reproduce here.

And then there was the wild boar. Not to be outdone by mere insects, reptiles and arthropods, the mammalian order laid on a special treat one night when I was walking the dog. Unusually I was out for a run, a bit ahead of Leon, so I was surprised to see him up ahead about 25 metres into the vines. As I got closer I was also surprised that he seemed jet black in the moonlight, whereas when I’d last seen him he was his usual tawny self. Also, although Leon is a hefty 8 stone of shaggy mountain dog, this animal seemed heavier, more barrel-shaped. And it was grunting, like a great big pig. I began to conclude that this was not Leon, but a sanglier, or wild boar, known to roam the vineyards at night and able to make a boar-shaped hole in a chain-link fence without slowing down. I was armed with a dog lead, a propelling pencil (in case of inspiration) and a head torch, turned off. As it faced me and started stamping the ground, I felt I had to decide quickly whether or not to turn on the head torch. It would either definitely charge at it or it would find it aversive. As the light snapped on, the grunting monster slowly wheeled round and trotted into the vines, more in irritation than fear. And then Leon arrived, late and inadequate cavalry, and shot off into the vineyards after it. Normally Leon will chase imaginary rabbits relentlessly for many minutes at a time at the merest hint of a rustle in the undergrowth, but on this occasion he shot back immediately professing total ignorance of anything amiss, and stayed very close by my side on the way back. Very wise.

The next day I took the children to track the boar, and they were wide eyed as we found and photographed the trotter prints in the loose grey earth, and had them verified by the salty farmers in the Café of the Universe in the village. ‘Il etait gros,’ they concluded, belly laughing and filling the air with clouds of pastis, when I mimicked my fear.

So, serpents included, this life was as much like Eden as I felt it was possible to get. With the broadband finally installed, and bats flying around my makeshift office in the empty barn, the book I had come to write was finally seriously under way, and Katherine’s treatment and environment seemed as good as could reasonably be hoped for. What could possibly tempt us away from this hard-won, almost heavenly niche? My family decided to buy a zoo, of course.

Chapter Two

The Adventure Begins

It was in the spring of 2005 that it landed on our doorstep: the brochure that would change our lives for ever. Like any other brochure from a residential estate agent, at first we dismissed it. But, unlike any other brochure from a residential estate agent, here we saw Dartmoor Wildlife Park advertised for the first time. My sister Melissa sent me a copy in France, with a note attached; ‘Your dream scenario.’ I had to agree with her that although I thought I was already living in my dream scenario, this odd offer of a country house with zoo attached seemed even better – if we could get it, which seemed unlikely. And if there was nothing wrong with it, which also seemed unlikely. There must be some serious structural problems in the house, or the grounds or enclosures, or some fundamental flaw with the business which was impossible to rectify. But even with this near certainty of eventual failure, the entire family was sufficiently intrigued to investigate further. A flight of fancy? Perhaps so, but it was one for which, we decided, we could restructure our entire lives.

My father, Ben Harry Mee, had died a few months before, and mum was going to have to sell the family home where they had lived for the last twenty years, a five-bedroom house in Surrey set in two acres which had just been valued at £1.2 million. This astonishing amount simply reflected the pleasant surroundings, but most importantly, its proximity to London, comfortably within the economic security cordon of the M25. Twenty-five minutes by train from London Bridge, this was the stockbroker belt, an enviable position on the property ladder achieved by my father, who, as the son of an enlightened Doncaster miner, had worked hard and invested shrewdly on behalf of his offspring all his life.

Ben did in fact work at the stock exchange for the last 15 years of his career, but not as a broker, a position which he felt could be morally dubious. Dad was Administration Controller, running the admin for the London Stock Exchange, and for the exchanges in Manchester, Dublin and Liverpool, plus a total of 11 regional and Irish amalgamated buildings. (At a similar stage in my life I was having trouble running the admin of a single self-employed journalist.) So as a family we were relatively well off, though not actually rich, and with no liquid assets to support any whimsical ventures. In 2005, the Halifax estimated that there were 67,000 such properties valued over £1,000,000 in the UK, but we seemed to be the only family who decided to cash it all in and a have a crack at buying a zoo.

It seemed like a lost cause from the beginning, but one which we knew we’d regret if we didn’t pursue. We had a plan, of sorts. Mum had been going to sell the house and downsize to something smaller and more manageable like a two- or three-bedroom cottage, then live in peace and security with a buffer of cash, but with space for only one or two offspring to visit with their various broods, at any time. The problem was, and what we all worried about, was that this isolation in old age could be the waiting room for a gradual deterioration (and, as she saw it, inevitable dementia), and death.

The new plan was to upsize the family assets and mum’s home to a 12-bedroom house surrounded by a stagnated business about which we knew nothing, but I would abandon France altogether and put my book on hold, Duncan would stop working in London, and we would then live together and run the zoo full time. Mum would be spared the daily concerns of running the zoo, but would benefit from the stimulating environment and having her family around in an exciting new life looking after 200 exotic animals. What could possibly go wrong? Come on mum … it’ll be fine.

In fact, it was a surprisingly easy sell. Mum has always been adventurous, and she likes big cats. When she was 73 I took her to a lion sanctuary where you could walk in the bush with lions, and stroke them in their enclosures, many captive bred, descended from lions rescued from being shot by farmers. I was awestruck by the lions’ size and frankly terrified, never quite able to let go of the idea that I wasn’t meant to be this close to these predators. Every whisker twitch triggered in me a jolt of adrenaline which was translated into an involuntary spasming flinch. Mum just tickled them under the chin and said, ‘Ooh, aren’t they lovely?’ The next year this adventurous lady tried skiing for the first time. So the concept of buying a zoo was not immediately dismissed out of hand.

None of us liked the idea of mum being on her own, so we were already looking at her living with one or other of us, perhaps in a larger property with pooled resources. Which is how the details of Dartmoor Wildlife Park, courtesy of Knight Frank, a normal residential estate agents in the south of England, happened to drop through mum’s letterbox. My sister Melissa was the most excited, ordering several copies of the details and sending them out to all her four brothers: the oldest Vincent, Henry, Duncan and myself. I was in France, and received my copy with the ‘Your dream scenario’ note. I had to admit it looked good, but quickly tossed it onto my teetering, soon-to-be-sorted pile. This was already carpeted in dust from the Mistral, that magnificent southern French wind which periodically blasts down the channel in south-west France created by the mountains surrounding the rivers Rhone and Soane. And then it comes right through the ancient lime mortar of my north-facing barn-office wall, redistributing the powdery mortar as a minor sandstorm of dust evenly scattered throughout the office over a period of about four days at a time. Small rippled dunes of mortar-dust appeared on top of the brochure, then other documents appeared on top of the dunes, and then more small dunes.

But Melissa wouldn’t let it lie. She wouldn’t let it lie because she thought it was possible, and had her house valued, and kept dragging any conversation you had with her back to the zoo. Duncan was quickly enthused. Having spent a short stint as a reptile keeper at London Zoo, he was the closest thing we had to a zoo professional. Now an experienced business manager in London, he was also the prime candidate for overall manager of the project, if he, and almost certainly others, chose to trade their present lifestyles for an entirely different existence.

Melissa set up a viewing for the family, minus Henry and Vincent, who had other engagements but were in favour of exploration. So it was agreed, and ‘Grandma’ Amelia, and a good proportion of her brood over three generations, arrived in a small country hotel in the South Hams district of Devon. There was a wedding going on, steeping the place in bonhomie, and the gardens, chilly in the early spring night air, occasionally echoed to stilettos on gravel as underdressed young ladies hurried to their hatchbacks and back for some essential commodity missing from the revelry inside.

A full, or even reasonably comprehensive, family gathering outside Christmas or a wedding was getting unusual, and we were on a minor mission rather than a holiday, yet accompanied by a gaggle of children of assorted ages. Our party was definitely towards the comprehensive end of the spectrum, with all that that entails. Vomiting babies, pregnant people, toddlers at Head Smash age and children accidentally ripping curtains from the wall trying to impersonate Darth Vader. The night before the viewing, we were upbeat, but realistic. We were serious contenders, but probably all convinced that we were giving it our best shot and that somebody with more money, or experience, or probably both, would come along and take it away.

We arrived at the park on a crisp April morning in 2005, and met Ellis Daw for the first time. An energetic man in his late seventies with a full white beard, and a beanie hat which he never removed, Ellis took us round the park and the house like a pro on autopilot. He’d clearly done this tour a few times before. On our quick trip around the labyrinthine 13-bedroom mansion, we took in that the sitting room was half full of parrot cages, the general decor had about three decades of catching up to do, and the plumbing and electrics looked like they could absorb a few tens of thousands of pounds to put right.

Out in the park we were all blown away by the animals, and Ellis’s innovative enclosure designs. Tiger Mountain, so called because three Siberian tigers prowl around a manmade mountain at the centre of the park, was particularly impressive. Instead of chain link or wire mesh, Ellis had adopted a ha-ha system, which basically entails a deep ditch around the inside of the perimeter, surrounded by a wall more than six feet high on the animal side, but only three or four feet on the visitor side. This creates the impression of extreme proximity to these most spectacular cats, who pad about the enclosure like massive flame-clad versions of the domestic moggies we all know and love, making you completely reappraise your relationship with the diminutive predators many of us shelter indoors.

There were lions, behind wire, but as stunning as the tigers, roaring in defiance of any other animal to challenge them for their territory, particularly other lions, apparently. And it has to be said that these bellowing outputs, projected by their hugely powerful diaphragms for a good three miles across the valley, have over the years proved 100 per cent effective. Never once has this group of lions been challenged by any other group of lions, or anything else, for their turf. It’s easy to argue that this is due to lack of predators of this magnitude in the vicinity, but one lioness did apparently catch a heron at a reputed 15 feet off the ground a few years before, confirming that this territorial defensiveness was no bluff.

Peacocks strolled around the picnic area from where you could see a pack of wolves prowling through the trees behind a wire fence. Three big European bears looked up at us from their woodland enclosure, and three jaguars, two pumas, a lynx, some flamingos, porcupines, raccoons and a Brazilian tapir added to the eclectic mix of the collection.

We were awestruck by the animals, and surprisingly not daunted at all. Even to our untutored eyes there was clearly a lot of work to be done. Everything wooden, from picnic benches to enclosure posts and stand-off barriers, was covered in algae which had clearly been there for some time. Some of it, worryingly at the base of many of the enclosure posts, was obviously having a corrosive influence. We could see it needed work, but we could also see that it had until recently been a going concern, and one which would give us a unique opportunity to be near some of the most spectacular, and endangered, animals on the planet.

As part of our official viewing of the property we were asked by a film crew from Animal Planet to participate in a documentary about the sale. The journalist in me began to wonder whether this eccentric English venture might be sustainable through another source. Writing and the media had been my career for 15 years, and, while not providing a huge amount of money, had given me a tremendous quality of life. If I could write about the things I liked doing, I could generally do them as well, and I was sometimes able to boost the activity itself with the media light which shone on it. Perhaps here was a similar model. A once thriving project now on the edge of extinction, functioning perfectly well in its day, but now needing a little nudge from the outside world to survive …

Mum, Duncan and myself were asked for the camera to stand shoulder to shoulder amongst the parrots in the living room, to explain what we would do if we got the zoo. At the end of our burst of amateurish enthusiasm, the camera man spontaneously said, ‘I want you guys to get it.’ The other offers were from leisure industry professionals with a lot of money, against whom we felt we had an outside chance, but nothing more. My scepticism was still enormous, but I began to see a clear way through, if, somehow, chance delivered it to us. Though it still felt far-fetched, like looking round all those houses my parents seemed to drag us round when we were moving house as kids; don’t get too interested, because you know you will almost certainly not end up living there.

On our tour around the park itself Ellis finally switched out of his professional spiel and looked at me, my brother Duncan, and my brother-in-law Jim, all relatively strapping lads in our early to mid-forties, and said, ‘Well, you’re the right age for it anyway.’ This vote of confidence registered with us, as Ellis had clearly seen something in us that he liked. Our ambitions for the place were modest, which he also liked. He said he’d actually turned away several offers because they involved spending too much on the redevelopment. ‘What do you want to spend a million pounds on here?’ he asked us, somewhat rhetorically. ‘What’s wrong with it? On your bike, I said to them.’ I can imagine the colour draining from his bankers’ faces when they heard this good news. Luckily we didn’t have a million pounds to spend on redevelopment – or, at this stage, even on the zoo itself – so our modest, family-based plans seemed to strike a chord with Ellis.

At about three thirty in the afternoon our tour was over and we began to notice that the excited chattering of the adults in our group was fractured increasingly frequently by minor, slightly over-emotional outbursts from our children milling around us, like progressively more manic and fractious over-wound toys. In our enthusiasm for the park we had collectively made an elementary, rookie parenting mistake and missed lunch, leading to Parents’ Dread: low blood sugar in under-tens. We had to find food fast. We walked into the enormous Jaguar Restaurant built by Ellis in 1987 to seat 300 people. Then we walked out again. Rarely have I been in a working restaurant less conducive to the consumption of food. A thin film of grease from the prolific fat fryers in the kitchen coated the tired Formica table tops, arranged in canteen rows and illuminated by harsh fluorescent strips mounted in the swirling mess of the grease-yellowed artex ceiling. The heavy scent of chip fat gave a fairly accurate indication of the menu, and mingled with the smoke of roll-ups rising from the group of staff clad in grey kitchen whites sitting around the bar, eyeing their few customers with suspicion.

Even at the risk of total mass blood-sugar implosion, we were not eating there, and asked for directions to the nearest supermarket for emergency provisions. And then, for me, the final piece of the Dartmoor puzzle fell into place, for that was when we discovered: Tesco at Lee Mill. Seven minutes away by car was not just a supermarket, but an ubermarket. In Monty Python’s Holy Grail, at the climax of the film King Arthur finally reaches a rise which gives him a view of ‘Castle Aaargh’, thought to be the resting place of the Holy Grail, the culmination of his Quest. As Arthur and Sir Bedevere are drawn across the water towards the castle by the pilotless dragon-crested ship, music of Wagnerian epic proportions plays to indicate that they are arriving at a place of true significance. This music started spontaneously in my head as we rounded a corner at the top of a small hill, and looked down into a manmade basin filled with what looked almost like a giant space ship, secretly landed in this lush green landscape. It seemed the size of Stansted Airport, its lights beaconing out their message of industrial-scale consumerism into the rapidly descending twilight of the late spring afternoon. Hot chickens, fresh bread and salad, humous, batteries, children’s clothes, newspapers and many other provisions we were lacking were immediately provided. But more importantly, wandering around its cathedral-high aisles I was hugely reassured that, if necessary, I could find here a television, a camera, an iron, a kettle, stationery, a DVD or a child’s toy. And it was open 24 hours a day. As I watched the 37 checkouts humming their queues of punters through, my final fear about relocating to the area was laid to rest. A Londoner for twenty years I had become accustomed to the availability of things like flat-screen TVs, birthday cards or sprouts at any time of the day or night, and one of the biggest culture shocks of living in southern France for the last three years had been their totally different take on this. For them, global consumerism stopped at 8.00 pm, and if you needed something urgently after that you had to wait till the next day! This Tesco, for me, meant that the whole thing was doable, and we took our picnic to watch the sunset on a nearby beach in high spirits.

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.

I went back to France, Melissa to her children in Gloucester, and Nick went back to Whipsnade, where he prepared the report that was to dictate the direction of our lives. If it was negative, it would be definitively so, and there would be no point chasing this dream any further. In many ways, as before, I was half hoping that this would be the case and I could finally lay the idea to rest knowing categorically that it would be a mistake to proceed. If it was positive, however, we knew we had to continue, and the report itself would become instrumental in finding the backing to make it happen.

Meanwhile I was learning more about the zoo every day. Ellis had once been seen as a visionary, designing innovative enclosures, putting in disabled access on a difficult sloping site long before legislation required him to do so, and developing an aggressive Outreach education programme, one of the first of its kind in the country and now copied by almost every other zoo. But he had absolute, total control. There was no one to tell him when to stop. And with over-investment in expensive infrastructure like the enormous restaurant (against advice which he overruled), an expensive divorce, and other zoos learning, copying and developing his techniques and continually changing their game while he began to grind to a halt, visitor numbers declined.

My life became a series of long phone calls to lawyers, estate agents, bankers, family members and Ellis. Every time I spoke to Ellis, I noticed, he inexorably steered the conversation towards conflict. We were frank with him. We didn’t have the money to buy it yet, but we had assets of equal value, which we could borrow against or sell, if he could only hold on. ‘You’d think when someone offered to buy a place they’d at least have the money to do it,’ he said once, the type of observation which gave me an indication of why so many other sales had fallen through. Apart from anything else, Ellis was in the terrible position of having to sell his much-loved park, built largely with his own hands, the expression of his life’s vision over the last 40 years, so it was no wonder he was irascible. The only bidder left was a developer wanting to turn it into a nursing home, and Ellis didn’t want that. So, to his enormous credit, he agreed to wait for us.

In this tense situation, I was genuinely concerned for Peter Wearden, who had become the focus of Ellis’s vexation, crystallized as the deliberate, Machiavellian architect of his downfall. It had all started with a routine inspection several years ago which had concluded that the hand-painted signs on the animal enclosures were now illegible and needed replacing. Ellis escorted the inspector from the park (some say at the end of a shotgun), and refused to carry out the directive. This activated a one-way process of head-on confrontation with the authorities, which escalated into many other areas over the years, and ultimately led to him handing in his zoo licence in April 2006. When we’d visited that last time, after so many years of gradual decline, it felt like we’d been to the Heart of Darkness, to a place where a charismatic visionary had created an empire once teeming with life and promise, but where human frailties had ultimately been exposed by the environment, with terrible consequences. I telephoned Peter and told him of my concerns. Ellis was, in my opinion, a man with his back to the wall, and I was genuinely worried about his safety. ‘Oh, I’m not bothered about that,’ laughed Peter, with a bravery I doubt I would have shown in his position. ‘He does seem very difficult to deal with’, I said. ‘Is there anyone else it might be possible to talk to there? His lawyer? Rob?’ ‘Try Maureen, his sister,’ advised Peter. ‘She talks sense.’

And so another vital piece fell into place for the acquisition of the park. Maureen was devoted to her brother, and on both tours of the house we had been shown a picture of her as a teenager falling out of the back of a stock car during a jump Ellis was performing (among other things he had been a stunt-car driver). But she had worked outside the park in a hotel all her life, and understood the pressures of the outside world perhaps better than he did. I spoke to Maureen two or three times a day as we tried to piece together a plan which would save the park.

Another key person, without whom we would never have succeeded, was Mike Thomas. To get backing we needed a site survey, which would cost about three thousand pounds. But I knew that several (nine, in fact) such surveys had been commissioned recently, and was reluctant to pay for another. I asked Maureen if she knew of anyone of the recent potential buyers who may be prepared to sell us their survey. ‘Try Mike Thomas,’ she said. So I ended up pitching down the phone to a complete stranger that we were trying to buy the park and had heard he had commissioned a full site survey recently. ‘Go on,’ said a gravelly voice. I told him everything about our inexperience and lack of funds, surprised as I continued that he didn’t put the phone down. ‘You can have the survey,’ he said at the end. ‘Where shall I send it?’ This was the first of many generosities from Mike, whose reassuring voice often saw me through difficult times in the months ahead.

Mike was the former owner of Newquay Zoo, which he had turned from a run-down operation with 40,000 visitors a year, to a thriving centre of excellence with about 250,000 visitors, in the space of nine years. He knew what he was doing. His bid had foundered on the twin rocks of Ellis and Mike’s business partner, but he wished the park well. More importantly, he had been appointed by Peter Wearden to oversee the dispersal of the animal collection to other zoos, should it be necessary. He was in daily contact with Rob, as holder of the DWA licence, and Peter, and as a man on the inside could not have been better placed. His unswerving support and sound advice were absolutely pivotal for us in securing the park.

Weeks dragged on and the main positive development – apart from the arrival of Nick Lindsay’s report from ZSL which gave a ringing endorsement to the park as a future enterprise – was that a cash buyer was found for my mum’s house. But he was a cautious man in no hurry, and any inclination that we desperately needed the money right now would have almost certainly reduced his bid. Bridging loans – those expensive, dangerous arrangements offered by commercial banks in the hope of snaffling all your assets in a year – were arranged, and fell through. Commercial mortgages, likewise, were offered and withdrawn. Several high-street banks let us down badly. Lloyds three times extended the hand of friendship and then, just as we were shaking it, pulled it away, put their thumb up to their nose, and gave it the full hand waggle. Very funny, guys. Private banks were similarly fickle. Perhaps eight banks altogether promised support in protracted negotiations on which we relied, and then we passed the good news on to the naturally keenly interested other side, and committed more funds on the basis of. Then the offer would be withdrawn. Corporate managers were generally persuadable and good at giving you a 100 per cent verbal agreement and a physical shake of the hand. But the back-room boys with the calculators and grey suits, known as Risk Teams, invariably baulked. Lawyers were also busy. At one point a six-acre paddock disappeared from the map of what was included in the price, which I made clear to Maureen was a deal breaker, and it re-emerged.

For light relief at the end of a 12-hour day of circular phone calls, we were watching the series 24, boxed sets of which were doing the rounds of the English mums in France. Kiefer Sutherland plays Jack Bauer, a maverick CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit) agent who, over several series, always has to save the world in 24 hours, shown in real time an hour at a time over 24 episodes. The ground shifts under his feet as he pursues leads with total commitment which turn out to be blind alleys, is betrayed by his superiors, double agents and miscellaneous villains, and faces new disasters with every tick of the clock. Allies become enemies, enemies become friends but then get killed, but he somehow adapts and finds a new line to go for. I knew exactly how he felt. Every day there were impossible obstacles, which by the afternoon had been resolved and forgotten, in preparation for the next.

But the situation at the other end seemed far more desperate. Running costs – seven tigers, three lions and six keepers to feed – continued without ticket sales to cover them, interest on debts stacked up, and creditors brushed up close with increasing frequency. Then, just as the buyer for my mum’s house agreed to sign sooner rather than later, Maureen told me we had to begin paying running costs for the zoo in order to stop it going to the nursing-home developer. By now we were pretty committed, so Duncan and I melted credit cards to pay, by whatever means possible, £3,000 a week to keep our bid open. This was way beyond our means and could not last long, particularly for something which may not actually pay off. Luckily, Duncan conjured a donor, who wants to remain anonymous, who lent us £50,000, for a ‘semi-refundable deposit’. This was good news, but obviously it needed to be paid back, win or lose, and the lose scenario didn’t really have that contingency.

By agreeing to pay a ‘semi-refundable deposit’ (we got half back if it fell through), we were now one of Ellis’s creditors. We were going up river to see Kurtz. We’d done the recce. Now we had to see if we could go all the way. All we had to remember was not to get out of the boat. Then, just as the sale of my mum’s house was finally agreed, we had our worst moment. My brother Henry, who had been supportive of the venture at the beginning, suddenly lost his nerve and mounted a costly legal battle against the rest of the family. Henry was executor for my dad’s half of the estate, so could delay the release of funds as he saw fit. He refused to be contacted except by letter sent through the post, which in a situation changing hourly was simply untenable for such a key player. Mum, myself and Duncan tried to go round and discuss it with him, several times, but he wouldn’t answer the door or phone. It was looking bad. We felt for Henry with whatever it was he was going through, but there was a bigger picture that every single other member of the family was in agreement on.

Finally the whole family door-stepped his expensive lawyers (paid for out of the estate), and after being kept waiting for three hours, persuaded them that this was mum’s wish and the wish of all the beneficiaries of my dad’s will. We all wanted to buy the zoo.

Eventually Henry agreed, as long as we all signed a clause that we wouldn’t sue him when it all went wrong, and each sibling took the full £50,000 they were entitled to under the Nil Rate Band legislation. This meant that there wouldn’t be enough to buy the zoo unless at least four of us gave the money straight back, which the other four siblings instantly agreed to, though in order to do so we each had to seek independent legal advice first. This meant finding another lawyer and paying for written evidence to show that we had been made aware of the risks, which was fun.

Also, instead of the zoo being bought in the name of a Limited Company, a business and tax efficient vehicle and the basis of all our months of negotiations, it had to be bought in mum’s name. And no one lends a 76-year-old lady half a million pounds, however spritely and adventurous. Back-of-the-envelope calculations revealed that if everything went according to plan, there would be enough money to buy the zoo, pay all the legal fees and still have £4,000 left over, equivalent to about ten days running costs.

We leapt at it. Well, my two brothers, sister and mum did. Katherine had remained slightly bemused by the idea throughout the negotiations, partly because of the inherent uncertainty about whether we would get the zoo, but also because running a zoo had never featured very high on her ‘to-do’ list. However, she thought about how much the children would enjoy it, she observed my enthusiasm, and investigated a role for herself doing graphics and money management. These were both well-honed skills from her days as art director on glossy magazines, and once she was able to equate the whole thing to organizing a large, complicated ongoing photo-shoot, she was fine and gave her cautious support. Now that it was becoming a reality, she knew what she had to do, and she was ready. The children, as you can imagine, were very enthusiastic, jumping up and down, clapping and squealing, though I’m not sure they still really believed it – but it was true.

Chapter Three

The First Days

From the outset, we knew that it was going to be tough. Employ 20 staff, when we had never employed staff before? Take care of 200 wild and exotic animals? The house we had moved into was as rundown as the zoo over which it looked. Though once a grand, 12-bedroom mansion, now its plumbing groaned, its paper peeled, its floorboards creaked – but it was home. Most people, especially at mum’s age, are looking to downsize their lives, but we were upsizing dramatically, into an utterly unfamiliar avenue of work, and the stakes were high. Everything, frankly, that my mum and dad had worked for over fifty years together was on the table. And still we needed more – half a million more – just to be able to take the chance that the zoo might be able to reopen, and that when it did, it would work. Normally this level of uncertainty over something so important would seem impossibly crazy, but the late legal challenge from our own side had forced our hand, leaving us uncertain, penniless and paddling like mad to find some money. But, in the context of the last six months negotiations, it just seemed like yet another bad, but, probably, weatherable development.

We were also comforted by the fact that although we hadn’t done anything like this before, and we didn’t have a licence to trade, nor even a particular curator in mind (Suzy in Australia was having health problems which put her out of the frame), at least we owned the entire place outright. This, surely, stood us in good stead with creditors. Plus we had a whole £4,000 left over.

The meticulously researched business plan I had evolved with Jim – or more accurately, Jim had put into spreadsheets based on his business knowledge and rumours I’d picked up from the twenty or so leading attractions in Devon – was now very much hypothetical. The urgent spending which was due to commence as we arrived was now delayed as we searched for new lenders, who circled again, sniffing with renewed interest as we had lurched to a new status with their back-room boys, as holders of actual assets.

As it turned out, the back-room boys remained less than impressed. We could hear their collective eyebrows creak up, releasing small puthers of dust from their brows, but the calculators were quickly deployed, and though some offers were tentatively made, all were swiftly withdrawn. This was a problem which was going to catch up with us fast, so with phones glued to our ears, we set about trying to solve immediate problems on the ground without actually spending any money. In those first few days, we walked in wonder around the park, meeting the animals, gathering information, marvelling at the bears, wolves, lions and tigers, getting to know the keepers, and grinning wildly that this was our new life.

The first time I met Kelly, with Hannah one of the two dedicated cat keepers who had stayed on against the odds to look after the animals, sometimes not being paid, and having to pay for vitamin supplements for the animals (and rudimentary sundries like torch batteries, and toilet paper for their own use) out of their own pockets, I got a surprise. ‘Are you the new owner?’ she asked, wide eyed and intense, to which I replied I was one of them. ‘Can you please do something about the situation with these tigers?’ I had no idea what situation she was talking about, but Kelly soon filled me in. The top tiger enclosure is a moated range of 2100 square metres called Tiger Rock, after the enormous Stonehenge-like boulder construction which is its centrepiece. It contained three tigers: Spar, at 19, the elderly patriarch of the park, and two sisters, Tammy and Tasmin, 10 and 11. But only two tigers were ever out in the enclosure at any one time. This was because Spar, though old, was still a red-blooded male, and occasionally tried to mate with the two girls, even though his back legs were arthritic and wobbly, and they were his granddaughters. Five years earlier, Tammy and Tasmin were given contraceptive injections to prevent inbreeding (and because Ellis was not allowed to breed tigers anymore, having recently been prosecuted for 32 counts of illegal tiger breeding). The unfortunate result of this hormonal change in the two sisters was that they suddenly hated each other and began to fight, and fighting tigers are very difficult to separate. It could only end in death, so one of the sisters was locked into the tiger house for 24 hours, while the other played fondly with her granddad. Then the other tiger would be locked away for 24 hours, allowing her sister a day-long taste of freedom. As Kelly explained this to me, she drew my attention to the a-rhythmic banging coming from the tiger house, which I had assumed was some maintenance work. In fact it was Tammy, frustrated by her confinement in a 6 x 12ft (2 x 3m) cell, banging on the metal door to get out. Kelly was on the brink of tears as she told me that this had been going on for five years, causing enormous suffering to the tigers (and keepers), and making them much more dangerous to handle. ‘It’s unacceptable in a modern zoo,’ Kelly ended, slightly unnecessarily, as even an amateur like me could appreciate this. I immediately promised her that we would do whatever was necessary to rectify the situation, which turned out to be finding one of the warring sisters a new home. A new tiger enclosure was expensive and unfeasible (we already had two), and would have meant permanent isolation for one of the girls. I asked Kelly to research new homes for whichever tiger was most suitable to pass on, and walked away from the encounter amazed that such an ongoing systemic problem had not arisen in the negotiations to buy the zoo. On the bright side, it was a big improvement we could make for almost no cost, but it was one we hadn’t been expecting, and it was worrying that we hadn’t known about it before we bought the zoo. Why had Peter Wearden or Mike Thomas not told me about this? What else would emerge?

It was all the more surprising given that Peter and Mike had not been shy about throwing me in at the deep end with difficult animal-management decisions already. On the phone from France, probably about three months before we bought the park, Peter sprang something on me as the last bidder planning to run the place as a zoo: ‘What are you going to do about the two female jaguars?’ he asked. ‘Er, they’re lovely. What’s the problem?’ ‘The house fails to meet with industry standards and there is a serious concern about the possibility of an escape.’ ‘Can’t it be rebuilt, or refurbished?’ ‘It’s been patched up too many times already, and rebuilding it with the animals in the enclosure is unfeasible. They have to be moved. If you’re going to be the new owner, you have to decide now what you are going to do.’

Standing barefoot in my hot, dusty, French barn office, looking out over sun-drenched vineyards throbbing with cicada song 700 miles away from this unfamiliar problem, I was taken aback. I wriggled for a bit, suggesting they be rehoused in the puma enclosure and move the less dangerous pumas elsewhere, desperately searching for a way of keeping these two gorgeous big cats on the site. Hand reared from cubs, they were particularly responsive to humans, answered their names and rubbed up against the wire-like epic versions of domestic moggies. Sovereign, the male jaguar housed separately, only got on with one of the females, who could be tried with him, but the sister cats were inseparable from birth and would pine for each other. As a keeper of cats (albeit domestic ones) since childhood, I understood the very real suffering this would cause, and instinctively shied away from that option.

In the end I realized that this was a test, and the correct response was to roll with it, however uncomfortable it felt. For the good of the animals, and in the interests of demonstrating a break from the past to the council, I asked Peter what he recommended. ‘Re-house them in another zoo as soon as you take over,’ he said. ‘Mike Thomas will organize it for you.’ I canvassed Mike and Rob, the head keeper currently responsible for the jags under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, and they both said the same thing. To prevent the very real risk of an escape, we should re-house as soon as possible. With a very deep sigh, I eventually agreed. ‘That’s the right answer,’ said Mike. ‘For that, you can probably get a couple of those zebras you’ve been on about, some way down the line when you’re ready to receive them. And probably a breeding female for Sovereign later on.’ This I liked, spots for stripes, and it made me feel a little closer to the zoo world, knowing I had made a tough decision everyone approved of, and was building credibility.

But with two prime big cats going, the Tammy/Tasmin question loomed large. In the first few days it also came out that a wolf and three of the seven vervet monkeys had also been ostracized by their groups and needed re-housing. Would we have any animals left by the time we re-opened? One well-meaning relative called to helpfully explain that I had made an elementary blunder with the jaguars. ‘If you’re going to run a zoo, it has to have animals in it,’ she said. The sense of siege from all sides was tightening, but I was sure that I’d made the right decision with all the information available to me on the ground, and it only made me more determined.

In these very early days a lot of time was spent clearing out the house and grounds of junk, and burning it on a huge fire in the yard. This was cathartic for us and the park as a whole, but must have been hard for relatives of Ellis like Rob, his grandson, who had to help haul furniture which was dilapidated but still things he had grown up with, onto the pyre. I’d already agreed that Rob could stay in the run down cottage on site, and offered him anything he wanted to salvage, but generally he seemed relieved by the process, and Rob was extremely positive and helpful towards us.

But then, four days after we took over Dartmoor Wildlife Park, while chatting to Rob about what to do with our surplus stock, the unthinkable happened. One of the most dangerous animals on the park, Sovereign, was accidentally let out of his enclosure by a catastrophic blunder from a junior keeper. At about 5.30 pm I was sitting with Rob in the kitchen when Duncan burst in, shouting ‘ONE OF THE BIG CATS IS OUT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL,’ and then ran off again. Now, Duncan doesn’t normally shout, or get agitated, but here he was clearly doing both. Rob disappeared like a puff of smoke, and I knew he’d gone to get the guns and organize the staff’s response. I sat for an increasingly surreal moment, and then decided that, as a director of a zoo I probably ought to go and see exactly what was going on. I started making my way towards the part of the park where the big cats are kept. This was one of the strangest moments of my life. All I knew was that a big cat – a lion, a tiger? – was out, somewhere, and may be about to come bounding round the corner like an energetic Tigger, but not nearly so much fun. I saw a shovel and picked it up, but it felt like an anvil in my hand. What was the point? I thought, and dropped it, and began walking towards the sound of screaming. Was I about to see someone being eaten alive? I had images of someone still alive but fatally mauled, ribcage asunder, being consumed before a horrified audience. Then a car pulled up with Duncan and Robert in it. ‘GET IN THE CAR!’ I was told, and gladly complied.

At the top tiger enclosure it was clear that the jaguar, Sovereign, was inside with a tiger, Tammy. Both animals were agitated and the keepers were shouting to discourage them from fighting. My first thought was relief that the animals were contained and no one was injured. I conferred with Robert, now backed up by his brother John armed with a high-powered rifle, and we began to build up a picture of what had happened. If the animals began fighting he would have to shoot one of them, and we decided it should be the tiger, because she was more dangerous and also the less endangered animal, but he would fire a warning shot first to try to separate them. I asked that he only do this as an absolute last resort, as letting guns off would seriously up the ante for the assembled personnel, who at the moment were all tense, but calm.

Suddenly the jaguar lunged at the tiger’s hind quarters, and the tiger turned and swiped the jaguar’s head, spinning him like a doll. At half the weight, Sovereign was instantly discouraged. From that point both animals stayed apart, encouraged by the coaxing of the keepers. But the tiger was reluctant to surrender her territory. Sovereign paced purposefully along the right-hand perimeter, tracking a keeper who was moving up and down the fence to keep his attention. Tammy the Tiger took up position on top of a rock and scowled and bellowed at Sovereign. Twenty minutes ago I’d been having a nice cup of tea, but this was Intense. A stand-off ensued, which could only be ended by a dart from a gun. Unfortunately, the one in our gun room didn’t work, and had never worked, despite being on the inventory as a working safety tool. We were only equipped to shoot to kill.

Soon the cat keeper Kelly ordered all available men to assemble along the bottom perimeter, and on command we shouted as loudly as we could at Tammy (she doesn’t like men or shouting), while the cat keepers Kelly and Hannah called her to her house. All keepers, maintenance and ground staff, and even an IT expert, Tom, who’d been on a site visit to give us a quote and had been with Duncan up at the lion house, got caught up in the escape. Tom had a good bellow, as depicted on the TV series, also being filmed at this early time. A camera crew shadowing your every move can be a worrying thing, but we felt we had nothing to hide and, just to raise the stakes, I negotiated with Rob that the crew could leave the safety of their car and join us at the wall. The bellowing commenced, and the effect was immediate, like spraying Tammy with cold water. Her tail twitched, her ears flattened, and after couple of minutes she cracked, jumped off the rock and into her house. There was an enormous sense of relief, but I called Mike Thomas and told him of my concerns that although he was contained, Sovereign was not 100 per cent secure because he was in an unfamiliar enclosure, and agitated enough to try something desperate. Mike agreed. ‘I’ve seen an ape jump forty feet when it was stressed,’ said Mike. ‘Which it’s not supposed to be able to do. Luckily we caught her in the ladies’ toilets.’ If Sovereign got out again, we were unlikely to be so lucky.

With all three tigers in, we decided the next obvious course of action was to try to lure Sovereign into the fourth tiger-house chamber, so that he really was contained. Unfortunately, this spare chamber was in disrepair, and was not secure. It needed lining with steel sheets, and the slats on the floor repairing, both tasks that could be carried out in house in a few hours with materials and personnel on site, but the light was fading fast. And there was no light in the tiger house. Duncan stayed to oversee the refurbishment of the cat house, and I went off to try to buy some emergency lighting, with directions from the keepers to the nearest likely lighting emporium in nearby Plympton. As I drove off into the dusk I noticed some workmen on the main access road unloading transits with tools, but they waved me through and I thought little of it as I sped on in my quest for lighting so that the repairs could continue.

After a couple of emergency U-turns I found a large garden centre cum-bric-a-brac emporium, selling myriad tat, but which had a DIY and a lighting section. I sprinted up the stairs, grabbed an assistant, and asked for halogen floodlights. There was a long pause. Then, as if in slow motion, she said, ‘Well … I … think … we’ve … got … some … fairy lights …’ ‘NO, no no: floodlights. Halogen floodlights. 500 watts. Completely different. Where would they be?’ As she drifted off to ask someone, I combed the lighting section again at emergency speed, eyes scanning systematically up and down the rows of frilly pink bedside lights, glass ladies holding a single bulb, and of course, fairy lights. I tried to broaden my mission statement; would any of this lighting detritus work as a compromise? I pictured our grizzled team working in a dank corridor with angle grinders and tigers in the next bay, and imagined their faces as I presented them with a Disney character desk lamp. No. And then I found it. In an unmarked box on a bottom shelf was a single exterior wall-mounted halogen lamp, but no plug or flex. I grabbed it with both hands and shot down to the DIY section, past the emerging assistant saying, ‘I’m … sorry … but … we … haven’t … got …’ ‘It’s OK. Got one. Thanks.’

With no one around in DIY I found a plug and some flex, and finally raised an assistant to measure it out for me. It was taking too long so I decided to take the whole roll. ‘I’ll … have … to … get … a … price … for … that … and … Reg … is … on … his … break.’ ‘OK measure it out and roll it back, quickly please as I’m in a bit of a hurry.’ He got the idea and I was soon in the checkout queue, restlessly shifting my weight and craning over the three people in front of me to see how long they were likely to take. Now, my tolerance for the dead time in checkout queues is minimal even when I’m not in a hurry. Over the years I have developed Zazen breathing strategies, and trained myself not to focus on the inevitable sequence of minor ineptitudes which could have been avoided and slow the queue down. But this wasn’t working. I was in full emergency mode – a couple of hours before I was making life-and-death decisions for the first time in my life, there was still a volatile big cat prowling around up the road in the wrong place, and it was going dark and I needed to complete this purchase so that work could continue on keeping it contained. And this was not a proficient checkout. The operator seemed bemused by her till, and everyone around me was moving in treacle. Then, as the first transaction finally meandered to its conclusion, the departing customer stepped smartly back into line and reached for a packet of marsh mallows; ‘Ooh, I forgot these,’ he said. I very nearly cracked and went into manual override. My hand was twitching towards the bag of fatuous pink and white confectionery to snatch it away, stamp on it, and demand to be processed next. But I didn’t. Deep breaths. And eventually it was over and I was speeding back through the darkness towards the emergency.

On the home straight an obstruction loomed in the headlights. Unbelievably, the guys in the transits I’d passed earlier had closed the road between me leaving the park and returning. Concrete barriers were down, and a sign said it would be closed for the next four months to build a power station. The diversion signs weren’t up yet and my mental map of the area was scanty to say the least, and it was a further half an hour of getting lost down identical single track back lanes before I eventually tore up the drive and set off at a run for the top tiger enclosure.

A single 60 watt bulb had been rigged up, and I rapidly set about wiring up the lamp using the Leatherman tool on my belt. I’ve wired tens, maybe a hundred or so, such lights in my time, but for this one I noticed that my hands were shaking slightly, and I wasn’t doing a very good job. Doing it 18 inches away from Spar, the elderly but massive and menacing Siberian tiger, didn’t help. Sporting a small bloodied cut on his ear from an earlier encounter with Sovereign, Spar was naturally spooked by the afternoon’s events, and didn’t like unfamiliar people working in his house at strange hours of the day. He was as unsettled by my presence as I was by his, and kept up an impossibly low and ominous growl, occasionally reaching a crescendo with a roar and a short lunge at the weld-mesh between us, his big orange eyes wide and locked onto me at all times. These noises travel right through you, resonating in your sternum and sending alarm signals to your primitive midbrain, which is already awash with worry trying to suppress the distressing news from the eyes, warning of massive predator proximity and imminent death. Perhaps understandably, in stripping the flex I cut too deeply into the wire, and the terminal connections were messy. But it would do.

When the light eventually flooded on I confessed to Rob, as our acting Health and Safety Officer, that its wiring might have to be redone later under more conducive conditions. His drawn face smiled sympathetically, and he said, ‘It’ll do for now.’

John, Paul and Rob worked quickly to finish the inside of the fourth chamber, with the unspoken efficiency of men who knew what they were doing and had worked together for a long time. Duncan had been exploring the dart-gun situation. The nearest zoo, Paignton, couldn’t lend us theirs because it wasn’t licensed for use off site. Our park’s previous reputation in recent years, and our much heralded inexperience can’t have helped with their assessment of the situation, and this sense of fiasco, the public perception of it, and what it might mean for our prospects, now had time to sink in.

Rob finally secured a dart gun and a licensed operative who was prepared to travel down – Bob Lawrence, senior ranger at the Midlands Safari Park – but it was decided that because Sovereign was contained, Bob would come down in the morning. Opinion on the ground was, quite reasonably, that the cat was contained in an enclosure designed to contain big cats, and the risk was minimal. We began trying to lure him into the finished fourth cat chamber by placing meat just inside the door, and though the presence of meat had an almost chemical effect on this muscular predator and brought him to the lip several times, his instincts for self-preservation held him back. He was just too canny, and too spooked, to surrender his new territory in order to jump into a small house for a free meal.

Mike advised that we kept a vigil from a car next to the enclosure, and at the first sign of trouble, like Sovereign trying to climb the wire mesh fencing, call for the firearms. Rob went to sleep on the sofa in the keeper’s cottage with the gun next to him, and I moved my mum’s car as close as I could, and settled down with a flask of coffee and a torch. Every half an hour, Mike said, I should shine the torch and make sure Sovereign was calm – and most importantly, still there. ‘Don’t get out of the car,’ warned Mike. ‘If he has got out, you won’t hear him, and he’ll be waiting outside the door.’ Unfortunately, as the evening drew in, sensible Sovereign decided it was safe to sit in the empty chamber, though he kept a watchful eye on anyone approaching the house. This meant I couldn’t see him from the car, so every half hour I had to open the door, half-expecting 100 kilos of muscle, teeth and claws to come bursting in, then, when it didn’t, walk a few paces into the darkness which may or may not contain a large angry Jaguar, and shine the torch. My confidence grew with each sighting of the two reflective eyes staring back at me from the house. Sovereign wasn’t going anywhere, and at 5.00 am Duncan relieved me in the car.

Bob Lawrence arrived at about 7.30 am with the dart gun. With things hanging off his belt and an Indiana Jones hat, Bob was a very reassuring presence to have on site. If there was a rhino loose (not that we had any), you felt he could deal with it. The vet arrived with the necessary sedatives, and at the third attempt Sovereign was successfully darted, unfortunately, it appeared, in the tip of his sheath, and he jumped around angrily until he began to slow down, scowling and prowling, glaring at us through the wire. You got the impression he was memorizing faces, so that if he got out again he’d know who to punish for this indignity.

There was a danger that, drugged, Sovereign may fall into the moat and drown, so I sent for a ladder, mainly to use to push him out with, but I secretly decided that if it looked even remotely possible, I was prepared to climb down the ladder into the water to drag him out. But that wasn’t necessary. Sovereign went down like a lamb, and we rushed into the enclosure to stretcher him out. Back in the safety of his own house – microscopically examined for flaws which may have contributed to the incident – Sovereign got a quick dental and general health check. It’s not often you get to peer into this kind of animal’s mouth without it being terminal, so the vet made good use of the time.

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