Gerald Durrell: Menagerie Manor

So this is the story of our trials and tribulations in taking the first step towards a goal which I think is of great importance.

Dear Mr Durrell,

I am eighteen years old strong in wind and limb having read your books can I have a job in your zoo…

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

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

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

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

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

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