Gerald Durrell: Menagerie Manor

You scuttle surreptitiously out of the house, but not surreptitiously enough, for both your wife and your secretary catch you in rapid succession and remind you that two reviews and an article are a week overdue and that your agent is baying like a bloodhound for the manuscript you promised him eighteen months previously. Assuring them, quite untruthfully, that you will be back very shortly, you make your way down to the penguins.

On the way you meet Stephan grinning to himself. He tells you that he was in one of the lions’ dens, cleaning it out, when, glancing over his shoulder, he was surprised to see a visitor standing there, using the place as a lavatory.

“What are you doing?” inquired Stephan.

“Well, this is the gents’, isn’t it?” said the man peevishly.

“No, it isn’t. It’s the lions’ den,” replied Stephan.

Never had an exit been so rapidly performed from a public convenience, he tells me.

Having worked out a complicated but very beautiful plan for the penguin pool, you then have to work out an equally complicated and beautiful plan for getting the scheme passed by Catha, the administrative secretary, who holds the zoo’s purse-strings in a grip so firm it requires as much ingenuity to prise money out of it as it would to extract a coin from a Scotsman’s pibroch. You march to the office, hoping to find her in a sunny, reckless mood, instead of which she is glowering over an enormous pile of ledgers. Before you can start extolling the virtues of your penguin-pond idea, she fixes you with a gimlet-green eye and in a voice like a honey-covered razor-blade informs you that your last brilliant idea came to approximately twice what you had estimated. You express bewilderment at this and gaze suspiciously at the ledger, implying, without saying so, that her addition must be wrong. She obligingly does the sum in front of you, so that there will be no argument. Feeling that this moment is not perhaps the best one to broach the subject of the penguin pond, you back hastily out of the office and go back into the zoo.

You are spending a pleasant ten minutes making love to the woolly monkeys through the wire of their cage when suddenly your secretary materializes at your elbow in the most unnerving fashion, and before you can think up a suitable excuse she has reminded you once more about the reviews, the article, and the book, and has dragged you disconsolately back to your office.

As you sit there racking your brains to think of something tactful to say about a particularly revolting book that has been sent to you for review, a constant procession of people appears to distract your attention.

Catha comes in with the minutes of the last meeting, closely followed by Les, who wants to know what mesh of wire to put on the new cage. He is followed by Shep, who wants to know if the meal-worms have arrived, as he is running short, and then Jeremy appears to tell you that the dingoes have just had eleven pups. I defy any writer to write a good review when his mind is occupied with the problem of what to do with eleven dingo pups.

Eventually, you manage to finish the review and slip once more into the zoo. It is getting towards evening now and the crowds are thinning out, drifting away up to the main drive to the car park, to wait for their buses or coaches. The slanting rays of the sun floodlight the cage in which the crowned pigeons live: giant powder-blue birds with scarlet eyes and a quivering crest of feathers as fine as maidenhair fern. In the warmth of the setting sun they are displaying to each other, raising their maroon-coloured wings over their backs, like tombstone angels, bowing and pirouetting to one another and then uttering their strange booming cries. The chimpanzees are starting to scream peevishly, because it is nearing the time for their evening milk, but they pause in their hysterical duet to utter greetings to you as you pass.

Up in the small mammal house the night creatures are starting to come to life, creatures that all day have been nothing but gently snoring bundles of fur. Bushbabies, with their enormous, perpetually horrified eyes, creep out of their straw beds and start to bound about their cages, as silent as thistle-down, occasionally stopping by a plate to stuff a handful of writhing meal-worms into their mouths; pottos, looking like miniature teddy bears, prowl about the branches of their cage, wearing guilty, furtive expressions, as though they were a convention of cat-burglars; the hairy armadillo, you are relieved to see, has roused itself out of its stupor and is now the right way up, puttering to and fro like a clockwork toy.

Downstairs, with growls of satisfaction, the gorillas are receiving their milk. Nandy likes to drink hers lying on her stomach, sipping it daintily from a stainless-steel dish. N’Pongo has no use for this feminine nonsense and takes his straight from the bottle, holding it carefully in his great black hands. He likes to drink his milk sitting up on the perch, staring at the end of the bottle with intense concentration. Jeremy has to stand guard, for when N’Pongo has drained the last dregs he will simply open his hands and let the bottle drop, to shatter on the cement floor. All around, the monkeys are gloating over their evening ration of bread and milk, uttering muffled cries of delight as they stuff their mouths and the milk runs down their chins.

Walking up towards the main gate you hear the loud ringing cries of the sarus cranes: tall, elegant grey birds with heads and necks the colour of faded red velvet. They are performing their graceful courting dance in the last rays of the sun, against a background of blue and mauve hydrangea. One of them picks up a twig or a tuft of grass, and then, with wings held high, twirls and leaps with it, tossing it into the air and prancing on its long slender legs, while the other watches it and bows as if in approval. The owls are now showing signs of animation. Woody, the Woodford’s owl, clicks his beak reprovingly at you as you peer into his cage, and over his immense eyes he lowers blue lids with sweeping eyelashes that would be the envy of any film star. The white-faced scops owls that have spent all day pretending to be grey decaying tree stumps now open large golden eyes and peer at you indignantly.

Shadows are creeping over the flower-beds and the rockery. The peacock, as exhausted as an actor at the end of a long run, passes slowly towards the walled garden, dragging his burnished tail behind him and leading his vacant-eyed harem towards their roosting place. Sitting on top of the granite cross that surmounts the great arch leading into the courtyard is our resident robin. He has a nest in a crevice of the wall, half-hidden under a waterfall of blue-flowered rock plants. So, as his wife warms her four eggs, he sits on top of the cross and sings his heart out, gazing rapturously at the western sky, where the setting sun has woven a sunset of gold and green and blue.

As the light fades, the robin eventually ceases to sing and flies off to roost in the mimosa tree. All the day noises have now ceased and there is a short period of quiet before the night cries take over. It is started inevitably by the owls—beak-clicking and a noise like tearing calico from the white-faced scops owls, a long tremulous and surprised hoot from the Woodford’s owl, and a harsh, jeering scream from the Canadian horned owls. Once the owls have started, they are generally followed by the Andean fox, who sits forlornly in the centre of his cage, throws back his head, and yaps shrilly at the stars. This sets off the dingoes in the next cage, who utter a series of gentle melodious howls so weird and so mournful they make you want to burst into tears. Not to be outdone, the lions take up the song—deep, rasping, full-throated roars tailing off into a satisfied gurgle that sounds unpleasantly as though the lions have just found a hole in the wire.