Gerald Durrell - Menagerie Manor

It was not long before we had Delilah’s new home ready, and then came the great day on which we had to transport her to it from one end of the zoo to the other. We had learned from bitter experience that trying to chivy Delilah into a crate was worse than useless. She simply put up all her spines, gurked at us fiercely, and backed into everything in sight, parting with great handfuls of quills with a generosity I have rarely seen equalled. The mere sight of a crate would send her off into an orgy of foot-stamping and quill-rattling. We had learned that there was only one way to cope with her: to let her out of the cage and then have two people, armed with brooms, urge her along gently. Delilah would stride out like one of the more muscular and prickly female Soviet athletes, and as long as you kept her on a fairly even course by light taps from the brushes you could keep her going for any distance.

This was the method we decided to employ to transfer her to her new quarters, and to begin with all went well. She started off at a great lick down the main drive, Jeremy and I panting behind with our brushes. We successfully made her round the corner into the courtyard, but once she got there a suspicion entered her head that she might be doing exactly what we wanted her to do. Feeling that the honour of the rodents was at stake, Delilah proceeded to run round and round the courtyard as though it were a circus ring, with Jeremy and me in hot pursuit. Then, when she had got us going at a good pace, she would suddenly stop and go into reverse, so that we would have to leap out of the way and use our brushes as protection. After a few minutes of this, there appeared to be more quills sticking in the woodwork of the brushes than there were in Delilah. Eventually, however, she tired of this game, and allowed us to guide her down to her new cage without any further ado.

She lived very happily in her new quarters for about three months before the wanderlust seized her. It was a crisp winter’s evening when Delilah decided there might be something in the outside world that her cage lacked, and so she got to work with her great curved yellow teeth, ripped a large hole in the thick interlink wire, squeezed her portly form through it, and trotted off into the night. It happened that on that particular evening I had gone out to dinner, so the full honours of the Battle of the Porcupine go to Shep.

At about midnight my mother was awakened by a car which had driven into the courtyard beneath her bedroom window and was tooting its horn vigorously. Mother, leaning out of the window, saw that it was one of our nearest neighbours from the farm over the hill. He informed Mother that there was a large and, to judge by the noises it was making, ferocious creature stamping about in his yard, and would we like to do something about it. Mother, who always has a tendency to fear the worst, was convinced that it was Leo who had escaped, and she fled to the cottage to wake Shep. He decided from the description that it must be Delilah, and pausing only for a broom, he leapt into the zoo van and drove up to the farm. There, sure enough, was Delilah, stamping about in the moonlight, gurking to herself and rattling her quills. Shep explained to the farmer that the only way to get Delilah back to the zoo was to brush her, as it were, with the broom along the half-mile or so of road. The farmer, though obviously thinking the whole procedure rather eccentric, said that if Shep would undertake that part of it he would undertake to drive the zoo van back again.

So Shep set off, clad in his pyjamas, brushing a snorting, rattling Delilah down the narrow moonlit road. Shep met several cars full of late-night revellers, and all these screeched to a halt and watched in astonishment the sight of a man in pyjamas brushing along a plainly reluctant porcupine. Several of them, I am sure, must have hurried home to sign the pledge, for, after all, the last thing you expect to find wandering about a respectable parish is an infuriated porcupine pursued by a highly embarrassed man in night attire. But at last Shep brought her safely back to the zoo and then, to her great indignation, locked her up in the coal cellar. For, as he explained, it had a cement floor and two-foot-thick granite walls, and if she could break out of that she deserved her freedom and as far as he was concerned she could have it.

Not long afterwards, Delilah caused trouble in quite another context. The zoo needs every form of publicity it can obtain, and, as television was clearly one of the best mediums, I tried to popularize the zoo by this means whenever possible. A television producer once said to me that if he could produce a programme without a television personality or professional actor he would be a happy man. I could see his point, but he did not know that there could be something infinitely more harrowing. He had never undertaken one with live wild animals, the difficulties of which make the strutting and fretting of television personalities fade into insignificance. When making a programme, animals either behave so badly that you are left a jittering mass of nerves in the end, or else they behave so well that they steal the show. Whichever way it is, you cannot win, and in my considered opinion anyone who undertakes to do such a job should be kindly and firmly conducted by his friends to the nearest mental home. If you let him do the programme, he will end there anyway, so you are merely anticipating.

One of the first programmes I did was devoted to the primates, or monkey family, of which the zoo boasted a rather fine collection. For the first time, live, on television, I could show the great British public a splendid array of creatures ranging from the tiny, large-eyed bushbabies, through the lorises, the Old and New World monkeys, to the gorilla and chimpanzee, with myself thrown in as an example of Homo sapiens. I had no qualms about this: the monkeys and apes were all extremely tame, the bushbabies would be confined in glass-fronted cases, and the lorises would be on upright branches, where they would simply curl up and sleep until awakened by me during the programme. At least, that is how it should have worked, but unfortunately I had not taken into consideration the effects of the journey, for the Island of Jersey is an hour’s flying time from the city of Bristol, where the programme was to be recorded. By the time the animals had been crated, flown to Bristol, and unloaded in the dressing-room which had been put at their disposal, they were all in a highly neurotic state. So was I.

When the time for the first rehearsal approached, all the monkeys had to be removed from their travelling crates, have belts and leashes attached to them, and be tethered (one to each compartment) in a construction that resembled a miniature cow-stall. The monkeys, hitherto always tame, placid, and well-behaved, took one look at the cow stall and had what appeared to be a collective nervous breakdown. They screamed, they bit, they struggled; one broke his leash and disappeared behind some piled scenery, from which he was extracted—yelling loudly and covered with cobwebs -after about half an hour’s concentrated effort. Already rehearsal was fifteen minutes overdue. At last we had them all in position and more or less quiet.

I apologized to the producer and said that we would be ready in next to no time, for all we had to do was to put the lorises on their respective tree trunks, and this—with such lethargic animals—would be the work of a moment. We opened the cage doors, expecting to have to chivy the sleepy lorises out onto their trees, but instead they stalked out like a couple of racehorses, their eyes blazing with indignation, uttering loud cat-like cries of disgust and warning. Before anyone could do anything sensible, they had rushed down their tree trunks and were roaring across the studio floor, their mouths open, their eyes wide. Technicians departed hurriedly in all directions, except a few of the bolder ones who, with rolled up newspapers as weapons endeavoured to prevent the determined lorises from getting among the scenery, as the monkey had done. After further considerable delay we managed to return the lorises to their travelling crates, and the props department was hurriedly summonsed to attach to the bottom of each tree a cardboard cone that would prevent the creatures from getting a grip and so climbing down to the floor.