Graham Swift: Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

I scorned London, for the same reason that I despised zoos and remained loyal to my rural heritage. In fact I liked animals — and couldn’t deny my uncle’s knowledge of them. At the same time I developed interests which were hardly likely to keep me in the countryside. I took a degree in mathematics.

It was on one of those Sundays as guests of Uncle Walter that we were first introduced to the Hoffmeier’s Antelopes. There were a pair of these rare and delicate animals at the Zoo, which, just then, to the great joy of the staff (my uncle in particular) had produced a solitary issue — a female. Neither adults nor young were as yet on view to the general public but we were ushered in on a special permit.

Rufous-brown, twig-legged, no more than eighteen inches off the ground when mature, these tender creatures looked up at us with dark, melting eyes and twitching flanks as Uncle Walter enjoined us not to come too near and to make only the gentlest movements. The new-born female, trembling by its mother, was no bigger and more fragile than a puppy. They were, so Uncle Walter told us, one of a variety of kinds of tiny antelope native to the dense forests of west and central Africa. The particular species before us had been discovered and recorded as a distinct strain only in the late forties. Twenty years later a survey had declared it extinct in the wild.

We looked at these plaintive, captive survivors and were suitably moved.

“Oh, aren’t they sweet! ” said my mother, with a lack, perhaps, of true decorum.

“Er, notice,” said Uncle Walter, crouching inside the pen, “the minute horns, the large eyes — nocturnal animals of course — the legs, no thicker, beneath the joint, than my finger, but capable of leaps of up to ten feet.”

He wiped the spit from the corner of his mouth, and looked, challengingly, at me.

The reason for my uncle’s attachment to these animals lay not just in their extreme rarity but in his having known personally their discoverer and namesake — Hoffmeier himself.

This German-born zoologist had worked and studied at Frankfurt until forced to leave his country for London during the nineteen-thirties. The war years had suspended an intended programme of expeditions to the Congo and the Cameroons, but in 1948 Hoffmeier had gone to Africa and come back with the remarkable news of a hitherto unidentified species of pygmy antelope. In the interval he had made his permanent home in London and had become friends with my uncle, who started at the Zoo more or less at the time of Hoffmeier’s arrival in England. It was by no means a common thing, then, for a serious and gifted zoologist to befriend a zealous but unscholarly animal keeper.

Hoffmeier made three more trips in the next ten years to Africa and carried out intensive studies of the “Hoffmeier” and other species of forest antelope. Then in 1960, fearing that the already scant Hoffmeier’s Antelope, prized for its meat and pelt by local hunters, would be no more within a few years, he had brought back three pairs for captivity in Europe.

This was the period in which blacks and Europeans killed each other mercilessly in the Congo. Hoffmeier’s efforts to save not only his own skin but those of his six precious charges were a zoological feat with few parallels. Two of the pairs went to London, one to Frankfurt, Hoffmeier’s old zoo before the rise of the Nazis. The animals proved extremely delicate in captivity, but a second, though, alas, smaller generation was successfully bred. The story of this achievement (in which my uncle played his part), of how a constant and anxious communication was kept up between the mammal departments at Frankfurt and London, was no less remarkable than that of Hoffmeier’s original exploits in the Congo.

But the antelopes stood little real chance of survival. Four years after Uncle Walter showed us his little trio there remained, out of a captive population that had once numbered ten, only three — the female we had seen as a scarcely credible baby, and a pair in Frankfurt. Then, one winter, the Frankfurt female died; and its male companion, not a strong animal itself, which had never known the dark jungle of its parents, was rushed, in hermetic conditions, accompanied by veterinary experts, by jet to London.

So Uncle Walter became the guardian of the last known pair of Hoffmeier’s Antelopes, and therefore, despite his lowly status, a figure of some importance and the true heir, in the personal if not the academic sense, of Hoffmeier.

“Hoffmeier,” my uncle would say at those Sunday afternoon teas, “Hoffmeier … my friend Hoffmeier …” His wife would raise her eyes and attempt hastily to change the subject. And I would seem to see the chink in his none too well fitting armour.

I was to live with him for some four months (it would be more accurate perhaps to say, “those last four months”) when I first came to London after taking my degree. This was only a short while after my Aunt Mary’s death following a sudden illness. I had got a job at the North London Polytechnic, and while I found my feet and looked for a flat it was agreed between Uncle Walter and my family that his home in Finchley, now half empty, should also be my own.

I accepted this kindness with misgivings. Uncle Walter welcomed me with morose hospitality. The house, with its little traces of femininity amongst the books and pipe-stands, was imbued with the sense of a presence which could not be replaced. We never spoke about my aunt. I missed her rock cakes and lemon-meringue. My uncle, whose only culinary knowledge had been acquired in preparing the diet of hoofed animals, ate large quantities of raw and semi-cooked vegetables. At night, across the passage-way that separated our rooms, I would hear him belch and snore vibrantly in the large double bed he had once shared, and, waking myself later in the night, would listen to him mutter solemnly in his sleep — or perhaps not in his sleep, for he wore now the shrouded look of a man wrapped in constant internal dialogue with himself.

Once, finding the bathroom light on at three in the morning, I heard him weeping inside.

Uncle Walter left before I woke to start his day at the Zoo; alternatively he worked late shifts in the evening — so that days passed in which we scarcely met. When we did he would speak coldly and shortly as if attempting to disguise that he had been surprised in some guilty undertaking. But there were times when we coincided more happily; when he would fill his pipe and, forgetting to light it, talk in that pedantic, pontifical, always “dedicated” way, glad to have me to debate with. And there were times when I was glad — since Uncle Walter had procurred for me a free pass to the Zoo — to slip from the traffic, the blurred faces of a city still strange to me, into the stranger still, but more comfortingly strange community by the banks of the Regent’s Canal. He would meet me in his keeper’s overalls, and I would be led, a privileged visitor, required to wear special rubber boots, into the breeding units closed to the public, to be shown — snuffling disconsolately at their concrete pen — the pair of frail, timid, wan-faced Hoffmeier’s Antelopes.

“But what does it mean,” I once said to Uncle Walter, “to say that a species exists which no one has ever observed?” We were talking in his front room about the possibility of undiscovered species (as the Hoffimeier’s Antelope had once been) and, conversely, of near-extinct species and the merits of conservation. “If a species exists, yet is unknown — isn’t that the same as if it did not exist?”

He looked at me warily, a little obtusely. In his heart, I knew, there lurked the slender hope that somewhere in the African forest there lived still a Hoffimeier’s Antelope.