Читать книгу We Bought a Zoo - Benjamin Mee - Страница 8

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.