Author’s Note
As the incidents in this book cover a period of about seven years and I have had to do a lot of pruning and grafting, some of them do not appear in the exact order in which they happened. This has been done purely to make the book run more smoothly, so if any of my readers notice that certain things are not necessarily in sequence they will understand why. My thanks are due to Messrs. Rupert Hart-Davis for permission to use the extract from Menagerie Manor on page 7.
Gerald Durrell
Dear Mr Durrell
I have frequently wondered about kangaroo pouches . . .
When I come back from an expedition abroad I always have a sense of great excitement at seeing the zoo again: the new cages that have been constructed in my absence from what had been mere drawings, the new animals that have arrived, the animals which have given birth; to be greeted by the discordant cries of joy from the various animals that recognise you and are pleased to see you back. Generally, it’s a very pleasant and exciting homecoming.
But on this occasion I had been on a fairly prolonged trip to Australia, New Zealand and Malaya, and on my return I found, to my consternation, that my precious zoo was looking shabby and unkempt. Not only that, but I soon discovered that it was almost bankrupt. After all the hard work and money that I had put into it, it was rather like being kicked in the solar plexus. Far from being able to relax after what had been a fairly hectic trip, I had to set to with the utmost rapidity to see what I could do to save the zoo.
The first thing I did, of course, was take over the management of the place myself, and then offer the job of Deputy Director to Jeremy Mallinson, who had been with the zoo since its inception. I knew of his immense integrity and of his deep love for the animals in his care. Moreover, he had worked in every section of the zoo and therefore knew most of the problems involved. To my infinite relief he accepted the job. Then I had a meeting with the heads of all the other sections and explained the situation to them. I said that it was more than likely that the zoo might have to close down, but, that if they were prepared to stay with me and work as hard as they could for a pittance, there was a good possibility that we might be able to pull it out of the mire. To their everlasting credit they all agreed to do this. So at least I knew that the animals would not suffer and would be well looked after.
My next job was to try and find a good administrative secretary. This was not as easy as it sounds. I advertised, and specified in the advertisement that a knowledge of shorthand, typing, and most important of all, bookkeeping, were essential. Somewhat to my surprise I got a flood of applicants. On interviewing them, I found that half a dozen of them couldn’t add two and two and make four, and very few of them knew what a typewriter even looked like. One young man even went so far as to say that he had applied for the job because he thought he could pick it up as he went along. After interviewing about twenty of these morons I was beginning to lose hope. Then we came to one Catha Weller. She waltzed into my office for her interview, diminutive, rotund, with sparkling green eyes and a comforting smile. She explained that her husband had just been transferred to Jersey and that she had had to give up her job in London, which she had had for the last seventeen years. Yes, she knew how to do bookkeeping, shorthand and typing – the lot. I looked at Jacquie and Jacquie looked at me. We both knew instinctively that a miracle had happened; we had found exactly what we wanted. So, within a few days, Catha Weller was installed, trying to make some sort of order out of the chaos of bookkeeping that had accumulated during my absence abroad.
The zoo, at that time, had two debts: one of twenty thousand pounds, which was the money that I had borrowed and which had been used for the original construction work, and a local overdraft and creditors amounting to another fourteen thousand pounds. My next problem, of course, was the difficult one of how to get sufficient finance to keep the zoo on an even keel in order that it should survive. This occupied me for some considerable time. During all this time Jeremy, being new to his job, had to keep coming to consult me about various animal problems, and Catha about various financial matters, all of which were new to her, and this, combined with the worry of trying to think of a way of saving the zoo, drove me into the very depths of depression. So, in spite of my protests, Jacquie called in our doctor.
‘I’m not ill,’ I protested. ‘It’s just worry. Can’t you give me a jab of something to keep me going?’
‘I’ll do better than that,’ said Mike. ‘I’ll give you some tablets to take.’
So he prescribed a bottle of rather lurid looking little capsules, of which I was supposed to take one a day. Little did he or I know that by doing this he was making the most important gesture towards saving the zoo.
Now two of our dearest and oldest friends on the island are Hope and Jimmy Platt. Jimmy spent most of his time in London, but Hope was a constant visitor to the zoo and would frequently pop up for a drink. She happened to come up one evening when I had, quite by mistake, taken two of my tranquillisers instead of one. The result was that I looked and sounded as though I was in the last stages of inebriation. Hope is a large and formidable woman, and she frowned at me as I staggered across the room to greet her.
‘What’s the matter with you’ she inquired, with all the authority of fourteen stone. ‘Have you been hitting the bottle?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘I wish I had. It’s these damned tranquillisers. I took two instead of one.’
‘Tranquillisers?’ said Hope, incredulously. ‘What on earth are you taking tranquillisers for?’
‘Sit down and let me get you a drink, and I’ll tell you all about it,’ I said.
So for the next hour I poured out my tale of woe to Hope. At the end of it she heaved herself massively out of the chair and stood up to go.
‘We’ll soon put a stop to this,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m not having you taking tranquillisers at your age. I’m going to see Jimmy about it.’
‘But, I don’t see why Jimmy should be worried . . .’ I began.
‘You listen to Mama,’ said Hope. ‘I’ll speak to Jimmy.’
And so she did. The next thing was a phone call from Jimmy. Would I please go round and see him and explain the matter. So I went round and told him how I had planned, originally, that once the zoo was self-supporting I was going to turn it into a Trust, but that it would be impossible to start a Trust carrying such an enormous debt. Jimmy agreed entirely, and sat brooding for a while.
‘Well there’s only one thing to be done,’ he said at last, ‘and that’s to launch a public appeal. First of all, I’ll give you two thousand pounds in order to tide you over your present difficulties, and I shall also contribute two thousand pounds to the appeal to encourage other people. If the appeal is a success, we can think again.’
To say that I was overwhelmed would be putting it mildly, and I went back to the zoo in a sort of daze. It really seemed as though there might be a chance of saving the place after all.
Launching an appeal is not quite as easy as it sounds. Neither is every appeal necessarily successful. But here our local paper, the Evening Post, which had always been our ally, gave us a most wonderful write-up about what we had done in the past, and explained our aims for the future. The appeal was launched and, in what seemed like a miraculously short space of time, we had raised twelve thousand pounds. I think the two donations that touched me most were the one from a small boy, of five shillings, which must have been his week’s pocket money, and another contribution of five pounds from the staff of the Jersey Zoo. This money was going to be the working capital of the Trust and therefore it could not be used for all the vital jobs that needed to be done in the zoo itself.
We now came to the second part of Jimmy’s stratagem. Both he and I agreed that the Trust could not be formed unless the matter of the original loan were cleared up. The Trust could then be launched with the twelve thousand pounds in hand, which would give it a good start, though still not good enough to allow for any large scale rebuilding or development. So I, personally, agreed to pay back the twenty thousand pounds owing to an increasingly restive bank out of my book royalties, and hand over the zoo and its contents to the Trust. This was done, and the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust came into being and officially took over the zoo, with myself acting as Honorary Director of both the Trust and the zoo. We chose a group of active people who were sympathetic towards our aims to act as our Council, and were delighted when Lord Jersey agreed to become our President. We chose, as our emblem, the Dodo, that large waddling pigeon-like bird that had once inhabited the island of Mauritius, and which was exterminated with great rapidity as soon as the island had been discovered. We felt that it symbolised the way in which a species can be wiped off the face of the earth in a remarkably short space of time by the thoughtlessness and greed of man.
But we were not out of the woods yet. It was still a very trying time, and I was still living on tranquillisers, unbeknownst to Hope Platt. For, at the same time as all this was going on, I was trying to write a book. This is a task that I view with abhorrence at the best of times, but now it was imperative, for I had twenty thousand pounds to pay back to the bank and the only way I could earn the money was by writing.
The book was called Menagerie Manor, and in it I explained why I wanted a zoo in the first place, and why I wanted the zoo eventually to become a Trust. I can do no better, I think, to explain it now than to quote what I wrote then:
‘I did not want a simple, straightforward zoo, with the ordinary run of animals: the idea behind my zoo was to aid in the preservation of animal life. All over the world various species are being exterminated or cut down to remnants of their former numbers by the spread of civilisation. Many of the larger species are of commercial or tourist value, and, as such, are receiving the most attention. Yet, scattered about all over the world, are a host of fascinating small mammals, birds and reptiles, and scant attention is being paid to their preservation, as they are neither edible nor wearable, and of little interest to the tourist who demands lions and rhinos. A great number of these are island fauna, and as such their habitat is small. The slightest interference with this, and they will vanish forever: the casual introduction of rats, say, or pigs could destroy one of these island species within a year. The obvious answer to this whole problem is to see that the creature is adequately protected in the wild state so that it does not become extinct, but this is often easier said than done. However, while pressing for this protection, there is another precaution that can be taken, and that is to build up under controlled conditions breeding stocks of these creatures in parks or zoos, so that, should the worst happen and the species become extinct in the wild state, you have, at least, not lost it forever. Moreover, you have a breeding stock from which you can glean the surplus animals and reintroduce them into their original homes at some future date. This, it has always seemed to me, should be the main function of any zoo, but it is only recently that the majority of zoos have woken up to this fact and tried to do anything about it. I wanted this to be the main function of my zoo.’
The problems of forming the Trust were greater and more complex than I had anticipated. They ranged from what subscription we should charge to members – not so large that people could not afford to become members, yet not so small that it would be of little benefit to us – down to details like what pamphlets we were going to publish to explain our aims and objects, and how these pamphlets were to be distributed. Over the years I have received a great number of letters about my books, and all of these had been answered and copies had been kept. So now all these people were circularised with a pamphlet and an enrolment form and, to my great delight, the vast majority of them joined the Trust immediately. When the new book, Menagerie Manor, was published it proved very popular (fortunately for me), and in it I asked any readers to join the Trust. So we got a fresh batch of members. By now we had some seven hundred and fifty Trust members dotted about in all parts of the world. It was particularly encouraging to think that people in countries as far away as Australia, South Africa and the United States were supporting a project which they might never even see.
At that time we were all working flat out for, although things were still fairly dicey, we could at least see, distantly on the horizon, some sign of success. To say that we were exhausted at the end of each day was an understatement. At that time I started receiving a spate of telephone calls, and these generally happened at the most irritating times. In the middle of lunch, for instance, I was called to the telephone – a long distance call from a woman in Torquay whose tortoise had just given birth to eggs. She wanted to know what to do with them. On another occasion, a woman wanted to know how to clip her budgerigar’s toenails. But the telephone call that really put the lid on it came at eleven o’clock one night when I was drowsing in front of the fire. It was a long distance call from up north: a Lord McDougall wanted to speak to me. Thinking, in my innocence, that perhaps he wanted to give a large sum of money for the Trust, I asked the operator to put him through. When he came on the line it became immediately obvious that his lordship had imbibed wisely but in too great a quantity.
‘Ish that Durrell?’ he wanted to know.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Now, you are the one man in England who can help me. I have a bird.’
I groaned inwardly. It was sure to be another budgerigar, I thought.
‘I own . . . a fleet of ships,’ he said, enunciating with great difficulty, ‘and one of my captains had thish . . . bird fly on board and he has jus’ brought it to me. Now . . . I want to know if you can help it?’
‘Well, what sort of bird is it?’ I inquired.
‘It’s a shweet little thing,’ he said.
As a zoological description this left much to be desired. ‘I mean, what sort of size or shape is it?’
‘Well . . . it’s a very shmall greyish-brown bird, with a whitish breast,’ he said. ‘Very tiny feet . . . very tiny feet . . . Remarkably tiny feet, in fact . . .’
‘I think it must be a Stormy Petrel,’ I said. ‘They do, quite frequently, fly on board ships.’
‘I will immediately charter a train and shend it to you if you can shave it,’ said his lordship lavishly.
I explained, at great length, that this would be quite useless. These tiny birds spend most of their lives at sea, feeding on minute forms of animal life, and are almost impossible to keep in captivity. In any case, even if he did send the bird to me, by the time it arrived it would most assuredly be dead.
‘I will shpare no expenshe whatshoever,’ said his lordship.
At that moment the telephone was torn from his grasp and a girl with a very county voice said, ‘Mr Durrell?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I do apologise for Daddy,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid he’s not quite himself. Please don’t take any notice.’
The telephone was wrenched from her, and his lordship came on again.
‘I will do anything,’ he said. ‘Fasht cars, planes, anything you like to get the bird to you.’
‘I’m afraid even if you got it to me, I could do nothing for it,’ I said.
‘Here I’ll put you on to my captain; he knows all about it,’ said his lordship.
A dour Scottish voice came on the phone.
‘Good evening, sir.’
‘Good evening,’ I said.
‘You say you think the bird’s a Stormy Petrel?’ asked the captain.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m almost certain. But in any case, the only thing to do is to keep it warm and in a dark place, send it out on one of your ships tomorrow. As soon as they are as far out to sea as they think necessary – two or three miles, perhaps – they can then let it go.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘I must apologise for worrying you at this hour of night, but his lordship insisted.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I . . . er . . . I understand the circumstances perfectly.’
‘His lordship, you understand,’ went on the Scots voice, ‘is a very kind man, and very, very keen on birds, but he’s not quite himself tonight.’
‘So I gather,’ I said. ‘I wish I was in the same state.’
‘Er . . . yes sir,’ said the captain. ‘Well, er, I’ll be saying goodnight, then, sir.’
‘Goodnight,’ I said, and put the phone back.
‘What on earth was all that about?’ said Jacquie.
‘A drunken lord, trying to send me a Stormy Petrel,’ I said, sinking into my chair.
‘Really!’ she said, angrily, ‘this has got to stop. We must get an ex-directory number.’
And so we did, and since then this spate of extraordinary telephone calls has mercifully ceased.
The following morning I related this incident to Catha, and she was amused though sympathetic.
‘Have you heard the story about Jeremy and the mole?’ she inquired.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t. What is it?’
Apparently, Jeremy had been driving the zoo lorry from the mammal house through the two great arches that guard the courtyard, carrying the debris of the day’s cleaning out. When he reached the second arch he saw, crawling across the gravel, a mole. He immediately clamped on his brakes, stepped out of the lorry, and approached the mole with the idea that he would carry it to an adjoining field where it would be safe. When he got closer he discovered that the mole was not only very dead, but attached to a length of twine, and it was being slowly pulled across the gravel. Following the twine to clear up this mystery, he found the entire bird staff at the end of it, pulling gently. The practical joker was Shep Mallet (known as Shep since, when he had first arrived, he had been nicknamed Shepton Mallet). He had not, for some time, played any practical jokes on people and I greeted this as a very good sign. It meant that the air of gloom and despondency, which I had found so prevalent on my return, had disappeared and was being replaced with hope and enthusiasm.
However, at this point, although hope and enthusiasm were things that were vitally needed, they had to be backed up with sufficient money. It was hard cash that we needed to rebuild cages that were by then five years old, and rebuild, moreover, not in a haphazard way but with some overall plan in mind. Every day it seemed that cages had to be shored up when really they should have been pulled down and rebuilt. Among the smaller animals and birds this did not matter so much, but when it came to the larger and more dangerous creatures, the problem became acute. In spite of the help that I had had from Hope and Jimmy in setting up the Trust, we were still desperately short of money and, in particular, money to create satisfactory caging for those animals that could be potentially lethal if they escaped. This was brought home to me forcibly by certain events that followed each other in alarmingly quick succession.
At the far end of the mammal house, where the gorillas had their quarters, we had had a small collection box constructed, and above it a notice telling of the aims and objects of the Trust, in the hope that kindly members of the public would put donations in it. In due course they did. One lunchtime, when there happened to be nobody about, I went into the mammal house to have a look at a marmoset that was supposed to be pregnant. I saw to my alarm that the door on the orang-utan cage was open and hanging crookedly on its hinges. I hurried down there and, to my relief, found both the orang-utans still sitting in the cage, but Oscar, the elder orang-utan, must have found some sort of a tool in order to have wrenched the door open. Having done that, he had then explored the mammal house. The only thing of interest, which he had found that he could detach easily and take back with him as a souvenir, was the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust collecting box. As soon as he discovered that this rattled, he rattled it vigorously. Finding that the coins wouldn’t come out of the slot, he’d soon tracked down the door at the back and wrenched it open. ‘When I arrived on the scene he was sitting in a pile of half crowns, sixpences and pennies. He was most irritated with me when I went into the cage, seized the box and picked up the money. I wasn’t sure how much money there had been in the first place, so it was a little difficult, but I felt sure there must be some more hidden around in the straw which I had missed. Then I looked at Oscar and I noted that his face was swollen and looked more puffy than usual.
‘Oscar,’ I said sternly, ‘you’ve got some in your mouth. Give it to me.’
I held out my hand and, with the greatest reluctance, he spat out five half-crowns and about four sixpences.
‘Is that the lot?’ I demanded.
He just sat and looked at me with his little almond-shaped eyes. I put the money back in the box, climbed out of the cage, and made a temporary repair to the door. Then, just as I was leaving to go and tell our maintenance man that the door needed fixing properly, Oscar spat a defiant penny at me.
But the incident that really made us realise the importance of getting new ape cages done as quickly as possible was when the chimps got out. It was a Christmas Day, and we had invited Catha and her husband, Sam, over to have Christmas dinner with us. Christmas Day is the only day that the zoo closes, and it was extremely fortunate for us that all the staff were still in the zoo and had not dispersed to their various Christmas dinners. Our turkey was done to a turn, the chestnut stuffing smelt marvellous, and all the vegetables were ready at a quarter to one, when the door burst open and a member of the staff rushed in, shouting, ‘Mr D., Mr D., the chimps are out!’ I’d had Cholmondley (or Chumley, as he was more commonly spelt) since he was quite a tiny baby, but even in those days, when he’d gone to do something disobedient and my mother had tried to stop him, he’d bitten her in the arm, which had necessitated seventeen stitches. Now he was almost as big and heavy as I was, so I had no wish to tangle with him or with Sheena, his wife, who was about the same size.
‘Where are they?’ I asked.
‘They’re just going into the courtyard.’
I rushed to the drawing-room window and looked out. There was Chumley walking along with Sheena, her arm draped affectionately over his shoulder, looking for all the world like an elderly couple enjoying a walk along the Bournemouth seafront. Just at that moment Catha and Sam’s car swept into the courtyard and came to a halt at the front door. Sheena was inclined to be a little nervous of this new apparition, but Chumley greeted it with hoots of delight. He knew all about cars as he had driven in them with me a number of times when he was a baby, and had thoroughly enjoyed watching the scenery and the passing traffic. He went up to the car, where Catha and Sam had wisely rolled up their windows, and banged on the glass in the hope that Catha would open up and give him a lift. However, she did no such thing.
I rushed downstairs, telling Jacquie to lock the flat door behind me, shut my office door, opened the door leading into the big main offices, and then flung open the front door. Chumley, on seeing me, gave several hoots of greeting and started ambling towards the houses. I scooted out through the office, opening the door that led into a passageway which, in turn, led to the stairs up to the staff quarters and to the big kitchen which served the cafe. I felt that if we could get the chimps in there we could trap them one way or another. I then went outside the house, round the back, in through the back door, and took up my stand peering through the crack of the door leading to the offices.
Chumley had decided he might as well pass the time of day with me and wish me a merry Christmas, so he was just walking in through the front door, followed by Sheena. They couldn’t go anywhere but into the main office and this they did. It was the work of a moment to close the sliding doors on them; but I hoped that they would get into the back passageway as quickly as possible, as in the office were all the files and they could do a considerable amount of damage in a very short time. To my relief Chumley, finding that there was nobody in the office, did precisely that. But when he got into the back passage there was a choice between going along it and into the big kitchen, or upstairs to the staff living quarters. Chumley knew all about stairs, for when he was a baby our flat had been up several flights of them, and he thought that this flight might lead him to me. So up he went, followed by a somewhat dubious Sheena. Luckily, all the staff bedroom doors were shut, with the exception of one, and this was the one that the chimps naturally made for.
We followed at a respectful distance, and when they were safely inside, slammed the door on them and turned the key. Then we went outside, got ladders and climbed up to the windows of the room to see what they were doing. Chumley had discovered, with great satisfaction, that there was a basin and a cake of soap in the room. He had turned on both taps to the fullest extent and was busy washing his hands, a habit he had much enjoyed when young. Sheena, on the other hand, was bouncing up and down on the bed, clasping a pillow to her bosom. She then found out that, by digging her nails in and pulling hard, it was quite easy to burst a pillow with the most satisfactory result that clouds of feathers filled the air. So she burst both pillows and the room looked as though it was having a snowstorm. A large quantity of feathers drifted down and settled in the basin, thus effectively clogging it. The basin started to fill and eventually overflowed, for Chumley by now had lost interest in it and he and Sheena were dismantling the bed with great thoroughness. When they came to the mattress they discovered that this, too, could be ripped open and the contents scattered about the room. Now the room was not only full of feathers but little bits of sorbo rubber, horsehair, and so on. I had a hasty conference with Jeremy. We had one cage strong enough and big enough to put the two chimps in, but this was made of solid steel and required about six people to lift it, and I doubted whether, in fact, we could get it up the stairs to the staff quarters.
‘The only thing to do is to try and get them down again,’ said Jeremy. ‘If we can get them to go along the corridor to the end there, where there are the two doors, we can trap them between the two doors and then manoeuvre the cage into place.’
We climbed up the ladders once again and peered in. Chumley had now found a coat-hanger and had managed to break a mirror with it. Sheena was still busily disembowelling the mattress with all the intentness of a world-famous surgeon doing a heart transplant.
‘If somebody were to open the door,’ said Jeremy, ‘he could nip across and lock himself in the bathroom. He’d be safe there. Then, perhaps, they’d go downstairs of their own accord.’
‘Well, we can try it,’ I said.
So a member of the staff went up, opened the door of the bedroom in which the chimps were disporting themselves, then whipped across the corridor and locked himself in the bathroom. The chimps, as I had suspected, were having far too good a time to wish to vacate their quarters. They merely glanced up when the door was opened and returned to their various activities. In Chumley’s case he was collecting together as many feathers as he could and throwing them in the air, while Sheena was still busy on her operation and the mattress was looking as though it would not survive.
‘I think there’s only one thing to do,’ said Jeremy. ‘We’ll have to hose them out.’
Now the curious thing was that, though both the chimps liked water to drink and to play with, they couldn’t bear to get it on their bodies. On some nights, when they had refused to go into their bedroom, we had had to threaten them with the hosepipe, whereupon they went in like lambs. We thought that this method might work equally well now. The hosepipe was solemnly brought up and attached to the tap in the animal kitchen, and we broke a pane of glass in the window in order to stick the end through. Then the water was turned on full force and the jet directed into the room. The chimps looked up in astonishment at this dastardly attack and then, as the stream of water hit them, ran screaming out of the bedroom, down the stairs and into the passage. Here we had two other members of the staff waiting concealed. As soon as the chimps reached the right spot both doors in the passageway were slammed and they were neatly trapped in a small area where they could do no damage and from which they couldn’t escape. I think we all felt relieved at this point, for chimps, being rather hysterical, extrovert creatures, quickly get overexcited and when overexcited could easily attack you. By this time both Sheena and Chumley were thoroughly overexcited, to say the least.
Our next job was to get the big steel cage and bring it down to one of the doors. This took a long time, for the cage had not been in use for ages and so was covered with stacks of timber and other materials which had accumulated in the workshop. Finally, however, we got it clear and six of us carried it and put it in position by the door. The sliding door of the cage was raised and then the door into the house carefully opened. The chimps were sitting there, dripping water from their fur, looking extremely belligerent. For an hour we tempted them with every delicacy we could think of to try to entice them into the cage, but nothing – not even out-of-season grapes – would make them enter it.
‘What about a snake?’ I said, for I knew that Chumley had a great fear of snakes.
‘No, it won’t work,’ said Jeremy. ‘At least, it will for Chumley, he’ll go in for a snake. But Sheena won’t; she’s not a bit scared of them.’
‘Well, it will have to be the hosepipe again,’ I said gloomily. ‘God knows what damage we’ve done already with water.’
So the hosepipe was carried round to the kitchen and attached to the tap. We then went to the other door, opened it, and directed a firm stream of water at the two chimps. They immediately rushed into the cage, the sliding iron door clanged shut, and they were safely prisoners once more. Together with Bert, our maintenance man, we went down to the chimps’ cage to see exactly how they had managed to escape. They were kept behind thick interlink wire, which was strong enough to retain them, but Chumley had discovered one loose end. Once you discover a loose end of interlink wire you can unravel it as easily as knitting, and this was precisely what he had done. So Bert, who had also just been about to sit down to his Christmas dinner, set to work to repair the cage. Within an hour or so it was ready once more to receive the chimps. So finally, at four o’clock, we got the chimps back into the cage, and made our way to our various Christmas dinners. Catha, Sam, Jacquie and myself, sat down to charred turkey and vegetables that looked as though they had been trodden on by an exceptionally heavy elephant, but at least we had some wine on ice as compensation.