Samuel John Aliru
c/o Phillip Ansumana
R.C. School, Bambawullo
Dear Sir,
I am here asking you kindly to develop my 221 Kodak film which I am here sending with my brother Phillip Ansumana. If you are able to undertake the developing and printing please do so.
I would have come with him but I am just composing a song and which I hope to present it to you next week.
I am also a scholar and I attend the Wesley Secondary School at Sezbwema.
Yours truly,
Samuel John Aliru
Respondez s’il vous plait.
For some considerable time I had been endeavouring to persuade the BBC to film an animal-collection trip, but they had been very myopic about the whole thing. I tried to convince them that the fascination of the trip lay not only in catching the animals but in keeping them as well, and then bringing them back by sea. I felt this would all make excellent film material. However, they dithered about it for a year or so, before eventually saying yes. I was delighted, as I thought it would be excellent for the Trust. First of all, the publicity would be considerable; secondly, the Trust would be obtaining some nice animals for its collection; and, thirdly, though hitherto I had had to find the money for all my expeditions myself, the BBC would at least be assisting me with financing this one. The Trust at that time, although doing very well, could not afford to start indulging in collecting trips.
We first thought of going to Guyana, but the political unrest there at the time made it seem a rather unwise spot to choose. I had once been caught in a revolution and had been forced to let half my animals go, and I didn’t want this to happen in the middle of filming a series for the BBC. After some thought I decided on Sierra Leone. It was a part of West Africa that I had never visited, it contained some particularly rare creatures which the Trust could do with, and also I happened to love West Africa and its inhabitants very much indeed. I was delighted when the BBC said that Chris Parsons was going to be the producer. He was an old friend of mine and I had worked with him before; in fact, we had done a mammoth trip through Malaya, Australia and New Zealand together, and I knew and liked him enormously. So I went over to Bristol and we formulated our plans. I decided that I and a member of the staff would go out by sea, arrange the base camp, and catch as many animals as we could in the shortest possible space of time, and then the camera crew and Chris Parsons would fly out to join us. We worked it out so that we would have about a fortnight for collecting before they arrived. It was essential to have some animals already caught for some of the film sequences when they arrived. Then I had to decide which member of the staff to take with me. I picked John Hartley, otherwise known as Long John. He is six foot two high and immensely thin, so that he looks rather like a Cruikshank caricature, but he was young and a hard worker and he was wildly enthusiastic when I suggested it to him.
Then came the very necessary but rather tedious process of collecting all the equipment that we would need for the trip. You are never quite sure, on a trip like this, what will be obtainable in the country itself, and so as to be on the safe side you have to make yourself almost entirely self-supporting. We took hammers and nails, screws, traps and nets and cages of various sorts, babies’ feeding bottles in case we got any young animals, hypodermic syringes and various medicines in case any of the animals got ill, and a host of proprietary products such as Complan, a sort of powdered milk which we found was very useful for rearing baby animals. When this had all been accumulated it made quite a considerable pile. Then, as always seems to happen when you are organising an expedition of any sort to anywhere in the world, a snag arose. We discovered that no ships that called at Freetown would carry animals. In desperation I phoned Elder Dempster and spoke to one of the directors. Luckily he had read some of my books and had liked them, and so they kindly waived their rule about carrying animals on passenger vessels. They said that we could not only go out on the Accra but come back on her too and bring all our animals with us.
So, on a bleak, grey, drizzly day at Liverpool docks, Long John and I got our mountain of luggage on board the Accra and we set sail that evening. Jacquie had decided not to come with me. She had been to West Africa twice and the climate didn’t agree with her at all. Instead, she was going off on her own with Hope Platt and Ann Peters, my secretary, for another visit to the Argentine.
It was rather good that during the course of our voyage we ran into one of the worst storms possible. Storms at sea do not worry me in the slightest and I am never seasick, but I was interested to see whether Long John would be. It is no fun having to look after a lot of animals if you are going to be seasick. Luckily, Long John proved to have a stomach like iron and we didn’t miss a single meal. We spent a lot of our time in the smoking-room, relaxing, drinking beer, and looking at all the books we had brought with us on West African fauna and memorising the habits of the creatures that we hoped to collect. Long John would lie spread out in his chair like a ship-wrecked giraffe but, as I pointed out to him, the voyage was the only time that we would have for relaxation so he’d better make the most of it while he could. I also told him that he would have to be prepared to rough it. I drew gloomy pictures of grass huts full of spiders and scorpions, hot beer, having to bathe out of a bucket, and similar terrors of the tropics.
We arrived at Freetown on a beautiful, blistering hot day, and the lovely aromas of West Africa were wafted across the sea to us; smells of palm oil, flower scents, and rotting vegetation, all combining into a lovely, heady mixture.
I had been lucky enough to obtain an introduction to Mr Oppenheimer through a Mr Geddes, who is a Trust member, and he had instructed the Diamond Corporation of Sierra Leone to give me all the assistance I required. I knew that we would have to spend some time in Freetown and so one of the things I had done was to write ahead and ask whether they could either book us rooms in a hotel or, if it was possible, get us a small flat somewhere. I was somewhat embarrassed when a chauffeur, in immaculate livery, came on board as soon as the ship had docked and asked me if I was Mr Durrell. I said yes, and he said he had got the car waiting to drive me to one of the Dicor flats, as they call them, which had been put at our disposal during our stay in Freetown. I hadn’t expected much because I had been warned that accommodation in Freetown was cramped and pretty hot and sticky. I asked him to wait while we got all our luggage through Customs, which was done with the utmost efficiency. In fact I think it is the only Customs shed that I have ever been in and out of in so short a space of time with such a mountain of varied goods. We piled these into the back of the enormous four-wheel drive truck that Land Rovers had kindly lent to us, and I got into the posh-looking car with the chauffeur while Long John drove the truck behind. We drove through the town and then, a little way outside it, came to a pleasant area where the houses were set well back in gardens that were a riot of flowers. Presently we went up a curving drive, aflame with hibiscus bushes, and there was a great glittering block of flats. I looked at them in astonishment.
‘Is this the place?’ I asked the driver.
‘Yessir,’ he said.
We drew up in front of the flats and immediately stewards in white uniforms appeared and took our bags up to the third floor where we were ushered into a flat that took my breath away. To begin with, it was enormous; the main living-room could have held about fifty people. Secondly, it looked like a Hollywood set. Thirdly, it was air-conditioned, and fourthly, from the veranda that ran along the front of the living-room, you had a magnificent view right down over the hills to Lumley Beach, one of the best beaches in Sierra Leone, that stretches for miles.
‘Well,’ said Long John, looking around, ‘this is a bit of all right, isn’t it? I don’t mind this sort of grass shack, if this is what you meant.’
‘I didn’t mean anything of the sort,’ I said severely. ‘You wait till we get up country; then you’ll really have to rough it. This is just a little bit of . . . er . . . extra, as it were. We’re very lucky to have it.’
I wandered into the kitchen and found the steward in there. He stood smartly to attention.
‘Are you the steward?’ I inquired.
‘Yessir,’ he said, beaming. ‘I am the steward for this flat. My name is John. I am also the cook, sir.’
I glanced round the kitchen, which was gleaming and immaculate, and spotted in one corner an enormous fridge.
‘I suppose,’ I said tentatively, ‘I suppose you haven’t got any beer, have you, John?’
‘Yessir! Yessir! I bring it straight away, sir.’
I went back to the living-room and sat down in a chair, still a bit bewildered by all this luxury. Long John came sauntering in. He’d been exploring the rest of the flat.
‘There’re three bedrooms,’ he said, ‘and all of them are almost as large as this room. It’s incredible.’
‘Well I’ve discovered that there’s some iced beer,’ I said. ‘So I don’t suppose we’ll starve.’
We had a great number of things to do and people to see. I had to get the permits for collecting animals, and for their export, and make contact with various people we thought might be helpful to us when we were up country. The awful part about this was that our enormous Land-Rover was classified as a lorry, and the same applied even to the smaller one. Lorries are not allowed in the interior streets of Freetown. This problem, however, was solved by the kindness of the District Commissioner, who put a car and a chauffeur at our disposal.
Then we had to decide where we were going to make our base camp and, after some deliberation, I decided that the focal point should be the town of Kenema, some four hundred miles up country. I chose it because it was quite a sizeable town and therefore would make the getting of food and supplies more easy, and also because the Diamond Corporation had an office there and, as they were being so helpful to us, I felt that if they were within reach it would be a good thing. On the Accra we had met up with Ron Fennel, who was working in Sierra Leone as adviser to the government and had suggested Kenema to me originally. When I had asked him whereabouts he thought we might be able to form a reasonable base camp, he said, ‘Why don’t you try the chrome mines?’ At first I thought he was joking. I didn’t really fancy living in a mine. But he went on to tell me that some five or six miles from Kenema itself there were some chrome mines and a lot of empty houses which had been built for the miners and their families. The chrome had given out and the whole place was now deserted. He felt sure that I could get official government sanction to take over one, if not two, of these houses and live in it. I thought this an excellent idea and eventually tracked down the official in question who promptly gave me the permission I required.
I don’t like cities as a rule but Freetown I found enchanting. The streets all had the most delightfully incongruous names, such as St James’s, The Strand or Oxford Street – all terribly British. English colonists are wonderful. Give an Englishman a swamp two thousand miles from anywhere and he will, in a blaze of originality, call it Piccadilly. Charming London buses ploughed through the streets carrying vast quantities of Africans, and on every side there were great skyscrapers, like white honeycombs, standing next to the remnants of the old Freetown, beautiful, large weather-board houses. By and large I preferred the old architecture to the new, but they seemed to blend in well together.
The next thing we had to do was to try and organise some staff, and so I made my first contact with Sadu. His name had been given to me by a friend who had spent several years in Sierra Leone and had employed him. He said that Sadu was an excellent cook and, moreover, was honest and a hard worker. Sadu himself turned out to be a tiny wizened little man, with a face rather like a monkey’s and an impish grin. When we had settled on his salary, I told him to go to the town and search for a ‘small boy’. Now a small boy, in West African parlance, means a sort of second-in-command. He’s really the boy who peels the potatoes, makes the beds, and does all the dirty jobs, while your cook – or the steward, if you’ve got one – does the less menial tasks. Presently Sadu returned with Lamin, who was a boy of about fourteen, very shy, with a charming grin. We employed him on the spot. Then came the great day. All the documents had been stamped and signed and sealed, everything was ready, and the large Land Rover (the small one was being left in Freetown for the BBC team) was piled up with all our gear, with Sadu and Lamin installed in the back. We climbed into the cab and drove off up country.
The first part of the drive was magnificent. Smooth macadam roads, and all the trees and bushes hung with flowers, red, yellow, purple and white, and then – at mile ninety-three – BANG! we hit the laterite. Red dust was plastered all over the plants and the trees on the roadside, and this fine red dust gets into your eyes and lungs and everywhere. It has the consistency of talcum powder and can slither through the tiniest crack. The corrugation in the laterite, caused by the winter rains and the wind, make the vehicle shudder so that after a few miles you feel as though you’ve been riding on a pneumatic drill for at least three hundred years.
The road seemed to wind on for ever, and the dust to become thicker and thicker. Occasionally, we would pass through a palmleaf thatched village and all the young children would run out, eyes shining, teeth glistening, to wave pink palms to us in greeting as we passed. Sometimes a pair of hornbills would fly across the road, their wings flapping madly, their long beaks making them look top heavy. One got the impression that they had to flap their wings so wildly since otherwise the weight of their beaks would make them nose-dive instantly to the ground.
After some hours of driving, we reached the village of Bambawo. The chrome mines lay in the hills behind Bambawo, but it was in the village itself that we were supposed to pick up the caretaker who had the keys to the various houses. This we duly did. Then we branched left and wound up into a low range of hills which lay behind the village. As we climbed higher the road got worse and worse, but the forest became more magnificent because this was real forest, not secondary undergrowth; gigantic trees standing on huge buttress roots covered with orchids and various epiphytes, and great waterfalls of giant ferns. As the forest grew thicker, my thoughts on what type of accommodation we were liable to find up there got more and more gloomy. Then we rounded a corner and there were the chrome mines. They were completely and utterly unexpected. First there was quite a large administration block. We drove past this and saw that there was a swimming-pool – empty, of course, and full of dead leaves, but a pool nevertheless. The road wound up a little higher and then, spread out along the top of the hillside, were some seven or eight beautiful little villas, each one tucked away amongst the trees, and each commanding the most magnificent view down over the plain in which the village of Bambawo lay, and across hundreds of miles of thick forest to the Liberian border. A lot of the houses had, of course, been allowed to go to wrack and ruin but we discovered two, both commanding magnificent views, quite close together and in excellent condition.
While our things were being unpacked and stacked in the house, I discovered from the caretaker that the administrative block contained a dynamo to produce electricity for this little village, and that, if we cared to obtain the necessary oil and petrol to work this, what he referred to as the electro-shitty man would be only too happy, for a small sum of money, to come up and run the dynamo for us. So this was organised, and I also arranged for two stalwarts from the village to clean out the swimming-pool and fill it. Long John and I spent the rest of the day unpacking our things and putting them in heaps in various parts of our spacious accommodation, and then, that evening, we sat down to an excellent curry which Sadu had produced.
‘You know, this was the part I was dreading most,’ said Long John, sipping his cold beer appreciatively. ‘The grass shack stuff, you know, scorpions in the roof and the spiders, warm beer . . .’
‘You just shut up and concentrate on your food,’ I said. ‘We’ve been damned lucky. I’ve never had a camp as luxurious as this. Do you realise that we have a bath and a lavatory that really work? That’s the height of luxury.’
We soon found that the chrome mines had other treats in store for us. For example, the water that we got came from springs in the forest just a little way behind the houses and so was pure enough to drink without our going through the awful tedious process of having to boil and filter it first. Also, there were no mosquitoes; we were high enough to catch every cool breeze that was going and so it never became oppressively hot in our houses.
The next few days were fairly hectic. We had an interview with the chief of Bambawo, a kind elderly man, to explain to him why we had come and to ask him if he could enlist the aid of the villagers for catching us ‘beef’. ‘Beef’ is the term which is used in West African pidgin to describe any animal from a frog to an elephant. We then engaged a carpenter and set him about the task of building a series of boxes to which we could attach the cage fronts which we had brought out ready-made from England. Very soon we had an impressive row of cages, all completely empty. We then drove to every village within a twenty mile radius and spread the tidings of our arrival and of what we were trying to do; saying that we would return in three days’ time to see if they had managed to capture any beef for us.
We had returned one evening from what Long John called one of our whistle-stop tours, had bathed and changed and eaten in self-satisfied silence, and were just relaxing preparatory to going to bed, when we heard a curious noise coming from down the hill; the sound of pipes and drums and chanting. Presently we saw a line of people coming up the road below us with their hurricane lights flickering as they passed through the trees.
‘Who on earth can they be?’ asked Long John, for the road led nowhere but to our house.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I suppose it’s some sort of deputation from the village. Perhaps the chief’s sent his band up for us, or something.’
We waited patiently, and presently the crowd of singing, chanting Africans appeared round the side of the house and lined up in front of us on the veranda. Two men in their midst were carrying a pole across their shoulders and from it was dangling quite a substantial cage made out of rough logs.
‘Ah! I said to Long John. ‘This looks like our first beef. Now, whatever it is, don’t get too excited over it, otherwise the price will go up.’
‘No, I won’t,’ promised Long John. ‘I’ll try and pretend that it’s something so revolting that we wouldn’t have it even if they gave it to us.’
‘Now, what you get, my friends?’ I asked the assembled crowd.
‘Beef, sir. Beef!’ came an immediate chorus from the crowd, and their teeth shone white in the lamplight as they grinned proudly at us.
They had put the cage at our feet and we tried to peer through the logs to see what was in it. It was big enough, I thought, to contain quite a large animal. However, we could see nothing, so we moved it into the light and cut through the bush ropes that had been used to tie down the lid.
‘Careful, sir!’ said one of the hunters, as I gingerly lifted the edge of the lid to see what the cage contained. ‘This beef go bite you.’ I lifted the lid a bit more and peered into the large box. Then, suddenly, in the crack appeared the most appealing face. It was a tiny Spot-nosed monkey who would have fitted conveniently into a large teacup, and his little green face had a heart-shaped white spot of fur on the nose. His eyes glistened and he peered at me through the crack. Then he uttered the piercing squeak of the baby monkey that was to become such a familiar sound in camp. I threw back the lid and lifted him out. He had a greenish body, a long tail, and a wistful face. He clung to my fingers tenaciously and uttered another tremendous wail.
‘Dis beef no go bite,’ I said to the hunter. ‘Dis no be big monkey, dis be picken monkey.’
I knew this ploy of old. For some obscure reason the Africans always imagined that if they could make out the animal they brought you to be more savage than it was, you would automatically pay more for it. I handed the baby monkey over to Long John, who enveloped it gently in his enormous hands and held it while I got on with the bargaining. This was a protracted business and I eventually beat the man down from five pounds to two pounds. This was really far in excess of what the baby monkey was worth, but I have always found it a good policy to start paying a little more than you should for the first animals in order to encourage the hunters to go and get more; then you can drop your prices. So, eventually, well pleased with their bargain, the group left us, singing and chanting and beating on their little drum. They disappeared down the hillside, while Long John and I went and got some warm milk and fed the baby monkey, who was terribly hungry. Then we gave him a nice warm bed of dried banana leaves in one of our cages and left him for the night.
‘Well,’ I said to Long John, as we climbed into bed, ‘that’s our first beef. Not such a bad one at that. Spot noses are quite rare. Maybe it augurs well for the future.’
During the next week the news of the price we had paid for the monkey spread, as I had anticipated, and soon there was a steady trickle of hunters coming up to the house with a strange assortment of beasts. There were bats and baby owls, brush-tailed porcupines, more baby monkeys, giant rats the size of a kitten, and mongooses in a variety of shapes and sizes. Also, our whistle stop tours of the villages round about had paid dividends and when we went to visit them again we rarely came away empty handed, even if it was only a tortoise or a young python that they’d managed to catch for us. Our cages were full of whistlings, rustlings, squeakings and hootings, and we felt that by the time the BBC arrived we would have a nice collection of animals with which to greet them. However we had not as yet got our two prime objectives for coming to Sierra Leone: one, the beautiful Colobus monkeys, the other, leopards. Then, just before the BBC arrived, we did get our leopards, but in the most unexpected way.
I had questioned all the hunters carefully as to the possibility of getting some of these beautiful cats which are becoming increasingly rare throughout their range, owing to the fact that they are shot for their skins. All the hunters shook their heads and said that leopards were ‘hard too much’ to catch. I began to think that we weren’t going to get any, when one day a very battered Land-Rover appeared winding its way up the road towards us. When it stopped, a lanky young American with curly hair got out and introduced himself as Joe Sharp. He said he worked with the Peace Corps in Kenema, and he had heard we were animal collecting. Would we, by any chance, be interested in a pair of leopards?
‘I’d say we would! Why? Do you know where there are some?’
‘Well,’ he answered, laconically, ‘I’ve got a pair myself. I got them off a hunter and hand-reared them. They’re about six months old . . . I thought you might be interested in them.’
‘I certainly am,’ I said eagerly. ‘Where are they?’
‘They’re here,’ he said, gesturing towards the back of his Land-Rover.
He walked round to the back of it and opened the door, and out jumped two of the most beautiful leopards I’ve ever seen. They were each about the size of a large labrador retriever, beautifully marked, with sturdy legs, and their skins shone in the sunlight as they wound themselves round Joe Sharp’s legs, purring loudly. They were each wearing a collar and to these Joe attached two leads. We led them round to the front of the house, tied them up on the veranda and sat gloating over them.
‘They’re called Gerda and Lokai,’ said Joe, stretching himself out in a chair and accepting the beer that I offered him. ‘I think they must be brother and sister because they were brought in by the same hunter at the same time, and they were both approximately the same size, although you’ll see Gerda’s a little more slender than Lokai.’
Lokai had put his paws on the table and was sniffing at my beer suspiciously. He then peered earnestly into my face and gave my hand a quick lick with his rasplike tongue.
‘Well, they’re yours if you want them,’ said Joe. ‘I don’t want to part with them, really – I’ve got very fond of them – but I’m going back to America shortly and it would be impossible to take them back there.’
‘We certainly will have them,’ I said. ‘I think they are the most handsomely marked leopards I’ve ever seen. Are they completely trustworthy at the moment?’
I said this because, at that precise juncture, Lokai had got down from the table and wrapped his paws affectionately round my leg. I could feel his claws digging into my skin.
‘Well,’ said Joe, ‘now there’s a point. They’re OK with me, and they’re OK with some of the other guys down in the Peace Corps. But there are one or two they’ve taken a dislike to, and then they get a bit funny. Lokai likes to jump on you from the top of a door, for example, and if he hits you at the wrong angle he’s quite a weight.’
‘If he hits you at the wrong angle I should think he could break your neck,’ I said, disentangling Lokai’s paws from my leg with difficulty.
‘Oh, I think they’ll settle down all right,’ said Joe. ‘They’re very nice-tempered, really.’
‘Where,’ inquired Long John, putting his finger on the crux of the whole problem, ‘where are we going to keep them?’
The thought hadn’t occurred to me. It was the carpenter’s day off, and in any case we hadn’t got a crate big enough to take them. One would have to be specially built, which meant a trip into Kenema to get sufficient planks to do it. All this would take time, and the BBC were arriving the following day. I thought about the problem for a moment, and then I remembered that just between our house and the little house farther down the hill that the camera crew were going to occupy, there was a small hut, measuring some six foot by ten and about nine foot high, which I presume at one time had been used as a sort of staff lavatory. If that was cleared out, I thought, the leopards would be quite happy in there until we could get a proper cage made for them. We went down immediately to inspect the hut and found that it was perfectly adequate for the leopards, except that there was a gap between the roof and the top of the wall of about eight inches. But Joe assured me that they wouldn’t be able to get out of that.
So we took Gerda and Lokai down to their new quarters, after they had been cleaned out, and gave them a large plateful each of their favourite tinned dog food which Joe had been rearing them on. Then we left them to their own devices and went back to have another beer. That evening, after Joe had left us, Long John and I, in some trepidation, carried down the leopards’ evening meal. As soon as they heard us approaching they set up such a series of yowls and purrs and scratchings at the door that Long John and I looked at each other in alarm.
‘I think,’ I said, ‘I think we ought to be armed for this operation.’
So we cut ourselves two stout sticks just in case.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘I think if we open the door cautiously and push one bowl of food in, that will keep their attention occupied and we can get the other bowl in and the dirty bowls out.’
‘Yes . . .’ said Long John, doubtfully.
We opened the door slowly and cautiously, and immediately the leopards flung themselves at it, snarling with satisfaction at the smell of the food. We pushed the plate in hastily, and it skidded across the floor into the far corner, the two leopards chasing madly after it. Then we whipped in, got the dirty plates out, put the second plate of food on the floor, and made a hasty retreat, slamming and bolting the door behind us.
‘Whew!’ said Long John. ‘They’re going to be a bit of a handful, aren’t they? The sooner we can get them into a cage the better.’
‘We’ll have to get cracking first thing tomorrow,’ I said. ‘If you go into Kenema and get the planks, I’ll persuade the carpenter to do some overtime. He should have the cage ready by tomorrow evening, I should think. It’s quite a simple construction, anyway.’
‘Righto,’ said Long John. ‘But I don’t fancy feeding them in the morning. I might not be alive to get to Kenema.’
‘Well, there’s nobody else who can do it, so we’ll just jolly well have to.’
‘Ah, well,’ said Long John. ‘I suppose it is what would be classified as a hero’s death.’
And on this sombre thought we went to bed. The following morning, by the same rather complicated process, we fed the leopards and then, when they had finished, cautiously opened the door and peered at them. They were lying there licking their lips and purring with gentle satisfaction. It seemed as though the food had had a soothing effect upon them. As we had to get on intimate terms with them in any case, I thought this was as good a time as any. So Long John and I locked ourselves in the lavatory with the two leopards and talked to them and stroked them. Gerda seemed to show an immediate preference for Long John, and Lokai for me. That is, if you can call putting his two fat paws on my knee and then stretching himself and yawning and digging all his claws into my kneecap, a sign of affection. After half an hour of this we put some fairly lengthy ropes through their collars and took them out for a little walk. They behaved very sedately and really looked magnificent in the sun. When the time came to take them back, however, we had a bit of a struggle, but fortunately, with the aid of another plate of food, it ended without any bloodshed.
Long John set off to get the wood in Kenema, and some other supplies we needed, while I finished cleaning and feeding the animals and awaited the arrival of the BBC team. They arrived simultaneously with Long John, for they had met up in Kenema. Long John had obviously filled them full of stories of what a ghastly place we were living in, for when their Land Rover drew up and Chris got out of it he was wearing an expression of disbelief on his face.
‘Lucky devil! I see you’ve fallen on your feet again,’ he said, grinning, as he came towards me.
‘Well, it’s not bad. It’s a modest little place,’ I said, ‘but it’s got all mod. con. and that sort of thing. And after all, there’s plenty of jungle at the back there that we can film in.’
‘Lucky devil!’ he repeated.
Chris is a man of about medium height, with a very prominent nose, the end of which looks as though, at some time or other, it had been chopped off. He has heavy-lidded, green eyes, which he tends to hood like a hawk when he is thinking, and in moments of crisis he retreats behind his nose like a camel. He introduced me to the other two members of the team. There was Howard, who was short and stocky with dark curly hair, and enormous horn-rimmed spectacles which made him look like a benevolent owl – and Ewart, the cameraman, who was tall, blond and rather Scandinavian looking. We all sat down and I asked Sadu to bring us some beer.
‘How did you find this place?’ asked Chris.
‘Pure chance,’ I said. ‘The whole place is deserted; it’s like a sort of village Marie Celeste. But we’ve got all the necessities of life. Bathrooms in both the houses – which work, and the lavatories work, too, which is even more important. And we’ve got a fridge so we can have cold drinks and keep food. And we’ve also got electricity, which would be rather useful, I thought, for charging the batteries for the cameras and so forth. Also, just down the end of the road there, there’s a swimming pool, if you boys are feeling energetic.’
‘Good God,’ said Chris. ‘It’s incredible!’
‘It is. It’s the most fabulous base camp I’ve ever had in all my days of collecting. I’ve never had such luxury.’
‘Well,’ said Chris, raising his glass. ‘Let’s drink to the chrome mines.’
‘They’re not called the chrome mines any more,’ said Long John. ‘They’re called the beef mines.’
And from then onwards that is exactly what we called them.
When we’d finished our drinks I took them down to show them their living quarters. As we passed the lavatory I waved at it in an airy fashion.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘don’t go and unbolt that door, will you? There’re a couple of leopards in there.’
‘Leopards?’ said Howard, his eyes growing wide behind his spectacles. ‘You mean . . . you mean . . . leopards?’
‘Yes. You know, those spotted things,’ I said. ‘We’ve got them locked in there until we’ve got a suitable cage ready for them.’
‘You sure they can’t get out?’ said Howard, in trepidation. ‘No, no. I don’t think so for a moment,’ I said. ‘Anyway, they’re quite young and tame.’
After lunch, Ewart, Howard and Chris went down to their house to unpack and check the recording and photographic gear, to make sure that no damage had been done to it over the rough roads. Long John was busy giving milk feeds to all the baby animals, and I was writing a letter. Suddenly, there were shouts of ‘Gerry! Gerry!’ and a distraught-looking Howard came panting up the hillside, his spectacles all misted over with emotion.
‘Gerry!’ he called. ‘Come quick! Come quick! The leopards have got out!’
‘Dear God!’ I said, and leapt to my feet.
Long John dropped what he was doing instantly, and arming ourselves with sticks, we went down the hill after Howard’s palpitating figure.
‘Where are they?’ I inquired.
‘Well, they were sitting on the roof of the lavatory when I left. Chris and Ewart were standing guard.’
‘God save us,’ I said. ‘If they get into this forest, we’ll never catch them again.’
When we got down there we found Chris and Ewart, armed with sticks and looking extremely apprehensive, standing at a discreet distance from the lavatory, on the top of which was perched Gerda, snarling in a gentle sort of way to herself. But there was no sign of Lokai.
‘Where’s Lokai gone?’ I asked.
‘He jumped down a minute ago. I couldn’t stop him,’ said Chris apologetically. ‘He’s gone off in that direction.’
He pointed down the hill towards the swimming-pool.
‘John,’ I said, ‘you handle Gerda. She likes you better than me. But for God’s sake don’t do anything silly. See if you can get her down . . . or get up to her and get a rope through her collar. Chris, you come with me and we’ll look for Lokai.’
Chris and I went down the hill and searched and searched, but I really thought that Lokai had turned off into the thick forest that lay behind us, and that we would never see him again. Then, suddenly, we spotted him lying placidly under a small orange tree. Slowly I approached him, crooning sweet nothings, and he purred at me in a friendly sort of way. With somewhat tremulous hands I slipped the rope through his collar and tied it securely. Then I handed the end of the rope to Chris.
‘Here. You wait here with him,’ I said. ‘I must go back and see how Long John’s getting on with Gerda.’
‘What do I do if he moves?’ called Chris plaintively to me as I ran back up the hill.
‘Follow him,’ I shouted back. ‘But don’t try to stop him.’
When I got back to the lavatory, Ewart and Howard were still dithering in the background with their sticks, while Long John had found a box and had climbed up and managed to get the rope through Gerda’s collar. So at least we knew she was secure from that point of view. But for some reason she seemed in a bad mood, and disinclined to come down from the roof of the lavatory. In the end we had to get a long pole and push her gently towards the edge, until she had to leap to the ground, where she turned and snarled at Long John as though he were responsible and made a vague patting motion with her paw. Now, although these leopard cubs were only six months old, it must be remembered that they were lethal animals, and a playful swipe from one of their paws could easily take away half your face. So it was with great circumspection that we urged Gerda to go back into the lavatory. Once we’d got her back inside, Long John sat with her and talked to her and stroked her, and she seemed to calm down considerably. I then went back down the hillside to find Chris, looking like a forlorn stork, holding on to the rope from the other end of which Lokai was regarding him with a somewhat baleful stare. I took the rope away from Chris and gently pulled Lokai to his feet.
‘Come on, Lokai,’ I said. ‘Come on . . . Nice food . . . Gerda’s waiting for you. Come on . . . lovely lavatory. Come on . . .’
And by this means, slowly, with many pauses to smell at things and look around and admire the view, we managed to get Lokai back to the lavatory.
In the meantime, the carpenter had been alerted and had brought planks which he nailed round the gap in the roof so that there could be no repetition of this escape. We all went back up to the house and had a beer to soothe our shattered nerves.
‘I hope that sort of thing doesn’t happen every day,’ said Ewart.
‘Well, not every day,’ I said. ‘On an average, about three or four times a week, you know. But then, after all, that’s what you’re out here to film, isn’t it?’
‘You can’t keep them in there indefinitely,’ said Chris. ‘What are you going to do with them?’
‘The carpenter’s in the process of building a cage for them now. It should be ready by tonight, and then we’ve got to get them into it. That’s going to be another jolly little lark.’
‘Good lord! What a wonderful film sequence that’ll make,’ said Chris.
‘Well, he won’t have finished the cage till after dark.’
‘That’s all right.’ said Ewart. ‘We can rig up the lights.’
‘As long as the lights don’t frighten them,’ I said. ‘If they start getting too nervous, I’m afraid you’ll have to stop the whole operation and switch them off. I’m not risking my neck for the BBC.’
‘Yes, all right,’ said Chris. ‘I promise that.’
So the rest of the afternoon was spent bringing up lights while the carpenter put the finishing touches to the handsome cage he’d made for the two leopards. By the time he’d finished it was quite dark, and we switched on the lights experimentally. They were very powerful indeed and lit up the whole area with a great glare that I felt was not going to be the most soothing thing that a leopard had ever seen. Eventually, when everything was ready, Long John and I, armed with platefuls of dog food and our ropes and sticks, went down to fetch the leopards up the hill. First we pushed the food in and then, when they’d finished it, we went in and talked to them soothingly, told them they were going to be film stars, put the ropes through their collars, and led them out. Gradually we moved up the hill, letting them make the pace. They loved to stop and stare, and their ears would twitch and you could see their whiskers come out almost as though they were antennae. Slowly we moved on and came over the brow of the hill and into the glare of the searchlight.
One moment Long John was with me, the next he wasn’t. He was off, tearing down the hillside, with Gerda dragging him along as though he had been a puppet. There was nothing I could do because I was attached firmly to Lokai, and he didn’t seem to have the same feelings about the searchlight as Gerda did. I led him slowly up and towards the cage. He’d never seen a cage before, so he was naturally a little suspicious. I allowed him to walk round and sniff it, and then I put a plate of dog food inside and urged him in. I got him half-way through the door when he suddenly decided that this was a dastardly trick I was playing on him and tried to back out. But luckily he had an ample behind and with a quick push I managed to get him in and slam the door. Then, when he was eating, I got the rope detached from his collar and out of the cage. By this time a panting Long John had appeared on the horizon dragging a reluctant Gerda with him. She was in a filthy temper and we now had the problem of trying to get one leopard in a bad temper into a cage containing another leopard who showed every desire, having finished his food, of wanting to come out again. It took us some time to accomplish this, but at last we managed it, safely slammed the door on both of them and heaved heartfelt sighs of relief. From behind the searchlight came Chris’s voice.
‘That was a marvellous sequence,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘And it went off so smoothly. I don’t know what you were all so worried about.’
Long John and I, drenched in sweat, covered with scratches that had been playfully delivered by the leopards en route , stared at each other.
‘What I say is,’ said Long John, with conviction, ‘blast the BBC.’
‘Motion carried,’ I said.
