The Old Men at the Zoo Page 12

  I tried to speak gently but firmly, “Look, Filson, if you’re wanting to tell me that your son would not have wished to look further into the causes of his death, I can’t accept that as a reason. It may seem presumptuous of me to say it to you, but the truth is that no one however close can tell what the dead would have wished.”

  “I should like you not to do so, Sir. The Zoo means a lot to me.”

  “The Zoo should be run properly and competently. It’s surely our duty to see that it is.”

  “Yes. I’ve thought of that, Mr Carter.”

  The change of his address seemed to suggest that he was both easier and less patient with me.

  “To be honest, it’s the point of view I first put to Mr Price. But he pointed out that no good can come to the place from a lot of unpleasant things being said.”

  “I believe you know how fond I am of Mr Price. But you also know as well as I do that he doesn’t like anything unpleasant brought to his notice. That isn’t a good enough reason for leaving this business alone, is it? In any case, I want to hear about your feelings, not Mr Price’s.”

  The intolerable thought came to me that I should have to hear myself speak in these housemasterly tones many times before I had done with the business. Yet that sad blonde’s accusation sounded in my ears set against the cackling panic of the ostriches. Before Filson could answer me I went on.

  “No, nothing’s going to alter my resolution, Filson. I’m sorry, but we’re all too busy these days forgetting what we don’t want to remember.”

  The old man stopped for a moment. More than ever he brought back the good old gardener of my boyhood, as he bent to pick a fat green caterpillar from one of the young lettuces. Squashing it between thumb and forefinger, he wiped the remains off on a blade of grass.

  “I shan’t forget, Mr Carter. I told the man he wouldn’t be welcome here today. I shan’t forget that he failed in his duty to my son.”

  For a moment I was puzzled, then I said, “We can’t be sure that Strawson was to blame.”

  “The young keepers that work under me are in my charge. I see to it that their conditions are as good as I can make them. I see to it that they get all the training they need before they’re left on their own. Yes, even when it’s against their temperament, I check them. Young Larkin’ll tell you that. I’m not boasting. It’s the duty of any good head keeper. Barrett in the Big Cats would do the same, or Kennedy with the reptiles, any of the lot of them. I shan’t forget Strawson’s neglect of Derek, Sir, you need not worry about that.”

  “But you have to consider the orders the man may have been given. I don’t want to make accusations, but ...”

  “You’d best say no more. In any case a good head keeper sees that he does get the right orders. It’s not my affair to look higher than Strawson.”

  This mystic N.C.O. stuff was beyond my powers of refutation.

  I said, ‘“Well, I’m afraid that I think it is my affair.”

  As though continuing with a story already familiar to me, he said, “You don’t know how hard it’s been for her. She always thought Kay was too old for him and not serious enough. She called it an infatuation. To tell the truth it was a strange thing. She’s a dance hostess, and, though she’s a good girl and it’s no criticism, she won’t see thirty five again. And Derek had such different interests, singing with the choral society, singing good stuff. She refused to recognize the engagement. And then she hated him being at the Zoo, she thought it was a waste. They were always rowing in the last months. You don’t know what she’s going through now. Her only child. It’s no good my telling her not to blame herself. Do you think it’ll help her to know that he needn’t have died?”

  I said, “There’s no reason why anything that happens in the Society’s meetings should reach your wife’s ears.”

  “Strawson’ll see to that. He’s said so. If there’s any blame put on him, he’ll give it all the publicity he can. It’s natural enough he should.” When I did not answer, he went on another tack. “You haven’t seen Dot at her best. She seems hard with Kay, but she doesn’t find it easy tp show soft feelings where she hasn’t got them. She’s a shy woman, Dot is.” He was talking fast now, as I am sure he never did normally, but he was pleading his wife’s case desperately. “She doesn’t find it easy to get on with people. But she’s been wonderful to us—Derek and me—Mother has.”

  As we turned back to the house, he asked, “You’ll think about it, at least, won’t you, Sir?”

  I answered, “I shall not be able to think of anything else.”

  I had taken an instant dislike to Mrs Filson for her charmless lack of assurance. It was clear that this had been her normal lot in life. How could I further hurt such a person? In any case I should at least let my conscience ponder over the problem until the television programme was out of the way.

  III

  LIMITED LIBERTY

  BACK AT the office, Leacock ignored the cause of my absence.

  He said, “Oh, there you are, Carter. They’re filming the coypus up at Oulton Broad on Thursday. I think you’d better go up with them. I’ve got to be here to check the final scenes of this place at night. I’ve set a lot of importance on showing how much wild life really comes alive at night time and what the public fail to see by having no National Reserve.” A little later he said, “It’s rather a nuisance you’re having to go up to Norfolk on Thursday, I’m having a tremendous tussle over music and commentary. These television people are so dyed in the wool. But you seem to have a way with them.”

  I said, “If I could be in two places at once, believe me . . .”

  “Yes. You don’t seem to have been able to be in one today. There have been a hundred things I have wanted to refer to you.”

  “I was at young Filson’s funeral.”

  He stood still and looked straight into my eyes.

  “If we can pull this thing off, Carter, a shocking thing like that boy’s death will be an impossibility in the future. It’s worth fighting for, you know.”

  I am sure that at that time I did not question this or a score of other battle slogans with which he urged us on during that week. Mrs Purrett came increasingly to resemble a fervent and highly coloured blancmange as she carried out her manifold small errands at the double; Rackham was forever bringing the last message that had got through to the beleagured fortress, and thoroughly he enjoyed the drama of his role. As we worked late each evening over our coffee and sausage rolls or sandwiches we did not care, for there was our Chief working as late, indeed later, and encouraging us now and then with a word of thanks. I describe it with irony and yet at the time I was in a strange double mood that matched the Director’s; to his egotism, his spurious self-dramatization, I presented a detached amusement that canalized my anger away from the thought that competent preparatory work could have avoided the whole “strafe’ as he liked to call our excessive labours; to his enthusiasm, his belief, his suddenly released imagination, I returned such powers of suspension of disbelief as I possessed. I found myself a more zealous believer than I had supposed possible; or perhaps he was a more potent spellbinder. In either case by the eve of the programme belief had driven out irony. I was already encased in his woven cocoon, although I knew it only in single threads and had no idea of its total form. I suppose I had composed it in my own ideal shape, for I responded to Leacock’s constant self assurances that it was ‘as good as he could make it’ by a belief that it was probably perfect. None of the senior staff had been asked to take part on the night; and I found myself childishly envying Rackham who was to make a brief appearance opening a gate—gates in large numbers were to heighten the prison-like image of the Regent’s Park set-up that viewers would absorb.

  When I departed that evening, dispatched early by the Director on the ground that I must be fresh for his finished product, I left behind a mass of cables and cameras and microphones that seemed already to hold in their impersonal womb the foetus of Truth; outside the Zoo I crossed t
he road and at once knew Doubt. This Truth I was so eagerly awaiting was not the child of these careful precise machines; it had been conceived in the reckless, imprecise mind of Dr Leacock. Yet if only to justify my own weeks of zealotry I determined to hold my disbelief suspended. I deserted Martha and the children for the safe inertia of a very hot bath; to avoid the embarrassing faith of Leacock’s naïve family and the deadening sceptimism of the Falcons I insisted that we should arrive at Mrs Leacock’s ‘do’ only a few seconds before the programme began. In fact the lists of technicians’ meaningless names were already slowly pursuing one another off the screen when we tiptoed to our chintz covered seats before the telescreen in the large drawing room of the Director’s London flat.

  I tried to create around myself a desert, in the full knowledge that, on one side of me sat Martha ready to stiffen with boredom, and that, on the other, the Leacock’s eldest, most priggish of sons was already swelling with vicarious importance from the sight of his father’s name in white block capitals. Into this rather self-conscious desert loomed the face of a well known young commentator, eyes a little too saxe blue, mouth a little disconcertingly vermilion.

  He said, “Men have dreamed dreams, strange dreams. Dreams, some of them that have vanished into the limbo of cranky illusion, dreams, others that have changed history, have altered the patterns of what men and women—you and I— think and say and do. In this series we shall try with the aid of all that the modern telescreen can do to give life to some interesting dreams of some interesting and unusual people.”

  As he talked on I felt the bitter testiness of every bureaucrat who sees for a moment the feeble policy to which his hard working accuracy has contributed. Then I heard the voice continue, “The first of these dreamers gives you his dream tonight—Dr Edwin Leacock, Director of the London Zoo.”

  I waited for the well known ugly mug, the strabismic beady eyes to peer at us down the long pointed nose, but instead I saw in quick succession flashes of many English cities, of the congested streets, the overcrowded buses, the lunch-hour restaurants, and then, at a slower tempo, short scenes of life on various social levels in flats, houses, factories, offices, and cafés. The scenes were familiar, the dialogue not new in its evocation of a modern strangled, frustrated existence; yet the total scene produced a most powerful effect of dismal, hopeless claustrophobia. What added to this effect was the total absence of the familiar otiose commentary or musical sequence, only the noises and voices came to us that related to what we saw. All the cloying irrelevance of so much documentary had vanished. I knew now what Leacock’s tussle had been about and I honoured him for his victory. Then came Leacock’s voice.

  “I call that, the death of man’s soul.”

  There was a touch of didactic self satisfaction that inevitably jarred after the excellent pictorial statement, but it was a little palliated though not entirely erased by his adding, “The phrase isn’t new any more than the idea. Lots of people have used it before. I tried to think of a better, simpler one, but I couldn’t find it.”

  Now suddenly we saw photographs of the Zoo—animals, birds, reptiles, fish, even insects, he had managed to direct the camera at all of them so that they were seen cornered, cramped, monotonously pacing backwards and forwards across what seemed minute spaces, flying to the tops of oppressively low cages, swimming in desperate circles, jostling one another at the corners of dwarf rockeries or midget pools. It was grossly unfair and immensely effective. Then followed a sequence of what might have been called a satire on Bobby Falcon’s dream —hideous, tired, Bank Holiday crowds moronically looking through bars at creatures they could hardly discern, creatures as listless, dragging in their steps and whining in their cries as the children that watched them. The total picture was pathetic and funny and also very off-putting; I wondered if perhaps Leacock had overreached himself here, for its caricature quality must surely strike many of the viewers who had visited the Gardens. Finally in this section came Rackham’s little moment. One after another, as the visitors departed, gates clanged to, locks were secured, keys swung from chains, a whole sense of prison house came out of the screen. And suddenly, as night came and the public was gone, animals everywhere began to wake up and cavort in delightful antics, display their intricate lines and gaudy or subtle colours, no longer to live what had seemed to be a feeble, dejected life in anthropomorphoid guise; yet even this life was subtly seen to be less than full by reason of the bars and ditches. It was a distorted picture: some of the less interesting nocturnal creatures like the viscacia were simply not shown, some of the star turns like gibbons that weaved in patterns and howled were as much to be seen by day as by night. Even so there were enough night creatures—owls, flying foxes, aardvarks, bushbabies—to make a substantial claim to truth. Leacock’s voice came, and I dreaded some underlying truism.

  All he said was, “That is Regent’s Park. Since the closing of Whipsnade Park five years ago for reasons of economy the sole place where the truly remarkable collection of animals in the possession of the Zoological Society can be displayed to the public. Those of you who know the Zoo well may think that it is hardly a fair picture. It is not. This is my dream and that is my nightmare. However, on reflection, you may well decide that it is a more meaningful picture than that of the guide books and traditional stories.”

  Now to my surprise there appeared a series of pictures of the former Green Belts around our cities. And then a delightful series of satirically chosen shots of cabinet ministers, speculative builders, estate agents, suburban householders welcoming the final legal abolition of the Green Belt zones in 1967—a wonderful display of greed, philistinism and smug complacency. Especially pleasing was a shot of the Minister of Housing addressing the first group of building labourers to ‘march in’ as ‘our new pioneers, our men of the covered wagon’.

  “That countryside,” said Dr Leacock, “was sacrificed in the name of boom and expansion. Whipsnade Park was abandoned in the name of slump and retrenchment.”

  Now an air survey took us over the British Isles, highlighting its four preserves ‘Zones of Scenic Beauty’—the Scottish Highlands, the Welsh Marches across to Snowdonia, the Northern Marches, and the little Norfolk Sanctuaries.

  “Until last year,” Leacock’s voice now had the denunciatory accents of Jeremiah or Habbakuk, “there was a fifth area of countryside in our land, but Exmoor and Dartmoor have now gone the way of the South Downs. I did not think it necessary to bring to your notice the miraculous housing developments, the grand factory sitings that private enterprise has provided in New Taunton, Exeter West and Plymouth Drakeville. Advertisement has already more than familiarized us with them.”

  It was a momentary flash of his youthful socialism and his voice suggested to me that he had once been a fiercer man less padded with spurious bonhomie. And now we saw flashes from a variety of Brains Trusts and Face to Face interviews covering a large percentage of our better known intellectual and academic personalities. Inconclusively, feebly, desparingly, they discussed or answered questions upon either of the two themes of our deadened soul and our lost countryside. And then Dr Leacock’s voice came through theirs suggesting that perhaps the two subjects were not so separate as they supposed, that perhaps these intellectuals could not answer because the developed intellect had crowded out their senses and their intuition, that perhaps man’s soul could only be healed by replenishing these deeper sources of cognition. And so we came to Leacock’s dream. From the mammal life selected by me, films of marten and badger, wild cat, coypu, red deer, and mole, we passed to avocets, ptarmigans, reed buntings, bitterns and crested grebes; and on through the reptile, insect and fish worlds we surveyed British fauna. Then we saw the wolves and wild boars, the wisents, bears and rebred aurocks, the bustards and storks of historical times. Then Whipsnade and Tring and Woburn were called in to show how wallabies, elands, zebras and gnus could live among us. The diminishing game reserves of Tanganyika and the Dingaan (formerly Kruger) National Park, Tserenge
ti, the reserves of India and Sumatra, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Soviet Arctic Animals Park, the new Jungle Paradiso of the Amazon passed before us—their methods of security, their varying freedoms and the amenities for visitors. We took a look at some of the new vast acred aviaries controlled only by devices of lighting and to insect reserves seen from above through vast magnifiers; we went down in diving bells in the Ocean Parks of the Caribbean and of the Ionian seas.

  “In every part of the world, something is being done to keep man in touch with the life of the instinct,” Leacock told us. “We can’t do all the things you have seen tonight; but we can have our own animal world here among us—smaller or greater, to include more or less. And I make a plea now, an earnest plea that, before it is too late one at least of our four ‘Zones of Scenic Beauty’ be given over to the preservation of wild life, the gradual replacement of Regent’s Park by a free, natural reserve. It can be done now and be within the range of visitors, restricted at first to those who want to train their senses and their instincts, to cultivate the patience, the awareness, and the tranquillity of those who learn to live among wild life.”

  We saw them at work then, myself among them—the naturalists, and the ecologists; and a miraculously sensitive, dedicated yet fulfilled lot we appeared to be. I felt almost embarrassed as I sat in the darkness, for this, in my depths, was how I liked to think of myself. A warmth of affection for Leacock welled up in me, and an extra affection for the fraud in him. He was giving me a chance to help build a Reserve where people who lived for the work that I wanted to live for would have the highest respect. I could happily throw him a conspiratorial wink for this that would make me accomplice to his sketchy science and his even more sketchy administration. Or rather I was happy to work hard to supply what was deficient in his work if I could.