The Old Men at the Zoo

by Angus Wilson

  “He’s an extraordinarily honourable man,” I said.

  It was a juggling use of the word, but, after all, I had as much right to try to poise someone on a pedestal as Leacock had.

  My pedestal crashed very soon after. Leacock, only too willing to leave the Curators behind, was determined to have his full share of head keepers to do the work for him. As yet only ‘Mammals’ and ‘Birds’ were much involved. It was proposed to offer their head keepers a house and an increase in salary to encourage them to leave London. When I realized that this meant the confluence of Strawson and Filson in the remote countryside, I protested vigorously to the Director; I told him of Filson’s declared hatred for Strawson. But I chose the wrong moment. Excitement, anxiety, unfamiliarity with such hard work, and doubt had already made Leacock’s temper very uncertain. Was it guilt that now toppled it over the edge?

  He turned on me savagely, “If you have to gossip with every underling in the place,” he shouted, “I’d be obliged if you’d keep your findings to yourself. I’ve heard about as much as I can take of your sickening moralizing about that wretched Filson business.”

  “You’d have heard a great deal more,” I shouted back, “if I hadn’t been forced to consider the feelings of the underlings you despise so much. Yes, and your own.”

  We stood, our faces red, our bodies shaking, facing each other across his desk. I think that anger had loosed in each of us the clamped suspicion that the other was taking him for a ride. Then we realized that the journey had already begun, it was too late to climb out.

  Leacock said, “My dear Carter, you don’t suppose I’m going to force either of these men to go down there. And if they do agree, I shall bear in mind what you’ve told me. Whatever my faults, I’m not an inhuman man, you know.”

  It wasn’t entirely the point at issue, but it sufficed to let us out of the quarrel.

  Strawson agreed to go down for a trial period. If after six months, he liked it, his wife would put a manageress into her shop and join him.

  “I wish she could give up now, Sir,” he said to Leacock, “but, as Mr Carter knows, a lot of us find a little help towards the Society’s wages no bad thing.”

  I truly believe that he chose to go to Stretton, when he knew that I should be mainly in London. Filson was a little more concerned—they were old, there was his wife’s house, he would like time to think it over. Later that afternoon Matthew appeared in the Director’s Room where we were busy comparing railway and air estimates for transportation of the wolves and jackals. I thought he had come to gossip with me, but he addressed Leacock in a purring drawl.

  “Oh, it’s just to say that Filson’s decided to go to Stretton. I’ve got a letter here from him confirming it. I thought that best.”

  Leacock said, “Well, that’s excellent news, Price. He seemed very doubtful this morning.”

  “Oh, well, he’s one of the old school. He didn’t like to act without consulting me.”

  “Well, I’m very grateful to you for agreeing to let him go.”

  Amazed, I said aside to Matthew, “How on earth will you manage without Filson?”

  He looked annoyed. “Perfectly well, thank you, Simon. I think he could do with a change of scene after that business with his son.” He looked at me challengingly, “And then quite frankly it’s a crashing bore for me to hear about it all the time.”

  When Matthew had gone the Director gave me a frank apology. “You’re perfectly right about Price, Carter. He’s not a Langley-Beard of course. But he’s a very good chap. And he’s got a deal of horse sense under that airy fairy manner.”

  With this I agreed. Sanderson, I regret to say, showed qualities the Director admired less. Since no entomological collections were as yet to be included in the National Reserve, Leacock was almost disposed to leave him out of the interviews; I persuaded him that this would be unnecessarily wounding, tedious though the old man might be. Yet when Sanderson appeared, he seemed quite uninterested in all that the Director had to say. Future hopes for careful controlled displays of agricultural pests, for observations of insect life under magnified conditions, of butterfly gardens in summer, and for special crepuscular displays of moths, brought only the most perfunctorily characteristic comments from him.

  “Yes, that’s very fine,” he said. “It’s a wonderful conception. My dear friend, you’ve got the creative gift.”

  Only as he was leaving did he turn, and, his plump cheeks pink below the blank circles of his glasses, ask in a trembling voice,

  “Is it true what they say, Leacock, that you intend to desert the old place altogether in the end?”

  Leacock came out of the entomological spins he had been weaving with a nasty bump.

  He said, “We can’t predict the future, Sanderson. I think it more than probable that this sort of menagerie will become obsolete. Probably in our life time if you want my candid opinion.”

  Sanderson walked back towards the Director’s desk.

  “It’s absolutely damnable,” he said, “absolutely damnable. There are hundreds of old people and poor people for whom this place is a second home. And lonely people too. People who don’t find it easy to make contact with other human beings, but who have found friends among the birds and animals. And you propose to cut them off from the source of their living.”

  Leacock was amazed.

  He said, “Come, Sanderson, there are thousands of people, you know, who never get near Regent’s Park and who may find it easier, not to say more satisfying, to see the animal world in greater freedom.”

  Sanderson considered for a moment, then he announced,

  “Yes, that may be so, but I don’t know them. I do know the people who come here.”

  He went out of the room at a slow, sad pace. Leacock was disgusted.

  “Making every allowance, you know, Carter, there’s no doubt that he’s impossible. Thank God, he’s only got two more years to go.”

  The most discouraging reaction, however, came from Harry Jackley, the Curator of the Aquarium. Godmanchester already had a small freshwater aquarium at Stretton, it was proposed to enlarge it with additional species from Regent’s Park. Leacock was all for doing this without consultation. He poohpoohed my insistence that to antagonize Jackley would be to antagonize the younger generation of the staff and to jeopardize the future of the Reserve.

  “There’ll always be a younger generation who don’t like what’s being done because they aren’t doing it. You’re too easily influenced, Carter.”

  However, we wrote to Jackley in New Guinea where he was collecting, only to learn that he was on his way home—-they understood he was stopping off in Bahrein to see if he could replace the two dugongs that had recently died.

  “Good God!” Leacock cried. “Why on earth can’t Falcon manage his own mammals?”

  It was not the time to remind him of mammalia that needed aquarium conditions. I was forced to agree that, as deputy for Jackley, Leacock should go ahead with his own schemes. It was on a very hot August i zth, I remember, that I sat, looking for a moment at Mrs Purrett’s copy of Lord Godmanchester’s chief daily. The Prime Minister, it seemed, and the paper suggested how irresponsible it was, felt happy enough with the state of world affairs to be shooting grouse. The telephone rang, it was Mrs Leacock to say that Dr Leacock would not be in until late that afternoon, he had been called away on family business. I cursed his guts, for we were desperately busy. Yet when he turned up at five o’clock, he looked so tired and old that I felt sorry for him. He began mechanically to deal with the questions I put before him, then he suddenly broke off.

  He said, “I’m sorry to have left you to all this work today, Carter. However, perhaps what I’ve been engaged on is not so different from my aim of doing away with the old Zoos with bars. I’ve been saving my daughter Harriet from being sent to prison. Apparently her tastes now lead her exclusively to associate with the criminal classes. Only the employment of a first-rate counsel saved her from a conviction on a c
harge of receiving. Receiving of all things! I don’t know of any other time when she has failed to spend. But still, to be perfectly honest I’d have let her take her chance. After all there are open prisons nowadays. But Mrs Leacock felt differently. So we’ve accepted the stipulation that she should live with us down at Stretton. It should be most pleasant for all of us. Limited liberty, you know!”

  He paused, and when he spoke again it was with less bitterness.

  “Nobody,” he said, “is going to turn this dream of mine into a nightmare. That I’m determined on.”

  As he spoke Rackham came in and handed Leacock a cablegram. Leacock read it and passed it to me.

  “REFERENCE YOUR LETTER AUGUST 6TH THE ANSWER IS NO, JACKLEY.”

  I bit Pattie Henderson’s head off two days later when she telephoned to me.

  “Isn’t it splendid,” she asked, “about Jackley’s cable? Simply ‘no’. Newton and Nutting have just told me about it. Of course it’s the only answer to give to all this time wasting nonsense.”

  On August 20th Dr and Mrs Leacock and their daughter Harriet left London to take up residence at Merritts Farm, a large eighteenth century red brick house on Lord God-manchester’s estate, only a mile from the Stretton Private Zoo.

  “From now on,” Dr Leacock said to me as he left, “you’ll be my link with the past.”

  The equinoctial winds blew fiercely that autumn. After the stuffiness of my office and more still the numbing sense of never-ending, self-renewing, detailed work, their freshness would have been welcome to me, but the railway detective and the guard obviously felt otherwise. The guard had been stoking up the small stove in the centre of the brake van ever since we left Paddington, and by now the air was stale and stifling. Yet from crevices and doors freezing draughts sped down my back and crept round my ankles. I sat on my air cushion on the minute wooden seat that was hinged to the wall of the van; I clutched the thermos of rum and coke that Martha had made up for me; and I dozed on and off as it seemed for hours. It was the third journey I had made since a fortnight earlier the escape of a skunk had led the Railway authorities to insist on the presence of a senior officer with every trainload of beasts. They agreed that it was a futile precaution, but it satisfied the insurance law. Apart from my illness in Africa I had not been used to much discomfort in my life; I had never known insomnia. But now I sat shivering through the night, so sleepy that at short intervals the guard and the detective and the fug and the red glow would swim in front of me, revolve rapidly and turn to some nightmare in which a hundred voices and faces that I knew, seemed to be chivvying me; and this dream in turn would dissolve and, with a crack that seemed to tear my head apart, I should be woken again by a whistle or a sudden jolt. Through it all, through all my tired, muddled and anxious thoughts, went the low, steady drone of the two men’s conversation, only on occasion breaking into my exhaustion with a sudden chance flow of meaningless words. I smiled at them now and again to palliate, if I could, whatever might seem snobbish or frightened or morose in my silence. But after my first two trips I had decided to give myself the luxury and them the peace of not attempting to make conversation.

  That evening, however, though I felt tired and jumpy, the whole scene seemed to flow over me. Tomorrow I was to begin a five day stay at Stretton. Five days without any office work. Five days to see what Leacock’s new found energy and determination had created for the grand opening next spring. The Exotic Park with its prairie herds of zebra and hartebeest, eland and giraffe, I had already travelled through in one of the Society’s buses; it had promise, but would always be only a glimpse of what the richer or more leisured or more interested could see in a visit to Africa. Behind this, stretches of pine forest provided the Historic British Reserve soon to be closed to all but the guided and the armed; for here in ten years we hoped for increase of deer that would maintain carefully limited packs of wolves and in the mountains that stretched beyond into Wales, golden eagles and the brown bear. Here already in patches of brown scrub great bustards roamed, and in the forest, wild boar were finding cover. But it was in the deciduous woods and chalky downland that I hoped to find the end to the bifurcation of my life; for eventually I was not only to be Administrative Secretary of the whole Reserve but also Warden of this region of fox and badger and marten—the British Reserve. There, in company with other selected naturalists, I should pursue the pleasure of my life, but free from conscience because I should also be giving the Society my cursed administrative skill. The good and the bad fairies at my cradle had embarrassingly both provided themselves with the same gift—a power to make patterns out of muddled details; they had squabbled over this social gaffe ever since; perhaps now they would be appeased. Then Martha could see me do what she knew I wanted to do and I could know myself to be doing my duty. I now knew that the success of Leacock’s scheme was as crucial for me as for him. Yet my cautious nature still only allowed me timidly to hope and plan for a future that Leacock’s stout, absurd and scheming, egoistic dreamer’s heart already declared to be a reality.

  It was easier, of course, for him than for me. He had made Stretton a Castle Faithful where treacherous voices of doubt were instantly silenced, where only Godmanchester, in his rare appearances from the London political waters in which he was still angling, talked of ‘evacuation’ rather than ‘foundation’. At Regent’s Park all was quite different. With Leacock gone, it had amazed me how quickly war had become the general topic of the day among the staff, when everywhere else in the country, save in Godmanchester’s unreliable ‘rags’ the Advertiser and the Globe, the sunny mood of Innsbruck, the Prime Minister’s slogan ‘Dover and over, not Dover and under’ reigned in happy, peaceful sloth.

  I sat that evening on the little seat trying to adjust myself to the rhythm of the guard’s van, yet every so often it jolted and shook violently. I summoned up the country scene that awaited me at Stretton—underfoot the beech leaf mould, hanging above the graceful snake head buds like paint brushes dipped in water; the sudden flashes of jayblue or pigeon opal— but the idyllic vision was constantly shattered by memories of Rackham’s persistent war chatter, of Bobby’s increasingly carefree last trump laughter, of Englander’s canny estimates of this and that blast proof material. In vain I assured their haunting voices as I had their solid presences that this was a great beginning, not a melancholy, long expected ending. As an inspirer of confidence, I was, as Jane Falcon would have said, ‘acting against the grain’. She would never have cast me for the role. Yet, just as by persevering in my vision of the Stretton countryside I was able to endure the fug of the van, so by hoping against hope that Leacock’s scheme was a reality, I had been able to support the tedium, the three men’s work, the petty squabbles and the sea of papers that nowadays filled my office. I had even found some balance on the crazy seesaw of evacuation-foundation which Godmanchester had offered us; and, believing that Godmanchester’s fears were justified, could carry out the evacuation single handed. But, as constant icy draughts made the van’s inferno almost intolerable, so the chilling winds of my doubts half-spoken in the interview with Leacock and Godmanchester returned again and again to make my work days at Regent’s Park seem meaningless. Why, whenever I heard that our President had been pottering or mooching in the Gardens, did it always seem that yet another member of the staff had become assured- that the National Reserve scheme was a cover for evacuation? Why did poor Mrs Purrett, alarmed for her ageing mother in London, assure me that a secret with her was as safe as with the Bank of England? Why did Matthew become a model of soldierly discretion, assuring me that he knew how important it was that the rank and file shouldn’t panic? If Godmanchester was so gaga that he blabbed like this, then our prospects were alarming. If, as I believed, he was not, what was his motive in telling all and sundry what he had so solemnly asserted was only for Leacock and me? The answer I hazarded, to this question was cynical, intuitive and malicious; it had been met already by his almost direct negative. I could not voice it to anyone
. Least of all to Martha. With her I had to hide even Godmanchester’s prediction of war, until I had decided whether I credited that enough to tear her out of her present happy calm.

  Yet I almost forgot my anxieties, grievances and discomforts when we arrived at Stretton. There on the platform stood Edwin Leacock ready to receive me. A regenerated old man is a sight to banish self-pity. He was always bouncy in his movements, springy in his gestures, of course; but, as I had known him, the vigour had been curiously wooden, the ebullience forced and impaired by a certain shiftiness. Now, with a change from the not very good formal suit which marked in his eyes the man at the top to an old man’s grey flannel trousers and sports coat, he seemed suddenly fifteen years younger, more honest, more likeable. Filson and Strawson, out of uniform until we opened to the public, were on each side of him. A group of young keepers and labourers stood by. It was the very picture of some inspiring, able colonel-archaeologist with his assistants at a dig.

  With confidence and happiness Leacock had also acquired consideration.

  “I’ll take on from now, Carter,” he said. “You go and have a sleep. And then you can tell me what you think of everything.”

  He summoned one of Godmanchester’s chauffeurs to take me to a waiting Bentley. It was evident that his command extended over more than the Zoo staffs. As I left him he was briskly and jovially giving orders, checking railway clearance sheets, even giving a hand to move some of the crates of porcupines. Speeding across a lush countryside of rolling farmland and oak filled parks, I saw in the distance the hills and forests of our National Park. I thought of the leisure of the next few days and moulded my aching limbs into the soft upholstery of the car. This, at last, was the holiday I had hoped for before Godmanchester’s offer; and, since it gave hope of such happiness to come, I was able to accept even the absence of Mania and the children that would otherwise have marred it. Able? Perhaps willing.

  Before sleep I had breakfast in the little inn parlour that was to be mine for the week.