ZOO QUEST

The zoo was busy. It was the school holidays. Thousands of grubby young children sucked ice-creams and swarmed around their irritable parents’ feet, screaming and shouting ‘gimme’. I’d never been to a zoo before. I didn’t know what to expect. Rain was imminent, heavy in the air.

I met my old friends in the members’ restaurant. They hadn’t aged a bit. One had felt sufficiently confident to wear a cream-coloured safari suit, but without a pith helmet. He looked like District Officer Hedley from Daktari. I wondered if the lion here was cross-eyed. We ate lunch. I was pleased that none of the zoo animals were on the menu. I had quite expected to see penguin soup followed by fricassee of ring-tailed lemur, but instead, I ate good old steak and ale pie.

We ventured out, replete. It started raining. Someone had given me a map. The map showed no gradients. The zoo seemed to have been built on the lee side of the Lickey Incline. The less fit of the party soon puffed, panted and gasped out for more of the moisture-laden air. We walked into the monkey house and saw the cappuchine monkeys, cute little things with tiny humanoid faces, button noses and prehensile tails. They slept precariously on windowsills and ate pieces of apple daintily and pensively, with their pinkies raised. A research student sat cross-legged on the floor with a microphone, recording their conversations, which ran along the lines of “Look at that idiot with a microphone,” followed by a few bars of “Camptown Races.”

We walked on. A peculiar striped deer with long horns stared over at us. It looked as if it had been assembled from spare parts. It was called a bongo. I knew that an LNER B1 steam locomotive had been named ‘bongo’ and others such as ‘nilghai’ and ‘reedbuck’ were also named after antelopes, so the bongo must have been an antelope. I thought the name ‘bongo’ was much more appropriate.

We caught sight of European otters grooming each other with delicate and loving movements. We were privileged to see these creatures, who looked as though they had been manufactured from fish oil and liquid graphite, so shiny were they, because they were classed as ‘shy and retiring’. I thought that there was not much point in having them on public display, then.

In fact, we discovered that most of the animals were of a shy and retiring disposition that day and had retired to their drawing rooms. The leopards were conspicuous by their absence, the red river hog was on leave, the cassowary had vanished, and of the Varsayan warty pigs I saw not a sign. I stared in vain for my first glimpse of a hyrax, which sounded like a throat condition, but he was resting. The wolverine was described as being ‘desperately shy, but you might see one in the top right-hand corner’, like the interactive red spot on a sky television. There was no red spot. The giant ant-eater was slumbering with a tummy full of ants, and his next-door neighbour, the maned wolf, was also taking a post-prandial doze. Lastly, to my great disappointment, the rhinoceros had taken the huff and was in hiding. I did get a view of a giant blue ball that hung suspended from a gibbet in his enclosure, with which he presumably practiced swordsmanship with his horn, unless it was for heading practice. To compensate, in the round, I saw plenty of dead tree-trunks, weeds and my reflection in the windows.

The Addax was in situ, however, his name reminding me of an upmarket carpet-sweeper. He was a strange looking creature, an antelope with thin corkscrew horns, the main purpose of which seemed to be to prod his neighbour in his fleshy, yielding flank in order merely to annoy him. I wondered what the plural of Addax was – ‘Addaxes?’’Addaces?” “Addaxi?”

We saw a tiger, and he was simply magnificent. I once had a pair of pyjamas like that. The Jaguar, too, uncomfortably asleep longways on a branch showed us his handsome cat’s face and his magnificent black-on-black spots. Then there was Reggie Perrin’s mother-in-law, the Pygmy Hippopotamus, high-stepping around his enclosure, skin glistening in such a way as to suggest he’d been cast in bronze.

The most bizarre sight of all was the goose-stepping honey badger in his SS uniform, turning abruptly on his heel every dozen paces and commencing the whole extravagant military sideshow again. Finally, we took in the chimpanzees, our nearest antecedents, who were cavorting about on dead tree-trunks and leaping from breeches buoys slung from the roof of their brand-new enclosure. They had mischief on their mind. “How do you stop them from being bored?” a woman in a pink chemise asked the zoo girl. She thought for a little while and replied “We feed them from a different place every day.” Pink chemise nodded. The irony was lost on her.

The last place we visited was the penguin enclosure. Those waddling and endearing creatures stank to high heaven and laid out enough guano to render the walls of a decent-sized factory. Under the water, they were transformed into efficient, fish-catching submarines. On land, they looked like an ancient and arthritic Charlie Chaplin in frogmans' flippers. A notice on the wall said they could hold their breath under water for 18 minutes. I tried it in the bath that night and came up 17 1/2 minutes short. That just goes to prove my theory that animals do things that they are good at better than humans. All we can do is wage war and build spreadsheets. Oh, and kill animals, of course.

All too soon the afternoon had melted away and it was time to say goodbye to the animals and also my old friends. As I left the main gate I thought sadly about one isolated little monkey I had seen looking absolutely crestfallen and dejected, staring out into the middle distance from his perch and shivering slightly every few seconds. My attention had been drawn to a notice attached to the window, above his head, which read, simply, “This monkey is sick. He is in quarantine. We are doing our best to help him.” He looked so forlorn, without a friend or a kind word in the world. I swept a raindrop out of my eye with my right forefinger. “Blasted rain”, I said, as I walked back to my car.