We Bought a Zoo

We Bought a Zoo
Benjamin Mee

Chuck it all in and buy a zoo? Why not? thought Benjamin Mee, unaware of the grim living conditions, creditors and escaped big cat that lay in wait…A few years ago, Ben and his wife, Katherine, sold their small flat in Primrose Hill and moved to France to pursue their dream of restoring an old barn near Nimes.That dream then became much, much bigger for, last October, they moved with their two young children, Ben’s 76 year-old mother and his brother, into a run-down zoo on the edge of Dartmoor which they had bought, and found themselves responsible for 200 animals including four huge tigers, lions, pumas, three massive bears, a tapir and a wolf pack.Ben's new extended family now included: Solomon, an African lion and scourge of the local golf course; Zak, the rickety Alpha wolf, a broadly benevolent dictator clinging to power; Ronnie, a Brazilian tapir, easily capable of killing a man, but hopelessly soppy; and Sovereign, a jaguar who is also a would-be ninja, and has devised a long term escape plan and implemented it.But tragedy was to strike for, in the midst of dealing with escaping wolves and jaguars, and troublesome adolescent vervet monkeys, Katherine, who had developed, and had removed, a brain tumour while in France, began to experience symptoms again. The prognosis was poor, and so Ben found himself juggling the complexities of managing the zoo and getting it ready for re-opening, and at the same time having to care for his rapidly deteriorating wife, their two young children, and their ever growing menagerie of animals.Ben's story will both move and entertain – charting, simultaneously, the family's attempts to improve the animals’ lives, the build-up to the Zoo’s official reopening, as well as Katherine’s decline, her final days, and how the family went on.

We Bought a Zoo

BENJAMIN MEE

The amazing true story of a broken-down zoo,

and the 200 animals that changed a family forever

Copyright (#uc4429c63-23ed-5267-92b4-4d12985d3019)

HarperNonFiction

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008

© Benjamin Mee 2008

Benjamin Mee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007274864

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007283767

Version: 2017-05-16

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page (#u5c82b09d-7e51-5403-91f4-e81244a84c49)

Copyright (#u7fd4db79-b872-5980-9cf9-a76d0bf9c890)

Prologue (#u2c55c812-ffbb-5bcb-a457-36b1d15e5aed)

1 In the Beginning … (#u2dbb22b0-0678-5cfa-8e73-2bd0e7e3a789)

2 The Adventure Begins (#u85fe6ca5-b7d3-5482-99a2-0da86153b4c9)

3 The First Days (#u2c117627-2700-5690-aff2-a0c8861c10e9)

4 The Lean Months (#litres_trial_promo)

5 Katherine (#litres_trial_promo)

6 The New Crew (#litres_trial_promo)

7 The Animals are Taking Over the Zoo (#litres_trial_promo)

8 Spending the Money (#litres_trial_promo)

9 Opening Day (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue (#uc4429c63-23ed-5267-92b4-4d12985d3019)

Mum and I arrived at Dartmoor Wildlife Park in Devon for the first time as the new owners at around six o’clock on the evening of 20 October 2006, and stepped out of the car to the sound of wolves howling in the misty darkness. My brother Duncan had turned on every light in the house to welcome us, and each window beamed the message into the fog as he emerged from the front door to give me a bone-crushing bear hug. He was more gentle with mum. We had been delayed for an extra day in Leicester with the lawyers, as some last-minute paperwork failed to arrive in time and had to be sent up the M1 on a motorbike. Duncan had masterminded the movement of all mum’s furniture from Surrey in three vans, with eight men who had another job to go to the next day. The delay had meant a fraught stand-off on the drive of the park, with the previous owner’s lawyer eventually conceding that Duncan could unload the vans, but only into two rooms (one of them the fetid front kitchen) until the paperwork was completed.

So the three of us picked our way in wonderment through teetering towers of boxes, and into the flag-stoned kitchen, which was relatively uncluttered and we thought could make a good centre of operations. A huge old trestle table I had been hoarding in my parents’ garage for twenty years finally came into its own, and was erected in a room suited to its size. It’s still there as our dining-room table, but on this first night its symbolic value was immense. The back pantry had just flooded onto some boxes and carpets Duncan had managed to store there, so while he unblocked the drain outside I drove to a Chinese takeaway I’d spotted on the way from the A38, and we sat down to our first meal together in our new home. Our spirits were slightly shaky but elated and we laughed a lot in this cold dark chaotic house on that first night, and took inordinate comfort from the fact that at least we lived near a good Chinese.

That night, with mum safely in bed, Duncan and I stepped out into the misty park to try to get a grip on what we’d done. Everywhere the torch shone, eyes of different sizes blinked back at us, and without a clear idea of the layout of the park at this stage, the mystery of exactly what animals lurked behind them added greatly to the atmosphere. We knew where the tigers were, however, and made our way over to one of the enclosures which had been earmarked for replacement posts, to get a close look at what sort of deterioration we were up against. With no tigers in sight, we climbed over the stand-off barrier and began peering at the base of the structural wooden posts holding up the chain link fence by torchlight. We squatted down and became engrossed, prodding and scraping at the surface layers of rotted wood to find the harder core, in this instance, reassuringly near the surface. We decided it wasn’t so bad, but as we stood up were startled to see that all three tigers in the enclosure were now only a couple of feet away from where we were standing, ready to spring, staring intently at us. Like we were dinner.

It was fantastic. All three beasts – and they were such glorious beasts – had manoeuvred to within pawing distance of us without either of us noticing. Each animal was bigger than both of us put together, yet they’d moved silently. If this had been the jungle or, more accurately in this case, the Siberian Tundra, the first thing we’d have known about it would have been a large mouth round our necks. Tigers have special sensors along the front of their two-inch canines which can detect the pulse in your aorta. The first bite is to grab, then they take your pulse with their teeth, reposition them, and sink them in. As they held us in their icy glares, we were impressed. Eventually, one of these vast, muscular cats, acknowledging that, due to circumstances beyond their control (i.e. the fence between us), this had been a mere dress rehearsal, yawned, flashing those curved dagger canines, and looked away. We remained impressed.

As we walked back to the house, the wolves began their fraught night chorus, accompanied by the sound of owls – there were about 15 on site – the odd screech of an eagle, and the nocturnal danger call of the ververt monkeys as we walked past their cage. This was what it was all about, we felt. All we had to do now was work out what to do next.

It had been an incredible journey to get there. Though a new beginning, it also marked the end of a long and tortuous road, involving our whole family. My own part of the story starts in France.

Chapter One (#uc4429c63-23ed-5267-92b4-4d12985d3019)

In the Beginning … (#uc4429c63-23ed-5267-92b4-4d12985d3019)

L’Ancienne Bergerie, June 2004, and life was good. My wife Katherine and I had just made the final commitment to our new life by selling our London flat and buying two gorgeous golden-stone barns in the heat of the south of France, where we were living on baguettes, cheese and wine. The village we had settled into nestled between Nîmes and Avignon in Languedoc, the poor man’s Provence, an area with the lowest rainfall in the whole of France. I was writing a column for the Guardian on DIY, and two others in GrandDesigns magazine, and I was also writing a book on humour in animals, a long-cherished project which, I found, required a lot of time in a conducive environment. And this was it.

Our two children, Ella and Milo, bilingual and sun burnished, frolicked with kittens in the safety of a large walled garden, chasing enormous grasshoppers together, pouncing amongst the long parched grass and seams of wheat, probably seeded from corn spilled from trailers when the barns were part of a working farm. Our huge dog Leon lay across the threshold of vast rusty gates, watching over us with the benign vigilance of an animal bred specifically for the purpose, panting happily in his work.

It was great. It was really beginning to feel like home. Our meagre 65 square metres of central London had translated into 1200 square metres of rural southern France, albeit slightly less well appointed and not so handy for Marks & Spencer, the South Bank, or the British Museum. But it had a summer which lasted from March to November, and locally grown wine which sells for £8 in Tesco cost three and a half euros at source. Well you had to, it was part of the local culture. Barbeques of fresh trout and salty sausages from the Cévennes mountains to our north, glasses of chilled rosé with ice which quickly melted in the heavy southern European heat. It was idyllic.

This perfect environment was achieved after about ten years of wriggling into the position, professionally and financially, where I could just afford to live like a peasant in a derelict barn in a village full of other much more wholesome peasants earning a living through honest farming. I was the mad Englishman; they were the slightly bemused French country folk, tolerant, kind, courteous, and yet inevitably hugely judgemental.

Katherine, whom I’d married that April after nine years together (I waited until she’d completely given up hope), was the darling of the village. Beautiful and thoughtful, polite, kind and gracious, she made a real effort to engage with and fit into village life. She actively learned the language, which she’d already studied at A level, to become proficient in local colloquial French, as well as her Parisian French, and the bureau-speak French of the admin-heavy state. She could josh with the art-gallery owner in the nearby town of Uzès about the exact tax form he had to fill in to acquire a sculpture by Elisabeth Frink – whom she also happened to have once met and interviewed – and complain with the best of the village mums about the complexities of the French medical system. My French, on the other hand, already at O-level grade D, probably made it to C while I was there, as I actively tried to block my mind from learning it in case it somehow further impeded the delivery of my already late book. I went to bed just as the farmers got up, and rarely interacted unless to trouble them for some badly expressed elementary questions about DIY. They preferred her.

But this idyll was not achieved without some cost. We had to sell our cherished shoebox-sized flat in London in order to buy our two beautiful barns, totally derelict, with floors of mud trampled with sheep dung. Without water or electricity we couldn’t move in straight away, so in the week we exchanged contracts internationally, we also moved locally within the village, from a rather lovely natural-stone summer let which was about to treble in price as the season began, to a far less desirable property on the main road through the village. This had no furniture and neither did we, having come to France nearly two years before with the intention of staying for six months. It would be fair to say that this was a stressful time.