We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals that Changed T Read online

  Copyright © 2008 Benjamin Mee

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher.

  For information address Weinstein Books, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  ISBN: 978-160286-068-1

  First eBook Edition: September 2008

  Contents

  Prologue

  1: In the Beginning . . .

  2: The Adventure Begins

  3: The First Days

  4: The Lean Months

  5: Katherine

  6: The New Crew

  7: The Animals Are Taking Over the Zoo

  8: Spending the Money

  9: Opening Day

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Mum and I arrived as the new owners of Dartmoor Wildlife Park in Devon for the first time 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 standoff in the entryway to 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 between teetering towers of boxes and into the flagstoned kitchen, which was relatively uncluttered and, we thought, could make a good center 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. Some boxes and carpets Duncan had managed to store in the back pantry had just been flooded, so while he unblocked the drain outside I drove to a Chinese takeout I’d spotted on the way from Route 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 place.

  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 flashlight 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 that 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 by flashlight at the base of the structural wooden posts holding up the chain-link fence. 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 maneuvered 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 around our necks. Tigers have special sensors along the front of their two-inch canines that 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, flashed those curved dagger canines, and looked away. We remained impressed.

  We started back toward the house. The wolves began their eery night chorus, accompanied by the sounds of owls—there were about fifteen on site—the odd screech of an eagle, and the nocturnal danger call of the vervet 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. 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.

  1

  In the Beginning . . .

  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 on do-it-yourself home improvement for the weekly newspaper the Guardian, and two others for Grand Designs magazine, and I was also writing a book on humor 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 kernels 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 really beginning to feel like home. Our meager sixty-five square meters of central London had translated into twelve hundred square meters of rural southern France, albeit slightly less well-appointed and not so handy for Marks and Spencer, the South Bank, or the British Museum. But it had a summer that lasted from March to November, and the locally made wine, which sold for £8 in Tesco, a British market, cost three and a half euros at source. Well, you had to take advantage of this—it was part of the local culture. Barbeques of fresh trout and salty sausages from the Cévennes to our north, glasses of chilled rosé with ice that 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 judgmental.

  Katherine, whom I’d married that April after nine years together (I waited until she’d completely given up hope), became the darling of the villa
ge. 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 Advanced Level, to become proficient in local colloquial French, as well as her Parisian French, and the bureau-speak French of the “adminheavy” state. She could josh with the art-gallery owner in the nearby town of Uzes about the exact tax form he had to fill out 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 Ordinary 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-size 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 sublet that was about to triple 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.

  So when Katherine started getting migraines and staring into the middle distance instead of being her usual tornado of office-keeping, packing, sorting, and labeling efficiency, I put it down to stress. “Go to the doctor’s, or go to your parents if you’re not going to be able to help,” I said sympathetically. I should have known it was serious when she cut short a shopping trip (one of her favorite activities) to buy furniture for the children’s room, and we both experienced a frisson of anxiety when she slurred her words in the car on the way back from that trip. But a few phone calls to migraine-suffering friends assured us that this was well within the normal range of symptoms for this often stress-related phenomenon.

  Eventually she went to the doctor and I waited at home for her to return with some migraine-specific pain relief. Instead I got a phone call to say that the doctor wanted her to go for a brain scan, immediately, that night. At this stage I still wasn’t particularly anxious, as the French are renowned hypochondriacs. If you go to the surgery with a runny nose the doctor will prescribe a carrier bag full of pharmaceuticals, usually involving suppositories. A brain scan seemed like a typical French overreaction; inconvenient, but it had to be done.

  Katherine arranged for our friend Georgia to take her to the local hospital about twenty miles away, and I settled down again to wait for her to come back. And then I got the phone call no one ever expects. Georgia, sobbing, telling me it was serious. “They’ve found something,” she kept saying. “You have to come down.” At first I thought it must be a bad joke, but the emotion in her voice was real.

  In a daze I organized a neighbor to look after the children while I borrowed her unbelievably dilapidated Honda Civic and set off on the unfamiliar journey along the dark country roads. With one headlight working, no third or reverse gear, and very poor brakes, I was conscious that it was possible to crash and injure myself badly if I wasn’t careful. I overshot one turn and had to get out and push the car back down the road, but I made it safely to the hospital and abandoned the decrepit vehicle in the empty car park.

  Inside I relieved a tearful Georgia and did my best to reassure a pale and shocked Katherine. I was still hoping that there was some mistake, that there was a simple explanation that had been overlooked and would account for everything. But when I asked to see the scan, there indeed was a golf-ball-size black lump nestling ominously in her left parietal lobe. A long time ago I did a degree in psychology, so the MRI images were not entirely alien to me, and my head reeled as I desperately tried to find some explanation that could account for this anomaly. But there wasn’t one.

  We spent the night at the hospital bucking up each other’s morale. In the morning a helicopter took Katherine to Montpellier, our local (and probably the best) neuro unit in France. After our cozy night together, the reality of seeing her airlifted as an emergency patient to a distant neurological ward hit home, hard. As I chased the copter down the autoroute, the shock really began kicking in. I found my mind was ranging around, trying to get to grips with the situation, so that I could barely make myself concentrate properly on driving. I slowed right down, and arrived an hour later at the car park of the enormous Gui de Chaulliac hospital complex to find there were no spaces. I ended up parking creatively, French style, along a sliver of curb. A porter wagged a disapproving finger at me but I strode past him, by now in an unstoppable frame of mind, desperate to find Katherine. If he’d tried to stop me at that moment I think I would have broken his arm and directed him to X-ray. I was going to Neuro Urgence, fifth floor, and nothing was going to get in my way. It made me appreciate in that instant that you should never underestimate the emotional turmoil of people visiting hospitals. Normal rules did not apply, as my priorities were completely refocused on finding Katherine and understanding what was going to happen next. I found Katherine sitting up on a trolley bed, dressed in a yellow hospital gown, looking bewildered and confused. She looked so vulnerable but noble, stoically cooperating with whatever was asked of her. Eventually we were told that an operation was scheduled in a few days’ time, during which high doses of steroids would reduce the inflammation around the tumor so that it could be taken out more easily.

  Watching her being wheeled around the corridors, sitting up in her backless gown, looking around with quiet, confused dignity, was probably the worst time. The logistics were over, we were in the right place, the children were being taken care of, and now we had to wait for three days and adjust to this new reality. I spent most of that time at the hospital with Katherine or on the phone in the lobby dropping the bombshell on friends and family. The phone calls all took a similar shape: breezy disbelief, followed by shock and often tears. After three days I was an old hand, and guided people through their stages as I broke the news.

  Finally Friday arrived, and Katherine was prepared for the operation. I was allowed to accompany her to a waiting area outside the operating room. Typically French, it was beautiful, with sunlight streaming into a modern atrium planted with trees whose red and brown leaves picked up the light and shone like stained glass. There was not much we could say to each other, and I kissed her goodbye not really knowing whether I would see her again, or if I did, how badly she might be affected by the operation.

  At the last minute I asked the surgeon if I could watch the procedure. As a former health writer I had been in operating rooms before, and I just wanted to understand exactly what was happening to her. Far from being perplexed, the doctor, one of the best neurosurgeons in France, was delighted. I am reasonably convinced that he had high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome. For the first, and last, time in our conversation, he looked me in the eye and smiled, as if to say, “So you like tumors too?” and excitedly introduced me to his team. The anaesthetist was much less impressed with the idea and looked visibly alarmed, so I immediately backed out, as I didn’t want anyone involved under performing for any reason. The surgeon’s shoulders slumped and he resumed his unsmiling efficiency.

  In fact the operation was a complete success, and when I found Katherine in the intensive care unit a few hours later, she was conscious and smiling. But the surgeon told me immediately afterward that he hadn’t liked the look of the tissue he’d removed. “It will come back,” he warned. By then I was so relieved that she’d simply survived the operation that I let this information sit at the back of my head while I dealt with the aftermath of family, c
hemotherapy, and radiotherapy for Katherine.

  Katherine received visitors, including the children, on the immaculate lawns studded with palm and pine trees outside her ward building—at first in a wheelchair, but then perched on the grass in dappled sunshine, her head bandages wrapped in a muted silk scarf, looking as beautiful and relaxed as ever, like the hostess of a rolling picnic. Our good friends Phil and Karen were holidaying in Bergerac, a seven-hour drive to the north, but they made the trip down to see us and it was very emotional to see our children playing with theirs as if nothing was happening in these otherwise idyllic surroundings.

  After we spent a few numbing days on the Internet, the inevitability of the tumor’s return was clear. The British and the American Medical Associations, every global cancer research organization, and indeed every other organization I contacted, had the same message for someone with a diagnosis of a grade 4 glioblastoma: “I’m so sorry.”

  I trawled my health contacts for good news about Katherine’s condition that hadn’t yet made the literature, but there wasn’t any. Median survival—the most statistically frequent survival time— was nine to ten months from diagnosis. The average was slightly different, but 50 percent survived one year, and 3 percent of people diagnosed with grade 4 tumors were alive after three years. It wasn’t looking good. This was heavy information, particularly as Katherine was bouncing back so well from her craniotomy to remove the tumor (given a rare 100 percent excision rating), and the excellent French medical system was fast-forwarding her on to its state-of-the-art radiotherapy and chemotherapy programs. The people who survived the longest with this condition were young, healthy women with active minds—Katherine to a tee. And despite the doom and gloom, there were several promising avenues of research, which could possibly come online within the time frame of a recurrence.