the day after opening, a sunday, was also a scorcher,and more people came. again we were flooded withvisitors, awash with praise, and nothing went wrong. it wasastonishing. it was a weekend, of course, but before theschool holidays had begun this could only be considered agood turnout. now all we needed was a summer full of suchdays, and the seamless plan would glide effortlessly intothe future.
unfortunately, after our wettest june, we thenexperienced the wettest july for a hundred years as well.
but on the good days, it was unbelievably good. peopleflocked to the park, spending the whole day here, buyingstuff, having a nice time. and learning about animals andconservation, and experiencing the natural world fromcloser up than most had ever seen it before. this was amassive, unexpected pleasure. i loved seeing the peopleswarm over the park, enjoying themselves, enthralled by theanimals. it is uniquely infectious being amongst a crowd ofpeople who are so clearly having such a good time, andknowing that you have in part been able to provide it.
seeing the animals i had become accustomed to—thoughnot blasé about—through new eyes, particularly those ofchildren, was enormously refreshing.
the animals liked having the public there too. a lot ofvisitors say that they like the intimacy of this zoo, where youcan get much closer to the animals than is usual. this is notbecause the enclosures are small—many are far largerthan those of bigger zoos. we just have fewer of them, andseveral are designed, like tiger mountain and the jaguarand bear enclosures, so that there is no wire betweenviewer and beast. this creates an intimate—and oftenspine-tingling, hairs-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck—experience, which seems to work two ways. on thatopening weekend, the animals were out and about muchmore than before. the tigers and the wolves in particularwere clearly showboating. of course, having been born onsite, they were used to crowds (though not so many inrecent years), and seeing people milling around restoredtheir normality. it was good to see them sniffing the air,taking it all in, and settling down somewhere conspicuousto watch us watching them.
august was less wet, almost like a proper summermonth, and packed with busy days, many of them breakingrecords set the previous week. on august bank holiday wehad nearly twice the number of visitors as on our openingday itself—according to robin, who has been here fornearly twenty years—as busy as any day he had ever seen.
other good news was the arrival of the lynx from france.
we had been trusted by another zoo to look after agorgeous, young siberian lynx, on the stud book and readyto breed. we would need to build her an enclosure, but inthe meantime she could go into quarantine in the enclosuresovereign had vacated when he went back to hisrevamped home at the top of the park. (sovereign’s oldpad had been passed by defra as suitable for thispurpose.)the lynx was gorgeous, so much more sleek and lithethan the elderly lynx, fin, we already had, for whom she wasto be a companion when she finished her quarantine,though obviously she was a bit tense at the unfamiliarity ofher surroundings. she was deposited successfully into thequarantine pen, which we were confident she could notescape from; if sovereign couldn’t get out, no one could.
and i hardly saw her for the next six months, partly becauseshe was a bit shy, but also because it was a nuisance tonegotiate the gates and footbaths necessary to maintainthe quarantine.
the rest of the summer passed in a blur, up early, bedlate, a blizzard of meetings and decisions in between, butall moving in the right direction. one slightly sad adjustmentfor me was that, shortly after opening day, the camera crew,having got what they needed for their four-part series,packed up and left. as a journalist i had got on well with thecrew, and the core group— francis the producer, joyce,max, charlie, and trevor—had been embedded with us forso long that they seemed like part of the staff, only lessprone to bickering. over the months they had watched usdevelop, and we had watched them—particularly trevor,who had arrived on his first day in a gleaming rental car andunpacked a brand-new pair of walking boots from the back,still wrapped in tissue paper in their box. he didn’t look likehe’d last long, but trevor was quietly steely, and by the endhe was usually spattered with mud, and his boots wereunrecognizable, worn in and virtually worn out on a singlejob. at the start i had related to the crew at least as much asthe staff, because they were from a world i knew. but by theend, hearing them talk longingly of paddington station,where they arrived after their week’s shift in the countrysideyearning for overpriced cappuccinos and soho eateries, irealized that i had changed. i didn’t yearn for these things,and the few times i had been required to go to london, icouldn’t wait to get out, and back to the clear air and bigtrees of the park. but i missed their banter. trevor had aparticular phrase when he was pleased with a sequencehe’d shot: “that’s tv gold,” he’d announce, grinning andputting down his camera if something had gone well, likewhen an animal had strolled into the shot.
however, after the summer, the numbers dropped offsharply. so sharply, in fact, that several people got nervousthat the business was going to fail, and one or two evenresigned to look for safer jobs. i was glad to see them go.
with their kind of loyalty, the business would surely workbetter without them, but it increased the workload and therecruitment process was inevitably time consuming. i amhappy to say that we now have a full complement ofdedicated, harmonious keepers and maintenance andcatering staff who all seem to get along seamlessly, thoughin my new role as someone who sacks people, perhapsi’d be the last to know if they didn’t.
soon, the mild autumn and the marketing of the neweducation officer produced regular snaking, gabbling,grinning convoys of school parties, holding hands in pairs,making a sound like a mobile babbling brook, watchedover by fraught, young (so young!) teachers. these boostedour income, increased our profile locally, and provided theeducational service we’re here for.
it had been a stormingly successful summer, in terms ofgate numbers on sunny days, spend per head, customersatisfaction, and feedback. but i knew the bank wouldn’tsee it like this. and they didn’t. as far as they wereconcerned, july hadn’t produced as much money as wehad said it would, and they refused to extend our credit (“itwas raining, guys, but more people came on the otherdays.” “that does not compute . . .”) for the winter if weneeded it, even though they had promised that they would ifthe basic business model seemed to be working. which itclearly was. but once again, we were on our own. and onceagain, it was looking bad. the late start to the season hadcost us dearly, as had the rain, and the reserves weneeded to pay wages and running costs for the winter werenot as big as we’d hoped. even closing for a few months,as many attractions do, would make little difference, as weneeded core staff to keep going, and the bills would keepcoming. we sensed distant lawyers reaching for box filesand dispassionately perusing repossession clauses.
and then the tv series started.
ben’s zoo went out on bbc2 from late november toearly december, from 8 to 9 pm, and was watched by anaverage of 2.5 million people a week. things started tochange. during the first program, adam monitored the website and reported a thousand hits during the transmission,many of them much-needed animal adoption enquiries. thenext weekend, fortunately mild, the trickle started, and roseto a torrent over the next few weeks. by the time thechristmas holidays had begun, we were inundated. andeveryone had nice things to say. mainly locals, many ofwhom had been to the park before and drifted away duringthe years of decline, congratulating us on theimprovements. it was a lovely feeling, like summer all overagain. keepers were being recognized and given presentsof chocolates and flowers by an adoring public, and i foundit impossible to move about the park without beingcongratulated every few yards by a gaggle of well-wishers.
though it meant having the same conversation about fiftytimes a day, i didn’t mind in the slightest, and i wasgenuinely, enormously grateful to everyone who came. thecrushing handshakes became a problem, though, as all themen around here seem to have huge, strong hands unlikemy “women’s” hands, made delicate by fifteen years oftyping for a living. one old man in particular, a little guy oncrutches, actually gave me a sprain. i asked him, whilemassaging my hand, what he had done for a living,expecting him to say crushing rocks with his bare hands ina circus. “graphic designer,” he replied, which wasn’t goodfor my ego.
inevitably, after such public exposure, there were peoplewho wanted to sympathize about katherine. and again, itwas usually the men who moved me most. from women,who are usually better at communicating emotions, youexpect sympathy and soothing words. but for men it ismuch harder (i could bore you for pages on why this is so,so write in at your peril). one woman hailed me from adistance to say, “ben, i know what you’re going through. ilost my husband nine years ago and i still haven’t got overit,” which i thought was a bit insensitive. but one man inparticular stands out. he stood out at the time. at least sixfoot five, built like a rugby player, and with the inevitablycrushing handshake, he looked into my eyes, his own fillingwith tears, and simply said, “well done.” enough said, hestrode off, message delivered. that’s male communicationfor you.
speaking of male communication, my dad was also aman of relatively few words. not that he was taciturn—hejust didn’t believe in filling the air with unnecessary waffle,and he had the gift of précis, even in speech, so that hisutterances were precise and measured, and usually lacedwith a desert-dry wit, which often took a while to sink in.
none of this would have been possible without my dad,whose lifetime of diligence, hard work, and devotion to hisfamily happened to give us this remarkable opportunity tosave this run-down zoo after his death. of course, he wouldnever have approved, and would probably be renderedspeechless if he could see us now. but the rest of us couldafford, thanks to him, to be a bit more reckless. mum, mysister melissa, and brothers duncan and vincent, allwithout hesitation put in everything they possibly could tomake this harebrained back-of-the-envelope plan work.
and it has. boxing day was our busiest day on record, andthe winter has been nearly as busy as the summer, so thatdespite missing a third of the season, we have just—just—managed to get through the winter without more supportfrom the bank.
my dad was also called ben, but just ben, whereas myfamily knows me as benjamin. it irked a bit that the tvseries was called ben’s zoo, largely because this was inno way the effort of a single person. but in a way it’s apt. itis ben’s zoo, but a different ben from the fatuous front man,me. it’s ben harry mee’s (1928–2005) zoo.
to say it’s been life changing is an understatement. butwatching the stream of people pouring through every day,leaving energized and enthusiastic, having learnedsomething about the natural world, and being in a positionto expand this amazing facility, recruiting animalsincreasingly from the iucn red list to protect for the future,is a rare privilege indeed. it’s been hard work, but it doesn’tfeel like work. it feels like a vocation. thanks, dad.
