Gerald Durrell - Beasts in my Belfry

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By Gerald Durrell

My Family and Other Animals

A Zoo in My Luggage

Birds, Beats and Relatives

Garden of the Gods

The Overloaded Ark

The Talking Parcel

The Mockery Bird

The Donkey Rustlers

Catch me A Colobus

Beasts In My Belfry

The New Noah

The Drunken Forest

The Whispering Land

Rosy is My Relative

Two in the Bush

Three Singles to Adventure

The Arks Anniversary

Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons

Menagerie Manor

The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium

The Bafut Beagles

Marrying off Mother and Other Stories

The Aye-Aye And I

Fillets of Plaice

Ark on the Move

Encounters with Animals

The Stationary Ark

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner

Contents

1. A Bevy of Beasts

They say that a child who aspires to be an engine driver very rarely grows up to fill that role in life. If this is so then I am an exceptionally lucky person, for at the age of two I made up my mind quite firmly and unequivocally that the only thing I wanted to do was to study animals. Nothing else interested me.

I clung to this decision throughout my formative years with the tenacity of a limpet and drove my friends and relatives mad by catching or buying and inserting into the house every conceivable sort of creature, ranging from monkeys to the humble garden snail, from scorpions to eagle owls. Harassed by such a pageant of wildlife, my family comforted themselves with the thought that it was just a phase I was passing through and that I would soon grow out of it. But with each fresh acquisition my interest in animals quickened and deepened until, by my late teens, I knew without a shadow of a doubt what I wanted to be: simply, I wanted to become a collector of animals for zoos and, later on when I had made my fortune this way to have a zoo of my own.

This did not seem to me to be a very wild or unreasonable ambition but the difficulty lay in how to achieve it. There were, unfortunately, no schools for incipient animal collectors and none of the professional collectors then operating would take on anybody who had only unbounded enthusiasm and very little practical experience to offer. It was not enough, I decided, to be able to say that you had hand-reared baby hedgehogs or bred geckos in a biscuit tin; an animal collector must know at the drop of a hat how to get a stranglehold on a giraffe or side-step a charging tiger. But it was exceedingly difficult to gain this sort of experience while living in a seaside town in England. This had been brought home to me recently in a rather forcible manner. I had received a phone call from a boy I knew in the New Forest who possessed what he described as a baby fallow deer that he was hand-rearing. He explained that, as he was moving to a flat in Southampton, he was unable to keep this most desirable pet. It was tame and house-trained, he said, and could be delivered to me within twenty-four hours or sooner by his father.

I was in a quandary. My mother, the only member of my family who could be remotely described as sympathetic to my interest in wildlife, was out, so I could not ask her how she would view the addition of a fallow deer, however young, to my already extensive menagerie. Yet, there was the deers owner clamouring for an immediate reply.

My dad says well have to destroy it if you dont have it, he explained lugubriously.

That clinched it. I said I would be pleased to take delivery of the deer, whose name was Hortense, the following day.

When my mother returned from shopping I had my story all ready, a story that would have softened a heart of stone, much less such a susceptible one as my mother possessed. There was this poor little fawn, torn away from its mother, now under sentence of death unless we helped. How could we refuse? My mother, convinced by my description that the fawn was about the size of a small terrier, said that to allow it to be killed was unthinkable when we could (as I pointed out) keep it in a tiny corner of the garage.

Of course we must have it, she said.

She then phoned up the dairy and ordered an extra ten pints of milk a day, being under the vague impression that growing deer needed a lot of milk.

Hortense arrived the following day in a horsebox. As the deer was led out of this conveyance by its owner it became immediately obvious that, firstly, Hortense was unmistakably male and, secondly, that he was some four years old. He had a pair of chocolate-coloured horns edged with a forest of lethal spikes and he stood, in his elegant white-spotted coat, some three and a half feet high.

But thats surely not a baby! said my mother, aghast.

Oh, yes, madam, said the boys father hastily, only a youngster. Lovely animal, tame as a dog.

Hortense rattled his horn up against the gate like a crackle of musketry and then leant forward and delicately plucked one of Mothers prize chrysanthemums. Chewing it in a meditative sort of way, he surveyed us with limpid eyes. Hastily, before Mother could recover from the shock of meeting Hortense, I thanked the boy and his father profusely, grabbed the dog lead that was attached to Hortenses collar, and led him towards the garage. Not for anything would I confess to Mother that I, too, had imagined Hortense to be a tiny, heart-melting fawn. I had expended a large sum of money on a feeding bottle for what now turned out to be, if not Landseers Stag at Bay, at least a close approximation of it.

Followed by Mother, Hortense and I entered the garage where, before I could tie him up, he had evinced a deadly loathing for the wheelbarrow which he attempted unsuccessfully to toss in the air. He eventually had to content himself with merely overturning it and disembowelling it on the ground. I tied him to the wall and hastily removed any gardening equipment that I thought was liable to incur his wrath.

I do hope hes not going to be too fierce, dear, said my mother worriedly. You know how Larry feels about fierce things.

I knew only too well how my elder brother felt about anything, fierce or otherwise, in the animal line and I was only too delighted that he, together with my other brother and sister, happened to be out when Hortense arrived.

Oh, hell be all right when he settles down, I said; hes just high-spirited.

At that moment Hortense decided that he did not like being left alone in the garage and so he charged the door. The whole garage rocked to its foundation.

Perhaps hes hungry , said Mother, backing down the path. Yes, I expect thats it, I said. Could you get him some carrots and some biscuits?

Mother trotted off to procure the necessary deer-soothing food-stuffs while I went in to grapple with Hortense. He was delighted to see me again, as the sideways sweep of his horns catching me in the pit of the stomach showed. However, I found that, like most deer, he was greatly addicted to being scratched round the base of his horns and I soon had him in a semi-comatose condition. Then, when a large packet of water biscuits and a couple of pounds of carrots arrived, he settled down to assuage the hunger which his journey had given him.