Dartmoor Wildlife Park. - We Bought a Zoo

Table of Contents

Mum and I arrived as the new owners of Dartmoor Wildlife Park in Devon for the first time at around six oclock 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 Mums 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 owners 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. Its 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 Id 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 wed 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 wasnt so bad, but as we stood up we 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 beastsand they were such glorious beastshad maneuvered to within pawing distance of us without either of us noticing. Each animal was bigger than both of us put together, yet theyd moved silently. If this had been the jungle or, more accurately in this case, the Siberian tundra, the first thing wed 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 catsacknowledging that due to circumstances beyond their control (i.e., the fence between us), this had been a mere dress rehearsalyawned, 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 owlsthere were about fifteen on sitethe 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.

LAncienne 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 heart of the South of France, where we were living on baguettes, cheese, and wine. The village we had settled into nestled between Nmes and Avignon in Languedoc, the poor mans 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 thisit was part of the local culture. Barbeques of fresh trout and salty sausages from the Cvennes to our north, glasses of chilled ros 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 folktolerant, kind, courteous, and yet, inevitably, hugely judgmental.

Katherine, whom Id married that April after nine years together (I waited until shed completely given up hope), became 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 shed 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 admin-heavy 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 Frinkwhom she also happened to have once met and interviewedand 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.