We Bought a Zoo. Benjamin Mee

the job was actually done. This life/work balance with the emphasis firmly on life was one of the most enjoyable parts of living in the region, and perfectly suited my inner potterer, but it was also satisfying to show them a completed project built in the English way, in back-to-back 14-hour days with a quick cheese sandwich and a cup of tea for lunch.

      We bade a fond farewell to Karsan and moved in to our new home, in the back of a big open barn, looking out over another, in a walled garden where the children could play with their dog, Leon, and their cats in safety, and where the back wall was a full adult’s Frisbee throw away. It was our first proper home since before the children were born, and we relished the space, and the chance to be working on our own home at last. Everywhere the eye fell there was a pressing amount to be done, however, and over the next summer we clad the house with insulation and installed broadband internet, and Katherine began her own vegetable garden, yielding succulent cherry tomatoes and raspberries. Figs dripped off our neighbour’s tree into our garden, wild garlic grew in the hedgerows around the vineyards, and melons lay in the fields often uncollected, creating a seemingly endless supply of luscious local produce. Walking the sun-baked dusty paths through the landscape ringing with cicadas with Leon every day brought back childhood memories of Corfu where our family spent several summers. Twisted olive trees appeared in planted rows, rather than the haphazard groves of Greece, but the lifestyle was the same, although now I was a grown-up with a family of my own. It was surreal, given the backdrop of Katherine’s illness, that everything was so perfect just as it went so horribly wrong.

      We threw ourselves into enjoying life, and for me this meant exploring the local wildlife with the children. Most obviously different from the UK were the birds, brightly coloured and clearly used to spending more time in North Africa than their dowdy UK counterparts, whose plumage seems more adapted to perpetual autumn rather than the vivid colours of Marrakesh.

      Twenty minutes away was the Camargue, whose rice paddies and salt flats are warm enough to sustain a year-round population of flamingoes, but I was determined not to get interested in birds. I once went on a ‘nature tour’ of Mull which turned out to be a twitchers’ tour. Frolicking otters were ignored in favour of surrounding a bush waiting for something called a redstart, an apparently unseasonal visiting reddish sparrow. That way madness lies.

      Far more compelling, and often unavoidable, was the insect population, which hopped, crawled and reproduced all over the place. Crickets the size of mice sprang through the long grass entertaining the cats and the children who caught them for opposing reasons, the latter to try to feed, the former to eat. At night exotic-looking, and endangered, rhinoceros beetles lumbered across my path like little prehistoric tanks, fiercely brandishing their utterly useless horns, resembling more a triceratops than the relatively svelte rhinoceros. These entertaining beasts would stay with us for a few days, rattling around in a glass bowl containing soil, wood chips, and usually dandelion leaves, to see if we could mimic their natural habitat. But they did not make good pets, and invariably I released them in the night to the safety of the vineyards.

      Other nighttime catches included big fat toads, always released on to a raft in the river in what became a formalized ceremony after school, and a hedgehog carried between two sticks and housed in a tin bath and fed on worms, until his escape into the compound three days later. It was only then I discovered that these amiable but flea-ridden and stinking creatures can carry rabies. But perhaps the most dramatic catch was an unknown snake, nearly a metre long, also transported using the stick method, and housed overnight in a suspended bowl in the sitting room, lidded, with holes for air. ‘What do you think of the snake?’ I asked Katherine proudly the next morning. ‘What snake?’ she replied. The bowl was empty. The snake had crawled out through a hole and dropped to the floor right next to where we were sleeping (on the sofa bed at that time) before sliding out under the door. I hoped. Katherine was not amused, and I resolved to be more careful about what I brought into the house.

      Not all the local wildlife was harmless here. Adders (les vipères) are rife, and the brief is to call the fire brigade, or pompiers, who come ‘and dance around like little girls waving at it with sticks until it escapes’, according to Georgia who has witnessed this procedure. I once saw a vipère under a stone in the garden, and wore thick gloves and gingerly tapped every stone I ever moved afterwards. Killer hornets also occasionally buzzed into our lives like malevolent helicopter gunships, with the locals all agreeing that three stings would kill a man. My increasingly well-thumbed animal and insect encyclopedia revealed only that they were ‘potentially dangerous to humans’. Either way, whenever I saw one I adopted the full pompier procedure diligently.

      But the creature that made the biggest impression early on was the scorpion. One appeared in my office on the wall one night, prompting levels of adrenaline and panic I thought only possible in the jungle. Was nowhere safe? How many of these things were there? Were they in the kids’ room now? An internet trawl revealed that 57 people have been killed in Algeria by scorpions in the last decade. Algeria is a former French colony. It’s nearby. But luckily this scorpion – dark brown and the size of the end of a man’s thumb – was not the culprit, and actually had a sting more like a bee. This jolt, that I was definitely not in London and had brought my family to a potentially dangerous situation, prompted my first (and last) poem for about twenty years, unfortunately too expletive ridden to reproduce here.

      And then there was the wild boar. Not to be outdone by mere insects, reptiles and arthropods, the mammalian order laid on a special treat one night when I was walking the dog. Unusually I was out for a run, a bit ahead of Leon, so I was surprised to see him up ahead about 25 metres into the vines. As I got closer I was also surprised that he seemed jet black in the moonlight, whereas when I’d last seen him he was his usual tawny self. Also, although Leon is a hefty 8 stone of shaggy mountain dog, this animal seemed heavier, more barrel-shaped. And it was grunting, like a great big pig. I began to conclude that this was not Leon, but a sanglier, or wild boar, known to roam the vineyards at night and able to make a boar-shaped hole in a chain-link fence without slowing down. I was armed with a dog lead, a propelling pencil (in case of inspiration) and a head torch, turned off. As it faced me and started stamping the ground, I felt I had to decide quickly whether or not to turn on the head torch. It would either definitely charge at it or it would find it aversive. As the light snapped on, the grunting monster slowly wheeled round and trotted into the vines, more in irritation than fear. And then Leon arrived, late and inadequate cavalry, and shot off into the vineyards after it. Normally Leon will chase imaginary rabbits relentlessly for many minutes at a time at the merest hint of a rustle in the undergrowth, but on this occasion he shot back immediately professing total ignorance of anything amiss, and stayed very close by my side on the way back. Very wise.

      The next day I took the children to track the boar, and they were wide eyed as we found and photographed the trotter prints in the loose grey earth, and had them verified by the salty farmers in the Café of the Universe in the village. ‘Il etait gros,’ they concluded, belly laughing and filling the air with clouds of pastis, when I mimicked my fear.

      So, serpents included, this life was as much like Eden as I felt it was possible to get. With the broadband finally installed, and bats flying around my makeshift office in the empty barn, the book I had come to write was finally seriously under way, and Katherine’s treatment and environment seemed as good as could reasonably be hoped for. What could possibly tempt us away from this hard-won, almost heavenly niche? My family decided to buy a zoo, of course.

       Chapter Two

       The Adventure Begins

      It was in the spring of 2005 that it landed on our doorstep: the brochure that would change our lives for ever. Like any other brochure from a residential estate agent, at first we dismissed it. But, unlike any other brochure from a residential estate agent, here we saw Dartmoor Wildlife Park advertised for the first time. My sister Melissa sent me a copy in France, with a note attached; ‘Your dream scenario.’ I had to agree with her that although I thought I was