We Bought a Zoo. Benjamin Mee

that moment she fast forwarded almost every part of the treatment, and I could see that this lady was going to do everything she could to make sure that Katherine survived. In her normal clinical consultations, however, Mme Campello was rather like a strict headmistress, which made Katherine, always the good girl, feel unable to question her too closely about treatment options. I, however, with one or two school expulsions under my belt, have never been overly intimidated by school heads, and felt quite entitled to probe. Mme Campello turned out to be extremely receptive to this, and several times I called her after speaking to Katherine once we had got home, and we decided on an adjustment to her medication.

      My nighttime excursions with Leon continued to yield interesting creatures, like fireflies from impenetrable thickets who never produced the goods in daylight in front of the children, scorpions towards whom I was beginning to habituate but was still jittery, and probably the most surprising for me, a longhorn beetle. Never before or since have I seen such a beetle in the wild, and I was convinced he was on the wrong continent. Long – perhaps three inches – with iridescent wing casings, a small head, and enormous antennae from which, I assume, he gets his name. I took great pleasure in identifying him with the children in our voluptuously illustrated French encyclopedia bought from a book fair in Avignon, and photographing him standing on the page next to his template self, though he was inordinately more impressive and colourful.

      Katherine was well and in capable hands, the children were blooming, and I was writing about DIY for the Guardian, even occasionally doing some, and gradually making contact with professors around the world on topics like chimpanzee predation of monkeys for sexual rewards, elephant intelligence and the dolphin’s capacity for syntax. It was close to heaven, with local friends popping in for mandatory glasses of chilled rosé from the vines on our doorstep, and me able to adjust my working hours around the demands of the village and family life relatively easily. Apart from all that rosé.

      But still I kept thinking about the zoo. The two days I had spent in the lush South Hams region of Devon would not go away. The park sat on the edge of Dartmoor, surrounded by the lush woodland and beautiful beaches of South Hams. Our family had enjoyed their stay, but it was more than that, somehow enchanting, something I could only very reluctantly let go of, even though I knew it was already lost.

      Standing in my Health-and-Safety-free French hay-loft door, the ancient portals bleached like driftwood by the sun and sand-blasted by the Mistral, dripping rusted door furniture, some of it reputedly dating back to the Napoleonic era, it was the zoo which kept coming back to me. When Napoleon passed through our village of Arpaillargues in 1815 he famously killed two local dissenters – known (admittedly among a relatively select few local French historians) as the ‘Arpaillargues Two’. In 2005 the Tour de France passed through the village causing no deaths, but quite a lot of excitement, though not enough for the local shopkeeper, Sandrine, to forgo her three-hour lunch-break to sell cold drinks to the hundreds of sweltering tourists lining the route. So in two centuries, two quite big things had happened in the village. In the meantime it settled back into being baked by the sun, and blasted by the Mistral. And, only slightly wistfully, I settled back into that too.

      A year passed, with the zoo as a mournful but ebbing distraction. Those big trees, so unlike the parched scrub of southern Europe, the nearby rivers and sea, and the ridiculously magnificent animals, so close to the house, so foolishly endangered by mankind and yet right there in a ready-made opportunity for keeping them alive for future generations.

      Partly because the whole family was in a bit of a daze about my father’s death, mum’s house was still not on the market, so we were unprepared for what happened next. As an expat without satellite TV (that’s cheating), I nevertheless craved English news and probably visited the BBC news online two or three times a day. Suddenly, on 12 April 2006, there it was again. Ellis had released a statement saying that the sale had fallen through yet again, and that many of the animals would have to be shot if a buyer wasn’t found within the next 11 days.

      It didn’t give us long, but I knew exactly what I had to do. I called Melissa and Duncan who had been the main drivers of the previous attempt, and told them that we had to try again. I was not entirely surprised, however, when neither of them seemed quite as excited as I was. Both had delved deeply into the machinations required for the purchase, and Duncan in particular had been alarmed by a demand for a ‘non-refundable deposit’ of £25,000 to secure a place at the head of the queue. ‘If you can get it in writing that he will definitely sell it to us, and we can sell the house in time, I’ll back you up,’ he said. In the meantime he felt it was just an endless time-sink, but gladly gave me all the information he had. Brother-in-law Jim, too, had a list of contacts and offered his help preparing spreadsheets for a business plan should it get that far.

      Peter Wearden was the first call. As Environmental Health Officer for the South Hams district, Peter was directly responsible for issuing the zoo licence. ‘Can a bunch of amateurs like us really buy a zoo and run it?’ I asked him. ‘Yes,’ he said, unequivocally. ‘Providing you have the appropriate management structure in place.’ This structure consists primarily of hiring a Curator of Animals, an experienced and qualified zoo professional with detailed knowledge of managing exotic animals, who is responsible for looking after the animals on a day to day basis. Peter sent me a flow chart which showed the position of the curator beneath the zoo directors, which would be us, but still in a position to allocate funds to animal management at his discretion. ‘You can’t just decide to buy a new ice-cream kiosk if the curator thinks there is a need for, say, new fence posts in the lion enclosure,’ said Peter. ‘If you haven’t got money for both, you have to listen to the curator.’ That seemed fair enough. ‘There is, by the way,’ he added, ‘a need for new fence posts in the lion enclosure.’ And how much are those? ‘No idea,’ said Peter. ‘That’s where you’ll have to get professional advice. But that’s just one of many, many things you’ll need to do before you can get your zoo licence.’ Peter explained a bit about the Zoo Licencing Act, and that Ellis was due to hand in his licence to operate a zoo within a couple of weeks, hence the 11-day deadline for the sale.

      In fact the animals would not have to be dispersed by then as they would be held under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act (DWA) as a private collection. It just meant that visitors were not allowed, so the park’s already seriously faltering finances would reach a crunch point. But not absolutely necessarily an 11-day crunch point, it seemed. If we could mount a credible bid there was every chance that we could carry on negotiating for a few weeks after the park closed. Already, there was scope to hope that this apparently hopeless task was not necessarily impossible.

      ‘Is it viable?’ I asked Peter. This time he took longer to respond. ‘Erm, I’m sure it is,’ he said. ‘With the right management, a lot of money invested in the infrastructure, and a hell of lot – and I mean a hell of a lot – of hard work, it should be viable, yes. For a long time it was one of the area’s most popular attractions. It’s declined over the last few years due to lack of investment and not keeping up with the times. But until quite recently it was a thriving business.’

      I was deeply suspicious that there must be more to it than this, and that there was some sort of black hole in the whole fabric of the place which meant that it couldn’t work. Why had the other sales fallen through? So many industry professionals had cruised up to this project and somehow not taken the bait. Were we going to be the suckers who bought it and then discovered the truth?

      Clearly I needed professional help, which came in the form of a text from a friend whose sister-in-law Suzy happened to be a fairly senior zoo professional, easily equivalent in fact to the rank of Curator, currently working in Australia. I had met Suzy once at a wedding a long time ago and liked her instantly. I was impressed with the way that even in a cocktail dress, with her wild mane of blonde hair she managed to give the impression she was wearing work boots, leggings and a fleece. Her job at the time had involved educating Queensland cattle farmers about the need for conservation of local wildlife, a tough-enough sounding proposition for a bare-knuckle prize fighter, I would have thought. But not for Suzy, who was now working as head of animal procurement for the three zoos in the State of Victoria, including the flagship Melbourne Zoo where she was based. Suzy offered any help she could give, and said she would even consider taking a sabbatical