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............