For lo, the gentil kind of the lioun!
Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women
I admit it came as something of a shock to be told that I was to start work on the lions. I flatter myself that I showed no outward sign of uneasiness when Phil told me, but I did feel he might have let me start on something fairly tame – a herd of dewy-eyed deer, for example. It seemed rather unfair to pitchfork me in amongst a lot of lions before I had got to grips with the job. However, I received the news with all the nonchalance I could muster and set off through the park in search of my section.
I found that the section was spread out along the crest of the downs, half hidden in a fringe of elder bushes and tall nettles. Where the hillside dropped down to the valley this undergrowth ended and its place was taken by great cushions of green grass, each harbouring an ants’ nest under its rabbit-cropped wig. From this point there was a magnificent view over the mosaic of fields that separated you in a broad sweep from the downland across the valley, fields whose pastel colours seemed to shift and change as the great cloud shadows swept across them.
The nerve centre of the section was a small, tumble-down hut hemmed in by a copse of tangled elder bushes. The hut wore a toupee of honeysuckle at a rakish angle, practically obscuring one of its two windows and so making the interior dark and gloomy. Outside it sported a battered notice-board on which was the euphemistic title ‘The Haven’. The furnishings were monastic in their simplicity – three chairs in various stages of decay, a table that rocked and jumped like a nervous horse when anything was placed on it, and a grotesque black stove that crouched in one corner pouting smoke through its iron teeth and regurgitating embers in quite incredible quantities.
It was in this dim hutch that I discovered the two keepers who were in charge of the section. Jesse was a red-faced, taciturn individual with fierce blue eyes under shaggy white brows and a nose the colour and texture of a large strawberry. Joe, on the other hand, was brown-faced and, with his twinkling blue eyes and husky, infectious laugh, he exuded good humour. When they had finished their breakfast, which my arrival had interrupted, Jesse walked the length of the section with me showing the animals and explaining the work. At one end of the section there was the wombat, Peter, then an enclosure full of Arctic foxes and another full of racoon-like dogs. Then came the cage containing the two puff-ball-white polar bears and a pit containing one pair of tigers. Further along the downs was a great enclosure in which there was another pair of tigers and then, finally, the animals from which the section took its name, the lions.
We walked along the narrow, twisting path through the elder bushes and came eventually to the tall, barred fence that surrounded the lions’ cage. This was some two acres in extent, built on the slope of the hill and thickly overgrown with bushes and trees. Moving along the barrier rail, Jesse and I came to a spot where this undergrowth curved back to form a dell, and here an area of long, lush grass surrounded a pool. Lying there, grouped picturesquely under a gnarled and twisted thorn tree, lay the lions. Albert, the male, lay in the pale sunlight, wrapped up in his mane, meditating. Beside him lay Nan and Jill, his golden, butter-fat wives, both fast asleep, their soup-plate paws twitching gently. Jesse shouted their names and rattled a stick along the wire, wanting them to come over and be introduced. Albert merely turned his head for a brief moment, gave us a withering look and returned to his meditations; Nan and Jill did not even stir. They did not look fierce and wild to me; in fact, they looked overweight, lazy and slightly superior. Jesse took up a stance with his feet apart as though on the deck of a rolling ship, sucked his teeth vigorously and fixed me with his fierce blue stare.
‘Now, you listen on me, son,’ he said. ‘You listen on me and you won’t go wrong. That there wombat, them foxes and them racoons, you can go in with them, see? But don’t you try no tricks with these others or they’ll have you. They may look tame but they’re not, see?’
He sucked his teeth again and surveyed me to see whether I had absorbed this lesson. I assured him that I had not the slightest intention of taking any chances with anything until I had got to know them. I felt – but did not say so – that it would be rather infra dig to be eaten by a lion to whom you had not, so to speak, been properly introduced.
‘Well, you listen on me, son,’ said Jesse again, nodding portentously, ‘and I’ll learn you.’
My first few days were fully occupied with the learning process, memorising the routine work of feeding, cleaning and other daily chores, but this routine work was fairly basic and once I had mastered it I had more opportunity for watching the animals in our care and trying to learn something about them. Both Jesse and Joe were vastly amused at the fact that I carried an enormous notebook in my pocket and would – at the slightest provocation – whip it out and make an entry.
‘Bloody Sherlock Holmes,’ was Jesse’s description of me, ‘always writing frigging things down.’
Joe would attempt to pull my leg by describing long and complicated actions that he had just seen the animal performing but he would always let his imagination get the better of him and I could soon spot the deception.
Naturally enough, I started my researches on the lions. Being, for the first time in my life, on an intimate footing with these beasts, I decided to read up all I could about them and see how it tallied with my own observations. I discovered, not altogether to my surprise, that there is probably no other animal (except some purely mythological creatures) that has been endowed with so many imaginary virtues. Ever since someone in a moment of unzoological enthusiasm named it the King of Beasts, writers have vied with each other to produce proof of the lion’s right to this title. This particularly applied, I found, to the ancient writers who were unanimous in praising Felix leo for its sweetness of character, sagacity, courage and sportsmanship; thus, I suppose, it was a foregone conclusion that it should be adopted as a national emblem by that modest and retiring race, the English. I had not been working with Albert and his wives for any length of time before I discovered that lions were not all that the old writers cracked them up to be.
In Pliny’s Natural History, published round about 1674, I found the following delightful account of the King of Beasts:
The Lion alone of all wild beasts is gentle to those who humble themselves unto him, and will not touch any such upon their submission, but spareth what creatures soever lieth prostrate before him.
As fell and furious as hee is otherwhiles, yet hee dischargeth his rage upon man, before that hee setteth upon women, and never preyeth upon babes unlesse it be for extreme hunger.
After knowing Albert for only three days I realised that this description did not fit him. He was, to be sure, as fell and furious as he could possibly be, but I do not think he had an ounce of mercy in his makeup. Anyone who had attempted to ‘lie prostrate’ in front of him would have received a bite in the back of the neck for his pains.
Another ancient writer I perused was Purchase, and he informed me, with all the assurance of one who has never seen a lion, that ‘the Lyons in cold places are more gentle, and in hotter more fierce.’ When I first read this it gave me a certain hope that I would be able to get on friendly terms with Albert for, just after my arrival at Whipsnade, the weather had turned cold and an icy wind roared across the downs, making the misshapen elder bushes creak and groan and shudder against each other. In this type of weather, according to Purchase, Albert and his wives should be gambolling around like friendly kittens.
On my second morning my faith in Purchase was rudely shattered. I was walking past the lions’ cage, bent double against the wind and blue with cold, on my way back to the shelter and warmth of ‘The Haven’. Albert had concealed himself in a thick bed of grass and nettles in the curve of the cage near the path. He had, I am sure, seen me pass earlier and had decided that he would surprise me on my return journey. He waited until I was opposite and then he suddenly jumped out against the bars with a hair-raising cough of wrath. Then he squatted on his haunches and glared at me, his yellow eyes full of ferocious amusement at my sudden panic. He decided that this was a good joke and repeated it later the same day. Again he had the pleasure of watching me leap in the air like a startled stag, but this time he was gratified to observe me drop the bucket I was carrying, trip over it, and fall heavily into a bed of particularly luxuriant nettles. I discovered afterwards that cold weather, instead of making Albert gentle, infected him with a dreadful skitishness, and he would spend his time hiding behind bushes and leaping out at unsuspecting old ladies as they passed. I presume that this exercise improved his circulation when there was a nip in the air.
I continued to read Pliny and Purchase on lions, but with a more discriminating eye. After a hectic day being jumped out at by Albert I found that their lions had a nice, soothing fairy-tale quality about them that made them much more endearing than the real lions I was looking after. I particularly liked the travellers’ stories of their meetings with lions in the wilds, all of which underlined the intelligence and amiability of the animals’ character. Pliny relates how Mentor the Syracusian met a lion in Syria that appeared to be irresistibly drawn to him, bouncing round him like a spirited lamb and licking his footprints with every sign of affection. Eventually, Mentor discovered that this touching display of affection was brought on by a large thorn in the animal’s foot which it wanted him to remove.
Lions in those days seemed to be remarkably careless, for Pliny records another story by one Elpis which stretched even my credulity to breaking point. Elpis had hardly set foot in Africa when he was accosted by a lion with open jaws. Not unnaturally, he fled to the nearest tree (calling upon Bacchus to preserve him) and stayed ensconced in the upper branches for some considerable time while the lion, still open-mouthed, wandered about below trying by various signs to show the dull-witted fellow what was wrong. Obviously, Elpis had not read much contemporary travel literature or he would have realised at once that the lion had a thorn or something it wanted him to remove. It was quite some time before it dawned on him that, however fierce a lion might be, it would not walk about with its mouth permanently open in that curious fashion. So he cautiously descended from the tree and found that the lion, true to form, had a bone wedged in its mouth. Elpis removed this at once and without, apparently, much difficulty. The lion was so overcome with joy and gratitude that it immediately appointed itself chief butcher to its rescuer’s ship, and for the whole time that they were anchored in that region it provided the ship’s company with fresh venison daily.
Albert and his wives, unlike their ancestors, seemed to be remarkably healthy and, to my relief, they never got thorns in their paws which they expected us to remove. They had prodigious appetites, in spite of being so fat, and would squabble and snarl over their meat as though they had not been fed for weeks. Albert would snatch the biggest joint and carry it off into the bushes and hide it. Then he would hastily return to see if he could pinch the joints belonging to either of his wives. To watch him cuff his wife out of the way while he stole her meat was a striking illustration of the lion’s noble character.
Once a week we had to trap up Albert and his wives so that we could enter the cage and clean up the bones and other signs of their tenancy. Built into the side of the enclosure was a large, iron-barred trap with a sliding door, and we had to get all three lions securely locked up in this before we could get on with the work. This trapping was a tedious performance, the monotony of which was only relieved by its ridiculousness. To trap Albert and his wives, who were, needless to say, uncooperative in the extreme, you had to be very cunning and combine this with the ability to look innocent and run fast. The first requisite for successful trapping was that Albert should be very hungry; he would then prowl along the bars, his little eyes glinting, his mane shaggy with ferocity. We would arrive at the trap, looking radiantly innocent, and place our various spades, buckets, brushes and forks on the path. Then we would produce a large, gory joint of meat and place it in a position where Albert could both see and smell it. He would greet this manoeuvre with a series of wicked, chuckling snarls, deep in the scarf of his mane. Then we would raise the sliding door at the end of the trap and stand about, all talking loudly, as if there was no thought further from our minds than the trapping of lions. I must explain, in defence of Albert’s intelligence, that he was not fooled by all this for one minute, but it had become a sort of ritual which had to be respected or the whole procedure would become disorganised.
When sufficient time had passed and Albert had studied the joint and pondered its possibilities, we would put it inside the trap. Leaning on the barrier rail, we would indulge in autosuggestion. The following remarks would be made with complete lack of tone and interest: ‘How about it, Alb? Hungry boy? Come on, then, come on. There’s a good lad. Have some meat, then. Come on, then. Come on. Come on . . . We would repeat this endlessly, like a part song, and the whole performance was made doubly ridiculous by the fact that Albert understood none of it.
Having exhausted our encouraging remarks, we would reach a deadlock; we would glare at Albert and he would glare back at us. All through this Nan and Jill would be prowling in the background, obviously impatient but doing nothing, for tradition demanded that their lord and master should take the lead. Albert would now give the impression of having gone into a trance. During these spells of waiting I would while away the time by attempting to find an answer to that much disputed question of whether or not the human eye has any power over the mere beast. I would stare with intense concentration into Albert’s little yellow eyes, and he would stare back unblinkingly. The only effect it ever had was to make me feel a trifle uncomfortable.
Generally, after about ten minutes, Albert would still show no signs of entering the trap and so we would be forced to try another ruse. Leaving the meat in the trap, we would saunter off down the path until Albert thought we were too far away to be dangerous. Then he would make a sudden dash into the trap, grab the meat, and endeavour to escape with it before we had time to rush down the path and slam the door on him. More often than not, the iron door clanged down some two inches behind his retreating tail and we would be left standing there foolishly while he carried his trophy off to some secluded spot to settle down and enjoy it. This, of course, would put an end to our trapping and we would be forced to wait twenty-four hours until Albert felt peckish again. With the other animals on the section, we had to go through much the same business to get them trapped up, but they never gave us as much trouble as the lions. Albert had a genius for being annoying.
If, however, we did get the lions safely locked up in the trap, we had to make our way round to a small door in the opposite side of the cage. Once we had entered the enclosure we had to shut and lock this door behind us. It was a feeling I never really relished, for it meant that we were shut in a two-acre cage, surrounded by a barred fence some sixteen feet high, with no means of escape should the lions, by some magical means, get out of the trap. On one occasion Joe and I entered the cage and, as usual, separated and worked our way through the bushes, picking up the gnawed white bones from last week’s meals. Soon we lost sight of each other in the thick undergrowth; I could hear Joe whistling and an occasional clang as he dropped a bone into his bucket. I was working my way along a narrow path between great bramble bushes which must have been a favourite haunt of Albert’s for I could see his great paw marks in the soft clay of the path and, here and there, a tuft of hair from his mane which had caught on a thorn. I was musing over the big paw marks and thinking what a vicious and sultry character Albert was, when suddenly he roared. Now the traps were some distance away through the trees, on my left, yet I could have sworn that the roar came from directly in front of me. Without waiting to find out exactly where Albert was, I made my way with all speed to the exit gate. Joe and I arrived at the gate simultaneously.
‘Is he out?’ I inquired when we were safely outside the cage. ‘I don’t know,’ said Joe, ‘I didn’t wait to see.’
We went round to the other side of the enclosure and found the lions still locked up in the trap, but Albert had a humorous glint in his eyes that made me think.
This incident was my first experience of the so-called ventriloquial powers of the lion. Many writers assert that a lion can throw his roar so that it appears to come from two or three different directions at once. This is not quite as impossible as it sounds, for many species of birds and insects have the most astonishing ventriloquial powers. In some cases you can actually watch the creature making the sound and yet the sound itself appears to come from several feet, or even yards, away. Obviously, if the lion possessed this power it would be immensely useful to him; he would be able to panic herds of game at night so that, in their tenor they might run towards their hunter instead of away from him. Judging by that morning’s experience it certainly seemed as though Albert could throw his roar; he had been about the same distance away from Joe as from me, yet both of us were sure that the roar had come from close by.
Some time after this experience I had another and equally startling example of Albert’s voice throwing. I was coming back from some village festivities late one night and I decided to take a short-cut through the park. My path took me along the side of the lion cage and as I hurried along through the rustling elders Albert gave a sudden snarling grunt that brought me to a standstill. The sound was difficult to place, although I knew the direction from which it must have come. It had a certain earth-trembling quality that made it seem as though it was vibrating up through the soles of my feet. To judge by the sound, Albert might have been inside or outside his cage. It was not very pleasant, and only my devotion to natural history prevented me from running like a hare. With considerable temerity, I walked up to the barrier rail and peered into the gloom, but I could not see anything and there was no moon to help me. The bushes were black and still. As I moved along the side of the cage I knew that I was being followed; I could almost feel the eager eyes fixed on me, but the tawny bodies made no sound and the great paws did not snap a single twig as a guide to their whereabouts. As I started up the hillside, away from the cage, there came a great sniff, full of scorn and derision.
Some people refuse to believe that a lion can throw his voice deliberately They maintain that all he does is to hold his mouth close to the ground when roaring, so that the sound is blurred and it is impossible to tell from which direction it is coming. Now, in order to find out if this was true I tried very hard to be present when Albert was roaring, but with little success. Time after time I would walk hopefully past his cage thinking that he might roar while I was there to see, but every time he remained stubbornly silent. Sometimes, when I heard him start up, I would treat the visitors to the sight of a keeper running madly along the path through the trees as though some escaped beast were at my heels. But every time, when I arrived panting at the barrier rail, I would find that Albert had either finished or else had thought better of it and had relapsed into silence after two or three coughs. However, I was more than compensated for this by the magnificent sounds he would produce when I could hear, but not see, him.
He always seemed to choose the late afternoon to burst into song. He would start, quite suddenly, with two or three preliminary ‘Aroom’ noises, with long pauses in between, as if he were making sure of the right note. Then he would launch into the full song: the ‘Arooms’ would become throaty and rich and the pause between each shorter and shorter, until they ran together in a terrific crescendo of sound. It would rasp out, faster and faster, then start to slow down: then, just as suddenly as it began, it would stop. It is difficult to describe the frightening possibilities that were snarled at you when the sound reached its zenith. Considered dispassionately, the song resembled, more than anything else, someone sawing wood on a gigantic echoing barrel. First there would be the slow strokes of the saw; then they would get faster and faster as the steel bit into the wood; then the strokes would get slow again, as an indication that the sawing was nearly done; then, silence. And at that moment I always waited to hear the thud of the piece of wood hitting the ground.
After some weeks’ association with Albert I decided that he did not in any way measure up to the popular estimation of what a lion should be. He was sulky, blustery and devoid of any finer feelings whatsoever. His small, golden eyes always had in them an expression of baffled rage; it seemed that he was trying to uphold his race’s reputation for fierceness but could not remember why. There was always a faintly puzzled look about him, as though he were wondering whether it was necessary to behave in this way. When he was not prowling about in a filthy temper he was indulging in his ‘joke’ of jumping out suddenly at unsuspecting passers-by and getting a sardonic pleasure out of their panic. At mealtimes he would behave in the reprehensible manner I have described and then, gorged with his own meat and his ill-gotten gains, he would sprawl in the long grass and belch. I tried very hard, but I could not find a single endearing quality in Albert.
Only once during our association did I see him look really regal, and that was when Jill came into season. With his mane standing out, Albert strode about the cage uttering heartrending ‘Urrrghs’ to himself and striking attitudes expressive of nobility and firmness of character. Pliny, I am sure, would have loved him. While Albert was following Jill round the cage I delved once more into Pliny to see what he had to say about the love life of the lion. The first reference I found was not very flattering:
. . . these Lionesses are very letcherous, and this is the cause that the Lions are so fell and cruell. This, Afffricke knoweth best, and seeth most: and especially in time of great drought, when for want of water a number of wild beasts resort by troups to those few rivers that be there, and meet together. And Hereupon it is, that so many strange beasts, of a mixt and mungrell kind are there bred, whiles the males either pelforce, or for pleasure, leape and cover the females of all sorts.
I never saw Nan and Jill behaving in a lecherous manner normally, and when in season they seemed more bored than anything else by Albert’s attention. Pliny goes on to say:
The Lion knoweth by sent and smell of the Pard, when the Lionesse his mate hath laied false, and suffered herselfe to be covered by him: and presently with all his might and main runneth upon her for to chastise and punish her.
Certainly, Nan and Jill had no chance of playing Albert false, since they were locked in the cage with him. But I do feel that Albert would have been a strict husband, and I should hate to have been his wife if I had been flirting with a Pard and he had caught me.
Why visitors looked furtively at each other and giggled when Albert performed an act of procreation, with great dignity and complete lack of embarrassment in the middle of a clearing, was a source of bewilderment to me. They would have been doubly disgusted if they had known that it was his daughter, Jill, who was participating in the orgy. Incest.
Joe was also afflicted with this curious shyness when he came across an example of coition and would, in fact, carefully avoid any cages in which he knew such dreadful acts were taking place. Jesse, on the other hand, possessed no such reticence. In a hoarse voice he would shout libellous encouragement to the animals while the crowd shuffled and dispersed around him. Jesse was a past master at the art of making a crowd disappear like a puff of smoke.
‘How he can do it, I don’t know,’ Joe would confide in me when we were safely in the sexless harbour of ‘The Haven’. ‘I go hot and cold all over, honest I do. Only yesterday I went along by the lions and there he was talking to ’em all, young girls and everything, and old Albert was there with Jill, plain as hell. I don’t know how he does it. I couldn’t, not for a hundred pounds.’
He would purse his lips and look very sad, as though he were really refusing the money. Poor Joe, his life was not worth living when any of the animals were in season.
Apart from his cavalier attitude towards the facts of life, Jesse was possessed of a curious power that won the grudging envy of both Joe and myself. As a dowser can feel water in the bones of his hand and make a hazel twig twitch over a hidden spring, as a truffle hound can scent the delicious fungus though it lurks ever so deeply below ground; so Jesse was capable, by some strange wizardry, of spotting a tip. He would stand just outside ‘The Haven’, sucking his teeth and surveying the passing throng of visitors; suddenly, he would stiffen, his frost-white eyebrows would quiver, he would crack his teeth together with a small, satisfied snap; ‘There’s two bob,’ he would say and start to stalk his prey with all the cunning of one of the great cats in his charge. Try as we would, Joe and I could never see any difference between the people that Jesse got into conversation with and the people that we got into conversation with, but Jesse had an unerring instinct and could estimate before his attack the precise amount of money that he was going to extract from the person concerned. He would have made a splendid pirate.
‘Don’t know how he does it, the old bugger,’ said Joe to me. ‘Look, the other day he says to me, “You try your luck, Joe. There’s a good ’un just going up by the polars – that chap in the trilby. He’s good for five bob.” Well, I went up and spent half an hour with the bloke, told him all sorts of things. I was as nice as pie with him, honest, and all I got out of him was a bleeding Woodbine.’
I am afraid that, after a time, I got rather bored with Albert and his females. They lacked the personality that the other animals on the section possessed. Also, they refused to be friendly in any way whatsoever and so you could not really get to know them. I found Pliny’s imaginary lions and lion stories much more interesting than the live specimens we looked after. I do not know if Albert realised that I had little affection for him, but he suddenly seemed to take an intense dislike to me and made noisy and alarming attempts to slaughter me whenever I went near the cage. He nearly succeeded, too.
One day Joe decided that we would clean out the drains alongside the lion cage so that I would have something to remember when I moved to another section. We went along there, armed with a hose, forks, brushes and other implements, and after a time managed to get Albert and company into the traps. Then, while Joe wielded the hose, whistling merrily, I climbed inside the barrier rail and worked my way along, cleaning all the accumulated debris out of the drain. I had to get close to accomplish this, and that was the reason that Albert had to be trapped up, for the bars in the cage were quite wide enough for him to get his paw through but those on the trap were closer together. We were getting along fine, when I came to the bit of drain that ran alongside the traps where Albert was simmering with rage. Joe had been squirting the hose about with gay abandon and everything was dripping with water. As I stood up to reach for a broom my foot slipped and I fell against the side of the trap. It was fortunate that the bars on it were no wider or Albert would have had me by the shoulder. As it was, he lost no time in springing at me with a triumphant snarl and trying to get his paw between the bars to dig his claws into me. He managed to get only a small part of his toes through but he got one claw firmly hooked in the sleeve of my coat. Joe, uttering a yelp of alarm and obviously under the impression that I was being mauled, turned the hose in our direction. He meant, of course, to squirt the water in Albert’s face and make him release me. However, in his excitement he misjudged and just as I had torn myself free of Albert’s claw and was leaping away, I received the full jet of the hose in my face and was sent reeling and spluttering back against the trap. Albert had another attempt at hooking me and failed; Joe squirted the hose again and hit me between the eyes. I got away from the traps and climbed over the barrier rail, dripping water.
‘Whose side are you supposed to be on?’ I asked Joe.
‘Sorry,’ he said contritely, ‘but I thought the old swine had got you.’
‘You certainly gave him every opportunity to do so,’ I said bitterly, mopping myself with an inadequate handkerchief.
Twice a week it was my duty during the long summer evenings to stay on the section after Jesse and Joe had left to make sure that no members of the public displayed their intelligence by climbing a barrier rail or throwing bottles at the animals. I found these evenings very pleasant. I was lord of all I surveyed; I would sit in ‘The Haven’ over a strong cup of tea, trying to make sense of my hurried notes and get them into some sort of order. Gradually, outside, the shadows would lengthen across the turf and the last little clusters of people would move towards the main gate. It was very quiet when the crowds had gone, and the wallabies would hop cautiously from the shelter of the elder bushes where they had been driven during the day by shouting hordes of little boys. Albert would give a few husky ‘Arooms’ to get his voice in trim for the night’s concert, and you would hear quite clearly the splash and splish of the polar bears lounging in their pool.
My last duty before leaving was to walk the length of the section to see that everything was all right. The wallabies would be scattered over the turf, feeding quietly, soothed by the sudden hush that followed the retreating visitors. The tigress Ranee would be glad to have the door of her den opened, for the great cement pit in which she lived was now in shadow and cold to the paws. Paul, her son, would be already asleep in his bed of straw. Farther along, across the downs, the racoon-like dogs would be curled up tightly in their little wooden hutches while next to them the Arctic foxes flitted like pale shadows among the bushes. Ahead of me, down the path, the wallabies would scatter in fright, bouncing and crashing through the undergrowth. The lions would be lying in the long grass by the edge of their pool; Albert, sunk in his mane, meditating as usual, while beside him Nan and Jill would sleep, with bulging stomachs. There would be wallabies everywhere, rocking slowly across the turf, dragging their heavy tails behind them. Flocks of magpies would flap and chuck in the treetops. In the tiger dell Jum and his mate would be drowsing while around their cage the bushes would crack and rustle with wallabies. Wallabies, wallabies, wallabies everywhere; and in the gloom of the elder spinneys you could hear their rabbit-like teeth rasping the bark from the trees. Having assured myself that all was right with the section and spurred on by the thought of the especially enormous tea that Mrs Bailey always gave me when I was on late night duty, I would take my leave. On the way out there was always the empty bottle to pick up or the scrap of sandwich paper.