Rogue Lion Safaris

‘I’m coming,’ I said. ‘I might see someone I know.’

‘He means he might get the chance to lust at Mrs van der Aardvark,’ Joseph explained to Helen.

‘Slander,’ I said. ‘Not my type at all, that one. You coming, Joseph?’

‘I’ll stay,’ Joseph said. ‘I have some work to do.’

‘Writing to Gianna,’ I explained to Helen, counter-teasing. ‘Dear Gianna, I send my love from the shower cubicle …’

‘Sex mad, my staff,’ said George. ‘Are you ready, Helen?’

When Helen had taken her place at the front of the vehicle, I climbed on behind. It was the standard vehicle of the Mchindeni Valley, a Toyota Land Cruiser with an open truck bed and a pair of benches fixed in the back, one bench higher than the other: a mobile platform for game viewing. But somehow, it didn’t look like standard transport. It was older than most of the vehicles run by the other camps. The doors of the cab had been removed, against conventional wisdom. Naturally, there was no windscreen. The vehicle looked as if it had done several seasons too many, mainly because it had. It had hit too many trees, had heaved itself through too many thorn bushes, had climbed the walls of too many dry riverbeds. Every square inch of its surface bore testimony to a million passages through all but impenetrable bush.

The company logo had been applied near each of the forward wheel arches: a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion surmounted by the words ‘Lion Safaris’. The word ‘rogue’ had been crudely painted beside this on each side in thick black varnish by an unknown hand. George had painted over this still more crudely in borrowed white emulsion. All in all, it was not a vehicle that inspired confidence in a non-bush-hardened client.

‘Well,’ said George. ‘Either we catch the plane or we don’t.’ He let in the clutch with his customary violence; my hand flew in a long-established reflex to my hat, once a racing trilby but now, like the vehicle, showing signs of hard use in the bush.

George’s driving was impatient at the best of times. On the road, the roads being merely graded tracks, he was a perfectly dreadful bush driver. Off the road (off-road driving naturally forbidden by the Manual), he was reckoned to be even worse. In point of fact, he was superb in this area, but the ride was never less than alarming. Most bush drivers tended to cruise gently, giving the animals the best possible chance of being unamazed. George preferred to roar about the bush, crash-halting when a nice animal came into sight, catapulting the clients out of their seat, desperately clutching cameras and binoculars while exclaiming with delight. This morning, George had a licence to hurry, and he hurried. Bush roads are not designed for speed (‘never exceed 20 kph,’ said the Manual) and the drive was rather like doing the Cresta Run on a tin tray. I stood, preferring to take the bumps through my legs rather than my back, removing my hat and standing on the brim to keep it safe. Impala flew from our roaring progress, puku scuttled away like huge fox-coloured rabbits. A party of zebra watched us amazed from the middle of the road, forcing George to lift his foot for a second. ‘Stupid bloody animals, don’t know what you see in the bloody brainless things, Dan …’

I pointed to one as we swept past and shouted over the engine’s noise: ‘Stallion!’

‘Definitely!’ George shouted back. ‘Bateleur, see, Helen?’ He crammed his foot to the floor again, still staring skywards at the eccentric tailless eagle of the Mchindeni Valley.

Helen craned her head back as we sped away, catching a fleeting glimpse of the gliding bird, and catching my eye as she did so. ‘Do you know what I say?’ she asked me, in a thoroughly unladylike yell.

I bent down. ‘What?’

‘Bugger the bloody plane!’ It was the first time I had heard her use an improper word. Both the word, and the sentiments were, I think, new to her. ‘Yes, bugger the plane. That was the most wonderful morning of my life.’

‘I believe you have fallen in love with Auntie Joyce,’ I said.

She turned to me again, and didn’t speak. Instead, an absolutely colossal grin. Then she asked: ‘Will we make it?’

We hit a bump, and I, in my unbalanced crouch, briefly flew, rescuing my hat with an adroit dab of the foot on touching down again. ‘Even money,’ I said. ‘Better, I’ll take six to four.’

2

I had never intended to be a safari guide. I was always going to be a racehorse trainer, like my father. I had grown up with racehorses. For twenty years, or since I could walk, I had been, or at least had seen myself as his right-hand man. I had been assistant trainer, mucker-outer, yard-sweeper, groom and work-rider. My father was a widower – I could hardly remember my mother – and he had never remarried. Horses were his life. He was English, but ‘by an Irish sire out of an English dam’, as he always put it. English enough in normal circumstances, he would become progressively more Irish with strong emotion or strong drink. Neither state was unusual; his stage Irishisms were deliberately self-mocking, deliberately endearing: ‘Sweet Jaysis, the focken dry season’s upon us,’ every time a bottle was finished, which was often.

He ran a string of a couple of dozen beasts, a mixed band of jumpers and flat horses. There was never a horse of any great distinction, but he, we, had a winner here and a winner there, ‘and God send nothing worse’. He loved horses, gambling, drink and chasing women, the women making a distant, hard-panting fourth. A big, bonhomous, bibulous man, he was greatly and widely loved, if seldom very profoundly. People tended to feel protective of him; I did myself. He was the most easy-going man in the world: generous and comfortable with clients, employees, women, horses. Perhaps that was why his horses never won quite as often as they might have done: he was a man without ruthlessness. But boundlessly optimistic: and as long as the horses won sometimes he was content.

Legends accumulated around him: he was that sort of man. They centred on his eccentricity and his extraordinary ability with horses. The best of these was the Derby winner he found wandering about on a motorway late at night, having dumped its rider and taken off that morning: how my father, having persuaded the frightened animal to trust him, led it home across country, arriving in the horse’s yard at two in the morning in full evening dress, leading a million pounds’ worth of horse in one hand, an open bottle of champagne in the other, a smouldering cigar in his mouth. In fact, it was not a Derby winner, nor a motorway, and the champagne and cigar were later embellishments. But the story was true, the racehorse was indeed a good one (Falco Spirit, went on to win the Cambridgeshire) and my father was certainly wearing a dinner suit. I know, I was there. I had picked him up after a dinner with one of his owners in Newmarket, and was driving him home. I remember seeing the horse and stopping: and then my father’s calm, matter-of-fact gentleness: ‘All right, me fella, what do you say to a few mints, now?’ Inevitably, he had a packet of Polos in his pocket: you could always tell my father’s movements around the yard by following the minty breath of his horses. Everyone in racing loved the story: well, everyone in racing loved my father. But they never sent him their best horses.

I spent most of my youth being told what a wonderful man he was: he was a genius with horses, a genius with money. How did he manage to run a small business so successfully, and with such style? What was his secret? I didn’t know then, but his secret was that he wasn’t and didn’t. It was something I should have known: and perhaps remedied. But I didn’t.

I finally learned the truth of my father’s business a few days after he died of a heart attack at the races. I took a little comfort in the inevitable witticism that ran through racing at the time: he had dropped dead from the sheer shock of seeing one of his own horses win. This was meant affectionately, on the whole, and I took comfort where I could find it. For I was struck down with grief, which is a kind of madness: a refusal to believe that it was not possible to turn the clock back just a few days: to, say, take over the bookwork, run the business, save the day, romp home a winner. Had I done the bookwork, would he be alive now? I could not bear such a thought, but I kept on thinking it all the same.

To my eternal regret, I was not with him at the races that day. I had been in the middle of my finals at university. I was completing a degree in zoology. My childhood, not lonely but somewhat isolated, had been divided between horses and nature. I had been a bird-watcher, a flower-presser, and a maker of soon dead pets from wild rabbits, hedgehogs and baby birds. I had jars full of beetles and I had watched many moths emerge raggedly from hoarded chrysalises. The first great love of my life was a stoat I had as a pet for a glorious few months, until it escaped. I was an only child in a stableyard set a fair distance from the village: horses, birds and wild beasts peopled my childhood: these, and my affectionate, chaotic father.

I read, of course, incessantly. My early heroes were Mowgli and Dr Dolittle; later heroes were the great interpreters of animal behaviour: Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Cynthia Moss on elephants, George Schaller on pandas and gorillas, George Sorensen and Peter Norrie on lion. My copy of their book, Lions of the Plains, was nightly perused in wonder, till it became a mass of dog-ears and pencillings. I had a few friends from neighbouring yards; my second great love after the stoat was the daughter of a trainer, a kind and lovely girl of much horsiness: very much my type. Perhaps I would have married her, had I not wanted to go to university.

My father had not exactly approved of my ambition to go to university, but he tolerated it well enough. Tolerating things was his strong point. ‘Horses have got four legs, and if you can count to four, you’ve got enough focken zoology for me,’ he had said, but only because he felt it was expected of him. Besides, I was never a student in the traditional sense of the term, having hundreds of affairs, exploring the far reaches of the universe, plotting global revolution. There was a girl in my second year, but she went off to study epiphytes in the Amazonian rain forest. She was, in a different way, very much my type. Things might have turned out otherwise, but probably not. I was still very much involved with racing and horses. I just did my course work and left for the yard. I would arrive at my provincial university at around noon on Mondays, still smelling of horses after riding out two lots. I would stay in residence until Friday lunch time, and get back to the yard in time for evening stables. I knew very few people outside my tutorial group. University was not a formative experience, it was a sideshow. My real life was bound up with horses: with my father’s horses, our horses. I had never considered the possibility of life without him, or them. And so, at his death, I found myself in free fall, plummeting under the gravity of grief.

My first coherent thought about the future, after I had been summoned from the exams by bad news, was that I would simply take over the running of the yard rather sooner than I had expected. Surely, I thought, it was just a matter of picking up the bookwork; I knew the horse side of things backwards. Without ever thinking the matter out at all clearly, I had envisaged taking an increasingly dominant role at the yard, my father gracefully assuming a back seat. It would be a painless transition, a gradual shift in the emphasis of a partnership that had already worked well for twenty years and more. But like lappet-faced vultures, troubles came down to roost.

I had never bothered much with the business side of stable management. Nor, I soon learned, had my father. There were debts: debts to inspire horror and despair. The yard was so heavily mortgaged it was effectively valueless. Repossession was inevitable. The six horses he – we – I – actually owned had not in fact been paid for. They had to go back. We owed the feed merchant, the farrier, the vet, we owed Weatherbys, we owed several jockeys. We even owed for a couple of horses that we no longer possessed. The wine merchant had not been paid either. This was not a mess, this was disaster. My entire legacy was debt. Solicitors wrote to me in scores, their offices telephoned me hourly. My father’s, our, my solicitor would not let me touch a penny of the estate, such as it was. Practically everyone in racing had a prior claim on it. Including the solicitor himself, as it happened.

Clearing up was, inevitably, a grim business. The owners took their horses away one by one, all with kind words and regrets, none more so than Cynthia, the tearful owner of Darlin’ Girl, who had been a faithful owner and, off and on, a faithful mistress to my intermittently faithful father. The lads were paid off: some grousing, some in tears. I organised a funeral, distractedly: my father had been a sentimental, non-practising Catholic, barring annual drunken forays to midnight mass. The undertaker kept ringing me up to ask unanswerable questions, like how should my father be prepared? What were his favourite hymns? I remembered his drunken improvised hymn of victory one afternoon about a year before, accompanied by a mad jig round the yard with two Tesco bags brimming with tenners. It went something like ‘We’ve stuffed the focken bookie and he’s lost his focken balls’, but perhaps that wouldn’t do. Any bloody hymn. ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ is very popular at these occasions, sir. What? Oh yes, the one about the quiet waters by? Yes, sir. Excellent, jolly good. Though neither water nor quiet had ever played a big part in his life. And what should he wear, sir? Plain wooden overcoat, cheapest in the shop. Very good, sir. And what shall I do with his effects? His what? Burn the bloody things. I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir. Will you take delivery of them? All right, all right.

And so I had to sign for this miserable bundle of junk. A large rumpled suit in Prince of Wales check, mud round the turn-ups and a red wine stain over the breast pocket. Brown brogues that needed mending. In the suit pockets keys, Polos. A wallet containing the usual odds and ends. A pair of unusually good race-glasses. A brown racing trilby. My legacy. The rest of the estate was being fought over by my father’s creditors and their solicitors: carrion feeders, hyenas and lappet-faced vultures.

I picked up the wallet: a familiar enough object, enormous, but seldom full, save after the occasional thundering coup against the bookmakers, when wallet, pockets and sometimes carrier bags would overflow with tenners. The wallet contained little of note. I took out the credit cards, and dutifully snipped them in half. There were two twenty-pound notes; these I pocketed, wondering if this was a crime and deciding that it almost certainly was. And there was also an inordinately thick wodge of betting tickets, fat as a pack of cards. I smiled with troubled affection: it was rare for my father to be in possession of entire betting tickets. They were generally ripped asunder and scattered to the four winds as the horses thundered past the post.

And then my heart performed a crash-halt. After a long moment, it restarted: galloping a finish, tumultuous rhythm. In the last race my father had bet on, his horse had won.

A week later I was richer by several thousand pounds. I did not tell any of the solicitors. My father had bet cunningly and well, placing a great deal of money with a wide selection of bookmakers. He had bet at odds from thirty-three to one down to fives. This was, I had no doubt, intended as a desperate coup to save the yard from extinction. Alas, victory had not been enough: the yard and he were gone. But I collected the money on his behalf. All the bookies paid up. There was no legal obligation for them to do so, but they did, some with good humour, some with resignation. One or two were reluctant, but I browbeat them with threats of the dreadful publicity that would follow any meanness. Popular Trainer’s Son Left Destitute by Heartless Bookie. Popularity: that was the trump card. Everyone had liked my father; many would be furious if he was cheated, as it were, beyond the grave. One of the Great Characters of Racing, said the obituaries, and the bookies, sensitive flowers when it comes to bad publicity, decided it was better to cough. And they coughed and they coughed. For the last time in that house, pockets and carrier bags overflowed with my father’s tenners.

In the final analysis, then, my legacy was this: one pair of binoculars from Leitz of Germany; one racing trilby from Bates of Jermyn Street; and vast wads of tenners. Make a life from that. All right, I will. The madness of grief is much like the madness of love, and so madly I rose to the challenge offered by this legacy. I had no close relatives, no close friends, nowhere to go. I had to vacate the house within six weeks. The logical course was to find a job as assistant trainer somewhere; and it wouldn’t have been hard. But I couldn’t face the idea. I was used to our yard, our system, our horses: my horses. I worked with my father, the idea of working for someone was impossible to contemplate. Just about everything was impossible to contemplate. And so, distracted by grief and overcome with bewilderment, I coldly and deliberately permitted myself a season of insanity. It was intended to be no more than that: a season of madness to be followed by a return to my sort of life, my type of people.

After the funeral, massively attended, and the boozy party paid for by my father’s last wager, I returned to the university. A mixture of compassion and respectable work over three years had secured me a respectable degree. They had no objection to my doing an MSc, once I had told them I could pay my own way. It would be research-based. Subjects for this were discussed, methods suggested, many useful contacts were provided. I spent money on telexes and telephones. Within a fortnight it was all fixed. I was going to turn myself for a season into one of the heroes of my childhood.

I flew on a single ticket to Cape Town, and there I bought a beaten-up but still effective Land-Rover. It was a Series One, a model much treasured by Land-Rover enthusiasts. The metal shelf can be used for opening beer bottles; the headlights are placed close together, giving the vehicle a slightly cross-eyed look. Subsequent models had the headlights conventionally placed: ‘No good,’ George was to say later. ‘Can’t hit trees.’ I drove north into Zimbabwe, and there I took up residence in a centre for field research in one of the national parks. I stayed there for just under a year, living in a bunk in a sort of long house for field scientists. I did not abandon horses, not exactly: in fact, for the first time, the two halves of my childhood were in unity. I produced a fat thesis on the subject of friendship in zebras. I did not dare to call it ‘friendship’, of course: in ethology, which is the study of animal behaviour, anthropomorphism is considered the sin of witchcraft. My paper was entitled A Record of the Interactions and Associations between Non-related Animals in Three Breeding Groups of Equus Burchelli Plains Zebra.

I collected enormous quantities of information: how long unrelated females stayed in each other’s company, and what they did together. I noted a thousand nuances of horsy behaviour, and, deep in Africa, I felt profoundly at home. For each gesture, each shared behaviour, was something I had witnessed at home, when my father and I had turned the mares out into the big field ‘for a buck and a kick and a pick of focken grass’. I made hundreds of graphs and pie charts and bar charts. It was all rather like making up an owner’s bill. Don’t give them a focken great big figure and let them boggle at it: give them lots of small amounts instead. God dwells in the details.

I was given enormous help by Dr Jessica Salmon, who was doing a colossal piece of research for one of the international wildlife organisations. She had done her doctorate at my university, hence the contact, and she was now researching every imaginable aspect of zebra ecology. Her project, lavishly funded, had involved the blood-typing of a large number of animals; thanks to her, the non-kinship of my chosen zebras was an established fact. Her groundwork gave my research its validity. She was planning a popular book to follow her research: ‘I want to do for zebras what George Sorensen and Peter Norrie did for lion all those years ago,’ she said. I was delighted that she used some of my own observations in her final, massively authoritative work, all properly, generously acknowledged, and a grand piece of work it turned out to be as well. But that is by the way.

My own paper was finished after a year or so, and so was my money. I got the work typed up in Harare, and posted it – two copies under separate cover, naturally – back to England. I had always thought that I would then post myself, but I did no such thing. I resolved to try my luck, to try ‘one more year’ in Africa.

I met someone who had worked in tourism, in South Mchindeni National Park, further north. He had worked as a safari guide for Philip Pocock. I was suitably impressed: Pocock was something of an African Legend, a former white hunter who had turned rabid conservationist and grand old man. I was given a letter of introduction and recommended to give it a try. Still uncertain of why, I drove on.

I reached the Mchindeni Valley a couple of weeks before the dry season, also known as the tourist season, or sometimes just as The Season, officially began. The camp operators were setting up for six months of beasts and tourists. I found my way to Mukango Lodge: this was the first tourist operation that had been established in the Valley. Pocock still ran it. I sought him out, and dealt him my letter of introduction. This seemed to go all right. He gave me a beer, talked about zebras and the research centre. He was not hiring staff himself, but I had timed this visit well: it turned out that he was holding a party that night for all the tourist operators in the Valley, a traditional pre-season ritual. I was invited to the do, and offered a bed for a few nights, until I had found a job. Philip Pocock was a crusty and difficult man, but always very kind to me.

The gathering that evening was large, and somewhat overwhelming. I knocked back several beers as a defensive measure, erected my academic status as a wall. I had expected the gathering to be all male, but there was a fair number of women as well. Most camps, I learned, employed a European woman as caterer; after a year on a research centre, each one seemed a dazzling nymph. Most of the people were white, but there was a small number of Africans among them. One of these, who worked as a safari guide with Philip, discoursed learnedly with me on zebras. I met a short but terribly wide man with a penetrating Afrikaner accent, who talked solid business at me. ‘The logistics of running a business on a six-month operation are frightening, man. You’ve got to be good to survive out here, man.’ I met an intense English birding type called Lloyd, who confused me mightily with his talk about red-billed and Cape and Hottentot teal. He told me more than once that he had seen a palmnut vulture that day. ‘A crippler,’ he said. ‘An absolute bloody crippler.’ I was familiar enough with birding slang to follow him. He introduced me to his camp’s caterer, whose beauty caused me to freeze instantly, like an alarmed impala. However, she treated me with impenetrable English snootiness, and when she heard I was looking for a job, she looked me up and down, and laughed. I decided that I hated her. Her freckled, sun-bleached appearance had rendered me more or less incapable of speech, but more attractive still was the thought of throwing her into the Mchindeni River to take her chances among the hippo. Not my type at all: she looked like the sort of owner who every week announced she would take her bloody horse elsewhere. Focken take him. He’ll not win nothing without a rocket up his arse.

I moved on, finding myself in conversation with a clownish individual in baggy shorts: shorts, I couldn’t help noticing, that had a kind of open-work crochet pattern around the crotch, a pattern created, presumably, by tumbling shards of cigarette. He looked like the party bore, and my first thought was to wonder how to escape. He was lanky without being in the least bit tall; he had a haircut of grey stubble that appeared self-administered, or rather, self-inflicted. I was struck by the almost cosmic filthiness of his clothes. He seemed utterly out of place in this pleasant, civilised gathering. He asked, in an unexpectedly mellow tone, what I had been doing.