strolled around the picnic area from where you could see a pack of wolves prowling through the trees behind a wire fence. Three big European bears looked up at us from their woodland enclosure, and three jaguars, two pumas, a lynx, some flamingos, porcupines, raccoons and a Brazilian tapir added to the eclectic mix of the collection.
We were awestruck by the animals, and surprisingly not daunted at all. Even to our untutored eyes there was clearly a lot of work to be done. Everything wooden, from picnic benches to enclosure posts and stand-off barriers, was covered in algae which had clearly been there for some time. Some of it, worryingly at the base of many of the enclosure posts, was obviously having a corrosive influence. We could see it needed work, but we could also see that it had until recently been a going concern, and one which would give us a unique opportunity to be near some of the most spectacular, and endangered, animals on the planet.
As part of our official viewing of the property we were asked by a film crew from Animal Planet to participate in a documentary about the sale. The journalist in me began to wonder whether this eccentric English venture might be sustainable through another source. Writing and the media had been my career for 15 years, and, while not providing a huge amount of money, had given me a tremendous quality of life. If I could write about the things I liked doing, I could generally do them as well, and I was sometimes able to boost the activity itself with the media light which shone on it. Perhaps here was a similar model. A once thriving project now on the edge of extinction, functioning perfectly well in its day, but now needing a little nudge from the outside world to survive …
Mum, Duncan and myself were asked for the camera to stand shoulder to shoulder amongst the parrots in the living room, to explain what we would do if we got the zoo. At the end of our burst of amateurish enthusiasm, the camera man spontaneously said, ‘I want you guys to get it.’ The other offers were from leisure industry professionals with a lot of money, against whom we felt we had an outside chance, but nothing more. My scepticism was still enormous, but I began to see a clear way through, if, somehow, chance delivered it to us. Though it still felt far-fetched, like looking round all those houses my parents seemed to drag us round when we were moving house as kids; don’t get too interested, because you know you will almost certainly not end up living there.
On our tour around the park itself Ellis finally switched out of his professional spiel and looked at me, my brother Duncan, and my brother-in-law Jim, all relatively strapping lads in our early to mid-forties, and said, ‘Well, you’re the right age for it anyway.’ This vote of confidence registered with us, as Ellis had clearly seen something in us that he liked. Our ambitions for the place were modest, which he also liked. He said he’d actually turned away several offers because they involved spending too much on the redevelopment. ‘What do you want to spend a million pounds on here?’ he asked us, somewhat rhetorically. ‘What’s wrong with it? On your bike, I said to them.’ I can imagine the colour draining from his bankers’ faces when they heard this good news. Luckily we didn’t have a million pounds to spend on redevelopment – or, at this stage, even on the zoo itself – so our modest, family-based plans seemed to strike a chord with Ellis.
At about three thirty in the afternoon our tour was over and we began to notice that the excited chattering of the adults in our group was fractured increasingly frequently by minor, slightly over-emotional outbursts from our children milling around us, like progressively more manic and fractious over-wound toys. In our enthusiasm for the park we had collectively made an elementary, rookie parenting mistake and missed lunch, leading to Parents’ Dread: low blood sugar in under-tens. We had to find food fast. We walked into the enormous Jaguar Restaurant built by Ellis in 1987 to seat 300 people. Then we walked out again. Rarely have I been in a working restaurant less conducive to the consumption of food. A thin film of grease from the prolific fat fryers in the kitchen coated the tired Formica table tops, arranged in canteen rows and illuminated by harsh fluorescent strips mounted in the swirling mess of the grease-yellowed artex ceiling. The heavy scent of chip fat gave a fairly accurate indication of the menu, and mingled with the smoke of roll-ups rising from the group of staff clad in grey kitchen whites sitting around the bar, eyeing their few customers with suspicion.
Even at the risk of total mass blood-sugar implosion, we were not eating there, and asked for directions to the nearest supermarket for emergency provisions. And then, for me, the final piece of the Dartmoor puzzle fell into place, for that was when we discovered: Tesco at Lee Mill. Seven minutes away by car was not just a supermarket, but an ubermarket. In Monty Python’s Holy Grail, at the climax of the film King Arthur finally reaches a rise which gives him a view of ‘Castle Aaargh’, thought to be the resting place of the Holy Grail, the culmination of his Quest. As Arthur and Sir Bedevere are drawn across the water towards the castle by the pilotless dragon-crested ship, music of Wagnerian epic proportions plays to indicate that they are arriving at a place of true significance. This music started spontaneously in my head as we rounded a corner at the top of a small hill, and looked down into a manmade basin filled with what looked almost like a giant space ship, secretly landed in this lush green landscape. It seemed the size of Stansted Airport, its lights beaconing out their message of industrial-scale consumerism into the rapidly descending twilight of the late spring afternoon. Hot chickens, fresh bread and salad, humous, batteries, children’s clothes, newspapers and many other provisions we were lacking were immediately provided. But more importantly, wandering around its cathedral-high aisles I was hugely reassured that, if necessary, I could find here a television, a camera, an iron, a kettle, stationery, a DVD or a child’s toy. And it was open 24 hours a day. As I watched the 37 checkouts humming their queues of punters through, my final fear about relocating to the area was laid to rest. A Londoner for twenty years I had become accustomed to the availability of things like flat-screen TVs, birthday cards or sprouts at any time of the day or night, and one of the biggest culture shocks of living in southern France for the last three years had been their totally different take on this. For them, global consumerism stopped at 8.00 pm, and if you needed something urgently after that you had to wait till the next day! This Tesco, for me, meant that the whole thing was doable, and we took our picnic to watch the sunset on a nearby beach in high spirits.
Although my mum’s house was not yet even on the market it had been valued at the same as the asking price for the park, so, with some trepidation, we put in an offer at that price in a four-way sealed bid auction, and waited keenly for the outcome. But two days later we were told that we were not successful. Our bid was rejected by Ellis’s advisors on the basis that we were inexperienced, and had no real money. Which we had to admit were both fair points. We sloped back to our lives, with the minimum of regrets, feeling that we had done what we could, had been prepared to follow through, but now it was out of our hands. Melissa went back to her family in Gloucestershire; Duncan was busy in London with his new business, Vincent, our eldest brother at 54, had a new baby; Mum went back to the family home in Surrey, preparing it to put on the market. All relatively comfortable, successful and rewarding. My life in particular, I felt, was compensation enough for missing out on this chance. Having spent nearly a decade manoeuvring into a position of writing for a living with low overheads in a hot country, watching the children grow into this slightly strange niche, I was content with my lot, and anxious to get back to it.
But after all the excitement, I couldn’t help wondering about what might have been. Sitting in my makeshift perspex office in the back of my beautiful derelict barn with the swallows dipping in and out during the day and the bats buzzing around my head at dusk, I couldn’t stop thinking about the life we could have built around that zoo.
Katherine was getting stronger every day, wielding my French pick-axe-mattock in her vegetable garden with increasing vigour, and her muscle tone and body mass, wasted to its furthest extreme by the chemotherapy so that she went from looking like a catwalk model to an etiolated punk rocker with her random tufts of hair, improved throughout the summer. Her neurologist, Madame Campello, a fiercely intelligent and slightly forbidding woman, was pleased with her progress and decided on shifting her monthly MRI scans to once every two months, which we saw as a good sign. It gave us longer between the inevitable anxiety of going into Nîmes to get the results, a process both of us, particularly Katherine, found pretty daunting.
Mme Campello was obviously compassionate, and I’m sure I saw her actually gasp