Memories of an Encounter with a Very Large Animal by Sara Burgess

The creamy, lace-edged parasol sways in time with Nanny’s languid gait. The gentle creak of the perambulator springs beneath my nest of cotton summer blankets, lulls me to a state resembling a coma. Overhead, the occasional puff of cloud or cluster of leaves on a branch glitters in the sunlight against the aventurine blue sky. This is all that marks our slow passage along some promenade in the Zoological and Botanic Gardens of the town Pappa had set us in that year.

      I am at that age where the extensions of my own body amuse me. A pink, dimpled foot poking out from the froth of my dress extracts a charming chuckle, my leg kicking at the air creates merry mirth, and my pudgy arms collaborating in some melodramatic minuet before my face, invite hales of laughter.  Then in an instant, my world goes dark. As unease lightly treads my skin, I can hear Pappa’s voice somewhere off, and the chocolate brown aroma of pipe tobacco, that evermore induces me to sickness, tints the air.

     I can feel something pressing against my leg as a wall of grey, wrinkled flesh obliterates my small horizon. A beady, amber coloured eye set in layers of charcoal ruches, sweeps across my vista. The stench of mud and off hay and a rough grunting sound. The flash of an ivory cutlass, and a rubbery snake like a gnarled limb torn from the trees, pushes against my thigh, snuffles my stomach, tries to nip my chest with its two-fingered tip. Screams rent the air. I am locked in a breathless paroxysm of fear. I am a stiff doll as Pappa wrenches me free of the invading monster, and men appear as if from nowhere to beat it away with sticks. An enraged trumpeting slashes the hysterical cacophony of women, followed by a low trilling, a rumbling, as the outraged animal lumbers off and picks up to a canter with another great roar, as it charges for the canopy of the arboretum.

     Dorothy, my Nanny, is a quivering wreck needing comfort herself, not least for the summary and public dismissal that swiftly follows this shock to her usually sturdy constitution, and Mamma, a spitting hydra, lobs balls of venom at anyone within earshot. As the veritable victim of the piece I am thankfully lauded for still being alive, although now a blubbering, slippery concoction of mucous and salt water, barely able to snatch a breath between my piteous wails. I am stroked and comforted, crushed and cuddled, then snatched away to nuzzle in Mamma’s unfamiliar breast as my beloved Nanny is taken away never to be spoken of again. 

                     

     My father’s singular desire was to own one of every animal that walked the Earth. As a self-styled naturalist, one of a growing number in England at the turn of the century, I often wondered if he valued them more than his own family. Surely we wouldn’t have been pursued to shame and penury, nor Mamma to an early grave, had he been driven by a less indulgent pursuit. But driven he was, and the story of that fateful day, whose details were supplied to me regularly for some time thereafter, remains imprinted on my memory as cleanly as the copperplate enclosure plaque bearing the name of its proboscidean protagonist; Kim.

     Animals fill my earliest memories, many of them stuffed and set in extravagant mahogany boxes with dreamy scenarios painted inside to give the illusion of an airy outdoors. In any of our houses there are always layers of shiny, carapaced insects and jewel-coloured butterflies pinned to boards, which slide into large mahogany chests of drawers. Outside, there are outhouses filled with cawing tropical birds, that never survive our dour winters, only to provide feathers for ladies’ hats or macabre trophies for Pappa’s cronies.

     When I first met Kim, we lived in a house on the Great Western Terrace not far from Kibble Crystal Art Palace in Glasgow. She was kept by a Negro gentleman called John Aaron. I was under the illusion that the great glass houses belonged to my father, at least that’s what he told me, his dreams of grandeur being so effluent. Until that day my young life was sheltered under its huge glass parasol and my dreams were peopled by alabaster statues against a backdrop of huge exotic ferns and rubber leafed flora.

     It was many years later that I learnt that my father was no good with money, and it was that which inspired our many moves in his pursuit of his zoological dream alongside flight from his creditors. We removed to Thorner near Leeds not long after my first encounter with Kim, to a lovely house called Ashfield Lodge, this time kept thankfully free of stuffed and pinned creatures as Mamma finally put her expensively shod foot down about the interior decor. Pappa would still hold forth to any who would listen on such topics as The Plight of the Invertebrate in Industrial Britain, or How to Cultivate an Effective Herbarium, although I was beginning to feel a little sorry for the animals, never more beautiful in stapled and pinned decay than in life. It must have been some ten years between the heated discussions with Mamma and the many flights to diverse hostelries in the area that the idea was borne for his own Zoological gardens in nearby Halifax...