We went to Buckingham palace, you know. Me and three others of my kind. Just to show them. Them and the queen. To let them know we could do as well as the others, the others they always used. They said we were tamed, but we knew better.
He was a bit like us, Mr Rothschild. Never fitted in. Always a bit out of place. Didn’t like banking, so they let him have his museum. An interesting hobby for a sickly boy. Well, it was just a shed on the estate to begin with, full of birds, butterflies and beetles. But look what it led to! Riding tortoises, naming giraffes. Who would have thought it.
They poured in from all over the world, the specimens. After all, this was the time of empire, far flung corners and all that. Bugs and beasts, fish and fowls, skins for the stuffing, insects to pin on white paper. A taxidermist’s dream. His interest was at this end, though he did, when young, go on one expedition to some place called the Chatham Islands. No, his passion was the identification. Lists, catalogues, taxonomies.
What stories there were from the collectors! Some sent the dead-alreadies: quagga, thylacine, great auk, moa and dodo. But best were the Boys’ Own adventure stories of wrecks and raids, sleeping sickness and snake bites, rifles to the ready, not for unruly natives of the human kind, but elephants, rhinos, lions, hippos, bears, gorillas, monkeys, seals, walrus, kangaroos, and, I have to admit, zebra. The sealion took a week to skin. It washed ashore in the Falklands, and they paid a Finn in whiskey to do the disgusting deed. Echidnas arrived pickled in spirits, butterflies in tins and beetles in bottles. From Peru and Patagonia, from Matabeleland and Madagascar, from an officer in the Indian Imperial Police Force, from a Resident Officer in the service of the Raja of Sarawak. They all wanted to be part of it.
Some of us were lucky. We escaped the slaughter, herded up on those sun-filled plains and shipped to this soggy country. The food was better though, no fear of predators, and interesting neighbours. We mixed with spiny anteater and pangolin, deer and wild asses, capybara, and of course the giant tortoise that he rode. And Walter liked his flightless birds, kiwi, emu, rhea and cassowary. He liked to eat their eggs, said they were excellent food, especially scrambled and in omelettes and cakes. All in the name of science.
Some of that science I could have done without. Cross-breeding, that’s what he tried. Us and horses, dingoes and dogs. What was the point, it always seemed to me. But Walter, he was a follower of that chap Darwin. Wanted to see the results. If it could be done. A zebroid was the outcome, poor little creature, though some called it a zorse. Looked liked its mum, striped like its dad. Whatever the name, it didn’t fit.
Our day of fame was the parade down Piccadilly. Four of us, groomed to the nines, every hair and stripe in place, polished hooves, a real team, harnessed to his trap, driven by the Baron himself. Good old Walter! We trotted politely, circled through those great gates into the yard of the Palace, a triumph of man over nature. So we let them think. Applause and aplomb. Gawking crowds and our unfathomable gaze.
