Born Wild Read Free

were being bred for fur, the table or as pets but I loved looking after them. I didn’t go so far as preparing them for release into the wild but I do remember that even then I liked animals and dares as much as each other. Indeed, in an unhappy combination of the two, I caught typhus after drinking from a puddle in the school playground and had to spend months in bed, staring at a naked bulb as the sweat poured off me. It was during this time that I came across a book that inspired me to go to Africa and work with the animals that I had already begun to love.
    Absurd as it may sound, in this age of the Discovery and National Geographic Channels, the book that stirred me was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes – one of the most inaccurate books ever written about the ‘Dark Continent’. We only had a small bookshelf at home and it was full of condensed reads and books about war in the desert, containing black-and-white pictures of men with their hands in the air. But hidden away at the back of the shelf was a paperback copy of Tarzan with a colourful cover. I read it over and over again. These were the days of Johnny Weissmuller and Cheeta down at the picture house, but it was actually the book that inspired me rather than thecelluloid, although I always had a liking for Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane.
    Tarzan fascinated me and inspired a lifelong love of Africa, its people and wildlife that endures to this day – even though I’ve eaten Africa’s dirt, been shot at by its inhabitants and gnawed upon by its wildlife. I still find it hard to define what it is that I love about this place – the freedom, the challenge or the responsibility – but I know I love it with an almost painful intensity and I hate spending too long away from it. When I first read Tarzan, going to Africa became an imperative. And I also wanted desperately to be able to communicate with animals like my hero did. Rice Burroughs never set foot in Africa (in fact, William S. Burroughs has probably been a more reliable guide to me) and his descriptions bear no relation to what it actually looks like or what it’s like to live here.
    The first school I remember properly was Enfield Grammar, a couple of miles’ bus ride from home. I must have driven my parents crazy when I was there: I was reasonably quick-witted but I did no work whatsoever. What I really concentrated on was stealing. I’m told that I was personally responsible for the installation of shoplifting mirrors in the local Woolworth’s because we were always down there nicking stuff when we should have been at school. It wasn’t because we wanted the things we stole. It was the buzz and excitement we yearned for – Enfield was tedious beyond measure, Cockfosters with more dirt, black-and-white to my Technicolor imagination. At first my petty larceny had been pretty harmless but it was fast aggrandizing, fed by my constant urge for excitement and my unwillingness to turn down a dare. Borstal and prison were becoming ever more likely.
    It was at about this time that my life began to change. My father had worked hard at the bank and had been able to buy our first car – a Vauxhall 10 I loved and whose engine I used to play with when I was not out in the fields with the dogs. He washed itreligiously at weekends and it always sparkled like new. Having a car in those days was a big deal and that consciousness of their worth has remained with me all my life. The Trust that George and I set up has loads of vehicles now and I keep them on the road way longer than I should because of some inbuilt sense of thrift: every vehicle we’ve ever had in Tanzania is still in use, an absurd source of pride until I was told how much it was costing us.
    Rationing in Britain didn’t stop until 1954 when I was nine, and life wasn’t easy even then. Nevertheless, Dad’s grafting at the bank paid off when he was offered the