Wojtek the Bear [paperback] Read Free Page B

happy to share with me. Although I knew from all Jim’s tales that Wojtek was a very large bear, it was only when I saw him
in the flesh that I realised just how big he was. I was awestruck by his long nose and huge feet.
    I always thought of Wojtek as my grandfather’s bear. Indeed, when he heard that our Sunday School trip was to Edinburgh Zoo my grandfather taught me the Polish word for
‘hello’. Sure enough, when I shouted it out, Wojtek immediately looked in my direction – he responded instantly whenever he heard Polish being spoken – and gave me that
first wave of his large paw. The thought of it still thrills me today.
    One of my ambitions, drawn from that day, is to have a plaque commemorating his life mounted at Edinburgh Zoo. When he was resident in the zoo there used to be one. But today there is no
reference to him having lived there, simply due to the passage of time. He died, after all, in 1963. The world moves on and memories fade. However, nearly 50 years on, Wojtek is once more coming
out of hibernation. There is international interest in his story. It isperhaps now time for his place in history to be remembered in the zoo where he spent so much of his
adult life.
    There were to be later visits to Wojtek in Edinburgh Zoo with my mother and my grandmother, but I recall one other overriding emotion from that first trip: I felt desperately sorry for Wojtek.
In the confines of his zoo enclosure, to me, he truly looked a displaced bear. Around the farm and the camp he’d been allowed to roam free. Yes, he was locked up at night, but that was no
more than happened to the other livestock. In the morning they were all let out in the fields. There is a certain sad irony about that fact: a bear in a DP (displaced persons) camp had more freedom
than he did as a civilian bear living in his own compound at the zoo.
    A huge admirer of the Poles’ hardiness and fighting qualities, Jim visited Winfield Camp several times a week and he listened to all their tales. He always had a small treat for the bear,
in the shape of an apple or some other titbit, in his pocket. It was only much later, when I began researching Wojtek’s life, that memories came flooding back and I realised just how many
stories Jim had told me about Wojtek.
    My grandfather and Wojtek were great friends. There was a strong bond between them. In their own ways, they were both loners who had made the military their family. Wojtek had joined the Polish
army as a scruffy little motherless bear cub. My grandfather, one of a family of nine, had run away from home at the age of 14 to go soldiering round the world. Fiercely independent, he was a
small, wiry, bantam-cock of a man who was handy with his fists and didn’t take kindly to people taking liberties. He used to be a lightweight boxer.
    Like Wojtek with his Polish companions, Jim had travelled to many foreign outposts with his regiment, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and had participated in many
of the darker moments of its military engagements. As a girl I rifled through a biscuit tin in the bedroom wardrobe of Jim’s home in Moniaive to sneak a peek at some of the mementos
he’d brought back from foreign parts. They included photographs from the Boxer Rebellion in China when an international military force had to be sent in to rescue Westerners besieged in
mission compounds by hordes of Chinese rebels. In horrid fascination I found myself staring at severed heads lying in the street where people had been executed by mobs intent on ridding China of
‘foreign devils’.
    In passing, it should be said that all Borderers have an abiding affection for the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Raised in 1689 to defend Edinburgh against the Jacobites, the Kosbies, as
the regiment is often called by the general public (but never by the soldiers themselves), has a long and illustrious history. Still traditionally recruiting from Dumfries and Galloway, Lanarkshire
and the Borders,