But now, it’s the Summer of ‘76. The sun is burning a satsuma in a pitiless cloud-free sky and my mother is doing something out of character: She has peeled herself from her work and is driving me to the scorched plains of the Windsor Safari Park.
The United Kingdom is burning up; it has never seen heat like this. Due to metal fatigue and for the first time in history Big Ben’s arms have seized, Brighton Beach is standing room only and all the country’s ladybirds – roving in bands for any last remaining aphids – have become a national menace.
Even so, my mother has said she can’t think of a better time for the Safari Park. She’s referring, I think, to mood; that it will be moodier, more echt, to observe these African animals when there isn’t a steady drizzle, and the omnipresent British damp isn’t suffusing (in June) through the fibers of the thickest coat. Yes, it’s the perfect thing to be doing today under this blistering, tangerine sun.
“Excited?” she says as the mercury bulges and we book west out of London in our tinpot VW, the color and shape (thinking now) of a ladybird.
I want to say we were ‘spinning’ along the motorway and that the long Liberty scarf around my mother’s head was battering in the wind coming through the little push-out windows. But it wasn’t so. The tarmac – returning to an earlier state – was melting. The wheels of our tin pot were catching in a Marmite-ian ooze.
This jaunt is all the more surprising because my mother wasn’t mad keen on animals – unless, of course, it was a 2D lion, drawn by John Tenniel for the pages of Alice in Wonderland, or a 3D lion in bronze wrought by one of her long-dead sculptor boyfriends. We did have a cat, but my mother retched like a grebe on a pellet at the litter box, and would give poor puss an eye-openingly reflexive smack any time it turned to lick its bum.
And dogs were a definite no-no; they produced even bigger turds. And did her concern for the conspicuity of their balls border on fetish?
So here we are, alone on a vast grid of empty parking spots waiting for the gates to open, and we are reading the signs. There isn’t one that specifically says TURN BACK NOW, though others, citing the risks of cheese and pickle sandwiches tossed e fenestra hint at the measure. My mother shudders dramatically, rolls up her window and glances yonder up a thirsty-looking hill to where a couple of elk are getting frisky.
“Don’t look!” she says, continuing to stare like a spectral tarsier. But soon, sweat weeps through her scarf down into her eyes and she puts the ladybird in gear.
Who knew that rhinoceroses would be the least of it? Certainly not us. We’d given little thought – none – to being cooked alive in a gimcrack orange Beetle because it was 130°, the windows had to be closed, and the UK wouldn’t see air conditioning until Mars was growing turnips.
It was hard to enjoy ourselves. While our hippothalamuses were working overtime to reroute blood to our skins, the ladybird seemed to be struggling, too. Steam was coming out and there was a smell of boiling oil.
“We can’t turn back now!” my mother said, wrenching the car hard left into the nearest enclosure which happened to be the baboons.
No one had told us about these. My mother knew a little bit – that their bums were, “the stuff of nightmares,” and that a varietal of bearded iris (called the Baboon Bottom) actually managed to be pretty.
No one told us they had a penchant for car parts and could remove them faster than a tire changer at Brands Hatch. Within seconds, our old Beetle was sans mirrors, sans wipers, sans everything, but not without two of the best seats in the house to the Monkey Horror Bottom Show that followed. It was too much, even for my mother who pushed her hands frantically against the windscreen and shrieked “shoo” over and over again. The baboons weren’t bothered and continued to press their bearded irises to the glass.
“They’re laughing,” my mother said. “Look at them; they’re laughing at us. They’re having the time of their lives.”
AB - 2.2.23
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I remember that summer well but never heard that story before - hilarious!!