If we could talk to the animals again! by Steve Gladwin

Just recently I have been spending a great deal of time with animals. It would be nice to say that that involves any kind of close contact, but sadly apart from the usual visiting birds in our garden, the odd squirrel making a leap for a tree in our local churchyard and a variety of dogs with their walkers, it’s not quite as full in your face as this.

What I have been doing is spending much enjoyable and valuable time with animals in their symbolic, creative and inspirational forms through the composition of tales for a series of books. Because my animal encounters have been limited to just a few mammals, birds and insects, (eight in all), I have grown to know them in depth in a way I could never match if I were either visiting them in captivity, or preferably in the wild.

And yet there is something special about meeting the likes of raven and swan, hare and wren, wolf and butterfly and seal and swallow through the medium of story, myth and folktale and especially maybe about concentrating on a few certain attributes – say raven as a symbol of death and wolf as a representative of the pack animal, swallow representing both journeying and memory and wren the importance of being cocky when you need to be.

Margaret's Cards - The Hare by Rose Foran

Writing my stories and working in this way with these animals has made me think a great deal about our relationship with animals, about how that has changed, and how that has been reflected - particularly in children’s literature.

Like so many people, one of my earliest literary memories was of Aslan and the rest of the talking animals in CS Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.Even as an adult, one of my favourite sections in any book is the section in Prince Caspian, where Doctor Cornelius secretly takes the young prince to the top of the tower at night time. Here he reveals that everything Caspian has been told by his Uncle Miraz about Narnia’s history is untrue. What's more animals do talk!Well of course they do! I thought everyone knew that.

I  also remember my early encounters with Animal Farm and the tragic death of Boxer, Pooh, Piglet and the magnificently gloomy Eeyore,and of course there was Ratty, Mole and Badger, (I always felt that big show-off Toad rather ruined things!) in The Wind in the Willows'. How could I forget that magnificent sequences of getting lost in the Wild Wood in winter, and the wonderfully pagan ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ encounter with Pan, (although of course as a child it was just a bit weird!) This was of course all long before Richard Adams rabbits out on silflay in Watership Down, (one of my all time favourite words!), not to mention Redwall and Deptford and Duncton and the like. 

Nowadays we must be even more richly endowed with talking animal encounters and adventures, (my fellow abba blogger Ruth Hatfield's 'Book of Storms' series, where even the grass talks, is one of the most wonderful recent examples) but surely in some ways all we’re really doing when writing such stories, is filling in the gap where we used to have proper relationships with all animals and not just the cats whose antics we post proudly on youtube and the dogs we turn into cowardly cartoon characters. Surely ancient man and woman used to actually ‘talk to the animals.’

Thankfully there are still places in the world – often where the terrain is harsh and therefore the pickings poor – where a warrior knows respect for the animal he will eventually kill, where he or she will almost persuade it into death and mourn it when it goes.  Nor is this a transient respect, but one which the whole tribe will have known since birth.Something which is as deep a part of their culture as the need to kill in order to use the fallen creature’s meat to survive, it’s skin to keep warm and a whole host of other ways in which no wastage is ensured. Contrast this with the amount of meat and fish lost to sell by dates and the discarding of nearly every part of all those animals we do kill as part of the factory farm, slaughter and profit merry go round.

It was simply never meant to be like this, but surely it has gone too far now to change! And as well as that more natural and respectful relationship between warrior and animal, there is a whole other lost relationship, when we truly were able to talk to the animals.

I remember many years ago a work colleague of my then partner coming round and talking to our cat in a completely different language. Spats immediately responded in the same sort of ‘Prip, prow’ language which we had never heard before. Here was a woman who could talk to cats as easily as horse whisperers can talk to horses and a native warrior can talk a quarry down into death. Why not the rest of us? We felt a mite miffed - here was our cat conversing quite deeply it seemed with a complete stranger!


We have clearly lost touch with talking to the animals on any number of levels. Whether you believe in spiritual animal connections, such as the idea of having a particular totem animal, or would just like to tell your problems to a sympathetic baboon next time you've got one peeling the roof of your car in your local safari park, surely we can all agree that things have gone in the wrong direction.

A few months ago I posted a two part blog about the Willard Price books of my childhood and contrasted these with Gerald Durrell's 'My Family and other Animals' and the new generation of responsible TV naturalists as personified by Steve Backshall and the first book in his Falcon Chronicles series, 'Tiger Quest.' I commented how Price's old-fashioned view of 'hunt 'em, catch 'em and presume they'l be happier in dad's zoo' sat quite awkwardly nowadays. In a rather naive moment, I also expressed relief that the problems with poaching weren't half as extreme as had been depicted in Safari Adventure. Almost straight away I discovered that not only was poaching still a horrendous problem, but that the same was in danger of being the case for whaling, and the systematic destruction of animal homelands and sanctuaries and this before Brexit and the recent US election of a 'go and find more oil and profit' president elect'

Many of the problems and confusions in animal conservation come - as they do so with so many things - from the too long dominating patriarchal attitudes of the old testament, which - while being set down as laws for a particular people, are still taken as gospel, (pun absolutely intended!) by far too many people who should know better. The 'thou shalt have dominion' school of thought truly should have no place in our modern society, but then there are still people out there who believe in creationism and I gave up on them long ago!

Writers have not only had plenty to say about animal conservation, but about re-introducing our animal companions to us in a way which doesn't always have to be cutesy or trapped in old cartoon ideas of the forties. There are many naturalists who became writers while readily admitting that they used to more or less shoot everything in sight, who later preached that others should preserve it. Peter Scott say, is a classic example. For quite often there is no more powerful advocate than the convert, rather like the ex smoker who becomes the tobacco industry's fiercest critic.

thanks to andeanshaman.com

Of course, those of us who write, can also do a great deal to promote a better understanding of a truer, more honest and above all less systematically cruel relationship to animals, but I'm about to suggest another way which you may choose to adopt if you wish, or encourage in others if you don't.

Basically it's this - find your equivalent of a totem animal! Now before you go dismissing this clearly new age madness and thumbing back through my previous blogs to find all the evidence of my evil insidious paganism, just consider this. I'm not asking you to connect with an animal, or dance yourself into a trance states to discover it. Nor am I asking you to descend to the spirit world to find a cure for your mum's eczema! That's a power animal and it's more a shaman's department!

No, a totem animal is more one which you may already feel some association with, maybe because you've already adopted one via any of those schemes where it's usually the same animal who gets adopted by everyone, and ends up with an ego so big it can't fit back in the enclosure! Or you might just always enjoy it's appearances on Planet Earth 2 and the like!

All I'm asking is this! Engage with it! Learn more about it and teach others about it! And if you can't choose between a whole sub species - say the Big Cats - well all the better. Spread the word about the whole family, create or sign petitions to save them - anything like that. It will all in the long term make a difference to the world. 

If you're a a cat and dog owner, you're already halfway there!, but there are a lot of other cats, wolves, wild dogs and jackals to help too. And if you want to be really unconventional, pick something resolutely unsexy, like say those rather scary creatures in the ocean depths that carry what looks like a light bulb on a chord in front of them. Go for the unromantic - I dare you!  

Or as a writer maybe you can pitch a great new idea about wildlife - say a private detective heroine with an off-beat animal side-kick - via an adventurous editor or publisher,(I'm assured they do exist!) and do your bit that way.

Go on, have a go! Every bit of it will make a difference?



Steve Gladwin

Writer, Performer and Teacher

Author of 'The Seven' and 'The Raven's Call'

www.stevegladwin.co.uk

A Whole Childhood World of Adventure Part Two by Steve Gladwin

Part Two- Battle of the Giants.

Previously on A Whole Childhood World Of Adventure.

I decided to revisit an old childhood favourite, the Hal and Roger Hunt adventures by Willard Price. I wanted to see how they stood up against more modern issues about zoos and conservation. I also decided to read, (finally!) Gerald Durrell's 'My Family And Other Animals', to see how the Hunt boys compared with 10 year old Gerry's very individual approach to the same subject, and for good measure to include modern day adventurer, conservationist and naturalist Steve Backshall's more modern take in his Falcon Chronicles Series.   

There is an old joke about a man going into a pet shop and requesting an unusual pet. Eventually he settles on an octopus, having promised the pet shop owner that he will not let it out of the tank and – should he disobey and can’t get it back in its tank - he promises to phone him for help.

Well of course the inevitable happens and – having soon got bored with a pet that can’t go anywhere, he lets the octopus out of its tank whereupon it flollops off in such a slithery manner that he can’t catch it. Worse still, every time he manages to grab a tentacle to push it back into the tank, another two slither back out. Eventually he has no alternative but to ring the pet shop owner, who turns up very quickly armed with a mallet. What on earth does he intend to do with that? The man soon finds out the answer when the pet shop owner lures the octopus with its favourite food, before whacking it smartly on the head with the mallet. The man then watches in astonishment as the poor octopus, yelling the octopus equivalent of ‘owch’, puts all its tentacles on his head, whereupon  the man from the pet shop sticks it back in the tank.

Giant Cuttlefish from Wikipedia. Roger Hunt lassoed it in Arctic Adventure  (which was probably cheating).

I’ve always loved this joke and was bizarrely reminded of it not just once but twice in Arctic Adventure, the last of Willard Price’s Hal and Roger Hunt series. In the first instance Hal and Roger capture a giant cuttlefish by cornering it in the depths of the icy ocean and Roger casts a lasso over it’s head, tightening it so the tentacles cannot move. Later on Roger also manages to capture a huge sea lion by bopping it on the head with a club every time it comes up for air, thus depriving it of its vital surfacing dives for breath so that it eventually blacks out!

Alas it is certain that there are several less than humane moments in the Hunt boys adventures and I have to say that I have real issues with the finding and feeding of live prey to the bigger animals, even though I can accept that its necessary. I got a really uncomfortable feeling in Amazon Adventure when Hal fed a live manatee to an ananconda, but worse still perhaps are the platitudes about animals being happier in captivity than in the wild. The most outrageous example of this I've read so far is in Arctic Adventure where the captured killer whale should – according to Hal – be positively looking forward to its new life performing tricks to the general public!

I will always love the books for the excitement they gave me in childhood and for Willard Price’s honest attempt to educate children not just about wildlife but humanity and the different ways it can exist together. By far the most interesting sections, (because Willard Price is never gripping) are those which involve the customs of the Inuit, who were called Eskimos in those days, (1980 when the last of the books was written). But the problem with the books – and I’d be interested in whether young people nowadays would pick up on this as much – is that Willard Price seems incapable of building tension. It’s almost as if he – like the Hunt boys – has a shopping list of animals and encounters to get through and therefore can’t spend long on anything. Price was a journalist and foreign correspondent so perhaps he was too accustomed to writing copy to make the transition to novel writing successfully. His villains too are cardboard in the main and you really can’t believe in any peril the boys are in because they’ll either brush it away or – if the peril involves animals – Roger will end up doing his Doctor Doolittle act, rendering it as gentle as a lamb.

No if you want genuine peril with a conservation message then Steve Backshall’s Falcon Chronicles surely fit the bill better. Steve has had a reputation for a number of years as a he-man adventurer chasing some of the world’s most deadly species in – often – some of its least inviting environments. But Steve is far more than a muscle man who wrests slimy or bitey things to the ground while showing off his pecs. One of the things I really like about Steve is that he doesn’t mind saying just how he feels. In Lost Land of the Volcano for example, he goes off with a caving group in a completely new cave system in New Guinea and half way through is struck down with fever. He has no qualms here or at other times, sharing his feelings, telling us he’s scared or in pain or needs to go and change his trousers. He's recently once again gone against his he man reputation with his unashamed blubbing when his fiancee Helen Glover and her rowing partner won Olympic gold.

In a Guardian interview Steve Backshall told us that his favourite childhood reads were Gerald Durrell’s My Family And Other Animals, Jack London’s Call of the Wild and Willard Prices Hunt boy adventures. In the first of the Falcon Chronicles, 'Tiger Wars', Steve goes a long way towards proving himself one of the natural inheritors of Willard Price’s crown. Here there is the same emphasis on culture and wildlife lore and the same message about the industrially sized evil of poaching as Price explored in Safari Adventure, (and which therefore made it such an exciting entry in the series. And crucially Steve provides us with both boy and girl teenage characters to root for who are thrown together by accident and have to survive untold perils. Saker the boy is a member of a mysterious group of teenage boys who have been trained in secret in the forests of Eastern Europe and forgotten their past, performing what almost amount to black opps for an unforgiving master called The Prophet. All of the boys are named after animals, such as Polecat, Bear, Wolf and Margay  (a small wild cat) and Saker’s own handle comes from the Saker hawk. He himself has gone AWOL after an attack of conscience following his shooting of a female tiger before discovering she has orphaned cubs. Sinter’s story is much less complex but in its own way just as deadly. Brought up as a strict Brahmin, she discovers one day to her horror that her father has promised her in an arranged marriage to a tubby doctor in his forties. The crushing disappointment and sense of betrayal makes her question everything that has happened in her life since her mother died and sets her up perfectly for being accidentally kidnapped by a desperate Saker when she runs into him fleeing other members of the gang.

Apart from the sort of wide ranging knowledge and perceptive and humane attitude that you’d expect from someone as well traveled, Steve Backshall does know how to build up tension and although one peril follows another very much in the same frying pan into fire manner of Willard Price’s books, he is thankfully not so much in a hurry to get to the next item on the shopping list. Instead we are given chance to care about the main characters because they are believable and – crucially – we also get to hear the perspective and grey area motivations of the other members of the gang who are chasing them. I'd be happy to read both of the books that follow in The Falcon Chronicles.

Steve and the rest of the team from Lost Land of the Jaguar - courtesy of bbc.co.uk

Long before this, on a magical island far away, the man who so influenced  Steve Backshall, Sir David Attenborough and so many others, was a ten year old discovering many of the jewels of nature in his new back yard. Young Gerry Durrell was the youngest of the Durrell clan which also consisted of his twenty two year old novelist brother Larry, (waspish, completely self -centred and withering in the extreme), his seventeen year old sister Margo, (fey, wispy and completely unprepared for the sometimes harsh realities of life), and brooding eighteen year old brother Leslie, who shoots anything that moves and if you’re a member of his family that might even include you. In addition to the four Durrell siblings there is also their long suffering and absent minded mother Louisa – another accident waiting to happen.

Having finally read My Family and Other Animals, (and why did it take me so long because it is quite wonderful), I’m just a bit sorry that I didn’t do so before watching ITV’s recent dramatization of all three books, The Durrells, with a wonderfully alternatively dazed and frazzled Keeley Hawes as mother and – what appeared to me at least – entirely appropriate casting unless you want Larry to be blonde rather than dark and local taxi driver cum fixer Spiros – very much a Brian Blessed type character in the books - to be actually played by the great man as he was in the first TV adaptation in the 60’s, rather than more accurately by a Greek actor. There is no doubt that Simon Nye adapted his six part version in fairly broad strokes – sort of Family Behaving Badly - but most of the happenings in the book and a good few of the magical moments, were there. Perhaps the saddest and most inevitable absence – were of young Gerry’s wide eyed continuing search to find, study and often capture Corfu’s natural world in all of its infinite variety. Like Steve Backshall’s Tiger Wars, MFAOA has limited dialogue which – more often than not – involves Larry being totally unreasonable while Mother begs him not to be.

Somewhere in the middle Margo witters her various disappointments with men  and Leslie comes in and thrusts a bloodied bag of the unfortunate local wildlife on the kitchen table. The other sections of dialogue tend to involve Gerry’s on-off education and the brave men who try to teach him. The most important of these was the polite and nervous doctor Theo Stephanides, who remained a life-long friend and who is given a special dedication in the introduction.

But I promised you a Battle of the Giants and it's with that dear reader that I must finish. Some of the most hilarious bits of MFAOA come when various creatures are kept in environments which clearly don't suit them, or else create fatal rivalries with other creatures, of which the rather splendid but ultimately tragic battle between the giant gecko Geronimo - who has long been resident in Gerry's bedroom and doesn't respond well to incomers - and the latest incomer, a giant mantid christened Cecil - is a fine example.. If you're of the sort of nervous disposition that doesn't want to be acquainted with the green mantis of Corfu, (still resident) please look away now.

Giant Corfu Mantis. Thanks to arachnoboards.com

It is in too many ways an uneven contest and has an inevitable conclusion. In a freak fall both creatures end up bloodied but unbowed on Gerry's bed.

'Cicely had a wing crushed and torn and one leg bent and useless, while Geronimo had a number of scratches across his back and neck caused by Cicely's front claws.

Eventually a now tail less Geronimo munches down on Cicely's left forearm, and - now weakened - she cannot prevent her head and thorax following suit. It has indeed been - and my cursory description nowhere near does it justice. - an epic battle, and it occurs to me that it is the sort of battle that - for all the effort he might have made with his 'shopping list' style of animal capture - Willard Price was never quite able to describe. It's interesting that Gerald Durrell actually published MFAOA in 1956, barely five years after the first of the Hunt boys adventures, Amazon Adventure, was published, but reading them both now they couldn't be further apart. While one man was setting up one of the first and most important conservation projects in the world at Jersey Zoo, the other - no matter how honourable his intent - was perpetrating all too familiar myths about animals being happy in captivity after being charmed into submission by 14 year old boys. Of course it's fairer to say that Price was more a man of his time, (as were say David Attenborough, the BBC and Zoo Quest - and Gerald Durrell - as he went on to consistently prove - was way ahead of it.  

For all that there's plenty of room for both. However I'll leave the last wise words to Gerald Durrell himself, (and friends)

'But the world is as delicate and complicated as a spider's web. If you touch one thread, you send shudders running through all the other threads. We are not just touching the web, we are tearing great holes in it.'

   

       

 

  

   

     

A Whole Childhood World of Adventure by Steve Gladwin

Several months ago I mentioned the bedroom of my childhood which I had been magically drawn back to while on a psycho-synthesis course in 1998. As well as my thunderbird wallpaper and gaily striped curtains, there were the bookshelves behind my bed, (what if they'd fallen on me one night and brained me!) It would be nice, I thought, to pick one much loved childhood author and use the excuse of this blog to re-visit them. There were so many choices  and they’re only the ones I can remember! Would it be Billy Bunter, the Fat Owl of The Remove of Greyfriars School, who said ‘Yarooh’, several times a chapter and was constantly awaiting the arrival of that fabled postal order. Or maybe another school favourite, Jennings and his friend Derbyshire and their many larks at Linbury Court Preparatory School. I will always remember how Jennings diary entries always ended ‘Weather not so good toddy.’

There were other choices, like the legions of Blytons still lurking on the upper shelves, of which – the ‘of Adventure’ series were always my favourites). Or I could pick Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators, Jupiter Jones, Bob Andrews and Pete Crenshaw, or The Hardy Boys books by Franklin W Dixon. Or there was always Tom Swift?.

Wait a minute! I was missing the most obvious ‘Adventure’ series of all – the Hal and Roger Hunt books by Willard Price which began, (I soon learnt) with Amazon Adventure in 1951 and ended with Arctic Adventure in 1980. But surely - I imagined - the books would be dated and colonial and I’d be wincing at the racism and the gratuitous slaughter or capture of animals by our two he men heroes.They might be zoologists and work for their father - who sent them out to capture animals for the world’s zoos - but there was hardly likely to have been much of a conservation message in the 1950’s.

One of my birthday presents had been a book by one of the great conservationists, Gerald Durrell – a lovely fiftieth anniversary edition of My Family and Other Animals, which I had first seen many years ago in a book club edition on both my parents and grandparents shelves. Surely it would be nice to compare two very different series with very different attitudes to conservation, both of which began in the 1950’s when I was born, (for alas dear reader – I am that old!).

Gerald Durrell and friend

All this sounded well and good as a project, but surely a modern perspective was needed with which to contrast these. So remembering our great love of The Lost Land, (Jaguar/Volcano/Tiger) series and documenting of the efforts of modern day conservation heroes Dr George McGavin, Gordon Buchanan, Justine Evans, Alan Rabinowitz and Steve Backshall, to observe and record wild life in some of the last pristine wildernesses on earth, (Guyana, New Guinea, and Bhutan), maybe I could find a connection here.And hadn't Steve Backshall himself written a series of wildlife adventure books for children, and named Gerald Durrell and Willard Price among his boyhood influences?

Making my own exploration in the slightIy less adventurous lands online I discovered that the first and last Willard Price books have been published in duo form by Red Fox. I obtained not only Amazon Adventure but Diving Adventure, not just Arctic Adventure, (which I didn't even know existed !) but Safari Adventure as well. Adding to my four for the Price of two, (sorry!), I was a copy of Steve’s own first children’s book Tiger Wars, I settled down to read my choices and use them as inspiration for this blog - er two blogs actually, as I’ve spent so long in this one assembling the team they've now nowhere enough time to come and save the village. So gentle reader, pray join me on a two part adventure with some true heroes of wildlife awareness, conservation and above all adventure.

Part One – Hal and Roger Ride Again

   

I can’t remember much about these books, but there was that one bit with Roger and his cheetah. Happily I managed to meet both in Safari Adventure, which is in one of my BOGOF’s. But we need to begin at the beginning.

Deliberately I decided to read before trying to research anything. I settled down in my attempt to reconnect with my childhood with Amazon Adventure, the first of Willard Price’s fourteen book series. Hal and Roger Hunt are accompanying their animal collector/zoo keeper father on a trip along a little known tributary of the Amazon on a mission to collect animals for the world’s zoos. All too soon the mood turns dark as John Hunt is forced to return home after a telegram from the boy’s mother informs them that his entire animal collection has been set alight by vandals/rivals and everything destroyed. Dad will be ruined unless this latest trip can bring him in a whole host of new collectibles, but he himself has to return home. Can he risk leaving his young 19 year old zookeeper son Hal, and his mischief loving younger brother Roger in charge of the mission? Oh of course he can!

Finding myself deep in the Amazon some hundred pages on, gave me the ideal chance to reappraise my childhood love of these books in the light of my bi-focal adult lenses, (never buy them!). The one criticism I found with the first book was a somewhat cursory approach to the exciting bits. Don’t get me wrong – Willard Price is never boring, but I do feel that he has so much adventure to throw us into that he can let off on the tension a bit. Before you know it, the latest extraordinary action is over hardly before it’s begun. And Hal and Roger’s first adventure is extraordinary. It involves them assembling a whole ark of creatures great and small from pygmy marmoset to rare black jaguar, from vampire bat to giant anteater, (which Roger wrestles!) and from tapir to anaconda with even a mascot shrunken head thrown in. Willard Price never sells the reader short. Not content with having just a boa constrictor as the big snake warm-up to the deadly giant anaconda, he makes it a mother which promptly gives birth to at least sixty babies, These soon become a handy weapon to throw at the villains!

You’d think that this teenage zoo keeper business would too often come over ridiculously far -fetched, ( and now and then it does, such as the rather too Scooby Doo ending/revelation of the poacher Blackbeard in Safari Adventure) but mostly it works. What helps apart from the author’s sheer energy, is his knowledge and attention to detail. In the company of Hal and Roger Hunt you really do learn all you seem to need to know about the teeming varied mass of the world’s wildlife and with Willard Price as a guide you are never short of stories within stories and the sort of survival anecdotes Ray Mears makes whole programmes about nowadays. In one quite phenomenal sequence, Hal, having been abandoned by his native team and then robbed of the animal ark by the villain, who he’s christened Croc, manages to commandeer one of the few floating islands that are actually stable and allow it to take him and a malaria stricken Roger along the river. Then, having failed to find either berries or spear fish, he fashions a tea kettle from a joint of bamboo, tries several methods of fire making including kapok and the rattan fire-thong method, ( no I didn’t know that one either!), before settling on the South Sea islander’s fire plough method where you stand a forked stick in the earth or sand and rub another stick through it vigorously to catch a flame. When he’s rubbed away with no result, Hal suddenly remembers the camera lens in his pocket and finally makes a fire using the old ‘using the awesome power of the sun to nearly set your trousers alight’ method beloved of over grown boys and girls everywhere.

If you think that’s it, you’d be mistaken, for having prepared an improvised fish line for another stab at the old fish game, Hal happily spears a monkey, (obviously not so happily for the monkey but hey they’ve got to eat) and ends up using every bit of it for a whole variety of purposes apart from eating it.

In case you think I’m mocking the writing here, I can assure you that it’s quite the opposite, for instead of the ‘blah blah.Secret plans’ school of children's book of the fifties, the action seems to come directly from the knowledge and sheer animal nous, even if the protagonists may seem a little on the youthful side.

In my next visit with Hal and Roger, Safari Adventure (1966), we are about halfway through the sequence and the Hunt boys are right in the thick of it in a manner which couldn’t contrast more with their Amazonian wanderings. Here, in the fourth in a whole sequence of African adventures, they are no longer collecting animals but dealing with  the problem of poaching, having been brought in by game warden Mark Crosby of Tsavo National Park, to put a stop to the activities of a particularly vicious gang of native poachers and their leader Black Beard. Before Hal and Roger ever get to set off on a mercy mission to emergency re-house a displaced colobus monkey and an okapi, away from the attentions of poachers, they are brought face to face with the harrowingly dreadful results of the poacher’s activities. Here both we and they are made aware of the sheer scale of the mass slaughter and its vast market in the ivory, fur and sundry other sickening trades.  As Hal. Roger and Warden Crosby free or put the trapped hundreds of animals out of their misery, you can’ help both applauding the uncompromising message and giving a shiver of relief that conditions in East Africa and elsewhere in poaching hot spots at least can’t be that bad nowadays.

Old Safari

One of the few criticisms made of Willard Price is that although he mentions the colonisation of native lands, he buys into the traditional tropes of such literature too much. For me this is a small price to pay for a series of books begun at the start of the fifties where native peoples are treated with honour and respect and our heroes follow their ways rather than trying to force their own on them. The only thing anywhere near to racism I have so far encountered is a phrase uttered by one of the villains, who seems clearly to be saying it so that we see just what an ignorant moron he is.

And the reason for this is surely that Willard Price himself appears to have been a fairly extraordinary and entirely honourable man, part journalist, part ground breaking social historian, and later a sort of roving correspondent and adventurer. He himself said of the series.

My aim in writing the Adventure series for young people was to lead them to read by making reading exciting and full of adventure. At the same time I want to inspire an interest in wild animals and their behavior. Judging from the letters I have received from boys and girls around the world, I believe I have helped open to them the worlds of books and natural history.

As for the conservation v zoos element, well the days of my childhood were clearly old fashioned ones in many such respects, when even David Attenborough was doing something similar to Hal and Roger in Zoo Quest. And as a flash forward to Part Two next month, for all the time that young Gerry Durrell spent on Corfu exploring and observing wildlife, he was also a collector and not all of what he collected lived long enough to tell the tale! As for his older brother Leslie, (at 19 exactly the same age as Hal Hunt) he was quite happy, as ITV’s recent adaptation of the books shows, to blast away at anything on sight. Give me the Hunt boys any day.

A newer Amazon

Did I enjoy catching up with these two boyhood heroes? You bet I did, and I can’t wait to tell you about the rest of it either, or to continue re-reading them. And I didn’t even get the chance to tell you about Roger and the cheetah.

Next time on 'A Whole Childhood World of Adventure'



Young Gerry Durrell attempts to referee and awesome contest between a gecko and a gigantic pregnant mantid.

Steve Backshall saves tigers and takes off his shirt (again)

Hal and Roger's last adventure in the arctic.

And if you want to catch up with the Hunt boys in print yourself you'll find them in three red Fox Doubles from Random House.