Laethanta Saoire: Feeding the elephants on a memorable trip to Dublin Zoo
Madeleine D'Arcy Picture: Claire O'Rorke
When I was a child, we rarely went on summer holidays. Sometimes, we visited relatives in Clare and Galway. Once or twice we stayed in a rented caravan in Kerry. When the rain drummed down on the caravan roof, it felt like sitting inside a tin can. We passed the time by playing Ludo or Snakes and Ladders or the aptly-named card game of Patience. I read a lot of books.
Once in a while my father would drive us to the seaside. He would sit in the car and listen to ‘The Match’ while the rest of us sat or lay on towels on the beach, made sandcastles and occasionally ventured into the cold Atlantic waves. Our sandwiches got sandy. Later, at home, a light dusting of sand would fall from the pages of my book.
A classmate of mine went – on an actual airplane – to the Canary Islands every summer. Back in school, each September, her sun-kissed skin made the rest of us look pasty and potato-coloured. I longed to go ‘out foreign’ like she did, but it wasn’t even vaguely within the realms of possibility. My parents had one income, a house with a substantial mortgage and three children: my older brother, my younger brother and me in the middle. The fourth, my sister Mary, was not yet born. There was no spare cash for luxuries, even though neither of my parents drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes.
In those years, parcels of clothing regularly arrived from our aunt in London. I dreaded these parcels. The clothing she sent was, to my mind, mortifyingly unfashionable. I had to wear the clothes anyway; waste not, want not. The clothes were sensible and good quality, from John Lewis or M & S, but they were rarely what I longed for. But once, when I was about nine, she managed to send me something great. Dungaree shorts, with a Big Red Apple on the bib. I was thrilled. At last, I had an outfit with a bit of ‘pizazz’.
That summer was hot. My older brother was spending time in Galway with our grandfather; he liked it there. My father worked. My mother was stuck with me and Mike. Sometimes we went to the river to swim. We baked bread and apple tart. I swung on the front gate and waved at buses of American tourists as they passed by. It was not an unpleasant summer, but it was certainly lacking in ‘pizazz’.
The cherry blossom trees began to strew their petals like pink confetti on the uneven lawn of our back garden. We were getting more and more bored. My mother hatched a plan. We would go on a day trip to Dublin Zoo. She would meet her old schoolfriend there. It would be an adventure. I felt a bit blasé about it – but something was better than nothing.
Very early in the morning, Dad drove us into Cork and deposited us outside the train station.
‘You’ll be good for your mother, won’t you?’ he said,, to me and Mike.
‘We will.’ He kissed my mother on the cheek and waved us goodbye.
Into the train station we went, nervously we found the train, cautiously we climbed aboard. Finally, the whistle blew, the train rolled away and off we went.
My mother wore a flowered dress, and her handbag matched her shoes. Her big brown raffia bag held our supplies: a thermos flask of tea, a bottle of milk, ham sandwiches, Goldgrain biscuits, Fox’s Glacier Mints and three packets of Tayto Cheese & Onion crisps. Her camera must have been in there too, along with some books. Maybe an Agatha Christie for her. Probably Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven for us.
Mike, a cheerful little soul, wore a blazer cardigan and shorts, and sported a pudding bowl haircut, courtesy of my mother’s scissors. I wore my dungaree shorts; the sole item of clothing I possessed that made me feel like the version of myself I wanted to be.
We waited at the entrance to the Zoo for what seemed like hours, but it was probably only a few minutes. Finally, my mother’s schoolfriend arrived, breathless. She and my mother giggled and hugged and eventually they stopped chatting and we went inside.
The Zoo! All those strange, elegant, scary, exotic, cute and strange creatures! I had seen some of the animals on our black-and-white TV. I had seen pictures in books. But seeing monkeys and penguins and emus and zebras and giraffes and hippos in real life, in full colour, was completely different. It was fantastic. Even the scary things, like snakes, were fascinating.
When we reached the elephant enclosure, it was empty. Not a single elephant to be seen.
I felt a bit disappointed. ‘Maybe they’re asleep.’ ‘Or eating their dinners,’ said Mike, sadly.
We leaned on the rails and stared across at where the elephants should have been. Our mother and her friend didn’t seem to care. They were more interested in their own talk. A man in a uniform and a peaked cap walked past, then stopped and looked back at us.
‘Hello,’ the Zoo Keeper said. He had a friendly face. ‘You look like good children. Are you very well-behaved?’ ‘Yes, we are,’ we said, in unison. We had been good all day so far, in fairness.
‘Would you like to feed the elephant?’ ‘Yes!’ He nodded at my mother, who smiled back.
‘Come on so, the two of ye,’ he said.
The Zoo Keeper took Mike’s little hand and I followed them. We reached a mysterious wooden door. The Zoo Keeper unlocked it with an ordinary-looking key and led us inside.
There she was! A huge grey elephant with wrinkled, leathery skin stood in the straw-littered yard. She stared at us with her big warm eyes, waving her trunk gently as if in greeting.
‘She’s very friendly,’ the Zoo Keeper said. He told us the elephant’s name (which I can’t remember, but if I was an elephant I probably would) and he asked us our own names and introduced us and the elephant politely to each other.
‘Would you like to feed her?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Mike.
I was so thrilled I could hardly speak.
From somewhere he found bread rolls and gave one to each of us. Surely it must be my imagination. Bread to an elephant? But this is what I remember.
The elephant stood there, looking patiently at me with her kind eyes, almost as if she loved me. I held a bread roll up toward her and she stretched out her trunk and grasped it delicately. In a graceful arc, she curled her trunk down towards her mouth and deposited the bread roll elegantly inside. Then she looked at me as if to say ‘Thank you very much. You are a good girl. I’ll remember you.’ Little Mike bravely fed her a bread roll too. The elephant touched the top of his head gently with her trunk, as if to thank him.
In Dublin Zoo that day, my mother took photographs. There we are, Mike and me, in black and white, with emus and a zebra, with a monkey, with a giraffe. No photographs of us with the elephant. Nothing to prove the best part of the day. No matter. I remember the elephant and the Zoo Keeper. I remember the kindness in their eyes.
P.S. When I began to write this piece, I googled ‘elephants’ and ‘Dublin Zoo’, and discovered, to my surprise, that the Zoo Keeper’s name was Jim Kenny. He worked at Dublin Zoo as the Head Elephant Keeper, as his father did before him. His son, Pat Kenny, didn’t work at the Zoo. Instead, he became a TV and radio presenter.
- Madeleine D'Arcy is a fiction writer based in Cork city. Her second collection of linked short fiction, Liberty Terrace (Doire Press, 2021) is Cork’s One City, One Book 2023.
