A tale of how breaking all the rules can have a profoundly positive payoff

IT wouldn’t be possible, these days, and it shouldn’t have been possible even back then.

But, it being a public holiday and all, let’s celebrate, just for today, how – sometimes – breaking all the rules can have a profoundly positive payoff.

The story started in the Swinging London of the ’60s. London was the magnet for young people then as now, the cool capital of Europe if not the world.

Among the thousands who wanted to be part of the excitement were two Australian young fellas – Ace Bourke and John Rendall. They found themselves a place to stay on King’s Road, Chelsea, and got themselves jobs in a pine furniture store.

Neither of them was much for sightseeing, but one day they visited the Tower of London, and – by way of a contrast – went on to Harrods, the department store. On the second floor, they found pets for sale. All sorts of pets, including Siamese kittens and an old English sheepdog. In between the two was a cage containing two lion cubs, the male of which had decided the only way to deal with shoppers ooing and aahing at him was to pretend they didn’t exist.

The two long-haired Aussies sat for hours beside the cage, enchanted by the cub. At the end of the session, they had decided to buy him. Raising the money wasn’t easy. The lion cub cost the equivalent of €4,000 in today’s money. Nor had they the right living accommodation.

But, having persuaded the furniture store where they worked that allowing the lion cub to live in the basement would be a good thing, having agreed with the clergyman responsible for a nearby cemetery that it could be the lion’s exercise ground, having rustled up the money and persuaded Harrods (who liked to be po-faced about even their irresponsibility in selling a wild animal to two untrained city-dwellers) that they would take good care of the animal, they took him home and named him Christian.

“Four months old, 30 pounds, and about 2ft long, he was a larger-than-life teddy bear,” they remember, after 40 years. “He loved being carried and cuddled, and his paws would gently reach around our necks and his tongue lick our faces.”

Christian had a placid nature, was easily house-trained, and the two lads did their best to work with his nature. They would never, for example, create a situation where he was chasing them. He was encouraged to chase a rugby ball (you will pardon the untimely mention) but never to chase a human.

As a relatively small cub he was no danger, but they reckoned that if he got into the habit of hunting humans, at some later point, when he was big and powerful, if the chasing game was engaged in, when he caught the person, instinct might out and he might maul them.

After his daily exercise, Christian would perch in the window and watch the traffic passing on the King’s Road. Overheard in a bus at the time was a conversation that went: “Mummy, there was a lion in that shop window!” “Don’t be ridiculous. If you don’t stop this lying, I’ll get your father to thrash you.”

The first few months were wonderful for owners and for the cub. Christian thrived. But that meant he ate more and more, and got bigger and bigger. With size came a growing need for more intensive exercise. His surroundings bored and cramped him.

By the time he hit his eighth month, the two young Australians were running out of options. Someone suggested that they might give Christian to a safari park. The two investigated the possibility and decided against it. The thought of submitting him to the nastiness of one of the zoos of the time repelled them.

Then they encountered the director of the film Born Free about a couple in Kenya working with lions.

“I think we can help you solve the problem of Christian’s future,” he told them. “We would like to arrange for him to be flown out to Africa where George Adamson can return him to the wild.”

The pair agreed and the process – inevitably being filmed all the way – of transporting a lion now weighing more than 130 pounds by air to Kenya – got under way.

Accompanied by his owners, Christian arrived at the compound where George Adamson and his helpers worked to get lions fit for safe release to the wild and watched him while he got used to his new surroundings. Then it was time to return to London and to earning a living.

They got communiques from Adamson. About how Christian coped with the alpha lion in the compound. About how he toughened up and got even bigger. About his survival in the wild, and how observation showed he was now leading a pride of lions.

So, despite being raised in a London furniture shop, their beloved pet seemed to be able to manage. (The fact that he could manage in the wild, paradoxically, meant he would have a shorter life. Lions live much longer in zoos than they do in the wild.) A year later, Bourke and Rendall decided to holiday in Kenya and take their chances on seeing Christian. George Adamson’s view was that it was quite likely they would encounter the grown animal, and very unlikely that they would be in any way endangered by him. Whether he would remember them was anybody’s guess. Near the Adamson compound, they waited and eventually, as one of them wrote to his parents the next day, Christian appeared about 75 yards distant from them.

“He stared hard at us for a few seconds, and then slowly moved closer for a good look. He stared intently. He looked marvellous, and up on the rocks, he didn’t appear much bigger. We couldn’t wait any longer and called him. He immediately started to run down towards us. Grunting with excitement, this enormous lion jumped all over us, but he was very gentle.”

The letter doesn’t begin to do justice to the reunion between men and lion. The lion hugs the two of them with a passion, muzzling his head into their necks, bounding from one to the other.

Nearly 40 years after the reunion, someone put footage of the encounter up on YouTube and the two men, one of them now an art curator, one a wildlife expert, began to hear from people who had seen the video and been profoundly moved by it. TV programmes picked up on the story. A publisher decided to update and re-release a book the two men had written about their lion in 1971: A Lion Called Christian.

If the weather isn’t great where you are, today, or if you’re bored or lonely on this holiday Monday, go on the internet and type in Lion Reunion. No matter which version you land on, it will hardly take a minute of your time.

But the footage of a hugely powerful animal delivering ecstatic affection to two returned friends will warm your heart. I don’t know why – and neither do the two men, now in their 60ss. It just will. Trust me.