Born Wild (2 page)

It was one of ours, Shyman, and it was another of ours, Freddie, that saved me. I had raised Freddie from a cub, but unlike that big thug Shyman, whom we'd never handled, he liked me. Freddie charged Shyman and distracted him just long enough for me to regain a bit of consciousness and get into the foetal position. Freddie went for Shyman at least four or five times as Shyman came back to grab some other part of me. Even then the bigger lion got me round the neck and started to strangle me. I went through the ‘
Reader's Digest
tunnel', my life ebbing away – the festering rubbish dump at the camp gates my last view of the world. I knew what was happening. And as the rest of me gave into the blackness I was furious about that rubbish.

I had
been working with George Adamson – the Kenyan game warden who reintroduced lions to the wild, as described in his wife's book
Born Free
– for the past four years and it was he who dragged me from the lion's maw. Alerted by our foreman, Erigumsa, he came charging out of our camp armed only with a short stick. He found Shyman dragging me off in his mouth, my body trailing between his front legs, blood pouring from holes in my neck, shoulders and body. I was dead, as far as the Old Man was concerned. George charged at the lion and, with Freddie, managed to see off Shyman and pull me away. Without Freddie, I wouldn't have stood a chance. I'd been attacked by one lion and saved by another. I'd lost a tooth and one of my ears was hanging off. A hole had been bitten in my right shoulder and neck, which was large enough to put my fist through. It would be a couple of painful weeks before I was back on my feet but I consider it my closest shave yet and not much to have paid for the privilege of living with animals since the day in 1971 that George Adamson had taken me on.

Mine was a long journey to George's camp in northern Kenya but I feel as if it wasn't until I arrived there in 1971 that my life really started. That said, I was actually born in 1945, rather freer than I would have liked – on the wrong side of the tracks, at the end of the line. I was raised in Cockfosters, the very furthest north you can go on the Piccadilly Line. My mother was a bank clerk; my father abandoned her before I was born. One of tens of thousands who met a similar fate during the Second World War, she tried to bring me up on her own but it was very hard to do when there was no work, little food and a hatful of stigma attached to dragging around a small boy without a father. When I was about seven months old she gave me up for adoption at the Church of England Children's Society. I don't know what happened to her and have never seen her again. I don't know
either who my father was. I've been told he was highly decorated, married and in the RAF, but I'm really not sure; I can't remember whether that's true or wishful thinking, and I can't find out now because most of the Society's records have disappeared. My adoptive parents, though, I know all about. Leslie and Hilda Fitzjohn came and got me when my age was still measured in months. They took me to Cockfosters where they lived the kind of life I've been trying to escape from ever since.

My dad worked in a bank. He got on a train every day and went off to places like Greenwich, Covent Garden and Tooting. He had been in the Supply Corps of the Desert Rats during the war and had seen some pretty unpleasant sights during his five years in Egypt. When he got back, I'm told he just sat and drank for six months, staring at the fire and refusing to talk. Today you'd call it post-traumatic stress disorder but back then there were no words for it. Soon after he had recovered my parents had a tragedy. They had adopted a baby who settled down well and upon whom they doted. Six months later his mother appeared on the doorstep and asked for him back; she had just married a man who had lost his wife and four children in a car crash. My parents thought it was the only fair thing to do and handed the baby over, but they were shattered.

By the time I arrived on the scene, they were in much better shape. Dad was doing well at work and getting on better with my mum. She was an inveterate charity worker and always off doing something that involved wearing a hat – Mothers' Union, Townswomen's Guild or going to church. I suppose we were your everyday emerging middle-class family, the kind of people who appeared in those old black-and-white educational films, holidayed on the south coast and went to the Festival of Britain in home-knitted jumpers. We lived in a small semi-detached house in a road with hundreds of similar houses. Ours was smarter than the ones on the other side of the street because you could
only just see the electric flash of the tube lines from our side, but they were all much of a muchness and there wasn't much of it I liked.

When I was two and a half or so we went to the orphanage again and, according to family legend, I picked out a sister, Margaret, who now lives a much more respectable life in the UK than her brother. We don't know why my parents adopted. Maybe there was some physical problem or they just didn't have enough sex. I certainly never saw them at it but this was the 1940s and 1950s: sex was not something one discussed with one's parents. Ours was quite a strict and repressed household and our parents might have quarrelled but they loved us and the good far outweighed the bad.

Back then the end of the Piccadilly Line was also the start of the countryside. I used to go for long walks with our dogs Trudi and Judy in the fields that began just a few hundred yards from our house. I'd play in the woods and climb trees with my friend Alex Duncan, the local vicar's son. We had an air pistol and we'd go up to the top of his house and shoot at women's bottoms as they tottered by. Inevitably we were caught. I've got one of those faces that has difficulty concealing the truth: I worked that out at an early age and have always behaved better than I would have wished. I hate to think what I'd have got up to with a more innocent face.

One of my greatest loves was Scouting. It doesn't have a good image these days – all paedophiles and sandals – but in the fifties it was a great way to escape and learn about the outdoors. By the time I finished school I had more badges than Idi Amin had medals. I loved Scouting and I kept on doing it right up until I left secondary school. We always had excellent Scoutmasters and the freedom of the outdoors was wonderful after the tight discipline that prevailed at home. All that practical stuff – knots, rope courses and the like – were fun at the time and have proved
extraordinarily useful. I tie knots every day of my life and I knew most of them before I was ten. Although it's a dying pastime in England, Scouting remains hugely influential in Africa. Like so many other things here, it's just like it used to be in England in the fifties. It's taken very seriously: ministers will happily be photographed in shorts and woggle. They're always having jamborees, and Lord Baden-Powell even went so far as to die in Kenya. His grave was made a national monument by Kenya's Chief Scout, Daniel arap Moi, when he was president. One of my oldest and most respectable friends is Kenya's Chief Scout today.

When I wasn't Scouting I was at school, but almost the only thing I recall about primary school is the rabbits. I don't know whether they were being bred for fur, the table or as pets but I loved looking after them. I didn't go so far as preparing them for release into the wild but I do remember that even then I liked animals and dares as much as each other. Indeed, in an unhappy combination of the two, I caught typhus after drinking from a puddle in the school playground and had to spend months in bed, staring at a naked bulb as the sweat poured off me. It was during this time that I came across a book that inspired me to go to Africa and work with the animals that I had already begun to love.

Absurd as it may sound, in this age of the Discovery and National Geographic Channels, the book that stirred me was Edgar Rice Burroughs's
Tarzan of the Apes
– one of the most inaccurate books ever written about the ‘Dark Continent'. We only had a small bookshelf at home and it was full of condensed reads and books about war in the desert, containing black-and-white pictures of men with their hands in the air. But hidden away at the back of the shelf was a paperback copy of
Tarzan
with a colourful cover. I read it over and over again. These were the days of Johnny Weissmuller and Cheeta down at the picture house, but it was actually the book that inspired me rather than the
celluloid, although I always had a liking for Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane.

Tarzan
fascinated me and inspired a lifelong love of Africa, its people and wildlife that endures to this day – even though I've eaten Africa's dirt, been shot at by its inhabitants and gnawed upon by its wildlife. I still find it hard to define what it is that I love about this place – the freedom, the challenge or the responsibility – but I know I love it with an almost painful intensity and I hate spending too long away from it. When I first read
Tarzan,
going to Africa became an imperative. And I also wanted desperately to be able to communicate with animals like my hero did. Rice Burroughs never set foot in Africa (in fact, William S. Burroughs has probably been a more reliable guide to me) and his descriptions bear no relation to what it actually looks like or what it's like to live here.

The first school I remember properly was Enfield Grammar, a couple of miles' bus ride from home. I must have driven my parents crazy when I was there: I was reasonably quick-witted but I did no work whatsoever. What I really concentrated on was stealing. I'm told that I was personally responsible for the installation of shoplifting mirrors in the local Woolworth's because we were always down there nicking stuff when we should have been at school. It wasn't because we wanted the things we stole. It was the buzz and excitement we yearned for – Enfield was tedious beyond measure, Cockfosters with more dirt, black-and-white to my Technicolor imagination. At first my petty larceny had been pretty harmless but it was fast aggrandizing, fed by my constant urge for excitement and my unwillingness to turn down a dare. Borstal and prison were becoming ever more likely.

It was at about this time that my life began to change. My father had worked hard at the bank and had been able to buy our first car – a Vauxhall 10 I loved and whose engine I used to play with when I was not out in the fields with the dogs. He washed it
religiously at weekends and it always sparkled like new. Having a car in those days was a big deal and that consciousness of their worth has remained with me all my life. The Trust that George and I set up has loads of vehicles now and I keep them on the road way longer than I should because of some inbuilt sense of thrift: every vehicle we've ever had in Tanzania is still in use, an absurd source of pride until I was told how much it was costing us.

Rationing in Britain didn't stop until 1954 when I was nine, and life wasn't easy even then. Nevertheless, Dad's grafting at the bank paid off when he was offered the managership of a new branch. We moved to nearby – but much posher – Southgate, and Dad joined the Rotary Club, an event that set me off on a completely new path. Instead of going to Borstal, I was packed off to Mill Hill, a smart boarding school on the outskirts of north London. They had an assisted-places scheme through which the school and Middlesex County Council would help to pay the fees of a few boys each year. A Rotary Club member had tipped him off about it. I don't know why they took me but I'm so lucky they did. Almost all of my trustees in the UK are Old Millhillians to this day, including my oldest school-friend, Bob Marshall- Andrews, who was one of our founders and is now chairman of the George Adamson Trust.

It's fascinating to imagine how my life could have gone without the influence of Mill Hill. Would I have carried on looting Woolworth's and ended up in jail, or would I have got a proper job and kept off the booze in my middle age? Mill Hill taught me many great things but it was a way of life I was after, not a salary; I haven't received a salary since the day I met George Adamson in 1971. Bob said in a speech when I got my OBE that the idea of Mill Hill was to take people from very different backgrounds – the wealthy, the
nouveau riche,
the middle classes and the poor – put them through the system and spit them out as
useful, serving, articulate members of society. Then he turned to me and said, ‘With you, Fitzjohn, it all went terribly wrong.' I may not be quite what they were planning but I knew from the moment I got to Mill Hill that I had to make it work for me.

Mill Hill was an amazing place to arrive after thirteen years on the grimy streets of north London. It's set in 120 acres of parkland and has views as far as the Chilterns in one direction and much of London in the other. The school buildings were like nothing I had ever seen before – towering ceilings with intricate plasterwork, polished wooden floors and panelling everywhere. It was like something out of a film. The school had gymnasiums, theatres and science laboratories – all things that would be impressive today, but in the 1950s I'd been used to having very little indeed. I was terrified. It was all so alien: I had to fag for someone, making his bed and cleaning his shoes, and I had to put up with a bit of bullying – but who doesn't? It didn't last for long. I was in the lowest class when I got there and right from the beginning I knew I had to get out of it and up to the next level. I had a great sense of privilege but was also conscious that this was my one chance. My schooling was virtually free but even having to pay for the textbooks and uniforms was a burden for my parents, who had to scrimp to make sure I had what I needed and that my sister's fees at a convent in Whetstone could still be covered. All around me other children had things that I wanted. I decided what I had to do was: change my accent, get three A levels and play rugby for the First XV. The first two weren't too hard but I was a weedy little squirt, and although I could jump like a Masai on a pogo stick – very handy at line-outs – getting into the First XV was quite a struggle.