My Summer at Newquay Zoo

I’ve got a story for you that backdates to 1974, when I was just 17. Every summer I used to go and live in a place called Newquay. Newquay is down in Cornwall, and I used to go with a chap called Phil Peters and another guy called Brian Edwards. Brian Edwards was the biggest man I have ever known. Have you ever seen The Green Mile? Brian Edwards was bigger than the guy in The Green Mile. He was a monster of a man. He was the biggest man I’ve ever seen in my life, and the three of us used to go down to live in Newquay for the summer. All we used to take was a tent. We’d go camping and live in a tent all summer and pick gooseberries and blackcurrants and things like that and we used to survive.

We had an old Ford Anglia and it was a real battered one. I remember I’d had to get a new door for it before we went. I went to a scrap yard in Belston and I said, “Have you got a driver’s side door for a Ford Anglia?”

They said “No, no we haven’t.” And I said, “Well how much are they?”

“Five pounds. But if you try next door I know he’s got one.”

So I went next door and I asked, “Could I have a driver’s side Ford Anglia door, please?” and the man said, “Yes. That’s ten pounds.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “Next door they’re only five pounds.”

“Well why don’t you get one from next door?” he asked.

“They haven’t got any,” I replied.

He said, “Well they’re also five pounds here when we haven’t got any!”

So we went down to Newquay in our Ford Anglia and Phil Peters did the directions. Never give Phil Peters an ordinance survey map and ask him to find the way to Newquay. He is useless. We finally got there about 11 p.m. and we parked up outside this wall. Phil says, “We’ll have to climb the wall; the camping site’s closed and we will get the night’s accommodations for free.”

So we parked our Ford Anglia outside, and the three of us proceed to climb the wall. We set the tent up and had a few laughs, and the next morning we were woken at about 6 a.m. by a zookeeper. What we’d actually done was accidentally broken into Newquay Zoo!

The zookeeper was very angry with us at first, but we explained to him what we did every summer and he gave us three jobs. He gave us a job apiece. I worked in one of the aviaries feeding the birds, Phil Peters was a driver, and Brian Edwards, the biggest man on the planet, was an odd job man. So we happily ploughed away the summer through and it was one of the best summers ever.

Now they had a polar bear in the zoo, and he was the polar bear off the Fox’s Glacier Mint advertisement. His name was Sonic and he was a world famous polar bear. Children used to come from all over to see Sonic the polar bear. There are only two animals in the world that suffer from a disease called musth, one is an elephant and the other is a polar bear. And when a polar bear has got musth he gets really angry, as he needs a female polar bear to have courting rights with her. Obviously because Sonic lived on his own he had no female companion. And one time he was really going wild with this musth and so they locked him away in his cage.

The zookeeper said to Brian Edwards, “Brian, we’ve got some children coming from a school in Newquay. Would you put a polar bear outfit on?” So Brian put the polar bear outfit on and sat in the corner with a bit of straw on him. And the children were looking at him and they said, “Look! There’s the polar bear off the Fox’s Glacier Mint advert!” Oh, Brian loved his job. But when the teacher wasn’t looking Brian got carried away with his acting career and waved at the children. The children said to the teacher, “Sir, the polar bear is waving!” Oh, that was it, there was pandemonium. The teacher says, “Polar bears don’t wave at children!” but Brian continued to wave when the teacher wasn’t looking.

Everything was in an uproar. This caused Sonic the polar bear to start shaking in his cage, and he eventually got the lock out. He went strolling towards Brian in the polar bear outfit to try and get him for a sexual contact! Brian was having none of this. As he couldn’t swim, Brian didn’t go through the water, but he jumped into the next pit, which by all agreement was a really big mistake.

Brian had jumped into the pit adjacent to the polar bear pit, and he soon realised that he had jumped into the Siberian tiger pit. Oh my, this put Brian into absolute disarray, so what he did was he tried to lift his head mask off and shout for help. And Brian yelled, “Help! Help! Help! By mistake I’ve fallen into the Siberian tiger pit!” And the tiger said, “Shut up! You’ll get us all the sack!”

_Mad Marty Wilson is a professional gambler and poker consultant for Matchroom Sport. _