Angus Wilson

And then came the crackling, whistling thudding sound of an explosion that filled the universe. I pushed Martha face down on the grass and threw myself on top of her. There followed in quick succession four more such dreadful sounds but farther away from us; and then a vast whistling, rushing wind. We lay still on the ground, waiting as it seemed to me for hours. I held Martha to me stroking her arms. Against the shrieking and howling of all the captive beasts and birds, I could hear Mrs Purrett quietly crying behind me. At last here and there people were getting to their feet. in the distance ambulance and fire bells were clanging, and there were shouts and cries in the streets. I got up slowly as though I must take the world by surpriseif I were to survive. Martha lay on the ground bruised and shocked. Whatever had fallen, must have been far off, yet blast had wrecked and twisted Zoo buildings; the Old Zoo was in flames and from it came the agonizing screams and roars of hippos, rhinos, zebras, apes and trumpeting elephants. The roof had gone from the eagle house and high above it great condors, vultures and golden eagles were circling and spiralling up into the sky. The trees were filled with chatering parakeets and among the beds of broken bruised flowers lay the little bodies of a hundred multi-coloured tropical birds; for the aviary had been shattered into a thousand pieces. Here and there men were writhing on the turf. In the floodlight the pools of blood stared in technicolour red against an emerald grass. A hundred yards from me lay the body of the boy from the snake house, his head nearly severed by a great sliver of grass. There above us on the top of the bronze lion that crowned the lion house was Sir Robert Falcon, doubled up with pain, but still wildly shouting, blown on high by some freak of blast, whole though bruised and shaken.

In that next half hour, like all the rest of London, we worked like beavers to repair our dam against a tide that any minute would engulf us and all our works forever. Firemen, staff, wives, all worked like navvies. the wounded were taken in ambulances. Injured animals were destroyed. Fire had spread too far to save any part of the Old Victorian Zoo and in it died most of the giraffes, rhinos, zebras, deer and elephants crammed in by Bobby to make his Roman holiday. Two wounded hippos broke their way down into the canal and we could see them, lashing the bloodied water for a while, until Strawson's assistant picked them off with a gun and they sank to send a great tide of mud spilling over the banks. The insect house was a hopeless wreck. Sanderson, tears in his eyes, came to assure me that we need not fear the poisonous spiders or any other venemous insects among those that were now crawling or flying in the ruins.
'I had them destroyed when you told me,' he said. 'In a way I'm glad I did it if only because they were dead before this awful thing happened.'

- The Old Men At The Zoo