On the nights of 7-8 April, 15-16 April and 4-5 May 1941, several hundred Luftwaffe bombers carried out three major air raids across Belfast, hoping to damage the war industries, transport and communications. In total, more than a thousand people were killed, the vast majority civilians, of whom over a hundred were mutilated beyond recognition. The remains of those unidentified Catholic and Protestants, united in death, are buried in a mass grave in the City Cemetery.
The German attack is central to the plot of American writer Kirk Walsh’s first novel which is also inspired by the true story of an eccentric young woman, Denise Austin, one of the first female zookeepers at Belfast’s Bellevue Zoo, who nightly brought home a baby elephant, Sheila, during the blitz, which she kept in the back yard.
The heroine in this novel is naïve, twenty-year-old Hettie Quin, who is being suffocated by, and would like to escape from, the sadness in which her somewhat slovenly mother Rose wallows—her lying, drunken, unfaithful husband Thomas having deserted her. Both are grieving for Hettie’s sister Anna who died giving birth to Maeve just months earlier. But Rose is estranged from Maeve, her only grandchild, because Anna had married a Falls Road Catholic, Liam Keegan. On the other hand, Hettie’s colleague in the canteen, the Catholic good-time girl Eliza, who does tricks for black market nylons and chocolate is beaten up by her brother for going out with ‘Protestant boys’. A little bit too formulaic, methinks.
At work Hettie is enchanted by three-year-old Violet, an elephant and recent acquisition from Ceylon.
‘Every time Hettie stroked the elephant’s skin, a strange sensation gathered underneath her fingertips. A congress of electricity. Dynamic and static at once.’
Violet is a kindred spirit; elephants mourn the loss of a lost member of their herd and will try to nudge its lifeless corpse back to life. In the company of her charges Hettie feels transported to another time and place. But that doesn’t stop her from being curious about the opposite sex, of whom she is a poor judge in separating the principled from the predatory, and is guiltily attracted to her brother-in-law Liam, pretty much a one-dimensional character who is an IRA fanatic and thinks Hitler has his ‘good points’.
Those old tropes—which some unionists repeat to this day—are also reprised on several occasions by various characters. That is, that the Fianna Fáil government was partly to blame for the blitz because its decision not to black out neutral Irish towns and cities at night helped the Luftwaffe navigate their way North. And that the Belfast IRA lit lights and fires to guide the planes to their industrial targets.
Hettie looks forward to having a young gentleman in her life who would be so proud of her that he would boast his fiancée is the only female zookeeper in Belfast. She dreams of becoming an internationally-travelled expert on elephants.
The best written passages—and there is some wonderful writing—are the descriptions of the horror of the heavy bombing, and about the animals and how they are cherished and cared for by their keepers. When the government issues a decree to slaughter certain species which could endanger the public should they escape during the bombing, Hettie acts to save Violet, evades the execution party, and takes her home, much to the delight of local children.
Though not my cup of tea, the charming story evokes with limited authenticity the atmosphere of the Belfast I imagined and imbued from my parents’ remembrances, along with the Forties’ background radiation extant in my childhood. So, the picture Walsh paints is quite vivid: the small terraced housing, the sooty streets, the food shortages and rationing, the class-ridden milieu, an apocalyptic Belfast in the wake of the blitz, the excitement, defiance and eroticism of dancing at the Floral Hall on Cave Hill, overlooking Belfast Lough.
The Zookeeper of Belfast can’t help but bring to mind other similarly titled books of recent times, The Bookseller of Kabul, Reading Lolita in Tehran, though the comparison stops there.
Above all it is a love story, and Violet, the elephant, is about the only entity that doesn’t disappoint the brave and vulnerable Hettie.
The Zookeeper of Belfast by S. Kirk Walsh.Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99, P/B, pp 324
