Never Trust A Zebra When It's Drunk

Not long after Thatcher had snatched the milk and in the following years when, if you didn’t own your own home and spent most of your free time in the yawning irony of a queue at B&Q you were labelled a ‘pikey,’ The Youth Training Scheme was conceived. Designed to channel the increasing numbers of school leavers who would normally follow in the footsteps of their father’s black steel toe capped boots into the coal mines or mills. The very same coal mines and mills that the same government was shutting down, into a new type of dark satanic misery. Hundreds of thousands of us turned up for these schemes in our old school trousers and shoes that had only seen half a term. The Y.T.S. advertising jingle proclaimed that getting paid ‘£23.50 was better than a poke in the face.’ Most of us thought that where there was a scheme, there was a schemer, and this new world of making tea for old men of 30 and being the endless victim of their practical jokes, felt more like a punch in the face.

A Careers Officer with Weetabix breath and balls of congealed saliva gathering slowly at the corners of his mouth, rocked like a fat Norman Bates on a cloth swivel chair. He put down the racing page of the Sun that he’d ripped out of the staffroom copy that he was studying like he had a clue . He ticked my name off his list. He then tilted back and to my surprise, began to beat his fat chest and give the full Tarzan jungle cry. Sensing my embarrassment he stopped, loosened a tie that for some reason had a Halfords logo on it, sat forward, looked into my eyes and breathing heavily asked “Well?”

A pungent pause followed

“Shall I call the Nurse, Sir?”

He looked slightly annoyed, “Don’t be silly boy, did you like it?”

“Like it Sir?”

“Yes, Like it boy,” throwing the Christmas present pen onto his desk he leaned back and did it again.

To cut him short before some poor bugger had to give him mouth to mouth to force his full cooked breakfast heart back to life I said “Yes!”

He smiled and the spit ball which were now the size if Tic-Tac glistened under the fluorescent lighting a sort of sunbed that turned your skin grey.

“Right then, Scheme 714, Knowsley Safari Park it is, you’ll love it like your Nan – not dead is she?”

“No Sir.”

“Good, thank God in heaven with all the angels and saints and bless her fluffy slippers.”

“Slipper Sir, one leg sir, smoking sir, Benson and hedges have got the other Sir.”

“ Very well, slipper, you start Monday” He passed me a card and went back to deciding whether to put this month’s mortgage money on a nag he’d circled out that was racing in the 3.20 at Kempton, he saw it is a sign, as it was called ‘No Future.’

Sunday night arrived too soon and me Mam made me have a bath and go to bed early as I’d thank her for it in the morning.Mum bless her tired hands and comedy slippers, made me a breakfast that looked like the HMS Ark Royal. ‘I was working now’. She said and that made me‘like Dad, but with more hair and my own teeth’.

I arrived at the gate of the Safari Park with twenty two other poor souls, destined to make money for someone who would work us like amateur porn stars and pay us £23.50. A thin David Bellamy sounding boffin, with a ginger goatee which made him look like he’d been drinking Tango out of a bucket, welcomed us all, told us to call him Uncle Noah and instructed us to follow his bouncy, I’ve been up since ‘five O’clock’ walk to the reception. We all followed apart from one braveheart of a lad who wandered off back up the road shaking his head laughing. We were shown into the ‘Bungle Jungle’ café where were invited to sit on plastic chairs and be inducted into this 20 acre patch of Africa, littered with Quavers packets and thin red straws ten miles from Liverpool by the sea.

Assuming my next year would be spent, polishing the backs of armadillos, feeding curds and whey (whatever that was) to big spiders who sat down beside me or lastly twirling a big cotton bud to elephants ears. I was somewhat surprised that after giving us a history of the Safari park that would bring tears to a glass eye, he told us that the park had been suffering of late because of a lack of animals and that we were, as a temporary measure, to be those missing animals in a job lot of animal costumes donated from a faliled production of Doctor Dolittle the murder mystery.

Names were called out

Michael Jones-Lion,

Stephen Peterson -Oryx

Leslie Court- Buffallo

Michael James - Hippopotamus, a roar of laughter went up as a laf who would have to run around in the shower to get wet stood up and collected his hippo skin.

Peter O’Mally, -Shark, ‘I can’t swim he protested, and I’ve got three false front teeth,’ his pleas were ignored and a couple of lags did the Jaws music and one wit shouted ‘Fuckinell, just as we thought it was safe to back in to the water.’ The laughter put everyone on a high. Then me, Ged Backland Zebra, ‘Thank Noah’ I sighed, a stripy horse, how hard could that be. I was later to find out, very hard indeed.My job, which I was to do all day, every day until I was told otherwise was to peep around a tree. When I saw a car coming I had to peep around the tree and then hide, as the people in the cars could only catch a glimpse of us costumed fools, just enough of a glimpse to make the hour drive around a barren park worth the fifteen quid it had cost.

Apart from the fact that all us four legged animals were upright, we were surprisingly successful, the cars kept on coming as did the £23.50’s of which me Mam took twenty quid for Keep.De-Niro would have been proud of us, method acting at it’s finest as over the week we became the animals whose skin we stepped into every 8.30am. It’s surprising how a costume can influence behaviour, all us Zebras sat together in the canteen at lunch looking nervously over at he lions, The gorillas, three of them and in my opinion one not needing a costume as his back was hairier than Elton Johns new forehead, only ever had 23 kilos of fruit and leaves for lunch. It was a miracle the three pandas didn’t get some sort of digestive complaint from the sheer volume of bamboo they demolished.

It was only at the Christmas party which began after the Christmas Dinner in the canteen, did things get ugly. Someone had brought in six of those large comedy bottles of vodka, people with flats save coppers in. We all filled our plastic cups to the brim and gulped neat vodka like we were at the watering hole.Mark Smith a fellow Zebra and someone who once left a shit like a murdered monkey in the portakabin toilets was like a man possessed.

"Who the fuck are those lions looking at?" He said a prison sentence in his eyes.

Tommy Johnstone also a fellow stripy, but who’d had more tattoos than Edinburgh joined in ‘Yeah, they’re not king of my fucking jungle’ and threw a slice of quiche, which narrowly missed a SImba with a C.S.E. in art. Most surprisingly I went with the herd, ‘Big Rod-Stewart-headed-bastards’. I shouted stood up on the table, my stripy belly full of chicken legs and vodka.

Behind us, the herd of Buffalos, were shouting abuse at the kangaroos.
‘Oi fucking Skippy,’ Kenny Welsh shouted, flipping the nervous (not jumpy) group of kangaroos in the corner the one finger. ‘ Get Mr. Hammond to stick this in your fucking Pouch.’

I don’t know whether it was the Elephants doing the Twist or the two Rhinos shagging by the buffet that kicked it all off. But all I remember is us Zebras hoofing it over and laying into the lions with everything we had, the antelopes joined in with a ferocity born out of a thousand years of running away. Sharks battered camels and I remember vividly a female Emperor penguin head-butting a sea lion and calling her a whiskered old slapper.

We were all arrested and taken in Landrovers to the police station. The Magistrates without a hint of irony said we had behaved like wild animals. I thought we deserved a pay rise for that, and wondered what he expected. I wrote to Richard Attenborough and told him that sometimes, after enough vodka, Lions were shit scared of Zebras. He never replied, maybe he thought I was making it up?