Man at the Helm by Nina Stibbe

squash?’
    ‘No, thanks,’ said my sister, at exactly the same time as my ‘Yes, please.’
    She came back with one tall glass of squash on a tray and a bulging paper bag. My sister handed over our money envelope and took the bulging bag.
    ‘We went to the zoo by accident,’ I blurted.
    ‘By accident?’ said the woman, smiling.
    ‘Well, we went there deliberately but stayed too long by accident,’ explained my sister.
    ‘Don’t you have a zoo in Leicester?’ she asked.
    ‘Well, there’s Twycross zoo, which is very good, but it’s right over the other side of the county,’ I said, ‘and we wouldn’t get over there.’
    ‘Added to which, London zoo is world-renowned,’ said my sister, who always had such wonderful things to say.
    ‘Yes, it is,’ said the woman.
    ‘But Twycross zoo has the PG Tips chimps,’ I said.
    ‘Ah, that’s where they’re from,’ said the woman.
    ‘Yes. They’re real chimps,’ I said, proudly.
    And then we were back out on the street with our package and we hailed a taxi to St Pancras station and got on the five o’clock Sheffield-bound train with a hundred other people who mostly got off along the way. I’d left my
Whizzer and Chips
down the side of my seat on the outward journey, thinking, stupidly, we’d be returning in the same seats. To be fair, though, on boarding for the return journey I realized my mistake straight away and didn’t show myself up by looking for it.
    ‘Don’t tell about the zoo,’ my sister reminded me at Kettering.
    I’d bought a tiny giant panda for Little Jack from the gift shop with ‘From London Zoo’ printed at the base in gold.
    ‘Can’t we just tell Little Jack?’ I asked.
    ‘God, no, he’s the last person to tell. He’ll make a mountain out of it one way or another and his teacher will be round worrying Mum – just keep your mouth shut.’
    I was one of those people (still am) for whom doing a thing was all about the telling. What was the point of going to a world-renowned zoo if you couldn’t tell people you’d been to it? If you couldn’t mention that Chi Chi the giant panda hadn’t been allowed into the United States due to her being a Communist panda. That she’d ended up in London and had refusedto mate with the available male even though she was lonely and had a centrally heated enclosure. Because all she wanted was to be back at home in China eating bamboo and mating with another Communist panda.
    What was the point?
    My sister and I were (are) very different in that respect. For her, it was the being there and the seeing the rare, exotic and dangerous animals, and once we came away it was over with and packed away with her other thrilling memories. Whereas I don’t want to be thrilled unless I’m allowed to tell the story of it.
    When my sister and I phoned from the coin-box at the railway station to say we were back in Leicester, our mother was very pleased to hear from us. We’d been longer than she had expected and she had got it into her head that we’d run away like her second cousin, Margot Fenton-Hall, who’d gone to London aged fourteen in 1950-something to be measured for ballet shoes at Frederick Freed’s and had never come back – only sent a note to her parents saying, ‘I’m not coming home, don’t look for me.’ She hadn’t even been to Frederick Freed’s for the shoes and wasn’t seen again by her parents until she appeared on telly years later playing a motel secretary in a soap opera. Our mother’s aunt and uncle wrote to Margot (now with a new name), care of the programme, begging her to get in touch but she never did and they had to endure seeing their daughter on the telly every week on a dreadful programme that they hated – and not even on the BBC – which was vexing. But they couldn’t bear not to watch. Our mother doubted the actress playing the secretary actually was the second cousin. Which was much sadder than it actually being her, I thought.
    Our mother was glad to