Ruminating on the question of whether, in my entire life, I have ever actually joined a club I’ld be hard pressed to come up with an answer in the affirmative.

I do claim, however, to belong to a group of the world’s people, an exclusive club, whose numbers must surely be miniscule.  I have been peed on by a lion.!

Although it happened a long time ago, the experience is still vivid and the memory still fresh as a daisy.  This is the story.

I was six years old and living, with my parents and three siblings, in the south of England.  One Sunday afternoon my father decided to take his family to the London Zoo.

He had brought home from his business as a Garment Manufacturer, ( better known in popular usage as “The Rag Trade”) two little pale green coats, samples from his line, for my younger sister and I.  Beautiful little woolen coats they were, with fitted waists, velvet collars and with two rows of cloth covered buttons down the front.  I loved my coat and proudly put it on and buttoned it up , ready for our family outing.

At the zoo we four children did the usual things – fed peanuts to the elephants, had a ride on the Bactrian camel, watched the penguins being cute, waited, in vain, for the hippopotamus and the polar bears and the rhinos to make a move to amaze or amuse us, ran about, asked our parents for ice creams and the way to the public toilets, got lost once or twice, got slapped for not listening to our mother – the usual things.

We found ourselves in the “Reptile House”.  Dimly-lit, quiet the place was… strangely smelly and full of lurking DANGER .  We were awed,  intrigued, and deliciously frightened of each snake in each glass box in there.  “Mum, how would you like to have that thing hanging over your head in the jungle, eh?” and “Dad, which ones are most poisonous,?  I want to see the really deadly ones.”   Nothing changes, the big snakes which could unbuckle their jaws and swallow a new-born baby and the boa-constrictor which could hold even Arnold Schwarzenegger in a lethal embrace are, naturally, the specimens which hold the most fascination for us, the most thrilling fear. As long as the inch thick glass of their separation from us holds true to its purpose.

The sun was shining brightly when we emerged from the darkness of the Reptile House, blinding us briefly.   Straight ahead was a big circular cage, lofty and strong-barred and topped with the elaborate ironwork embellishments which the Victorian taste and craftsmen of that time preferred and fashioned.   The cage was surrounded by a crowd of on-lookers, two and three bodies deep.  “There must be something jolly good in there”, I remember thinking and nudged and pushed my way through the adults and up to the railing to get a good look at what that might be.

The old male lion, regal and indifferent, was strolling slowly round the inside perimeter of his cage…taking his time…picking his target…savoring the moment.   No doubt.

He  made one more unhurried pass then came to a stop right in front of my little green coat, lifted his hairy leg and let me have it. Right on target!

Hemmed in, as I was, I couldn’t even move – let alone run.  There was a chorus of amused snickering from the crowd of on-lookers.  There was even one heartless guffaw to pour salt into my wounded psyche.  Talk about mortified…I was shattered.

Did I cry?  Curiously, I don’t remember.  I do vividly recall my mother, with much sympathetic “tut-tutting” and a wealth of excoriating reference to lions in general, sponging me off with a handkerchief and water from a public fountain.

Some researcher somewhere must have a statistic on the bladder capacity of the male lion.  I wouldn’t be able to estimate that volume but I’ll bet a bundle that a colony of Amazonian tree frogs, living their whole lives in the pools of water cached in the branches of jungle trees could survive very happily in the largesse of that  lion’s avoir dupois output.

All I know is that my beautiful coat was a goner for good.   I never wore it again.

Judith G Kane

September 2013