The playground at Cage Green Junior School, Tonbridge was buzzing with the news that early summer 1969 morning. A local boy had claimed to have seen a large ape-like creature, thought to be a gorilla, in a field on nearby farmland; and there he was on the front page of the local newspaper in an article complete with photograph. Some pupils had brought in a copy of the photograph, torn surreptitiously from their parents’ papers that morning. In vain we scanned the grainy image of the boy, the field and a solitary tree in the distance for signs of a gorilla hanging from the branches. In those innocent times it never crossed our minds that the boy might have been mistaken or even lying. It was there in the newspaper so it must be true. Quite how a gorilla had come to pitch up at a farm in Kent was the subject of endless speculation. One boy, whose grasp of geography and zoology was sketchy to say the least, suggested, to general derision, that it might have swum over from Africa. But most people concluded that it had escaped from a zoo or circus.
During lessons and at breaktimes that day the talk was of little else. Ideas were discussed. Plans hatched. Participants recruited. And so it was that at about 5 o’clock that afternoon after bolting down our respective teas and vague promises to parents that we were just going out to play, my friends and I scampered from houses along the length of our road and assembled on a nearby green. We had armed ourselves for protection with a fairly blunt kitchen knife, a cricket stump, a toy Winchester rifle with a cracked barrel and some bamboo canes, along with several varying lengths of string and garden twine purloined from sheds and greenhouses. Blissfully ignorant, in those pre David Attenborough days, of the great ape’s ferocity when roused or its capacity to rip a man limb from limb, and confident in the ability of six small boys to track, subdue and tie up said beast, we were off on a gorilla hunt.
Entering the woodland that surrounded the field where the alleged sighting had taken place, we were certain that this was where the gorilla would now be hiding, despite the lack of ape essentials such as bananas and jungle vines to swing from. It soon became evident that, strangely, almost every other male child in North Tonbridge who was of junior school age seemed to have had the same idea as us, and the woodland trails quickly became clogged with intrepid gangs of little boys, all, like us, bearing an assortment of weapons and string, all communicating in whispers or sign language, all pretending that they had seen or heard something ‘just over there’, and all scanning the ground for tracks, broken twigs or overturned stones that might indicate that the gorilla had passed that way. At long last we were putting into practice those hunting skills gleaned from TV, comics and the booklets that came with Clarks Commandos shoes.
At one point we were startled when something burst from the bushes ahead of us, but our initial excitement abated when we realised that it was only a ginger-haired lad from another class, out hunting solo. “Well it might have been an orang-utan,” said one of our number, trying but failing to justify his girly shriek of alarm. After a further fruitless 30 minutes or so, the only hazards we had encountered were stinging nettles and the ubiquitous piles of dog excrement, much of it already trodden in by previous unfortunates. The thrill of the chase had given way to boredom and, almost as one, everyone abandoned the Great Gorilla Hunt. With the sun going down, we went our separate ways home, the promise of the weekend ahead of us now occupying our thoughts.
I never did find out whether it all turned out to be a childish hoax that got out of hand or whether the gorilla had been shot with a tranquillizer dart by a police marksman and recaptured. Perhaps it just swam back to Africa.
During lessons and at breaktimes that day the talk was of little else. Ideas were discussed. Plans hatched. Participants recruited. And so it was that at about 5 o’clock that afternoon after bolting down our respective teas and vague promises to parents that we were just going out to play, my friends and I scampered from houses along the length of our road and assembled on a nearby green. We had armed ourselves for protection with a fairly blunt kitchen knife, a cricket stump, a toy Winchester rifle with a cracked barrel and some bamboo canes, along with several varying lengths of string and garden twine purloined from sheds and greenhouses. Blissfully ignorant, in those pre David Attenborough days, of the great ape’s ferocity when roused or its capacity to rip a man limb from limb, and confident in the ability of six small boys to track, subdue and tie up said beast, we were off on a gorilla hunt.
Entering the woodland that surrounded the field where the alleged sighting had taken place, we were certain that this was where the gorilla would now be hiding, despite the lack of ape essentials such as bananas and jungle vines to swing from. It soon became evident that, strangely, almost every other male child in North Tonbridge who was of junior school age seemed to have had the same idea as us, and the woodland trails quickly became clogged with intrepid gangs of little boys, all, like us, bearing an assortment of weapons and string, all communicating in whispers or sign language, all pretending that they had seen or heard something ‘just over there’, and all scanning the ground for tracks, broken twigs or overturned stones that might indicate that the gorilla had passed that way. At long last we were putting into practice those hunting skills gleaned from TV, comics and the booklets that came with Clarks Commandos shoes.
At one point we were startled when something burst from the bushes ahead of us, but our initial excitement abated when we realised that it was only a ginger-haired lad from another class, out hunting solo. “Well it might have been an orang-utan,” said one of our number, trying but failing to justify his girly shriek of alarm. After a further fruitless 30 minutes or so, the only hazards we had encountered were stinging nettles and the ubiquitous piles of dog excrement, much of it already trodden in by previous unfortunates. The thrill of the chase had given way to boredom and, almost as one, everyone abandoned the Great Gorilla Hunt. With the sun going down, we went our separate ways home, the promise of the weekend ahead of us now occupying our thoughts.
I never did find out whether it all turned out to be a childish hoax that got out of hand or whether the gorilla had been shot with a tranquillizer dart by a police marksman and recaptured. Perhaps it just swam back to Africa.
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