My Wild Life Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

  Michael O’Mara Books Limited

  9 Lion Yard

  Tremadoc Road

  London SW4 7NQ

  Copyright © Simon Cowell 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-78243-520-4 in hardback print format

  ISBN: 978-1-78243-522-8 in ebook format

  www.mombooks.com

  Cover design by Richard Green

  Designed and typeset by K DESIGN, Winscombe, Somerset

  Contents

  PROLOGUE: Oh, Deer

  CHAPTER ONE: In the Beginning There Was Simon

  CHAPTER TWO: Down on the Farm

  CHAPTER THREE: International Playboy

  CHAPTER FOUR: Answering a Call of Nature

  CHAPTER FIVE: Animal House

  CHAPTER SIX: Close the Door on Your Way Out

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Rescuers

  CHAPTER EIGHT: The Good Lord Giveth . . .

  CHAPTER NINE: . . . And He Taketh Away

  CHAPTER TEN: Onwards and Upwards

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Gunslinger

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Goodbye, Dad

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: International Rescue

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Lion King

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Gorillas and Militias

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Undercover in the Temple

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: It Shouldn’t Happen to a Wildlife Presenter

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Over and Out

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: The Badger Whisperer

  EPILOGUE: Manifesto

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Illustrations

  PROLOGUE

  Oh, Deer

  SOMETIMES YOU GET lucky and the caller gives you accurate information so you can make an educated assessment of the situation and give the poor creature caught at the sharp end of the emergency a fighting chance. In any rescue there are always variables so instinct and experience play a big part. I’m certainly no Dr Dolittle but I do get a sense of what most of the animals I rescue are feeling by their body language and the way they behave. This empathy is the difference between a successful outcome or blundering into a situation, spooking an animal into a panic and creating even more danger for it.

  When the caller is an animal expert it makes the job easier because usually they know what they are talking about, as was the case one sunny day in 2013 when the phone in the office rang and the RSPCA was on the other end of the line.

  ‘It’s a roe deer and it’s trapped in a car park . . . in a school . . . in the middle of south London,’ the guy explained. ‘It’s got some kind of facial injury. There is a lot of blood. The police are here too and the deer is really panicked. The school is near a main road and the kids have been kept inside but I don’t know how long it will stay here. If it gets out it could cause a major accident.’

  I shuddered to think of the carnage that an adult deer would cause on a busy London road.

  ‘I’m on my way. Let me know if the situation changes,’ I told the caller.

  Then, with the familiar adrenaline buzz firing my synapses, I jumped out my chair and ran over to the store room to grab the equipment we’d need for the rescue. Top of the list was the huge net we kept for large, fast animals. If the deer was going to bolt from wherever it was, we would need something to stop it getting onto the road.

  ‘Lucy,’ I yelled. ‘Emergency!’

  By the time I got to the car Wildlife Aid’s trusty vet nurse was waiting along with one of our volunteers who was also acting as cameraman. I knew I would need an experienced team and I called my number-two rescuer, Sean, who lived nearby and was every bit as good as I was. We loaded up the Volvo and sped out of the gates. Less than four minutes had elapsed since I’d hung up. I started to work things out in my head. Deer rescues were tricky: the animals are big, fast and unpredictable. To successfully corner and catch a deer you need enough people to close off all the exits. There were three of us in the car, at least one RSPCA officer and some police officers. Hopefully that would be enough.

  No two rescues are the same and every rescue presents its own special set of circumstances. Each species has its own behavioural traits and quirks and each individual animal has its own personality. Some are bold and aggressive, some are frightened and shy. Very rarely, some seem to know that you are there to help and passively allow you to do what you need to do in order to save them.

  Deer are tricky customers, which is why the RSPCA called us. They are terrified of man and want to get away from you. You need to be extremely careful and extremely quick when the capture moment presents itself. You can’t afford mistakes, both for the sake of the deer and for the sake of the rescuer. Antlers hurt, believe me. I’ve been caught twice by them, once in the forehead and once in the neck. You also have to watch their hooves because a deer can jump several feet from standing and has a hell of a lot of latent energy stored in its legs. One kick can easily rupture an organ.

  Deer can also cause all kinds of harm to themselves when they are in flight mode. They are prone to stress and shock and roe deer are the only deer that can develop a condition called capture myopathy, which is an acute condition with symptoms varying from muscle stiffness to paralysis, respiratory problems and cardiac arrest. They can literally get scared to death.

  I arrived at the school and was met by two RSPCA officers in uniform: a man and a woman. The school was on lock-down and excited faces stared out of each window. I scanned the L-shaped car park and spied the deer – a roe buck with large antlers – cowering behind a car at one end of it. It was panting, its flanks were streaked with sweat and speckled with blood from a deep wound in its mouth. I couldn’t see the extent of the injury but even from a distance the amount of blood suggested it was serious.

  There were around twenty cars parked in spaces with enough room around them for the deer to dart through, which meant it would be hard to catch. The car park was bordered on several sides by the brick school buildings and also by the playground, which was enclosed by a high chain-link fence, so while there was room for the animal to run around, there was only one exit – the opening to the road. There were borders and some trees on the fringes of the car park too.

  The male RSPCA officer introduced himself.

  ‘What’s the situation and why haven’t you gone for it?’ I asked. ‘You are worrying me now.’ He explained that he had sought advice from the agency Natural England who had told him simply to catch and release the deer but that the police had wisely vetoed the plan in case the release caused a traffic accident. Bemused, I asked whether English Nature had given any tips on how they assumed the deer would be caught in the first place.

  ‘Do you just say “come here, deer”, put it in the car and drive off?’ I joked.

  I knew we needed to get the deer in a position where it would have no option but to run through the net. Once caught I could grab it, sedate it and then gauge what medical attention was needed. Before any of that happened, however, I needed to work out where to release it. Once we had it under sedation we would need to treat it and release it quickly, preferably back to where it had come from. I looked at a map of the local area. The only likely open space was a small area of woodland around half a mile away. If all went well that would be our final destination.

  I began
to work out the logistics of the rescue. We needed two net holders and several herders to gently corral the animal into a corner. The net was around 6 metres wide and could be extended to around 2.5 metres high if you held it above your head. We could form a barrier with it between two cars parked opposite each other.

  The sun was beating down as I started to place each person at strategic points and direct them backwards and forwards towards the deer, then away when it got spooked. I spoke quietly and used hand signals to issue commands. On several occasions the deer broke cover from where it was cowering and darted behind cars and past rescuers. I was careful not to encourage anyone to make a lunge and try to grab it. It may have been scared and exhausted but it still had plenty of energy and the more it felt threatened, the more agitated it would become. We made several slow passes up and down the car park in a game of cat and mouse where the mouse was a terrified 20 kg deer. At one tantalizing pass the deer sped past Lucy, close enough for her to touch it.

  ‘Don’t try,’ I said as it streaked past her. It would have been foolhardy and dangerous to attempt to grab the antlers when the animal was going at full pelt.

  Eventually, after over an hour of gentle manoeuvring, we got the animal in a position where I felt capture was possible. It was cornered in the far end of the car park with a wall behind it and two cars parked opposite each other creating a bottleneck through which it had to run. The net holders positioned themselves at either side of the gap, holding the net up at maximum height. Lucy stood back ready to tranquillize the animal when it became entangled. I walked slowly in front of the net. The deer knew it couldn’t go any further back and made a bolt to try and get past me. It saw the net at the last second and tried to leap over it. Its antlers got caught and in that split second I pounced and grabbed the horns in my gloved hands, taking care to keep them away from anywhere they could do damage. I wrestled it to the ground and the RSPCA officers jumped in to help. A terrified, guttural grunt rang out across the car park as the poor thing was pinned to the tarmac. We needed to restrain it for its own safety but it didn’t understand. It just wanted to escape.

  Lucy ran into the melee and administered the sedative. A vet had arrived and oversaw the injection. Slowly the deer’s terrified pants became more laboured and it slumped as the fight drained from its exhausted body. The relief at getting to that stage was huge. I looked down at the creature in my hands and felt a wave of sadness. The poor thing must have been terrified. I made a promise that I would do all I could to get it back to safety. Then I saw the wound in its mouth. Its lower lip was split completely in a deep V-shape which sliced down its chin to its jawline. Blood was seeping from the wound onto the ground.

  ‘This is going to need several stitches and antibiotics,’ I said.

  We travel with sedatives and other supplies but we did not have a suture kit that day.

  ‘Lucy, you’ll need to find a local vet and get what you need to deal with the wound,’ I said and looked at my watch. ‘It’s ten to three now, we’ve got an hour.’

  Once you sedate an animal, you have a time window because you can’t keep it sedated forever. The deer was in a state of shock and even under sedation I could feel its heart pumping quickly. I didn’t want to keep it under for any longer than an hour. Lucy ran off with one of the RSPCA officers to find a local vet while the other officer and I gently lifted the deer off the tarmac and to a shaded, grassy area where I covered its eyes with some gauze and lay quietly with it, waiting anxiously. Every few minutes I checked its heart rate. To begin with it was strong but as fifteen minutes passed, and then thirty, the rhythm began to get less regular and the animal’s breathing slowed.

  By fifty minutes the heart beat had become very erratic, speeding up then stopping for a couple of beats. The deer was dying. I stroked its face gently and it began to convulse. I thought that was it. I thought it was going into death throes. I could feel the life slowly drain from it.

  I looked up across the car park and saw a white car pull in. The door opened and Lucy got out with a local vet who needed to oversee the medical side of the operation; a vision in green scrubs. She sprinted over and quickly stitched the wound and administered a long-lasting antibiotic. We lifted the animal into the back of the Volvo. Time was critical. I sat in the car with our patient and we sped off into the London traffic to the release site, which was less than a kilometre away.

  We were at the site within five minutes and two of us lifted the deer and half walked, half ran with it to get it as far from the road as possible. The site was a large park with playing fields and woodland beyond. We got the deer to the edge of the woods and laid it on the grass.

  Lucy knelt down with a syringe of antidote at the ready. She plunged the needle into the animal’s haunch, reversed the sedation and after about thirty seconds the deer came back to life, full of strength and the natural urge to get as far away from me and the other humans as possible. It stood and I pointed it in the right direction. Once it was facing forward I let go.

  It was unsure at first but became fully alert and leapt over the escarpment that formed a natural border between the fields and the woodland. It was one of the most glorious sights I have ever seen. I watched as it bounded to freedom while the lady from the RSPCA pumped her fists in jubilation next to me. Then the tears came. I always shed them when I see an animal go back to the wild.

  ‘It deserves a second chance,’ I sobbed. All the adrenaline and the fears that had kept me going that day dissipated and I slumped into the grass and cried like a baby as another satisfied customer disappeared into the urban jungle.

  Beyond the trees, in the distance, the London skyline spread across the horizon like a mirage. Once, in another life symbolized by fast cars, casinos, bad behaviour, money and excess, that landscape had been my stalking ground.

  How the hell did I get here? I thought to myself.

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the Beginning

  There Was Simon

  MY STORY STARTS like all good wildlife stories with a baby creature covered in hair, mewling and whining in its mother’s protective embrace. It is a man-cub and it is me, Simon Cowell (no not that one, although I’m pretty sure he would have been an equally hirsute newborn). I was a tiny infant and entered the world prematurely weighing just two pounds after my mother suffered a pre-pregnancy bout of tuberculosis. Despite the freakish dark pelt that covered me at birth but cruelly deserted me prematurely in later life, I was a handsome devil and a plucky little fighter loved by the nurses. They crowned me King Simon and fussed over me in the drab post-war maternity unit of Epsom General Hospital. The magnetic chemistry I shared with the opposite sex as a baby was something I tried to maintain in my formative years, often at personal cost.

  Before I came along my mum, Jeanne, had lost a child: another boy. I suspect that after I arrived in such dramatic fashion and gave her and my dad, Michael, a fright, they decided to cut their reproductive losses and quit while they were ahead. Consequently, I remained an only child (I like to think I was a blessing), and that suited me fine.

  I was born in April 1952 and my habitat was the idyllic surroundings of Surrey and, in particular, Epsom, a market town made famous by the racecourse and the world’s largest cluster of psychiatric hospitals. They had been built at the turn of the twentieth century to provide a centralized hub in which to house and treat the nation’s growing community of mentally ill and insane people. Some were let out at the weekends, which made the Saturday shop interesting. Often in later life I felt like joining them and on a couple of occasions I nearly did, but more of that later.

  Dad came from an agricultural family and grew up in a village called Radwinter in Essex, which was a rural backwater. During the Second World War he left the farm and joined the RAF where he served as an engineer and was posted to Singapore and Burma. He fixed aircraft and was bloody good at it thanks to years spent tinkering with tractors and other heavy machinery in the farm workshop. He was an extraordinary handyman with
a sixth sense that allowed him to understand how machines worked. He was still in the Far East when the Japanese surrendered in 1945 and was part of the liberation effort that went into the prisoner-of-war camps and helped repatriate the wretched souls who survived. I can only imagine the sights he witnessed in those chaotic weeks. He never talked about it to me or anyone else and put his dark memories in a box somewhere in his head and locked them away. He was a great bloke and the backbone of the family.

  After the war he worked for a farm supply wholesaler in Dorking as an engineer and also sold big plant such as tractors and combine harvesters. His clients were farmers and farm managers and he’d broker deals worth several thousand pounds. If I was off school or on holiday he sometimes took me with him on business. There was a workshop at his business premises where I was allowed to mess around with the tools and the machinery. There were none of the silly health and safety regulations that strangle the fun out of life nowadays. It was a time of innocence and the occasional industrial accident!

  When I was a few years old we moved further out into the countryside to a village called Brockham which was a pretty place with a village green and a church that sat in the shadow of Box Hill. Dad went to work; Mum stayed at home and looked after me and the house. All told we were an unremarkable post-war family.

  I went to Leigh County Primary School, which my parents chose over the nearest school to our home. My mother had aspirations to be a social climber and didn’t feel that the local school was good enough for me, so I suffered the longer walk to further my academic potential (which never really materialized). By chance several of my teachers lived on my road so I always had to be on my best behaviour. There was Miss Keen, the headmistress who terrified the life out of me, and Miss Collinson who had a tin leg. She lived with a lady friend, Miss Smith. Both were sweet, middle-aged ladies (although Miss Collinson was a little bit scary because of the leg) and I was blissfully ignorant about their living arrangements. To this day, I have no idea whether they were just friends or friends with benefits. They were always lovely to me and, perhaps because I was a neighbour, Miss Collinson always looked out for me in school. One day I remember getting a really bad earache and snivelling in pain during class. Miss Collinson came and got me from my desk and gently led me to the front of the room where she placed a little chair next to her for me to sit on. As she taught the rest of the class she encouraged me to rest my head in her ample lap where the cold tin of her prosthetic limb soothed away my pain through the linen of her dress.