When Virginia McKenna was a little girl, her father, a Christie's auctioneer, used to take her to the Snake House at London Zoo and drape grass-snakes around her neck. "He was passionately keen on snakes, and wanted me not to be afraid of them."
Fifty years later, when she visits the zoo it is likely that the authorities there wish - at least momentarily - that they could try the same trick with the giant python. For with her husband, Bill Travers, McKenna has been the founding force in Zoo Check, and a persistent, ladylike thorn in the flesh of the zoological establishment.
Zoo Check, whose aim is to monitor conditions of animals in zoos and protest at both physical and psychological cruelty, was born three years ago out of outrage at the grim death in London Zoo of Pole Pole, the young elephant which co-starred with McKenna and Travers in the film "An Elephant Called Slowly". At that time the zoo's management dismissed the couple as "emotional cranks", and their movement as a nine-days' wonder. Now, with newly-won charitable status, a growing list of powerful patrons, and a substantial EEC research grant, Zoo Check shows every sign of flourishing.
"The establishment still try to belittle us," McKenna says, "because we're not scientists. I think that fact actually gives us more freedom to speak for the humanitarian point of view. And they're clearly appalled that this actress should get the opportunity to express views, ongoing views, on their subject. They ignore the great number of scientists, zoologists, and vets who have joined our side."
She sips tea, tranquilly, eats a vegetarian sandwich, and gives me, unconsciously, a jungly analogy: "Zoo directors are on the defensive. That's why they attack."
I found it curiously fascinating to meet McKenna in this new, combative incarnation. She was, after all, one of the more powerful female images of my girlhood, largely because the films in which she starred were of a kind that my convent school found highly suitable for screening on wet winter Sunday evenings: good-hearted, wholesome, and understatedly heroic in tone. I saw her uniformed, or bedraggled, or stiff-upper-lipped in films like "Carve Her Name With Pride", "A Town Like Alice", "The Cruel Sea" and "Born Free". It was understood, in those days, that if you wanted a beautiful woman with classic bones who could trek barefoot across Malaya, defy Nazis or rear lionesses while remaining a perfect English lady, you cast Virginia McKenna and no one else.
As I walked up the street with her towards her next appointment, middle-aged fans appeared from nowhere, all brandishing starry girlish photographs and begging for signatures: all searching for a world of lost certainties and iron-clad English standards.
It was the experience of making "Born Free" which opened her eyes to the glories of wildlife in the wild. She and Travers, playing Joy and George Adamson, lived for months with them and their lions in Kenya and never used doubles in animal scenes. Before that, McKenna had merely met a few snakes, owned dogs, and felt vaguely antipathetic to her one fur stole (obligatory equipment for a rising West End actress and film star of the Fifties).
She was uneasy about zoos during her own children's early days, and took them only once to Chessington "which they all hated". She observed then, and still maintains, that children are, in fact, rather bored by zoos. "The animals aren't doing anything interesting, or natural to them, unless they're provoked. So they're quite boring.
"I once saw a group of children sitting outside the Elephant House, eating sandwiches, not paying much attention, when suddenly a squirrel dashed across and ran up a tree. They were immediately alive, and enchanted. The squirrel was doing something natural. And I don't think we have a right to keep animals in a place for 14 years, just so that our children can look at them for four hours."
It also worries her that children learn "a false attitude - false confidence, false security and arrogance", from being able to stand inches away from wild lions and tigers, protected by steel bars. "You see little boys roaring back at the lions. Well, it's a false situation. They'd never do that if the bars weren't there." She emphasizes that it is not Zoo Check's aim to do away with zoos entirely but to investigate if there are acceptable forms of captivity.
In the Zoo Check collection of essays which is published next week, different contributors cast different lights upon the inadequacy of zoos from conservationist, humanitarian, and philosophical points of view. (There is a rather pretentious section by the writer Richard Adams about animals in religious rituals, a down-to-earth account of his conversion by the former Chester Zoo vet Bill Jordan, and contributions from photographer Hugo van Lawick and philosopher Mary Midgley.) McKenna herself veers away from wide and sweeping condemnations, or hard moral lines, in favour of concrete and fairly sickening examples of the actual cruelties now practised in British and European zoos as a matter of routine.
The report initiated by Zoo Check last year, which found that most polar bears in captivity in Britain are exhibiting psychotic behaviour, is something of a solid achievement, which they plan to follow with similar reports on apes and elephants (reports in which the zoo directors' federation will not be co-operating). And on a personal level, the animal which has upset her most in recent months was a lone silverback gorilla in Dudley Zoo, who sat "hunched, all by himself, under a placard that told you how silverbacks are leaders of roaming family groups and very social animals".
The campaign has made her enemies and critics: a hard thing, I thought, for an actress once so universally admired, not least for her graceful semi-retirement to bring up her four children at the height of her film and stage career.
She, however, maintains that "being an actress is very good training for being a campaigner. You learn to take criticism and still go out the next night and do it again and not be hurt too much". Zoo Check has become a family affair: her eldest son, Will, to her great delight has taken on the directorship of the charity. "His choice, we didn't push it: he has travelled on his own in Africa, so it's his real interest too."
She is tougher now, and more guarded and canny, than her fans' misty old photographs would ever suggest. "I'm not speaking for myself. I'm speaking for animals who have no chance to make their views heard. When something suffers, it diminishes all of us: certainly it if suffers unnecessarily.
"Every creature has the right to work towards its own survival, naturally. There is no automatic human right to impose conditions on animals merely for our entertainment."
