Brit’s amazing chil

BY the age of eight, Peter Meyer had survived two rhino attacks and been bitten twice by snakes.

His was an outdoor world – shared with an elephant, ostrich and warthog.

Peter, who grew up on a nature reserve in South Africa created by his British dad, said: “I didn’t realise how incredible my life was then because it was all I knew.

“It was only when I saw how other children lived that I realised how lucky and privileged I’d been. Adventure was in my blood from as early as I can remember.”

Peter, 34, now a model and actor, calls himself a “real life Mowgli” – the character from Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book.

He recalled: “Roaming our sprawling garden, looking down over the reserve dad created, was our baby elephant Tembie, Maggie our warthog, our ostrich Gertrude, a nyala antelope called Tammy and countless others, all part of our family.”

Home was the Karkloof Valley Nature Reserve, a dream of his property tycoon father James and the place where Peter and his younger brother Jamie were born.

With Jamie and his best friend Pugga, a local Zulu boy, he would regularly head off into the wilderness in search of adventure – climbing trees, throwing themselves off waterfalls and enjoying the kind of freedoms almost unimaginable in 21st century Britain.

Now Peter has told the story of that extraordinary childhood in a memoir, The Boy From the Wild.

He recalled: “We’d return home at sunset to find all the neighbours round to share a scrambled egg Gertrude laid. Then we’d ride the elephants down to the watering hole and tell dad about our scrapes.”

James had fallen in love with South Africa as a student at Hilton College in Pietermaritzburg. He returned to the UK and made his fortune with a firm developing the first shopping malls, along with golf courses and thousands of homes.

But at 40 he sold his stake and headed back to where his dreams still lay. Peter said: “As a teenager he’d climbed a steep hill and see before him a breathtaking valley known to the Zulu as the Valley of Heaven. He’d vowed to return one day and turn it into a nature reserve.”

James had been back in South Africa less than 12 months when he fell in love with 20-year-old Mandy, and within a year they were married and expecting a child. Peter said: “By the time I was born he’d bought the Karkloof Valley – about the size of London.

“He started populating it with game flown in from all over the world. It was like he was creating our own Jurassic Park.”

The first development, luxury villas by the river on the valley floor, was washed away in 1987 by flash floods.

Undeterred, James then created Safari World. According to Peter: “It was unlike any other game