Pets, part 2.
One of the great preoccupations of my childhood was acquiring a pet. Now my parents were very straight-thinking people who believed that if you had an animal in the house, it had to serve a purpose. If your house was infested by mice (ours wasn’t) you bought a cat. If you lived in an isolated house in the country (which we didn’t) you bought a guard-dog. All other animals were a waste of time and money.
Yet despite all of the logical arguments that they could bring to bear, including the difficulty of looking after the pet when we were on holiday or the grief I would feel when said pet inevitably died, I still resolutely clung to my intention to acquire one sooner or later. It didn’t have to be furry and cute, it could be big and pug-ugly for all I cared, as long as it was living and I could feed it and preferably take it for walks.
Yes, I did think of this but I couldn't afford the fruit.
Clearly, if my parents were not going to buy me a pet, I would have to get one by some other means. As I recall, my first real attempt to do this was to catch tadpoles in the local river. On the principle of more is better, I collected hundreds, conveyed them home in a jam-jar and put them in a bucket in the back yard. I didn’t feed them as I had no idea what they ate, but I added a bit of pond weed and a few stones to make them feel at home. Naturally some of them died. I realised this had happened when they stopped wagging their tails and remained motionless for a few days.
To my delight, the surviving tadpoles actually turned into frogs. This was fascinating to watch. The little frogs were far more exciting than tadpoles, which frankly didn’t do a great deal except wriggle about a bit and then die. I looked forward to the day when I could give them names, teach them tricks and perhaps even take them for a walk.
Sadly, the frogs had other ideas. As soon as they had four legs they promptly high-tailed it out of the bucket and disappeared into the garden, never to be seen again.
Some of my tadpoles leaving the bucket.
The next potential pet, as I recall, was a fledgling sparrow that I found in the street. I took it home with me and put it in a cardboard box lined with cotton wool. Remembering where I had gone wrong with the tadpoles, and quite sure this time that the sparrow was not going to evolve into something else, I attempted to feed it on bread and milk and mashed-up worms. However, little did I know that I had happened on the Mahatma Ghandi of the sparrow world. Objecting to this oppression from another bipedal species, the sparrow promptly went on hunger strike. I’m not sure how much publicity this generated in the bird world but it soon became obvious that this was going to turn out badly. It did. However, I gave this admirable example of avian passive resistance a decent burial and marked the grave with a cross on which I wrote ‘Bird’. Looking back on it, the bird was probably not a Christian.
Mahatma Sparrow.
Apart from the natural world, there was another source of acquiring a pet. This was the local fairground. In those days, fairgrounds were a plentiful source of goldfish. Typically these could be won by tossing a certain number of ping-pong balls into goldfish bowls but this was a skill I never managed to master. Alternatively, you could also win a plastic bag containing a live goldfish at the shooting range. I soon became a crack shot with a .177 air-rifle. However, the trouble with being such a good shot was that you inevitably got into the higher prize-range. Instead of winning a goldfish in a plastic bag, I was winning tasteless porcelain knickknacks and life-size neon-blue fluffy bunnies. It took some further skill to negotiate the prize downwards to a goldfish in a plastic bag.
So I had a succession of goldfish who lived and died in a goldfish bowl on the dining-room window ledge. All of them appeared to have learned something from the sparrow since, to a man, well, a fish, they all adamantly refused to eat. I saved up my pocket money and bought them the best goldfish food that money could buy but it did no good. A week and they were floating upside down.
And sometimes they just told me to get lost.
This being, the nineteen-fifties when ‘animal rights’ meant ‘how would you like to be cooked?’, my next potential source of a pet was the local market. At the market was a ‘pet stall’ that appeared to specialise in half-dead rabbits, scrawny budgerigars and stacks of tortoises. When I put ‘stacks’, I meant that literally: they were stacked like pancakes. The bunnies and budgies were way out of my price-range so I settled for a tortoise.
Now I tried to make this tortoise as comfortable as possible. I kept it on a table in the garden shed and tried to tempt it with lettuce and anything else that I felt a tortoise might eat. However, the ghost of Mahatma Sparrow was still around. I would wave a bit of lettuce under the tortoise’s nose and it would just gaze at me disdainfully. I would attempt to seduce it with other vegetable titbits but the tortoise clearly regarded me as just another imperialist oppressor of third-world reptiles. I had another hunger strike on my hands.
But Tortoise did not have the moral resolve of Mahatma Sparrow. I arrived one morning, lettuce in hand, to find an empty box. In the night, Tortoise had scaled its walls, shinned down the leg of the table and probably waited until I opened the door before making a quick escape to the garden and freedom.
No! Don't jump!
It was many years until I next tried my luck with pets. I was a student then and, quite frankly, having a pet was the last thing on my mind. I was also a poor student so it was even laster on my mind than it would normally have been. Unfortunately, one day I happened to pass a pet shop and lingered in front of the window. Bad move. There was the cutest, the most delightful hamster I had ever seen. It was love at first sight, and, as it turned out, pretty cheap love at that. Mind you, although the hamster was cheap, the cage, the wheel, the food and the instruction book called ‘Enjoy your hamster’ added up to quite a few pounds. But I gave him – or her (I never did quite find out what sex it was) – a name: very originally, Hammy.
Hammy ate! He ate enough for three hamsters and actually got incredibly fat. So fat, that the wheel became more or less useless and I considered taking it back to the shop to swap for the guinea pig version. Unlike Tortoise, who refused to say a word, Hammy would utter delightful squeaks and even bite me occasionally to show his affection.
And then, one day, I returned from college to find the cage empty. Somehow, Hammy had found the combination to the lock, abseiled down from his table and hitch-hiked across the bedroom. He had to be there somewhere though. I had learned my lessons with Tortoise and was quite sure that he hadn’t sneaked out of the room when I opened the door.
Don't play all innocent with me, chum!
So I started searching. I looked behind all of the large cardboard boxes in which I kept my books. These were large, heavy boxes containing the very best of English literature.
I might have heard a brief squeak but, to this day, I can’t be sure of that. What I did find, under one of the boxes that I pulled out, was a flat hamster. From fat to flat in a few seconds.
The memory of Hammy lived on with me for many years. Mostly because his instruction book got mixed up with the cookery books. Anyone idly browsing through them would find, between ‘100 best chicken recipes’ and ‘The Art of French Cuisine’, a slim volume entitled ‘Enjoy your hamster’.
I have never had a pet since then.
