by Doreen Tovey
What is important is that there, in a nutshell, is the basic reason why things happened to us. On my left Grandma, with whom I had lived in a state of impending calamity since the day I was born. On my right Charles, with whom I was to continue in that state from the day we were married.
They had much in common, Grandma and Charles, including a passion for gadgets that were either impractical or—when handled by them—impossible. Gadgets that were impossible for them, of course, were not necessarily impossible for other people. Take Charles’s electric drill, for instance. So simple that, to quote the advertisement, a child could use it. The first day he brought that home he used the sanding attachment to polish an old copper kettle I had just bought in a junk shop. Wild with enthusiasm he not only sanded a hole clean through the kettle bottom, he also—as a result of doing the job in the bathroom because he said that was the most convenient power point—turned the bath and lavatory seat emerald green in a shower of copper dust. Which, I regret to say, became embedded, and we have an emerald-spotted lavatory seat to this day.
When he used the paint-mixing attachment he not only mixed the paint, he went on so long that eventually the whole lot shot out in a sort of circular tidal wave and Solomon, hanging hopefully around in case we were getting something to eat, became temporarily the only Seal-Point Siamese in existence with bright blue ears. When he used the drill itself with no attachment whatever, to drill a couple of holes to fix the switch for the hall lights, he managed that all right. The trouble was he then went on to fix a switch that was—according to Father Adams—big enough for Battersea power station, with two little inch-long screws. The result was that within two days the switch came off in somebody’s hand and for the next six months—until Charles, who flatly refused to have a smaller switch, remembered to buy some longer screws—the switch, with a couple of whacking great cable wires attached, lay tastefully on the hall table and anybody who wanted to go upstairs operated it from there.
Aunt Ethel, grovelling one day for the switch which had fallen down behind the table and coming up instead with a dead mouse which had been filed there by Sheba, said she didn’t know how I stood it. The answer was simple, of course. This was exactly how I had lived with Grandma. Down to the gadgets which invariably went wrong. Down to the paint—Grandma had once painted some chairs, putting the second coat on before the first was dry, and for weeks when unwary visitors sat on them there had been a gentle rending sound every time they got up. Even down to the mice.
Grandma once had a cat called Macdonald who was bitten by a mouse. Believe it or not, she used to say, she had seen that cat one day with a mouse which had its teeth firmly fixed in his chin while Macdonald himself—one paw on the mouse’s tail, his head strained upwards like a giraffe and the poor old mouse stretched like elastic in between—tried desperately to lever it off. As a result of that experience Macdonald had developed a complex about mice. When he caught them he no longer ate them, but laid them out in rows in conspicuous places and gloated over them. Visitors needed jolly strong stomachs to take tea in our house in those days, when more often than not there were half a dozen mice laid out on the rug before their very eyes and a big black cat sitting proudly by the side of them like a pavement artist, but Grandma would never allow them to be taken away from him. It would hurt his subconscious, she said. It was his way of retrieving his pride after the mouse had bitten him. If people didn’t like it, she said, when any of us remonstrated with her, they could do the other thing.
We would soon have been left without any friends at all if it hadn’t so happened that Grandma also had three parrots and that one day Piquita, the Senegal parrot, bit Macdonald on the paw when he was seeing how far he could reach into her cage. Piquita was always biting people. She was the most fiendish bird I have ever come across—and that, considering the number of parrots Grandma kept in her time, all of which bit at the slightest instigation, was saying something. She was small, with a green back, an orange stomach, yellow legs, and a grey, snake-like head. She had pebble-grey eyes which were also cold and snake-like, except when she got annoyed, when they turned bright yellow and went on and off like a Belisha beacon.
You could always tell when Piquita was going to attack by the flashing of her eyes. The trouble was, by that time it was generally too late. Her usual time for attacking was when she was being fed and, with Grandma’s usual inconsistency, while her other parrots all had cages with seed tins that fitted from the outside, Piquita alone had a cage where they hooked on to the inside.
She also, lucky little bird that she was, had a door which instead of opening outwards slid vertically up and down in grooves like a portcullis. Every member of the family, with the exception of Grandma, was trapped at some time or other by that blasted door coming down on their wrist while they were putting in the seed tin, whereupon Piquita, her eyes flashing on and off like neon signs, dived down and bit them solidly in the thumb.
Grandma was as deaf to our complaints about Piquita as she was about Macdonald’s mice. If she bit us, she said, we must have offended her and it served us right. Piquita, she would observe with the air of finality which she always adopted to complaints about her pets, never bit her. The astonishing thing was that she was right. Grandma could do anything with birds, just as she could with animals. Immediately one of us was bitten, even while we were still hopping round doubled up and sucking our thumbs in anguish, off she would sweep in great concern to comfort Piquita—and there, a couple of seconds later, you would see that horrible bird lying on her back in the bottom of the cage, wings widespread, eyes closed in ecstasy, while Grandma tickled her on her stubbly little stomach and said what a wicked lot we were to torment her.
What with Macdonald’s mice and Piquita biting life was pretty arduous for us just about then, and it seemed—to everybody except Grandma, anyway—poetic justice when in the end our two crosses cancelled themselves out. Piquita, as I have said, bit Macdonald one happy afternoon when he put his paw in her cage, and Macdonald, no doubt remembering what Grandma was always saying about his subconscious and the need for him to retrieve his pride, subtly plotted his revenge. The rest of the day he sat licking his paw and glowering darkly at her from under a chair. That night, while we were all in bed, he marched purposefully into the sitting room, knocked her cage off its table, the sliding door which had been our own downfall so often in the past slid smoothly up in its grooves for the last time—and that was the end of Piquita. When we came down next morning we found the cage upset, birdseed all over the floor, and Piquita herself laid out regimentally on her back alongside the night’s catch of mice.
Grandma was inconsolable at her death. Right up to the loss of the next of her parrots, which happened a long time afterwards and was another story altogether, she never stopped mourning Piquita and saying how she was the best, most faithful, most loving parrot she had ever had. As for Macdonald, sitting up there so proudly and waiting for her to congratulate him on his night’s haul—he, bewilderment in every line of his fat black face at her sudden change of attitude, got the tanning of his life and never caught a mouse again. Any time after that if he even thought of chasing a fly he would hesitate, look at Grandma, lower his ears and slink under the nearest chair. Humans, he said, gazing stonily at us out of his big yellow eyes while we stroked his ears and promised him a consolatory saucer of milk when she wasn’t looking, were Horrid.
Four
Blondin
My grandmother was awfully pleased when Charles and I acquired a squirrel. It just showed how we liked animals, she said. I took after her, as she’d always said I would. Charles … she’d always liked Charles, and to think of his taking this dear little orphan of the woods, comforting it and bringing it up … it just showed how right she’d always been.
Actually Grandma, as usual, was as far from right as she possibly could be. We hadn’t adopted Blondin willingly. We liked animals, yes. But squirrels—as, in those carefree, far-off days, Siamese cats—were hardly our cu
p of tea. All we had aspired to until then had been three Blue Rex rabbits with which Charles, fired by a book entitled How To Make Money in Your Spare Time, had once dreamed of founding a flourishing rabbit business. The idea was that he would sell the carcasses at tremendous profit to a shop and I—as Charles was continually pointing out, they had magnificent pelts—could have a fur coat. What actually did happen was that six months later, by which time we had a grand total of twenty-seven rabbits and they were costing us a fortune in bran and potatoes, Charles announced that he couldn’t kill them. They were his friends, he said. Particularly the little one with the white foot. Had I noticed, he asked, how that one could actually climb the wire of the hutch door like a monkey when it was opened, and the knowing way it would sit up on the top tier and wait to have its ears scratched?
As a matter of fact I hadn’t. I was too busy cooking buckets of bran mash and scouring the hedgerows for dandelions. One thing I did jolly well know, however, was that I wasn’t going to be the one to kill them; neither could we afford to go on keeping them in rapidly expanding multiples forever. The outcome of that affair was that Charles’s friends eventually departed en masse one Saturday afternoon on a handbarrow, hutches and all. We had sold them alive to another breeder—a small boy who informed us firmly that the bottom had fallen out of Rex rabbits, and that while six months earlier we had paid seven pounds ten for three of them the best he could do for us now for our total of twenty-seven was thirty bob, including hutches. If, he said, with a meaning glance at Charles, we wanted to sell them alive.
Well, there we were. We didn’t adopt Blondin willingly. Neither was he the dear little orphan Grandma so imaginatively described. He was a silly clot who had fallen out of a thirty-foot-high drey one cold March afternoon, no doubt as a result of his own nosiness, and when we found him he was lying at the foot of a towering pine tree. Shivering, hungry—so young that his tail hadn’t even feathered out yet but was thin and stringy like a rat’s; so tiny that he couldn’t even crawl.
Charles having firmly refused to climb thirty feet to put him back in the drey—though many a time later he was to wish fervently that he had—the only thing we could do was to take him home with us and look after him until he could fend for himself. Contrary to my grandmother’s picture of Charles comforting and nourishing him, I, incidentally, was the one who gave him a good going-over with flea powder when we got there, and I was the one who kept getting up at hourly intervals throughout the night to feed him warm milk from an Apostle spoon.
I was also the one who, when we woke next morning to the realisation that somebody was going to have to give him hourly feeds through the day as well if he was to survive, was detailed to take him to the office with me. When I pointed out that Charles’s office was more private than mine, and he could much more easily feed Blondin without attracting attention, he looked at me incredulously. Who, he demanded with horror, had ever heard of a man feeding a squirrel in an office? I could have asked who had ever heard of a woman feeding one there either, but it wouldn’t have got me anywhere. When I trudged tiredly into my office at nine that morning Blondin was with me, wrapped in a blanket in a shopping basket.
Actually the first day people hardly knew he was there. The milk had unfortunately been too strong for his small stomach and the whole day he lay there like a dead thing with me forcing a mixture of brandy, warm water, and sugar down his throat at regular intervals and waiting for the end. The next day, however, Blondin felt much better. Halfway through the morning there was a screech like a train whistle from under my feet and when I touched ground again and looked under the desk, there was a small brown head regarding me indignantly from the folds of the blanket. Where, he demanded menacingly, rattling his teeth at me in a way I was to come to know very well indeed in the weeks that followed, was his Brandy?
There was no trouble in feeding him after that. Diluted brandy, cracker biscuits mashed to a gruel with sugar and water, Blondin took the lot, sitting up to suck at it with both paws clasped tightly round the teaspoon and refusing point-blank—all our animals showed their independence at a dishearteningly early age—to feed from the fountain-pen filler we bought for him on the second day.
His fame spread quickly once he was up and about. People came from all over the building to see him and hold his teaspoon. Others brought him pounds of nuts and were most disappointed when he didn’t sit up and start eating them right away. Even the scream which meant he was hungry, and which could be clearly heard halfway down the corridor, rapidly became part of the office routine. So much so that when the clarion call sounded one morning while my boss, myself, and a rather important visitor were discussing early Virginian history the only one who jumped was the visitor—and he nearly went through the ceiling. I merely streaked automatically for the door while my boss startled the poor man still further by telling him I’d gone to feed a squirrel.
It couldn’t last, of course. It ended, in fact, the moment Blondin began to feel really good and realised what he was. Nobody, said one of my colleagues towards the end of the second week while he frantically tried to extricate Blondin from halfway up his coat sleeve, where he had crawled by way of experiment and was now firmly wedged and screaming his head off, could like animals better than he did—but an office was not the place for squirrels. They ruined the filing, complained the filing clerk—and indeed quite a bit of our current correspondence had an odd octagonal look where Blondin had tried his teeth out on the corners. They upset the ink, said the junior—and indeed there was a large black splodge on the carpet where Blondin, looking hopefully for something to drink, had indelibly proved it. They were bad for his heart, said the boss, leaping madly for the door one afternoon as Blondin, who had been idly chewing a pencil on my desk, loped light-heartedly across the floor and sat up right in front of it just as somebody prepared to come in. Would I please, he said, leaning against the door jamb and mopping his neck with a trembling hand while Blondin clambered happily up his leg to thank him, take my blasted squirrel HOME?
Grandma was awfully annoyed when she heard about that. She wanted to go down and speak to my colleagues, and I had an awful time dissuading her. They’d never get on, she said wrathfully, if they weren’t kind to little animals. (From what I could see my immediate prospects didn’t look too good if I was.) Heaven would pay them out for it, she said, wagging her teaspoon vigorously in the air. Heaven would … At that moment the small tawny figure which had been busily teething on the picture rail till it spotted the teaspoon sailed gracefully through the air and landed on her head and Grandma, who wasn’t expecting him, nearly swallowed her pastry fork. She changed her mind after that. What that little devil wanted, she said, wiping the remains of her cream puff from her chin and glaring grimly at him as if he were suddenly a sprig of Old Nick himself—was a cage.
For a short while, for his own good, he got one. He had by this time progressed to being able to feed himself. Not so politely as we might have wished, perhaps. At first we gave him his mash in a saucer into which, the moment he saw it, he immediately jumped and got his stomach wet. We got so tired of continually drying his stomach out on a hot-water bottle that eventually we gave him a cup turned on its side. He threw himself just as lustily into that, rolling and sucking noisily as he ate and getting himself plastered with mash, but at least he kept his stomach dry, and at least he could feed himself. So we left him at home with his basket and his cup of mash and his drinking water—and the very first day he was left alone, growing more squirrel-like with every hour that passed, he climbed on to a shelf, chewed the paint off a tin, and poisoned himself.
We cured him that time with copious doses of magnesia. We were, said Charles, hammering fiercely away that night at a large packing case which he was converting into a cage to prevent Blondin from attempting suicide the next day as well, getting to know quite a lot about squirrels. Not as much as Charles thought we did, I’m afraid, because he said a rhinoceros couldn’t get out of that cage once he had rein
forced it, whereas with Blondin it lasted just until the end of the week, when we went home one night to find that he had chewed a hole in a corner just large enough to squeeze his small, fat body through and was regarding us complacently from the top of a cupboard.
After that he was never put in a cage again. Fortunately he had learned his lesson about chewing tins, but he achieved other catastrophes with clockwork regularity. He went through a period of imagining that his tail worked like wings, so that he was continually launching himself into mid-air from the backs of chairs and falling flat on his face. Then, apparently having decided that altitude might help, he tried it from the top of a six-foot cupboard and nearly killed himself. Fortunately we were on hand to pick him up. His small button nose was streaming with blood and he had sprained his hind paw so that he limped for days, but after screaming hard for several minutes he calmed down, drank a teaspoon of brandy and water with the air of one who hated the stuff but knew it would do him good, and decided to live.
His next escapade was really spectacular. Through his habit of sprawling in his mash at mealtimes the fur on top of his head had become completely glued down with sugar mixture which had hardened into a glossy cap and made him look like an advertisement for brilliantine. We made several attempts at washing it off, but the gloss was immovable. Blondin himself spent hours vainly trying to comb it out with his claws, sitting up and twiddling away at his top-knot till Charles said he found he was doing it himself when he wasn’t thinking. Finally, however, Blondin’s patience gave out. One day while we were away he sat down and pulled the patch out by the roots. When we got home he emerged from his basket to greet us, inordinately pleased with himself and as bald as a coot.
