By the end of that day I had made my calculations and my decision. With my savings, next week’s pocket money and a major initiative on Mrs Atkinson, I could raise about six shillings.
‘I’ll give you ten bob for one of them owls,’ I said, almost fainting with the excitement and what the City slickers call the exposure. Ten shillings was a colossal amount, and I didn’t have it. Eddie was too clever for me. He could recognise sheer desperation, and shook his head.
‘Five shillings and my fishing rod.’ How pathetic, said Eddie’s snort. ‘All right. My fishing rod, reel and tackle included, five shillings, and a two-shilling book token.’ The book token, Eddie well knew, could be exchanged at the newsagent’s for ten cigarettes, normal price one and tenpence.
Eddie picked up his duffel bag, slung it over his shoulder, and walked away. It was the classic salesman’s manoeuvre. If you really want someone to buy, tell him he can’t have it. I walked home so slowly, I’m surprised I got there before bedtime.
‘I’m not keeping tea things out all night in case you turn up, our Carter,’ said my mother. ‘There’s bread and cheese in the pantry. And you can give some to that dog who’s been out all day with nothing.’
I lay awake in bed, trying to make owls seem less essential than life itself, and failing. No, there was nothing for it. A boy had to do what a boy had to do, and the condemned boy ate a hearty breakfast very fast. Round at Eddie’s house, I knocked on the door. He answered.
‘My fishing rod and tackle, my new rugby ball, five shillings and my sheath knife.’ Eddie almost smiled. Maybe he’d be a professional torturer when he left school.
‘My fishing rod and tackle, my new rugby ball, five shillings, my sheath knife …’ and here I had to pause. This was to be a pledge of galactic proportions. I was about to offer Eddie the one object I prized above all else: ‘… and my air pistol. Webley. Point one seven seven.’
‘With a tin of slugs. And that book token,’ said a cool Eddie.
I nodded. I was now destitute. I had endowed Eddie with all my worldly goods. He must have known I had nothing left and had driven me until I could be driven no further. But, joy of joys, I had my owl.
I ran home, got all the money out of my pot pig, ran to the ironmonger’s, bought a tin of slugs, ran home again, picked up my rod, rugby ball, fishing bag and all, and ran to Eddie’s. With all the drama of two spies being exchanged at Checkpoint Charlie, I swapped my entire wealth for a funny little heap of feathers. I had never been so happy. I was home in a fraction of a second and moving pigeons from one loft to another so that My Owl could have his own spacious apartment.
He was not appreciative. He clicked and complained like mad at the indignity of his recent imprisonment inside a blue cotton bag with Yorkshire Penny Bank written on it, and he looked around with suspicion in his gaze. Where, he wanted to know, was his breakfast? And his lunch, come to that? My mother had some stewing steak she was going to make into a pie for our tea, so I begged a little lump of that, wrapped it in a few small pigeon feathers, and down it went.
Such a dietary regimen couldn’t last, of course – or could it? Mother soon had the butcher saving unconsidered bits and pieces and Tal didn’t seem to mind if it was beef, lamb or pork or what cut it was, although there was an overall preference for chicken. The feathers were for roughage, to maintain his natural system, which includes making pellets of indigestibles and regurgitating them.
My family had had all sorts of suggestions for a name but I stuck to Tal, short for talons, seeing as he had extra large ones. It was a boring name, but I’d thought of it, so there. A couple of weeks passed and Tal started flapping about, seeming to want more space, so I went to the library and got a book out about falconry. There were drawings of various tools of the trade and I copied one of the less ornamental pictures of jesses. A jess is a two-piece leather strap which fits around the bird’s leg, normally to be attached to a training line or the falconer’s glove by means of a swivel. I didn’t have a swivel so I used a key ring, and I didn’t have any leather so I used the canvas from an old plimsoll, and the idea was not training but to give Tal the freedom of our yard on a running line.
He seemed pleased about this and made a certain place on the back wall his own, where he’d sit and watch the world go by, bobbing up and down and turning his head through something like 270 degrees. Celebrity status followed. The coalman, the bin men and the milkman all brought titbits for Tal. My mother, returning from shopping, would find Tal swooping down with a screech to land on her basket, and he wouldn’t let go until she gave him a scrap of chicken or whatever. Everybody in the neighbourhood came to look, and he grew and he grew.
I was grateful for the butcher’s meat but concerned that it wasn’t really the proper thing for an owl whose diet in the wild would mainly be small furry rodents, young birds when there were any, and the occasional frog or fish. They hunt mainly at night, not with especially good eyesight but, as owls do, with exceptional hearing. They’re about ten times better than us at hearing low-frequency sounds, as a little vole might make when moving through the grass, and their ears are not symmetrically placed on their heads, so the very slight differences in each ear’s reception is computed by the brain to give them superior ability to tell where sounds are coming from.
Worms and beetles too are part of the wild diet but when I tried a worm on Tal he gave me a distinctly funny look, as one would if one was used to poulet à la mode and collet d’agneau. And so it was that I became a martyr to a never-ending task.
Each morning I’d be up long before anyone else, slurping a high-speed bowl of cornflakes and trotting the mile and a half to my original wildlifing range, the old railway sidings. I had twelve mousetraps in my system. I set six, usually with a piece of sweet biscuit as bait, and collected the six from the day before. These went into my satchel and the catch into my school-blazer pockets, two, three or sometimes four small rodents, shrews and voles mostly. The traps would have to be cleaned at home that night, and fumigated. Wild rodents will not touch a trap that smells of blood. They sense it, not like house mice. So I used to dangle the traps one at a time on a toasting fork, over the smoke from the coal fire, and that got rid of the taint.
Beyond my trapping grounds was a timber yard, and beyond that a goods railway line from the docks. A train would come along at the same time each day and slow down for a certain junction, allowing me to leap on it and cadge a lift almost all the way to school. If I ran the last half-mile at top speed, I could just slip in before the bell.
My system was hard work but worthwhile, and my predations on the local rodent population seemed to be sustainable. Tal was growing into a feisty adult and a real character but his fame had not, apparently, spread into the masters’ common room at my school. Everybody in my class knew about my trapping except our form teacher, who ordered a search of satchels and pockets after an announcement in assembly about a sudden rush of petty thefts. I was most reluctant to turn out mine, so our master nominated me as prime suspect. Towering over me, he thrust a hand into each side pocket. I can see his face now. Expecting to find someone’s fountain pen or several lots of dinner money, he instead felt something cold, furry and damp.
He felt again, couldn’t believe what his fingers were telling him, so pulled out two dead shrews. Destroying his credibility with that class in one instant, he squealed, went white, dropped the shrews on the floor, and left the room. I picked the bodies up, put them back in my pockets, enjoyed my few minutes as class hero, and looked forward to a search-free summer.
My vole harvest began to thin out. I was, eventually, having the same effects on the small rodents of that part of Hull as the rainforest loggers have on the tree dwellers of the Amazon. Of course I didn’t see it that way. All I could think about was alternative means of supply, which meant ranging further and wider, which meant getting up earlier and earlier and finding myself later and later for school. I was in a difficult position, being permanently skint but needing t
o buy in. My only option was to trade and, after my deal with Eddie, I had precious little to trade with.
Each week I could pay pennies for road-kill and various things shot by air-gun owners, until the pocket money ran out. After that I only had my museum, a collection of shells and oddities kept in four shoe boxes, which was hardly a big come-on apart from some of the fossils I’d found on trips to Whitby, and my bird’s egg collection.
Being left with nothing forced me to recognise an uncomfortable fact. Tal was from the wild and he needed to go back. If further proof were needed it came one night when I heard another owl answering his calls. Tal was tu-whitting and the other was tu-whooing. Next night I stayed up to watch and saw another tawny on a house roof opposite. To my utter amazement, it flew down and perched beside Tal on our wall, and they carried on calling to each other.
This was in a back street in Hull, with not a tree in sight, and here was a wild female tawny owl trying to get off with the tame male. There was only one way to resolve the matter, and the next time she came to sit on the roof, I released Tal from his bonds. Straight away he flew up to join his mate, and there they were, whitting and whooing on the ridge tiles. Such birds, I knew, mate for life, and would set up a territory somewhere and defend it against other owls, and their young against all-comers.
I thought that would be the last I’d see of them as they flew away, but they were back the next night looking for chicken. I threw what meat I could get, and dead mice, onto the roof and it was three months before they stopped coming.
By the time I was fifteen, nearing school-leaving age, with Tal long gone and my pigeon loft no longer such a fascinating place, Mrs Atkinson in a home and Brian disappeared out of my life, I was like the Cisco Kid without a Pancho. I had a bike, I had a .22 air rifle that I could strap to the crossbar, and every weekend and school holiday to hunt, shoot, fish and look.
On Saturday mornings, my favourite was to bike to Hessle where there was (and still is) a park cum nature reserve called Little Switzerland. There were made paths through the trees and gravelled walks for leisurely strollers but I got right off the beaten track, heading always first for the chalk pits. These were old limestone quarries, a piece of the edge of the Wolds become a set of natural ponds rich in all manner of creatures and plants.
On this particular morning the trees were in their full spring leaf, the sun was bright in a blue sky and my own private wildlife sanctuary was busy. You could sit perfectly still and sense it – optimism, new life, growth, everything dashing about on a mission. I had my gun. I was Langdale of the Jungle, making my way silently across uncharted territory, listening for the crack of a twig which might betray the presence of the deadly Uckawi tribe, headhunters of Hessle and District.
What I did hear was silence; then, striking the air with a purity never found in any orchestra, a song thrush. He ran through his repertoire of single notes, warbles and riffs, then did it all again, and again. I could see him, on a branch of a beech tree, high up, telling me and anyone else within earshot that there was nothing, but nothing, better to do on a fine spring morning in England than to sing his finest song. What happened in the next few seconds is a blank in my mind. I wish the rest of it was a blank too, but it isn’t.
The song stopped and the bird tumbled from the tree. A few tiny feathers floated in the space where he’d been and began their slow zigzag down, in and out of the shafts of sunlight, while their former wearer’s fall was halted in some branches a few feet off the ground. I threw my gun aside and swiftly made the few steps to the beech tree. As I reached it, the gods of the forest shook those branches and the dead thrush dropped at my feet.
I looked at it. I could see one eye half closed. After maybe a minute I made myself pick it up, a warm, damp bundle of nothing with two teardrops of fresh blood on its chest. Moments before, it had been singing the hymn of life. I cannot begin to tell how horrible I felt.
I could have dropped to my knees and begged forgiveness, or sighed and sobbed over the death of poor cock robin. Instead I threw the body into a pond and made a simple promise to myself, that I would never, ever, do anything like that again as long as I lived.
3
THE ELECTROPHANATOR AND ME
After leaving school I had a brief dab at the navy, a sojourn chiefly remembered for the happy hours spent cleaning the bogs with a toothbrush. That was followed by half a year trying every job on every postcard pinned up at the Hull Labour Exchange. I attempted to explain to my father why it was that I appeared to be so useless. It wasn’t that I was, actually, useless; it was because I really was keen to work with animals.
‘You want to try cousin Jack,’ said my dad.
‘Cousin Jack? Who’s he?’ said I, knowing my dad’s sense of humour and so imagining that this previously unmentioned relative was perhaps a lonely goatherd living in a cave on the Lincolnshire Wolds, or someone who reared goldfish for the funfairs.
‘RSPCA, is our Jack. Has been as long as I can remember. Tell him that your mother’s mother’s sister was his wife’s brother’s wife, or something of the sort. Put that kettle on as you go.’
Quite how this information had passed me by I couldn’t explain, but cousin Jack, Jack Hartley, turned out to be an RSPCA senior figure, manager of the Hull station, and had been with the firm for thirty years. By this time he was approaching retirement with no enthusiasm for that indolent state at all. He was the big, bluff type, what you see is what you get, the sort who had respect for higher authority but no need of it and – not always visibly or obviously – would do anything to help anyone. Maybe such people still exist.
I called ‘our Jack’ from one of the special cream-painted Hull phone boxes and started to tell him about his sisters and his cousins and his aunts, but he seemed to know who I was anyway and told me to pop down and see him. Later I found out that he wasn’t a cousin at all but somebody Dad knew from the pub.
‘Now then, young Master Langdale,’ he said, after crushing my right hand into a third of its normal size, ‘sit you down and I’ll tell you what it is. The girl’s leaving to run after one of them long-haired boys that plays a banjo on the stage, and we’ve never had a lad doing it. But that doesn’t mean we won’t.’ I tried to look hopeful and expectant, rather than stupid. If I listened carefully, I thought, I might be able to divine what on earth he was on about.
‘Twenty kennels,’ he continued. ‘Sometimes up to twenty dogs, but never more. Understand?’ I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t test me. ‘If there’s no room when a new dog comes in, and we have to make room, you see, with the electrophanator, no blame can be attached to the kennel maid or, in this case, the kennel knave I suppose you are. Even so, if it was me, I’d regard it as a personal failure. Now, let’s go and have a look.’
Electro what? Cousin Jack pronounced this new word ‘electro-FANter-nor’. By the time I found out what it was, I would know it was an ee-lec-TROFFernater. Meanwhile, I had wild pictures in my mind of a dog-eating electrophant, pictures based on a boyhood trip to Scarborough where, in Northstead Manor Gardens, they’d had a gaudily painted mechanical elephant with castors on its feet, which gave small children rides in its howdah.
There were indeed twenty concrete cells, or holding pens, for stray dogs. As we walked along the barred fronts, every one of the inmates came rushing up, tail wagging, wanting whatever it was we might have, hoping that we might represent something better than their clean, tidy, all-essentials-catered-for lives, which were, nevertheless, awful for a dog.
‘For every miserable, sinful bastard who abandons a dog, or mistreats a dog, there has to be a person of the opposite kind, who will take this dog in and give it love and care and respect,’ said our Jack.
I was right with it now. I was to be employed by the RSPCA to look after the kennels and the strays and keep all in as good a condition as possible, and the better I did my job, the more likely it would be that a citizen of Hull and environs would find one of my charges attractive enough to take home.
I smiled. Goodbye, Labour Exchange. Hello, destiny.
*
A large part of the work was mucky and repetitive. I had to scrub out twice a day and all my guests had to be fed, watered and exercised. That much was set in stone but it didn’t take up all my hours. New dogs usually needed some extra attention, which was no problem, and in any time spare from my routines I was happy fooling around with all the dogs. Some of them clearly had never had even the most basic training. Some had never known the fun a dog can have, just by being a dog with a kind and caring human. Some distrusted humans entirely, and winning their trust was a kind of emotional torture because I knew the original distrust might eventually prove to be well placed, because here came the hard part.
The longer-term residents created special pressures. As the numbers mounted in the kennels – seventeen, eighteen, nineteen – it became more and more important to persuade the nice people who came looking for a rescue dog that the one nobody had wanted so far, the one in kennel nineteen, was the one they should have. If not, and of course this had to remain unsaid, the next dog in would put nineteen into twenty, and there was no twenty-one, only The End.
My powers of persuasion, I felt, were not as fully developed as they might have been. I read a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. No use at all. I tried smooth-talking charm, but I never was cut out to be an estate agent. I tried little white lies, funny stories made up to make the less appealing hounds seem to be jolly characters, despite their shortage of good looks. I can’t say it worked very often. Something clicks between dog and potential owner, or it doesn’t. Even so, I could never give up, and I never could become immune to what our Jack had called ‘a personal failure’.
As kennel knave, I was mostly enjoying myself but it wasn’t what you might call a career position. I’d made my way into the RSPCA but at the very bottom, and I was looking for a step up. The most obvious, and the most exciting, had one big obstacle in the way.
An Alligator in the Bathroom...And Other Stories Page 3
