Mum’s requirements were more important than mine. My parents hadn’t thought that hamsters are nocturnal creatures. So Bimbo would sleep all day then come out to play when I went to bed. I barely saw him. At the time, of course, I wondered whether this was deliberate but there was no point in my complaining. ‘You’ve got a pet, what’s the matter with you?’ I’d be told in no uncertain terms.
As it turned out, it didn’t really matter. One evening my mother decided she should get to know Bimbo a little better. I have no idea why she did this. She hadn’t shown much interest in him until now. And she approached the cage with gritted teeth.
Animals sense things and Bimbo, it seems, sensed my mother’s disdain. So he nipped her on the finger. I can still remember the yell. Before I knew it, Bimbo had been banished to school. My father had a word with the headmistress and so Bimbo became the school’s hamster.
This only served to make my sense of loss even worse, of course. It wasn’t just that I could see him in his cage every day at school. Every weekend and holiday a child had a turn in taking him home. Every child, that was, except me. I wasn’t allowed to take him home.
It is only now, looking back on that time, that I realize just how desperate and pathetic my desire for company must have looked to other people. Soon after Bimbo’s departure I headed off, in cahoots with a friend of mine called Eric, to the graveyard at the local Catholic church, St Thomas’s across Escort Road. Armed with a bucket, Eric and I snuck around the gravestones scraping off snails and had soon collected hundreds.
I took them home. I hadn’t thought about where I was going to keep them, I had only thought to myself that I had some pets. I seem to remember I had even started giving each of them names. My hopes were soon dashed, though. I got to the front door and my mother opened it. She just screamed.
She went absolutely mad. ‘Get rid of them, don’t you dare bring them into my home!’ On reflection, slimy snails are not the most natural domestic pets, but that’s how desperate I was.
So I had to take them back to the churchyard. I can remember tipping the bucket and the snails just sticking there. They wouldn’t budge. Suddenly I heard a voice behind me: ‘Can I help you?’ It was the priest. I was ever so scared. ‘I think we can help them on their way,’ he said and he took me and the bucket over to a tap where we poured some water in. He was ever so gentle and kind. And he tipped them out into the grass.
‘One day you’ll have a pet of your own,’ he said.
‘One day I’ll have hundreds,’ I said with a trembling lip.
Perhaps inspired by the snails, my father’s next gift to me was two tadpoles, Alfie and Georgie, as I had soon christened them. Again my mother had accepted this under extreme duress. She let me use one of her best fruit bowls, a boat-shaped glass affair, as Alfie and Georgie’s home. I can still see the constant pained expression she wore whenever she passed anywhere near them. It was saying: ‘Do I have to have this in my living room?’
She must have been quietly delighted that their stay was so brief. Once more, things hadn’t been very well thought out. Georgie died just as he was metamorphosing into a frog. His tail had begun to shrink, some rear legs had grown and a set of front legs had begun to develop too. Then Alfie died at the same stage. We didn’t realize they needed a pond. It had been another disaster and I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Especially when I found out my dad had flushed them down the toilet.
When my father suggested a budgie, I thought my wait for a proper companion was finally over. The green hen bird he brought home, Bobo, quickly reduced my mother to a state of nervous agitation, however. Bobo wasn’t the friendliest of creatures, it turned out. Every night she’d be allowed out to fly around for a while, with my mother following her around sweeping up wherever the bird had been. She was petrified of Bobo defecating on her best china, I think.
Their relationship was clearly doomed. And it came to a head one evening, in unforgettable circumstances.
I can still see the scene. Dad was in the kitchen and Mum was in the living room in front of the mirror getting herself ready to go out, which was a regular sight. She was putting on her make-up and Bobo – out of his cage for his evening exercise – was sitting on top of the mirror. To this day I don’t know why, but all of a sudden Bobo flew down and got hold of my mother’s lip.
Pandemonium broke out. My mother screamed in agony then started leaping and running around the room with Bobo swinging and flapping as she clung on to her lip. Blood gushed and furniture was sent crashing over. My father came flying into the room shouting. ‘Stand still, Nona!’ Eventually he prised the bird free, leaving my mother sobbing uncontrollably. Luckily the damage was only cosmetic, although – naturally – my mother failed to appreciate that.
Throughout it all I sat there, consumed by what I knew would be the inevitable consequence of what was occurring. I kept thinking: ‘Bye bye, Bobo.’
Bobo went next door to the neighbours, who had their own budgie, Pippa. When they bred I persuaded my dad to let me have one of the babies, a tiny lump of fluffy blue.
It took some doing, I can tell you. My mother, of course, was adamant that it would have to have a cage large enough to exercise in and could never be left free to fly around and wreak the kind of mayhem poor Bobo had inflicted. We agreed.
But as it turned out, Bluey, as the new arrival was christened, turned into my mother’s personal favourite.
He was an absolute character, a real gold-plated star. He used to talk to me in the morning; he’d say: ‘Janice, come on, get up.’ He’d recite nursery rhymes but say them upside down. ‘Hickory dickory dock, up the Queen’, was one of his favourites. He would dive into the lettuce bowl. What a character he was. My mother loved him, she was absolutely besotted by him, probably because he lavished so much attention on her. He’d say, ‘Oh, you’re beautiful,’ and she loved that. Mum even deigned to let him fly around the house in the evenings.
We used to take him everywhere we went. He even came camping with us. I remember we once stayed next door to a family who had a bird called Bobby. One day the two birds were out in their cages and we heard ours talking. My mother’s face turned scarlet when she heard her bird say: ‘Bobby’s a bugger, Bluey’s beautiful.’ We all burst out laughing. That bird was the light of our lives.
The time we had with Bluey was wonderful to me. To be honest, despite all my love for animals, until then I hadn’t realized an animal could be so loving in return. And the fact that he was the first successful pet I’d had made me love him back even more.
I was about to let Bluey out of his cage one November night in 1958, when there was a knock on the door. I opened it to discover a couple standing on the landing outside. They were an odd-looking pair: she looked nervous and was quite clearly heavily pregnant, he was a cocky young man in his twenties with the biggest Teddy Boy quiff I had ever seen. Whenever I see Woody Woodpecker I remember him.
‘Is your mum in?’ he asked.
I went to the sitting room to get Mum and was surprised when she recognized the Teddy Boy.
‘Oh, hello, Ron,’ she said, seemingly quite pleased to see him.
‘Hello, this is my wife, Anne,’ he replied, gesturing to the woman.
My mother ushered them into the sitting room and I, well-trained young girl that I was, headed to the kitchen to put the kettle on for a cup of tea.
I had been there for a minute or two when my mother
