by Doreen Tovey
This was before the days of Yul Brynner, and we were terribly ashamed of him. People were continually asking how he was and it seemed such an anticlimax to keep producing a squirrel who looked as if the moths had been at him. It was weeks, too, before his fur grew again—until the wrinkled pink tonsure which disconcerted everybody except Blondin himself disappeared, and he looked like a normal squirrel once more. Meanwhile he had progressed beyond the soft-food stage and was at last able to eat nuts. At first they had to be cracked for him, and he had no idea of storing them, but from the very beginning there was an instinctive ritual about his nut-eating. Always, however hungry he might be, he would carefully peel three-quarters of the nut before he began to eat, spinning it round in his paws as he worked. He always held it by the unpeeled portion—and never by any chance would he eat the part he had been holding. When he progressed to cracking nuts for himself he never discarded the entire shell, but used part of it as a holder for the kernel so that there was no need to touch it at all. He ate slices of bread and apple in the same manner, always discarding the part he had held. Tomatoes were his favourite fruit—probably because the first one he ever tasted was one which he stole himself from a bowl on the kitchen dresser—and these, too, he carefully peeled before eating. But far and away above anything else Blondin loved tea. He decided that he liked it quite suddenly one morning at breakfast, while he was sitting on Charles’s shoulder. Without more ado he catapulted himself down Charles’s arm and dived headfirst into the teacup which he was just raising to his lips.
The tea—fortunately only lukewarm—went everywhere. Over Charles, over the tablecloth, and over Blondin, who emerged looking as if he had had a bath, wiped his chin on Charles’s dressing gown, and retired blissfully to the back of a chair to lick himself dry. After that he would leave whatever he was doing at the first glimpse of the teapot, and the only way to ensure peace at mealtimes was to give him a saucerful before pouring out our own. Only once I forgot—and when I came in from the kitchen our dear little orphan of the woods, as Grandma still persisted in calling him, was on the table, standing on his hind legs and hopefully pushing his tongue down the spout.
By this time Blondin was quite a sizable squirrel, and perfectly able to look after himself. The only drawback to his prospects of survival when we set him free was the fact that he was, unfortunately, not the rare Red Squirrel which his sandy baby fur had led us to believe, but had developed into a perfect specimen of the American Grey—and as such he was liable to be shot at sight by anybody who saw him.
It was difficult to know what to do. He was so tame that we hated the idea of parting with him—and the fact that he was liable to be shot if he were at large surely gave us every excuse for keeping him with us. On the other hand it seemed wrong to deprive him of his birthright. If he were to be shot, at least he wouldn’t know anything about it until it happened. Meantime he would have led a full life, climbing to his heart’s content in the windswept trees, perhaps even finding a mate and building a drey of his own …
Finally we decided to compromise—to set him free not in his native woods but in the vicinity of the farm where we were living at the time, in the hope that we should still see him sometimes and that, as everyone in the district knew him by sight, he might escape the gun at least for a while.
So, one fine warm morning in July, we carried him to the far end of the garden and put him gently on a tree trunk. He sniffed about him curiously for a moment, his whiskers bristling with interest, his tail bushed out and fluttering with excitement. Then like lightning, he sped to the topmost branches, chasing himself giddily round and up and down, until at last he had to stop and lie out along a branch to get his breath back.
Sadly we stood and watched him, waiting until he should take it into his head to make for the taller trees on the other side of the wall and pass out of our keeping forever. But Blondin didn’t go. He romped and played in the branches until he was startled by a crow flapping its way briskly over his head—then he was out of the tree, streaking across the lawn and hiding fearfully behind the kitchen door almost before we knew what had happened. He didn’t like the idea of being a wild squirrel, he informed us with chattering teeth as we carried him back indoors and put the kettle on. He liked us … and tea … and sitting in Charles’s pocket and sleeping in the wardrobe … He was, he announced, regarding us happily over the top of the biggest walnut we could find for him, going to stay with us for Ever.
Five
The Story of a Squirrel
Blondin—sometimes we wondered if it was the result of the brandy—was not an ideal squirrel. He threw nutshells and tomato skins on the carpets. He was obstinate and self-willed. When a situation arose such as his deciding to spend the evening in Charles’s pocket and Charles not wanting him to, it invariably ended in Blondin getting tough and threatening to bite. Squealing with rage, battling tempestuously with his claws, peace would descend only when he was curled cosily in Charles’s pocket, with—presumably it acted as some sort of radar device—his tail hanging down outside.
With me he preferred to be the other way up. He particularly liked me to wear a sweater, when he would sit inside it on my shoulder with his head sticking out of the top. I cooked, I did housework, I answered the door—all with Blondin gawking happily out of my collar so that I looked like a two-headed Hydra. Not, as Grandma claimed, that he did it from affection. Just so that he didn’t miss what was going on.
Blondin never missed anything if he could help it. As soon as he could climb he had taken to sleeping in our wardrobe, in a pile of Charles’s socks in one of the pigeonholes. There he slept the night through; snug, warm, safe from his enemies—so secure that if we woke up during the night and listened, invariably from the direction of the wardrobe we could hear small but distinct snores. As soon as dawn broke, however, Blondin was up and keeping an eye on things. Hopping up and down the bed, peering into drawers, looking out of the window at the birds and finally, with his tail curled jauntily over his head, settling down to wait on top of the wardrobe, where he could spot us the moment we got up.
Many a piece of mischief was planned from that little lookout. He was there the morning Charles looked at his watch to see the time and, instead of getting up straightaway and putting it on, stuffed it under his pillow and went to sleep again. We overslept that morning, and when we did get up we had to move so fast that in the rush Charles completely forgot his watch. Not until halfway through a hurried breakfast, when we realised that Blondin was missing from his usual vigil by the teapot, did he remember it—and by that time it was too late. When we rushed upstairs Blondin had it under the bed. Cracking it to get at the tick.
He was there, too, the day Charles brought home his new suit from the tailor’s. From his eyrie Blondin watched with interest, his head on one side, his tail curled into a question mark, while Charles tried it on. He also watched with interest while Charles put it on a hanger and hung it inside. We did notice that that night he went to bed earlier than usual, but nobody thought anything of that. He often popped off up to the wardrobe by himself when he felt tired, and indeed by the time we went to bed ourselves he was already fast asleep, snoring away inside his pile of socks like a small buzz-fly.
It wasn’t until next morning, when Charles said it was a fine day and he might as well wear the suit, that we discovered what had made our little orphan of the woods so tired. Not only had he taken every button off the new suit, as Charles discovered when he went to put the trousers on. Overcome with achievement, he’d chewed the buttons off all his other suits as well.
There was no need to enquire which of us Blondin belonged to at that moment. He was all mine. He was always mine when he did anything wrong. The time he upset a bottle of ink, for instance, paddled in it and then left a Chaplinesque little trail over a shirt that had just been ironed—he was mine then all right. It was a wonder he and I weren’t sent to the Zoo together.
He was mine, too, the day Charles locked the wardrob
e to keep him off his suits and Blondin, equally determined to get back in again, chewed a large chunk out of the door. I was out at the time but it was my squirrel who greeted me on my return, chattering indignantly away on the top. My squirrel, Charles informed me, trying fruitlessly to fit the bits back in again—who, if he couldn’t behave in a civilised manner, would have to Go.
Normally, of course, he was Charles’s squirrel, and if he’d gone anywhere it would have been over Charles’s dead body. Circumstances altered cases, too. When it was not Charles’s watch but my handbag that he chewed through—a neat, semicircular hole in the flap to get at my fountain pen—there was nothing mischievous about that. It was just, according to Charles, an example of his intelligence that he should have noticed where I kept the pen and—being naturally curious about it—used his brains to get it out.
He was certainly intelligent. Young as he was when we found him—far too young to have learned anything from other squirrels—he still knew instinctively when the summer began to wane and it was time to start storing nuts. He kept his in the hearthrug and nearly drove us mad by the way he had no sooner buried them and carefully patted over the top by way of camouflage, than he got all worried because he couldn’t see them and immediately dug them up again, turning them suspiciously over in his paws to make sure they were still intact.
Actually the last bit was due to Charles rather than instinct. Charles liked nuts too, and one day Blondin caught him helping himself to a particularly fine walnut he had found under a cushion. Incredulously he watched while Charles cracked and ate it—his very own nut—and never offered him a piece. Incredulously, afterwards, he examined the nutshell before he could believe that Charles, his friend, had done this thing to him. After which it was entirely Charles’s own fault that whenever he entered a room he was tailed by a squirrel who leapt on guard as soon as he approached a cushion and who, the moment he went near the hearthrug, patrolled furiously up and down it threatening to bite if he so much as moved a foot.
He knew, too, all about building dreys. We had at that time a bed-settee which we sometimes used for guests and Blondin, when he felt like a nap without the bother of going upstairs, often disappeared inside it for an hour or so, going in by a private entrance of his own through the back. One day, seeing him dragging a tray cloth across the floor and finally, after considerable effort, getting that through the back as well, we opened up the settee to find a sock, a small screwdriver, a dozen or so paper handkerchiefs which he had stolen from a packet in a drawer, and a good half-pound of nuts. The socks, the handkerchiefs, and the traycloth had been fashioned into a snug little nest in which, when we opened the settee, he was rather sheepishly sitting. The nuts were obviously siege stores. The screwdriver—we had been searching for that for days and Charles said he couldn’t think why Blondin wanted that. I could. To defend himself when Charles went after his nuts.
It was just about then that we bought the cottage. Not because of Blondin. We had been looking for one before he was even thought of—though, as Charles said, it did seem opportune that we found it the week he ate the farmer’s housekeeper’s begonias. It consoled her a little, anyway.
It was a relief to us too. Blondin by this time had the energy of a horse and teeth like a pair of pneumatic drills; we’d been praying for weeks that he wouldn’t start in on the farm.
Now, we said as we drove down the hill to our new home with Blondin in a birdcage on the back seat, for the life we had planned. Digging the garden; entertaining our friends; quietly, selectively, getting to know our neighbours …
Not so quietly or selectively as we imagined, I’m afraid. On our first night there we gave them the shock of their lives. It began by my having a bath and turning on both taps at once. A thing, as Charles said afterwards, that anybody might do, except that in our case it caused the ballcock to stick in the tank and the tank to overflow into the yard.
It continued with Charles, already perturbed by the rate at which the water was gushing into the yard, worrying about the boiler. A strange house, he said, a system we didn’t understand … heaven only knew how the pipes went in this old place. He thought we’d better take out the fire.
We did, which was why that first night our quiet country retreat strongly resembled a scene from Faust. Water pouring like Niagara into the yard. Charles and I appearing alternately at the back door in our dressing gowns carrying buckets of coals which, as soon as the wind touched them, burst spectacularly into flame. Dramatic moments when—for, so far as the onlookers could see, no particular reason at all—we pushed the buckets under the overflow with a shovel and doused them in clouds of steam …
Nobody interfered, of course. One or two cars going down the lane slowed abruptly for a moment and then, in the manner of well-bred Englishmen, drove on. Only from the gate—from a little knot of awed spectators on their way home from the Rose and Crown whose attention was divided equally between our activities and those of a large buck squirrel who was intently watching the proceedings from the kitchen window—came any comment. Just one solitary, awestruck voice. Later we learned it was Father Adams, but we didn’t know him then. ‘God Almighty!’ it said.
We stopped the overflow eventually by climbing into the roof and lifting the ballcock. What we couldn’t stop, of course, was the talk that went on. At the farm at least people had known us before we had Blondin—and, in the manner of village life, when we did have him everybody knew why. All they knew here was that we’d arrived with a squirrel in a birdcage, that there’d been some odd goings-on in our backyard the night we came, and that we were quite obviously mad. It took us a long, long time to live that verdict down—if we ever did.
Part of the trouble was Blondin himself, of course. We were so used to him by now that except for running when we heard him chewing the furniture we took him quite for granted. Other people—even if they’d heard of him—didn’t.
Sidney, nervous as a hare when he came to work for us and obviously expecting us to start doing war dances round a fire bucket at any moment, nearly fainted in his gumboots when Blondin ambled over his feet carrying a screwdriver in his mouth. The woman who called for a charity subscription—telling us over a friendly cup of tea that she had a little squirrel in her garden too, who ate all the wallflowers—wilted nonetheless when she reached down for her handbag and encountered the tail of our little squirrel, who was busily investigating its contents.
Even the bravest of them—who, when he came to supper, allowed Blondin to sit on his stomach, saying this was nothing to what he’d experienced in the Colonial Service—looked a bit shaken when he got a nut stuffed down his trousers waistband and a firm refusal to let him take it out. Safe from Charles in there, said Blondin, peering down the top and patting it affectionately in place. We retrieved it in the end by persuading our visitor to stand up and shake himself, while Blondin clung chattering protestingly to his stomach, but it put rather a damper on the evening. He never came again.
When, after a succession of incidents like that, we went home from the office one night to find that Blondin had vanished, nobody was particularly perturbed. ‘Gone back to the woods,’ they said, when we explained how he had chewed a hole under the kitchen door and squeezed his way out. ‘Never see he again’ was the gamekeeper’s verdict when we asked him, if he did come across a squirrel on his rounds, not to shoot it but to see first if it was tame.
We thought that he was right. Blondin was a different animal now from the little squirrel kitten who’d been frightened by a crow. Tough, powerful, well able to defend himself—what was more natural than that he should go back to the woods. Nor, in our heart of hearts, could we have wished to stop him. All we could do was to put away his nuts, move a pathetic, half-eaten apple from the mantelpiece, and wish him well.
Odd, wasn’t it, how a little shrimp like that had got us? said Charles, as we peered out into the rain that night wondering if he was safe. What was odder still was that we seemed to have got Blondin. Two days later,
when we went home from the office he was back. Huddled in an armchair looking sheepishly at us from under his tail. A self-willed, sandy little scrap who, though he’d left us at a time when the woods were ripe with nuts and for miles around there stretched more trees than the most ambitious squirrel could ever hope to climb, had of his own free will come back to us …
Maybe it was affection. Maybe it was just that two nights in the woods, surrounded by strange noises without his hot-water bottle and—worst of all—without his tea, were more than our adventurer could stand. Whatever the reason, he never left us again. For two years after that wherever we turned—unless he was asleep—there he was, swinging on the curtains, chewing at the furniture, peering hopefully down the spout of the teapot.
He died eventually, one cold, wet autumn morning, of a chill. For weeks we mourned him, forgetting the mischief he had done and remembering only the fun we had had together. We tried to get another squirrel, but we never could. There were none to be had in the local pet shops—and the Zoo, when we asked, said they had a waiting list for squirrels.
Which was why, missing the crash of crockery, overrun by mice who were looking for his nuts—and, as Charles said, definitely not in our right minds—we went in for Siamese cats.