Some of My Friends Have Tails

by Sara Henderson

  Guests would be taken into the lounge room. This room was off-limits to children, Cocko, dogs and cat, so, of course, we all spent our time trying to get in there. Cocko almost always succeeded, I came second; the dogs and the cat never had a chance.

  The lounge chairs were enormous. I could sit in a chair with my legs straight out in front of me, and my feet just reached the edge of the seat. If I put my knees at the edge and leaned back, I disappeared—all that remained in sight were my knees, shins and feet. My eyes, when I sat up, were level with the armrests. Even when grown-ups sat in the chairs, it was quite difficult to get out of them. They were covered in heavy damask, embossed with a raised velvet pattern. At the end of the enormous armrests were fairly large, flat, wooden squares with ornate wood supporting them, and continuing down to the floor. The chairs were the closest thing you could get to a throne (outside a throne room).

  Guests would sink into them and be held captive, with Cocko lying in wait. While Mum served tea and biscuits, Cocko hid behind a chair ready for his big chance. Finally the signal came: the phone ringing. Mum would excuse herself and leave the room, and Cocko would swing into action.

  As the unsuspecting guest sat with a cup of tea and biscuits, Cocko would climb up the outside of the chair and suddenly appear over the edge of the arm, scaring her half to death. But he would be friendly and open the conversation with, ‘Hullo, how are you?’

  Most guests recovered quickly, having heard about Mum’s cockatoo, and realising he was friendly they would start chatting with him. Cocko would then waddle along the arm, quickly take a biscuit from the plate with his beak, transfer it to one scrawny claw and start nibbling it, while asking the shocked guest, ‘How about a bit of a biscuit?’ and, ‘How about a drink?’, as he slipped his beak into the cup of tea and took a drink. If Mum returned at this point, he would let out an ‘Oh goodness!’, drop the biscuit and head for the nearest escape route as Mum threw at him anything she could lay her hands on.

  If the phone call was longer, Cocko would finish his snack, climb down from the chair and disappear out the door, leaving Mum to return to a very stunned guest. One look at the biscuit crumbs all over the chair, and the guest’s expression, would soon tell Mum what had happened. After calming her guest, she would guard as another cup of tea and another biscuit were peacefully consumed. Mum would bid her still slightly dazed guest goodbye, and set off in hot pursuit of Cocko, who by then would be perched on the top of the highest tree, knowing full well he was in for it.

  Mum would try to coax him down, and he would respond with an endless string of replies like, ‘How about a bit of a good boy?’

  ‘You’ll be in bits when I get hold of you!’ she would say.

  He would sense Mum’s anger and talk faster, non-stop, ‘How about a beautiful boy then, how about a r-e-e-e-e-a-a-a-ally beautiful boy, how about a drink, how about a driscuit (a drink and a biscuit), how about a scratch?’ A loud, ‘Oh!’ would stop the flow, as a missile whizzed close by. Then, even faster, ‘How about a boy, a biscuit, a drink, a driscuit! A bit of a-a-a g-g-g-o-o-o-o-d b-o-o-o-o-y!’ would all come tumbling out as he ducked brooms, buckets and mops.

  Cocko got away with that little game many, many times. Sometimes, though, he found himself in situations that he definitely didn’t like. One I remember vividly was ‘The Great Car Trip’ up north, along the old coast road, for our yearly holiday.

  Mum’s driving never improved over the years. Nearly everyone who knew her wondered why she ever bothered to drive, it was such a trial for her just to get into a car. She was a nervous wreck the whole trip, and often would have to go to bed to recover from the ordeal. But regardless of the horrors ahead, it was Mum who had to drive because Poppa only ever drove a car once.

  When they were newly married, Dad went out and bought their first car, and started his driving lessons. They came back after the first hour, and the driving instructor told Mum if she wanted to keep her husband, and the car, then she should learn to drive quickly. Poppa, it seemed, had no depth perception, or any other driving perception, and would just drive into the back of anything in front of him. He didn’t improve with age, because he was not much better at steering a boat, as Charlie found out when he was trying to teach Dad, in the Philippines, in the 1960s.

  Charlie showed Poppa how to keep the wind in the sails, and left him at the wheel. The wind changed, but Dad stuck to the course, never moved the wheel; he jibbed the boat, the main boom swung to the other side of the boat and knocked Mum overboard. Dad obviously never developed a steering ability; well, it appeared he never had it to develop, even in the early days.

  So Mum reluctantly became the driver of the family, and although she was the slowest and most nervous driver in creation, at least she never ran into the back of anything. My brothers said it was because she never went fast enough to get near anyone to run into them.

  I was around age eleven when we started up the north coast on our holidays. Dad packed the little Ford Anglia. Mum and Dad were in the front, and I shared the back seat with some of the luggage. The boot was open with a suitcase lying flat, and strapped to the top of the suitcase sat Cocko’s cage.

  It was a three-hour drive. That meant Mum would take about five and a half hours or more, depending on how many parked cars we encountered along the way. We left at daybreak. Cocko set up a squawking wail the moment the little car turned out of the driveway. They say birds are psychic; if he knew what was ahead of us on our holiday, I can understand why he was carrying on.

  Progress was slow in the suburbs, but we sped up to fifteen miles per hour once we were out in the rural area, and the drive was uneventful—that is, if you could eliminate Cocko’s continuous screeching. The trip went along pleasantly enough until we came to the mountain. The road began to weave up a long, steep incline, and ahead we could see cars and lorries struggling up the zigzag slope.

  We were approaching the beginning of the climb, and all the other cars and traffic were actually going as slowly as Mum! Mum took one look at the heavily loaded lorry in front of our little Ford Anglia, and refused to drive up the mountain behind it. No amount of persuasion from Dad could convince Mum its brakes wouldn’t fail; she had visions of it rolling back onto the little car and squashing us all. So we pulled off on the side of the road, waiting for a lull in traffic, which Dad rightly explained would never come as we were on the main interstate highway. I could see this was true, because for the half hour he spent talking to Mum, the traffic had gone past at a regular flow.

  Dad finally convinced her to pull in behind a few cars; if they rolled back on us, he reasoned, the damage would only be to the car, not to us. She agreed to go. I had to look back down the road and shout a report, indicating what was coming. When Dad heard three cars in a row, followed by a slow truck, he shouted to Mum to go in after the third car. ‘Go! Go!’

  Mum hung halfway out of the window, giving her extended arm signal with ramrod index finger to the truck driver, then kangarooed back onto the highway in front of the truck.

  Dad said it was good to be in front of the truck because it had a big load, and would travel slowly once we hit the steep grade. Mum gripped the wheel in a deathlock, and giving the appearance of someone driving at one hundred miles per hour, she faced the road ahead. One eye was on the road, and the other on the ever-increasing cliff that was appearing on the other side of the road. The higher we climbed, the slower the little car climbed. The closer the truck came, the louder Cocko screeched. Along with Mother’s fear of the mountain she was climbing, the other reason we were slowing to an almost engine-failing halt was that Mum wouldn’t change gear. Dad kept telling her to change down, but Mum was terrified of rolling back, or rolling over the cliff, even though it was on the other side of the road.

  The truck’s bumper was inches from Cocko’s cage; he was screeching, the truck’s horn was honking, the clear road stretched out in front of us as far as you could see, and the traffic down the mountain behind us was at a stan
dstill. The little car was barely crawling, starting to show stalling symptoms, when Mum told us to get out and push!

  By this stage she was crying, and Dad knew there was no way he could convince her to change to a lower gear. The little car made the next decision by giving a few feeble coughs and stalling. Dad and I jumped out under the glaring eyes of the truckie. We held the car from rolling back, while Mum got it going again.

  She put the car into first gear, took off and didn’t look back; Mum had her eyes firmly glued to the top of the mountain, and that’s where she was heading. We watched as the little car disappeared around the next bend, the last sight being Cocko, comb up, flapping his wings and still screeching. It was at least another mile to the top of the mountain. The traffic was stacked up behind the truck for as far as you could see down the mountain.

  The truck driver shook his head in disbelief as Mum disappeared around the corner, and without saying a word he opened the passenger side door. Dad thanked the driver at the top of the pass, and we walked over to the little car sitting in a parking space outside a lookout restaurant that served Devonshire teas. We found Mum hunched over the wheel, crying her eyes out.

  It took many pots of tea, and a Bex, before Mum had the courage to get in the car and drive on down the mountain. We reached the bottom in one piece, although the brakes were very much the worse for wear. Mum had her foot clamped on the brake pedal, and we crawled at a rubber-burning snail’s pace down the mountainside with traffic banked up behind us for as far as the eye could see. It was fortunate that there was not another mountain between us and our destination, because there was no way Mum would go off the ‘flat and straight’.

  The holiday was a back-to-nature thing; Dad had hired a caravan on a camping site, right on the beachfront. Thank heavens the caravan was already set up there; the mind just cannot comprehend Mum towing a caravan with screeching Cocko on the back. The place was so back-to-nature, we didn’t even have electricity.

  Tragedy struck the first night. Mum asked Dad to light the Tilley (a pressure hurricane lamp). Pressure lamps are designed to withstand high winds. I suppose the designers never dreamed people like my Dad existed; the lamp couldn’t withstand Poppa. Mum thought it was a simple operation, to light the lamp, so when it started to get dark, she gave it to Dad with all the bits and pieces for him to start it. No-one, not even Dad, knows what he did, but one moment he was sitting at the table, glasses on, reading the instructions with an innocent-looking unlit lamp in front of him. He turned a few knobs, poured some metho into a small ridge at the base of the glass, did a bit of frantic pumping on a handle, put a match to it—and ended up with a bonfire. The ceiling of the caravan was quickly turning black, and so Poppa grabbed the lamp and rushed out into the open.

  We were just about to get into the car to take Dad to the hospital for treatment for his burns, when more smoke started billowing out of the caravan. Mum had forgotten she was cooking dinner, and it was now on fire.

  We came back from the hospital with Dad’s hands wrapped. The doctor said the burns were not serious, and in a few days his hands would be okay for the bandages to come off.

  It was late; the inside of the caravan was black and smelt terrible. The meat for dinner was ruined, so we had tea and sandwiches by candlelight.

  Mum, now paranoid about fire, would not let the candle be moved from the table. Much time was spent groping in the dark. My bed was at the far end of the caravan, behind a sliding door, so I couldn’t see a thing. We did get torches the next day, and the evenings passed playing cards, eating, writing and everything else by torchlight. Poppa wasn’t allowed a second go at the pressure lamp. We finally adapted to living by torchlight, but we were all pleased to pack and head for home, especially Cocko. He had not been allowed out of the cage. Mum thought he might fly off and never be seen again, and Dad, quite rightly, was worried about the destruction of the area if Mum unleashed Cocko.

  Driving home was similar to the drive there, a little better but not much. Mum stopped at the bottom of the mountain, and again we waited for the right spot to charge into the traffic. She leaned so far out of the car for the hand signal that the approaching driver thought she was climbing out of the window onto the road, and quickly put on his brakes, giving Mum loads of time to kangaroo into the traffic lane. She stayed in low and crawled up the hill, oblivious to the horns honking behind her and to Cocko screeching.

  We had the compulsory cups of tea, and Mum had a Bex, at the top of the mountain, then we went down the other side in low, riding the brakes all the way. The rest of the journey home was child’s play, except that Cocko didn’t stop screeching until we turned into our driveway.

  That was my last long holiday away with Mum and Dad. I became so committed to my tennis career and there were never three weeks I could be away because of tournaments. So when Mum and Dad ventured off on their yearly jaunt, I stayed at home with my sister, Sue, and had a wonderful time. The only drawback was we had to look after Cocko! At least he didn’t screech twenty-four hours a day, but he sulked a lot because he missed Mum.

  I was in Manila, in the Philippines, in 1964, when Mum wrote to say Cocko had laid an egg. What a crazy mixed-up bird! Didn’t know he was a she until he—she—was twenty-three years old!

  I think growing up with Cocko, Timmy and Lucky gave a very solid foundation to my love of animals. It also taught me valuable lessons, other than care of animals. It was wonderful to watch three animals, traditional enemies, living in such harmony. A dog, a cat and a bird cared for and looked after each other lovingly. Yet society said they were not supposed to like each other.

  With the love of all animals firmly established in my early years, my Mum and Dad completed my training by giving me a few golden rules to live by, then set me free to sail the sea of life, out in the big world. Learning fast, but still terribly naïve, I sailed right into the arms of Charlie, one of the world’s greatest characters. A different ‘cut of the jib’ altogether from the people and characters I had shared my first twenty-four years with. It took me quite a while to work him out … while I struggled with that task, he exposed me to a new world full of all types of people.

  3

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  MANILA, DASHER AND BLAZE

  After living in Hong Kong for a few months, from June to September 1960, Charlie and I sailed for Manila, where we lived for the next four and a half years. After living first on the boat in the harbour, then in a friend’s apartment, we finally rented a top-floor, four-bedroom apartment, in the suburb of Paco. (Our apartment was actually the upstairs floor of a big house; the owners lived downstairs.) Paco had once been an attractive area of big homes with big gardens, just on the outskirts of downtown Manila. But the city had overgrown the quiet tree-lined streets and rolling lawns. The houses gradually lost their rambling gardens as more and more houses were built, until the big old houses sat with no land around them at all, just small patches of lawn, a driveway; ugly high walls surrounded them, topped with broken glass, or embedded barbed wire, or both. Because along with more houses and people, came crime.

  The streets of Paco were a curious sight, if you took the time to stroll and observe. There would be an imposing two-storey stucco mansion with elaborate wrought iron lace trimmed windows and glass doors standing regally beside a small wooden house, jammed against the fence on the other side of the drive. You never knew what the next step would bring.

  In fact it was on our street in Paco that I came face to face with my first Brahman bull—never realising that in the years to follow I would be breeding these beautiful regal creatures. And it was indeed a very regal creature I walked straight into that day as I came around the corner.

  The Indian Ambassador lived across the street from us in another large Spanish mansion of bygone years, now squeezed in amongst all the smaller houses. It was so squeezed, in fact, that when the maid cleaned the ground-floor apartment where the Ambassador’s pet Brahman bull resided, she tied the bull to the telegraph post,
outside the gate on the street.

  So you can imagine my shock when I came face to face with two thousand pounds of massive bull in the heart of downtown Manila. The maid, a tiny girl, assured me he was as quiet as a lamb, and proceeded to brush his already shiny, satin black coat. He was the quietest, fattest, most docile bull I had ever seen. You could hug him and sit on him, and crawl all over him, as the Ambassador’s children did most of the day. He lived downstairs with the maids, and the Ambassador and family lived upstairs, and on the day when his apartment was cleaned, he stood out on the footpath and was patted by all the local people, who knew he was harmless. New people in the area took one look and disappeared at high speed back around the corner, especially if he decided to let out a deep long-drawn-out bellow.

  He was not the only animal of distinction in the district. Friends at the end of our street had a Bassett hound. He was unbelievably spoilt, and extremely overweight, so much so that the middle of his long torso bowed under the great bulk, and touched the ground. This was distressful for the dog, because his small garden was a cement courtyard, and when the maids took him for a walk, the footpath was cement too. His poor tummy and other unmentionable parts rubbed on the cement and the skin was rubbed raw, causing infection, not to mention how uncomfortable it must have been. So the dog wouldn’t exercise, and became even fatter, which accentuated the problem. Finally a small platform on four tiny castors was made and fitted under the long expanse of torso; two straps went up and around the wide expanse of tummy and two buckles secured the contraption snugly to his midriff.

  He lived upstairs with the family, and a wide staircase separated him from the busy world below. He did not need to wear the platform in the house, because the floors were polished parquet with lots of scatter rugs, and he could move around in comfort. But he couldn’t walk down the stairs, they were too steep; so when he wanted to go down into the courtyard he would stand at the top of the stairs and bark, and two maids would carry him down in a basket. But the funniest sight was when he went for his daily constitution, on his leash, with platform strapped to the sagging parts, accompanied by children or maids.