You see, I said, I need a bath and a change of clothes because of this slight flea problem. No way, matey boy, was Carol’s response. I wasn’t going in the house covered in fleas. I wasn’t going in the house even with one flea that I knew about.
My pleas and entreaties, and appeals to the loving side of her nature, eventually produced a marginal softening in her attitude. A plan was agreed.
Her part of the plan was to run a bath and open the bathroom window (we lived in a bungalow). My part was to strip off on the back lawn in the perishing cold, stuff my socks, shirt and underclothes into an old feed sack ready for burning, leave my RSPCA gear spread out on the grass for dealing with later, and climb in through the bathroom window. I could see Carol looking out from the kitchen as I did all this, smiling, with a cup of tea in her hand and a piece of curd tart.
The bath was hot and foaming. Carol had dissolved half a bottle of car shampoo in it. I slid in and watched with some satisfaction as a layer of dead fleas formed in the suds. I pulled the plug, to get rid of this bath-load and start again with another, and the sheer volume of bodies clogged the plughole. I pushed them down with a nailbrush and, the bath clean, ran another tub of hot water.
There were hardly any fleas left now, no more than a hundred or so. I sank back and relaxed, and remembered an old story about how a fox is supposed to get rid of his fleas. He goes to a barbed wire fence, grabs a bunch of sheep’s wool in his mouth then jumps in the river. As he swims up and down, his fleas run along his nose to what they think will be a better berth on a sheep and, at the right moment, he says goodbye.
I too said goodbye as I pulled the plug and called to Carol that the delousing process was complete. While she’d watched me earlier through the kitchen window, she hadn’t only been enjoying my come-uppance from my beloved animals that always came first in our lives. She had also noticed that I had acquired approximately three million flea bites and that my body appeared to have been drained of blood.
She came into the bathroom spraying Nuvan Top before her and carrying a large bottle of calamine lotion, with which she began dabbing. Well, there wasn’t much of me left undabbed but what there was did credit to the cleansing powers of car shampoo. Even when I was mostly covered with fresh clothes and RSPCA uniform, my face and neck were still visible, skin of a deathly pallor liberally blotched with the crusty pinkish chalk of dried calamine.
Carol told me I should take the rest of the day off, having first burned my undergarments in the garden incinerator, sprayed my van and sprayed the uniform in the garden before hanging it on the line, there to stay through several nights of January frost until we could be sure all wildlife therein had been extinguished.
I did as I was told except for the day off bit. There were no SOS messages, for a change, so I was able to take the cats and Buster to York, where I was the source of much amusement and the inspiration for a series of imaginative and comical remarks which would run and run and never quite fade away. My fleas would be a feature of every Christmas do for years to come.
Shirley, the girl on the desk, reminded me of someone. Marianne Faithfull? Mary Hopkin? She sang a song especially for me, an old song by The Coasters called ‘Poison Ivy’.
‘It’s gonna take an ocean, dum-de-dum-de-dum, of calamine lotion. You’ll be scratchin’ like a hound, the minute she starts to mess around.’ Yes, yes, very funny.
I was fading as fast as the daylight as I drove home, feeling feverish, sweating but shivering with cold, and aching all over. I thought I must be coming down with flu but Carol had other ideas. She sent me to bed and called the doctor.
This doctor, quite unlike the breezy young woman earlier, was one of the old school, the sort who arrives in a dinner jacket if you call him out at night. He thought my story most entertaining and had no difficulty with his diagnosis: blood poisoning.
‘I have known very severe cases,’ he said, gravely, ‘where limbs have had to be amputated. In extremis, you understand. Another aspect of the presentation can be boils. Yes, you might come out in boils. If you do, I shall have to lance them, of course.’
Carol has always denied telling this doctor to wind me up but I don’t think she would have missed such a golden opportunity.
Despite having made his diagnosis, he went around the houses again with another examination. Pulse, stethoscope, torch thing for looking in your ears and eyes, thermometer.
‘Hm,’ he said. ‘Hm.’ He began to pack his bag.
‘Doctor?’ was all I could manage.
‘Ah, yes, Mr Langdale. Thing is, you see, I am not entirely convinced that your particular case would be best served by the modern treatment of antibiotics. I rather think the old traditional cure might be best. Yes. I think so. In your case.’
‘Traditional cure?’ I asked, thinking of leeches, or perhaps blood-letting.
‘Large doses of quinine and whisky. Half a bottle of whisky a day, for a week, should do the trick, plus quinine tablets dissolved in hot milk. I’ll instruct Mrs Langdale. Good evening to you.’
I had no strength to complain and sank into the pillows in despair. Amputations? Boils? A week? How could I take a week off? And what was Carol going to say about the cost of all that whisky? I didn’t suppose she could go to the off-licence with a doctor’s prescription and ask for a free half-dozen of VAT 69.
I heard the front door go and the sound of the kettle being put on. A few minutes later, Carol came in with some hot lemon and honey and two small white pills.
‘Marvellous,’ she said, keeping her face perfectly straight. ‘These modern antibiotics. So much power in a tiny tablet. Thank the Lord for medical science, that’s what I say. Two now, two every four hours thereafter.’ I swallowed the pills and washed them down with hot lemon. ‘You’ll be all right for work the day after tomorrow, and completely all right by the end of a week. Only thing with these pills is – no alcohol.’
The police, the police surgeon and the ambulance men who came to pick up Alf’s body, all complained about having a couple of flea bites but nobody thanked me for taking almost the entire swarm away with me. Social services had to fumigate the house twice before anyone would go in it again. York office found homes for all the cats and, after three months, an elderly couple who had lost their own dog offered to take Buster, so my first big job in my new world had had a happy ending, as I repeatedly told myself while hoping that none of my more athletic fleas had managed the leap from me to his lordship’s gingery Harris tweed suit.
2
WHEN I WERE A LAD
Fleas or no fleas, being an RSPCA inspector seemed to me the perfect job, as if I’d been born to it, which I must have been because I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by animals.
Where I grew up (in the fishing town of Hull, close to the docks) and when (in the 1960s), nobody thought anything of kids roaming free. I don’t quite know how my mother decided when I was old enough to go out alone, but the minute she did I was off and away. Had I been able to range across the Serengeti I would doubtless have marvelled at the big exciting animals but probably missed the detail. As my range was somewhat more confined, being the old railway sidings by the docks, I uncovered all sorts of details, like rare flowers, butterflies and beetles. Great crested newts, or horse newts as we called them, were quite hard to find then but I knew where they were.
I soon expanded my territory to the streams, woods, open country, hedgerows and, of course, the sea. It was fifteen miles to Spurn Point and it took all day to walk there and back, but that didn’t matter. Lizards lived there. A bit nearer, between Hornsea and Withernsea, was Aldbrough, where there’d been a bombing range during the war. Some of the clusters of bomb craters had turned into ponds, and wherever there’s a pond there’s a whole world of life to find. There, I could see grass snakes, and dragonflies, and gather frogspawn to hatch at home, and collect live daphnia for my fish tank.
I had friends, too, young adventurers and explorers like me, who were interested in
the things that lived in ponds and woods but they weren’t as interested as I was. We were all happy doing our Just William thing, roving about the countryside and along the seashore but, unlike William Brown, my mates also liked to play cricket and football in the street, or go to watch Hull KR play rugby league. I wasn’t against any of that. I joined in, but with me, the priority was the wildlife. The exploits of F. S. Trueman and D. B. Close held a certain fascination that was soon overtaken by the problems of catching a certain eel, with which I’d become acquainted by staring for hours on end into a stream.
All this meant that I really only had two reliable companions. One was our dog, Skipper, who did have some of that archetypal Yorkshire canine in him, being part whippet and part a lot else besides, and the other was Brian. Anyone who has seen the film Kes has seen Brian, the pale, skin-and-bone, out-of-place raggedy boy, except Brian’s scruffy head had blond hair growing out of it. Brian’s large family had no visible means of support and so, without our modern social security system, they had nothing at all. If I ever grumbled about lack of generosity in the pocket-money department, I was invited to exchange my paltry income for whatever Brian or any of his half-dozen siblings might be on. Or, instead of our handing down our old clothes and anything else useful to Brian’s lot, we could reverse the flow of trade.
Although slightly wealthier than Brian, I still felt the urge to increase my stock, and one of the ways I did it was by dealing in pigeon futures. Quite a few of us had lofts and we’d race between ourselves, and occasionally we’d find ourselves in possession of a possible contender. Even more occasionally, a real pigeon fancier, one who raced for money, might pay us something well below market value for such a bird, but our best customer was Mrs Atkinson.
We were all terrified of Mrs Atkinson. She had a face like a herring gull and a voice to match. She could slice wedding cakes at a hundred yards with that voice. When we had to read Macbeth at school, there in all our minds instantly were three Mrs Atkinsons in the opening scene, and when we went to see The Wizard of Oz, there she was again, the Wicked Witch of the West.
Mrs Ack didn’t have a pigeon loft. She didn’t race pigeons. She just kept them. The walls of her back yard and part of the outside of the house were decorated in the manner of a loft, in stripes of dark green and white paint to help the birds find their way home, but they were not kept in at all. They sat around, perched on every available inch of space, cooing and chuckling, and Mrs Ack presided, feeding them royally.
If something surprised them, they’d take off in a great clatter, a cloud of pigeons wheeling about the sky, and then they’d return, pushing each other off window sills and guttering until all were settled once more.
There was a mystery about Mrs Atkinson and her pigeons. She never refused to buy from us, at a threepenny bit per bird, yet her population seemed to remain constant. Yet, she claimed no pigeon ever flew from her care because of her unique discovery as regards homing instincts. By experiment and intellectual endeavour, she had found that three minutes was the ideal time for her to hold a pigeon’s head in her mouth, lips closed around its neck. These special minutes removed all primitive desires to wander and made Mrs Ack’s back yard the pigeon’s magnetic home, sweet home.
We also observed her holding the heads of certain birds under the cold tap, for three minutes by her watch. These were ones that she could tell in advance would not respond properly to the mouth treatment and so needed their brains washing ‘like the Chinese do’. Neither the Chinese nor the mouth method ever worked for us, possibly because we didn’t have the knack of telling which bird should have which, and we were reduced to the orthodox way of developing a homing response by keeping new birds locked up for a few weeks.
So, if Mrs Ack’s birds never deserted her but their numbers stayed at the same yard-filling maximum despite our constant additions, there could only be one conclusion. Pigeon pie. That such an awe-inspiring old hag could be telling us lies never occurred. It had to be pigeon pie, or possibly she used some of them in spells.
Anyway, this was the marketing end of our business. The production side was much more risky, not financially, because there were no costs, but personally. Our source of supply was the massive flock of retired racing pigeons and descendants thereof that lived in among the heavy timbers of the old jetties by the docks. These pigeons, without the benefit of Mrs Ack’s Chinese treatments, had fled their former owners, or their ancestors had, and become feral. They bred and bred, at all times of year, and the import-export trade in grain and other foodstuffs through the port of Kingston upon Hull gave them plenty to eat at every season.
Our target was the squabs, the near-fledged but not flying, sitting in the nest waiting for the journey of life to begin. Brian and I would walk along the jetty decks, peering through the gaps in the planks to find a suitable nest. When we did, Brian would stay there while I ran back to the shore. Brian was my navigation beacon. His shouts guided me to himself and the nest. My route depended on the state of the tide.
If it was out, I could stay at a low level, climbing along the jetty beams, which meant I wouldn’t have far to fall into the mud below, thus reducing my chances of disappearing entirely as I hit the fathomless slop. The downside was that the beams were wet and covered in seaweed, shellfish and slime, all very slippery.
If the tide was in I was forced up much higher and had to start my route a lot further away, but the beams were relatively hazardless. I didn’t really mind the thought of falling in the water in any case. I was a good swimmer, but nobody wanted to end up in that mud.
For me, the task of getting there and getting back with a shirtful of wriggling squabs was the most satisfying thing I knew. For Brian, shivering up above on a wintry Hull day with my cast-off shirt to keep him warm, the only reward was the threepenny bits and he didn’t seem to care much about them.
Come the spring and I would be in the woods, continuing my studies of miracles. One day I was up a tree, looking into a blackbird’s nest, checking that Mr and Mrs B had not been neglecting their duties and that all six of their offspring were thriving. These chicks were almost ready to step out onto the branches to try their wings. I didn’t want to stay long in case I put the parents off but the sound of footfalls below made me hesitate.
Oh no. It was Johnny Edwards, known as Eddie, a boy two years above me at school and one to keep clear of. He was big for his age, therefore much bigger than me, and he was feared for his ability to thump the living daylights out of anyone he cared to take on. If a foolish new boy came to school with a lunch box, Eddie would demand to know what was in it. He’d take a bite of a sandwich, spit it out in disgust, and smack the boy about for trying to poison him. I hoped that if I stayed still in my tree, he wouldn’t notice me, but he saw my faithful Skipper sitting at the bottom, looking up.
‘What’s in t’nest?’ he shouted.
‘Nowt,’ I called back.
‘Get down here,’ he replied. Thinking about the alternatives, I did what he said.
‘What’s in t’nest?’ he said again.
‘No eggs,’ I said. ‘Only blackbird chicks.’ He had a duffel bag, its cord drawn tight shut, which he placed gently against the tree trunk. I noted the gently, and wondered.
‘Don’t touch,’ was his economic instruction, with the death threat left unspoken, as he shinned up the tree to reach inside the nest, stuff the chicks in his jacket pockets, and slide down again.
The next thing was doubly amazing: to see what was in the duffel bag, and to have proof that Eddie was human all at the same time. Even though I represented to him a matter of no more importance than a dead amoeba, his pride in his duffel bag’s contents was such that I became an audience. He loosened the cord carefully, and slowly reached inside. I could hear a very odd noise, quite loud, like two wooden rulers being tapped together in anger.
So far, it looked to me like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. This was Eddie’s showy variation, pulling his trained pet clicking rabbit
out of his duffel bag, but instead of a rabbit he drew forth a ball of feathers, brown and grey. I knew immediately what it was although it was the first time I’d seen one. I had pictures at home in my animal books. It was a young tawny owl.
The tawny is the most common British owl, about fifteen inches tall with a wingspan over three feet. It’s the one that allegedly says tu-whit tu-whoo, although what it actually says is either something like kerwick, or something like hoo-hoo, and if you hear both it’s two owls calling, probably a male and a female. It has a rather rotund appearance and a serious manner, and the young ones have more grey feathers on their heads and upper bodies so they look like miniature high-court judges in full wig.
This judge seemed rather narked, making its angry ruler noises with its beak and digging its talons into Eddie’s arm. Whatever its expectations when out of the bag, things clearly were not happening quickly enough. Eddie took the hint and a chick from his pocket. The owl put its head back and opened wide. In went the chick, not very much smaller than the owl’s head, wig included. After two gulps, all that was visible of the chick was one skinny leg dangling out of the owl’s closed beak. Another swallow and that was gone too.
I felt my eyes so big and popping that I must have looked like an owl myself. I don’t think I’d drawn a breath through the whole proceedings. I knew from Sunday School about St Paul and his blinding vision on the road to Damascus. This was my Damascene moment. Whatever else might happen in my life and whatever obstacles might lie in my way, one thing was sure and certain. I had to have an owl.
When Eddie pulled another owlet out of his bag and fed it too, my owl-owning necessity suddenly had ways and means. He didn’t want two. One would be mine. I asked Eddie if I could come with him to find more owl food. He shrugged. I could if I wanted.
An Alligator in the Bathroom...And Other Stories Page 2