Fillets of Plaice

by Gerald Durrell

  My next little effort concerned two very large and benign Leopard toads which came from North Africa. Now, Mr Romilly’s idea of North Africa was an endless desert where the sun shone day and night and where the temperature was never anything less than about a hundred and ninety in the shade, if indeed any shade was to be found. So in consequence he had incarcerated these two poor toads in a small, glass-fronted cage with a couple of brilliant electric light bulbs above them. They sat on a pile of plain white sand, they had no rocks to hide under to get away from the glare, and the only time the temperature dropped at all was at night when we switched off the light in the shop. In consequence, their eyes had become milky and looked almost as though they were suffering from cataract, their skins had become dry and flaky, and the soles of their feet were raw.

  I knew that suggesting to Mr Romilly anything so drastic as putting them into a new cage with some damp moss would horrify him beyond all bounds, so I started surreptitiously to try and give the toads a slightly happier existence. I pinched some olive oil from my mother’s kitchen for a start, and when Mr Romilly went out to have his lunch hour, I massaged the oil into the skin of both toads. This improved the flakiness. I then got some ointment from the chemist, having explained – to his amusement – why I wanted it, and anointed their feet with it. This helped, but it did not clear up the foot condition completely. I also got some Golden Eye Ointment, which one normally used for dogs, and applied it to their eyes with miraculous results. Then, every time Mr Romilly had his lunch hour I would give them a warm spray and this they loved. They would sit there, gulping benignly, blinking their eyes and, if I moved the spray a little, they would shuffle across the floor of their cage to get under it again. One day I put a small section of moss in the cage and both toads immediately burrowed under it.

  ‘Oh, look, Mr Romilly,’ I said with well-simulated surprise, ‘I put a bit of moss in the toads’ cage by mistake, and they seem to like it.’

  ‘Moss?’ said Mr Romilly. ‘Moss? But they live in the desert.’

  ‘Well, I think some parts of the desert have got a little bit of vegetation,’ I said.

  ‘I thought it was all sand,’ said Mr Romilly. ‘All sand. As far as the eye could see.’

  ‘No, er . . ., I think they’ve got some small cactuses and things,’ I said. ‘Anyway, they seem to like it, don’t they?’

  ‘They certainly do,’ said Mr Romilly. ‘Do you think we ought to leave it in?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Shall we put a little more in, too?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it could do any harm. They can’t eat it and strangle themselves with it, can they?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘I don’t think they will,’ I said reassuringly.

  So from then onwards my two lovely toads had a bit of moss to hide under and, what was more important, a bed of moss to sit on, and their feet soon cleared up.

  I next turned my attention to the fish, for although they loved tubifex dearly I felt that they, too, should have a little variety in their diet.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be possible,’ I suggested to Mr Romilly in a tentative sort of way, ‘to give the fish some daphnia?’

  Now, daphnia were the little water fleas that we used to get sent up from the farm that supplied the shop with all its produce, like waterweed and water snails and the freshwater fish that we sold. And the daphnia we used to sell in little pots to fish lovers to feed their fish with.

  ‘Daphnia?’ said Mr Romilly. ‘Feed them on daphnia? But they wouldn’t eat it, would they?’

  ‘Well if they won’t eat it, why do we sell it to people to feed their fish?’ I inquired.

  Mr Romilly was powerfully struck by this piece of logic.

  ‘You’re right, you know,’ he said. ‘You’re right. There’s a little left over down in the cellar now. The new supply comes tomorrow. Try some on them and see.’

  So I dropped about a tablespoonful of daphnia into each tank and the fish went as mad over them as the toads and frogs had gone over the wood lice.

  The next thing I wanted to do, but I had to do it more cautiously, was to try and decorate the cages and tanks to make them look more attractive. Now, this was a task that Mr Romilly always undertook himself, and he did it with a dogged persistence. I do not think he really enjoyed it, but he felt that, as the senior member of the firm, as it were, it was his duty to do.

  ‘Mr Romilly,’ I said one day. ‘I’ve got nothing to do at the moment, and there are no customers. You wouldn’t let me decorate a fish tank, would you? I’d love to learn how to do them as well as you do.’

  ‘Well, now,’ said Mr Romilly, blushing. ‘Well, now. I wouldn’t say I was all that good . . .’

  ‘Oh, I think you do it beautifully,’ I said. ‘And I’d like to learn.’

  ‘Well, perhaps just a small one,’ said Mr Romilly. ‘And I can give you some tips as you go along. Now, let’s see . . ., let’s see . . . Yes, now, that mollies’ tank over there. They need clearing out. Now, if you can move them to the spare tank, and then empty it and give it a good scrub, and then well start from scratch, shall we?’

  And so, with the aid of a little net, I moved all the black mollies, as dark and glistening as little olives, out of their tank and into the spare one. Then I emptied their tank and scrubbed it out and called Mr Romilly.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘You put some sand at the bottom and . . ., urn . . ., a couple of stones, and then perhaps er. . . ., Vallisneria, I would say, probably in that corner there, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Could I just try it on my own?’ I asked. ‘I, er . . ., I think I’d learn better that way – if I could do it on my own. And then, when I’m finished you could criticise it and tell me where I’ve gone wrong.’

  ‘Very good idea,’ said Mr Romilly. And so he pottered off to do his petty cash and left me in peace.

  It was only a small tank but I worked hard on it. I piled up the silver sand in great dunes. I built little cliffs. I planted forests of Vallisneria through which the mollies could drift in shoals. Then I filled it carefully with water, and when it was the right temperature I put the mollies back in it and called Mr Romilly to see my handiwork.

  ‘By Jove!’ he said, looking at it. ‘By Jove!’

  He glanced at me and it was almost as though he was disappointed that I had done so well. I could see that I was on dangerous ground.

  ‘Do . . . do you like it?’ I inquired.

  ‘It . . . it’s remarkable! Remarkable! I can’t think how you . . . how you managed it?’

  ‘Well, I only managed it by watching you, Mr Romilly,’ I said. ‘If it hadn’t been for you teaching me how to do it I could never have done it.’

  ‘Well, now. Well, now,’ said Mr Romilly, going pink. ‘But I see you’ve added one or two little touches of your own.’

  ‘Well, they were just ideas I’d picked up from watching you,’ I said.

  ‘Hmmm. . . . Most commendable. Most commendable,’ said Mr Romilly.

  The next day he asked me whether I would like to decorate another fish tank and I knew that I had won the battle without hurting his feelings.

  The tank that I really desperately wanted to do was the enormous one that we had in the window. It was some four and a half feet long and about two foot six deep, and in it we had a great colourful mixed collection of fish. But I knew that I must not overstep the bounds of propriety at this stage. So I did several small fish tanks first, and when Mr Romilly had got thoroughly used to the idea of my doing them, I broached the subject of our big show tank in the window.

  ‘Could I try my hand at that, Mr Romilly?’ I asked.

  ‘What? Our show piece?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s . . . it’s in need of . . . of a clean, anyway. So I thought, perhaps, I could try my hand at redecorating it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know . . .,’ said Mr Romilly doubtfully. ‘I don’t know. It’s a most important piece that, you know. It’s the centerpiece of the window. It’s the one that attr
acts all the customers.’

  He was quite right, but the customers were attracted by the flickering shoals of multicoloured fish. They certainly were not attracted by Mr Romilly’s attempts at decoration, which made it look rather like a blasted heath.

  ‘Well, could I just try?’ I said. ‘And if it’s no good, I’ll do it all over again. I’ll even . . . I’ll even spend my half day doing it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure that won’t be necessary,’ said Mr Romilly, shocked. ‘You don’t want to spend all your days shut up in the shop, you know. A young boy like you . . . you want to be out and about . . . Well, alright, you try your hand at it, and see what happens.’

  It took me the better part of a day to do, because in between times I had to attend to the various customers who came to buy tubifex or daphnia or buy a tree frog for their garden pond or something similar. I worked on that giant tank with all the dedication of a marine Capability Brown. I built rolling sand dunes and great towering cliffs of lovely granite. And then, through the valleys between the granite mountains, I planted forests of Vallisneria and other, more delicate, weedy ferns. And on the surface of the water I floated the tiny little white flowers that look so like miniature waterlilies. With the aid of sand and rocks I concealed the heater and thermostat and also the aerator, none of which were attractive to look at. When I had finally finished it and replaced the brilliant scarlet sword-tails, the shiny black mollies, the silver hatchet fish, and the brilliant Piccadilly-like neon-tetras, and stepped back to observe my handiwork, I found myself deeply impressed by my own genius. Mr Romilly, to my delight, was ecstatic about the whole thing.

  ‘Exquisite! Exquisite!’ he exclaimed. ‘Simply exquisite.’

  ‘Well, you know what they say, Mr Romilly,’ I said. ‘That a good pupil needs a good master.’

  ‘Oh, you flatter me, you flatter me,’ he said, wagging his finger at me playfully. ‘This is a case where the pupil has surpassed the master.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think that,’ I said. ‘But I do think that I’m getting almost as good as you.’

  After that, I was allowed to decorate all the tanks and all the cages. I think, secretly, Mr Romilly was rather relieved not to have to urge his non-existent artistic sense into this irksome task.

  After one or two experiments I always used to take my lunch hour at a little café not very far away from the shop. Here I had discovered a kindly waitress who, in exchange for a little flattery, would give me more than my regulation number of sausages with my sausages and mash, and warn me against the deadly perils of Irish stew on that particular day. It was one day when I was going to have my lunch that I discovered a short cut to the cafe. It was a narrow little alleyway that ran between the great groups of shops and the towering houses and flats. It was cobble-stoned and as soon as I got into it, it was as though I had been transported back to Dickensian London. I found that part of it was tree-lined and farther along there was a series of tiny shops. It was then that I discovered that we were not the only pet shop in the vicinity, for I came across the abode of Henry Bellow.

  The dirty window of his shop measured, perhaps, six feet square by two deep. It was crammed from top to bottom with small square cages, each containing one or a pair of chaffinches, green finches, linnets, canaries, or budgerigars. The floor of the window was inches deep in seed husks and bird excrement, but the cages themselves were spotlessly clean and each sported a bright green sprig of lettuce or groundsel and a white label on which had been written in shaky block letters ‘SOLD’. The glass door of the shop was covered with a lace curtain which was yellow with age, and between it and the glass hung a cardboard notice which said ‘Please Enter’ in Gothic script. The reverse side of this notice, I was to learn, stated equally politely. ‘We regret weareclosed’. Never, in all the days that I hurried for my sausages and mash up this uneven flagged alley, did I ever see a customer entering or leaving the shop. Indeed, the shop seemed lifeless except for the occasional lethargic hopping from perch to perch of the birds in the window. I wondered, as the weeks passed, why all the birds in the window were not claimed by the people who had bought them. Surely the various owners of some thirty assorted birds could not have decided simultaneously that they did not want them? And, in the unlikely event of this happening, why had the ‘Sold’ signs not been removed? It was a mystery that in my limited lunch hour I had little time to investigate. But my chance came one day when Mr Romilly, who had been dancing round the shopsinging‘I’m a busy little bee’, suddenly went down into the basement and uttered a falsetto screech of horror. I went and peered down the stairs, wondering what I had done or left undone.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mr Romilly?’ I asked cautiously.

  Mr Romilly appeared at the foot of the stairs clasping his brow, distraught.

  ‘Stupid me!’ he intoned. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid me!’

  Gathering from this that I was not the culprit, I took heart.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked solicitously.

  ‘Tubifex and daphnia!’ said Mr Romilly tragically, removing his spectacles and starting to polish them feverishly.

  ‘Have we run out?’

  ‘Yes,’ intoned Mr Romilly sepulchrally. ‘How stupid of me! What negligence! How very, very remiss of me. I deserve to be sacked. I really am the stupidest mortal . . .’

  ‘Can’t we get some from somewhere else?’ I asked, interrupting Mr Romilly’s verbal flagellation.

  ‘But the farm always sends it up,’ exclaimed Mr Romilly, as though I were a stranger in need of an explanation. ‘The farm always sends up the supply when I ask for it, every weekend. And I, crass idiot that I am, never ordered any.’

  ‘But can’t we get it from somewhere else?’ I asked.

  ‘And the guppies and the sword-tails and the black mollies, they so look forward to their tubifex,’ said Mr Romilly, working himself into a sort of hysterical self-pity. ‘They relish it. How can I face those tiny pouting faces against the glass? How can I eat my lunch while those poor little fish . . .’

  ‘Mr Romilly,’ I interrupted firmly. ‘Can we get some tubifex from somewhere other than the farm?’

  ‘Eh?’ said Mr Romilly, staring at me. ‘Other than the farm? But the farm always sends . . . Ah, wait a bit. I see what you mean . . . Yes . . .’

  He climbed laboriously up the wooden stairs, mopping his brow, and emerged like the sole survivor of a pit disaster. He gazed round him with vacant, tragic eyes.

  ‘But where?’ he said at last, despairingly. ‘But where?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, taking the matter in hand. ‘What about Bellow?’

  ‘Bellow? Bellow?’ he said. ‘Most unbusinesslike chap. He deals in birds. Shouldn’t think he’d have any.’

  ‘But surely it’s worth a try?’ I said. ‘Let me go round and see.’

  Mr Romilly thought about it.

  ‘Alright,’ he said at last, averting his face from the serried ranks of accusing-looking fish, ‘take ten shillings out of petty cash, and don’t be too long.’

  He handed me the key and sat down, gazing glumly at his highly polished shoes. I opened the tin petty cash box, extracted a ten shilling note, filled in a petty cash slip – ‘IOU 10/- Tubifex’ – and slipped it into the box, locked it, and pushed the key into Mr Romilly’s flaccid hand. A moment later I was out on the broad pavement, weaving my way through the vacant-eyed throng of shoppers, making my way towards Bellow’s shop, while the mountainous red buses thundered past with their gaggle of attendant taxis and cars. I came to the tiny alley and turned down it, and immediately peace reigned. The thunder of buses, the clack of feet, the honk and screech of cars became muted, almost beautiful, like the distant roar of the surf. On one side of the alley wasablank soot-blackened wall; on the other, the iron railings which guarded the precious piece of ground that led to the local church. Here had been planted – by someone of worth – a rank of plane trees. They leant over the iron railings, roofing the alley with green, and on their mottled trun
ks looper caterpillars performed prodigious and complicated walks, humping themselves grimly towards a goal about which even they seemed uncertain. Where the plane trees ended the shops began. There were no more than six of them, each Lilliputian in dimensions and each one forlornly endeavouring.

  There was Clemystra, Modes for Ladies, with a rather extraordinary fur in their window as the pièce de resistance; a fur which with its glass eyes and its tail in its mouth, would have curdled the heart of any anti-vivisectionist should one pass that way. There was the Pixies’ Parlour, Light Luncheons, Teas and Snacks, and next door to it, once you had refreshed yourself, was A. Wallet, Tobacconist, whose window consisted entirely of cigarette and pipe advertisements, the predominant one being a rather Holman Hunt type of placard for Wills’ Wild Woodbines. I hurried past all these and past William Drover, Estate Agent, with its host of fascinating pale brown pictures of desirable residences, past the shrouded portal, decorated rather severely andsomewhatsurprisingly by one rose-pink lavatory pan, of Messrs M. & R. Drumlin, Plumbers, to the end of the row of shops where the faded notice above the door stated simply and unequivocally: Henry Bellow, Aviculturist. At last, I thought, I had the chance of getting inside the shop and solving, if nothing else the mystery of the birds with the ‘SOLD’ notices on their cages. But as I approached the shop something unprecedented happened. A tall, angular woman in tweeds, wearing a ridiculous Tyrolean hat with a feather, strode purposefully down the alley and, a brief second before me, grasped the handle of the door marked ‘Enter Please’ and swept in, while the bell jangled melodiously. I was astonished. It was the first time I had ever seen a customer enter any of the shops in the alley. Then, anxious to see what happened once she had entered the shop, I rushed after her and caught the closing door on the last jangle.