Читать книгу An Alligator in the Bathroom…And Other Stories - Carter Langdale - Страница 9

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.

By the end of that day I had made my calculations and my decision. With my savings, next week’s pocket money and a major initiative on Mrs Atkinson, I could raise about six shillings.

‘I’ll give you ten bob for one of them owls,’ I said, almost fainting with the excitement and what the City slickers call the exposure. Ten shillings was a colossal amount, and I didn’t have it. Eddie was too clever for me. He could recognise sheer desperation, and shook his head.

‘Five shillings and my fishing rod.’ How pathetic, said Eddie’s snort. ‘All right. My fishing rod, reel and tackle included, five shillings, and a two-shilling book token.’ The book token, Eddie well knew, could be exchanged at the newsagent’s for ten cigarettes, normal price one and tenpence.

Eddie picked up his duffel bag, slung it over his shoulder, and walked away. It was the classic salesman’s manoeuvre. If you really want someone to buy, tell him he can’t have it. I walked home so slowly, I’m surprised I got there before bedtime.

‘I’m not keeping tea things out all night in case you turn up, our Carter,’ said my mother. ‘There’s bread and cheese in the pantry. And you can give some to that dog who’s been out all day with nothing.’

I lay awake in bed, trying to make owls seem less essential than life itself, and failing. No, there was nothing for it. A boy had to do what a boy had to do, and the condemned boy ate a hearty breakfast very fast. Round at Eddie’s house, I knocked on the door. He answered.

‘My fishing rod and tackle, my new rugby ball, five shillings and my sheath knife.’ Eddie almost smiled. Maybe he’d be a professional torturer when he left school.

‘My fishing rod and tackle, my new rugby ball, five shillings, my sheath knife …’ and here I had to pause. This was to be a pledge of galactic proportions. I was about to offer Eddie the one object I prized above all else: ‘… and my air pistol. Webley. Point one seven seven.’

‘With a tin of slugs. And that book token,’ said a cool Eddie.

I nodded. I was now destitute. I had endowed Eddie with all my worldly goods. He must have known I had nothing left and had driven me until I could be driven no further. But, joy of joys, I had my owl.

I ran home, got all the money out of my pot pig, ran to the ironmonger’s, bought a tin of slugs, ran home again, picked up my rod, rugby ball, fishing bag and all, and ran to Eddie’s. With all the drama of two spies being exchanged at Checkpoint Charlie, I swapped my entire wealth for a funny little heap of feathers. I had never been so happy. I was home in a fraction of a second and moving pigeons from one loft to another so that My Owl could have his own spacious apartment.

He was not appreciative. He clicked and complained like mad at the indignity of his recent imprisonment inside a blue cotton bag with Yorkshire Penny Bank written on it, and he looked around with suspicion in his gaze. Where, he wanted to know, was his breakfast? And his lunch, come to that? My mother had some stewing steak she was going to make into a pie for our tea, so I begged a little lump of that, wrapped it in a few small pigeon feathers, and down it went.

Such a dietary regimen couldn’t last, of course – or could it? Mother soon had the butcher saving unconsidered bits and pieces and Tal didn’t seem to mind if it was beef, lamb or pork or what cut it was, although there was an overall preference for chicken. The feathers were for roughage, to maintain his natural system, which includes making pellets of indigestibles and regurgitating them.

My family had had all sorts of suggestions for a name but I stuck to Tal, short for talons, seeing as he had extra large ones. It was a boring name, but I’d thought of it, so there. A couple of weeks passed and Tal started flapping about, seeming to want more space, so I went to the library and got a book out about falconry. There were drawings of various tools of the trade and I copied one of the less ornamental pictures of jesses. A jess is a two-piece leather strap which fits around the bird’s leg, normally to be attached to a training line or the falconer’s glove by means of a swivel. I didn’t have a swivel so I used a key ring, and I didn’t have any leather so I used the canvas from an old plimsoll, and the idea was not training but to give Tal the freedom of our yard on a running line.

He seemed pleased about this and made a certain place on the back wall his own, where he’d sit and watch the world go by, bobbing up and down and turning his head through something like 270 degrees. Celebrity status followed. The coalman, the bin men and the milkman all brought titbits for Tal. My mother, returning from shopping, would find Tal swooping down with a screech to land on her basket, and he wouldn’t let go until she gave him a scrap of chicken or whatever. Everybody in the neighbourhood came to look, and he grew and he grew.

I was grateful for the butcher’s meat but concerned that it wasn’t really the proper thing for an owl whose diet in the wild would mainly be small furry rodents, young birds when there were any, and the occasional frog or fish. They hunt mainly at night, not with especially good eyesight but, as owls do, with exceptional hearing. They’re about ten times better than us at hearing low-frequency sounds, as a little vole might make when moving through the grass, and their ears are not symmetrically placed on their heads, so the very slight differences in each ear’s reception is computed by the brain to give them superior ability to tell where sounds are coming from.

Worms and beetles too are part of the wild diet but when I tried a worm on Tal he gave me a distinctly funny look, as one would if one was used to poulet à la mode and collet d’agneau. And so it was that I became a martyr to a never-ending task.

Each morning I’d be up long before anyone else, slurping a high-speed bowl of cornflakes and trotting the mile and a half to my original wildlifing range, the old railway sidings. I had twelve mousetraps in my system. I set six, usually with a piece of sweet biscuit as bait, and collected the six from the day before. These went into my satchel and the catch into my school-blazer pockets, two, three or sometimes four small rodents, shrews and voles mostly. The traps would have to be cleaned at home that night, and fumigated. Wild rodents will not touch a trap that smells of blood. They sense it, not like house mice. So I used to dangle the traps one at a time on a toasting fork, over the smoke from the coal fire, and that got rid of the taint.

Beyond my trapping grounds was a timber yard, and beyond that a goods railway line from the docks. A train would come along at the same time each day and slow down for a certain junction, allowing me to leap on it and cadge a lift almost all the way to school. If I ran the last half-mile at top speed, I could just slip in before the bell.

My system was hard work but worthwhile, and my predations on the local rodent population seemed to be sustainable. Tal was growing into a feisty adult and a real character but his fame had not, apparently, spread into the masters’ common room at my school. Everybody in my class knew about my trapping except our form teacher, who ordered a search of satchels and pockets after an announcement in assembly about a sudden rush of petty thefts. I was most reluctant to turn out mine, so our master nominated me as prime suspect. Towering over me, he thrust a hand into each side pocket. I can see his face now. Expecting to find someone’s fountain pen or several lots of dinner money, he instead felt something cold, furry and damp.

He felt again, couldn’t believe what his fingers were telling him, so pulled out two dead shrews. Destroying his credibility with that class in one instant, he squealed, went white, dropped the shrews on the floor, and left the room. I picked the bodies up, put them back in my pockets, enjoyed my few minutes as class hero, and looked forward to a search-free summer.

My vole harvest began to thin out. I was, eventually, having the same effects on the small rodents of that part of Hull as the rainforest loggers have on the tree dwellers of the Amazon. Of course I didn’t see it that way. All I could think about was alternative means of supply, which meant ranging further and wider, which meant getting up earlier and earlier and finding myself later and later for school. I was in a difficult position, being permanently skint but needing to buy in. My only option was to trade and, after my deal with Eddie, I had precious little to trade with.

Each week I could pay pennies for road-kill and various things shot by air-gun owners, until the pocket money ran out. After that I only had my museum, a collection of shells and oddities kept in four shoe boxes, which was hardly a big come-on apart from some of the fossils I’d found on trips to Whitby, and my bird’s egg collection.

Being left with nothing forced me to recognise an uncomfortable fact. Tal was from the wild and he needed to go back. If further proof were needed it came one night when I heard another owl answering his calls. Tal was tu-whitting and the other was tu-whooing. Next night I stayed up to watch and saw another tawny on a house roof opposite. To my utter amazement, it flew down and perched beside Tal on our wall, and they carried on calling to each other.

This was in a back street in Hull, with not a tree in sight, and here was a wild female tawny owl trying to get off with the tame male. There was only one way to resolve the matter, and the next time she came to sit on the roof, I released Tal from his bonds. Straight away he flew up to join his mate, and there they were, whitting and whooing on the ridge tiles. Such birds, I knew, mate for life, and would set up a territory somewhere and defend it against other owls, and their young against all-comers.

I thought that would be the last I’d see of them as they flew away, but they were back the next night looking for chicken. I threw what meat I could get, and dead mice, onto the roof and it was three months before they stopped coming.

By the time I was fifteen, nearing school-leaving age, with Tal long gone and my pigeon loft no longer such a fascinating place, Mrs Atkinson in a home and Brian disappeared out of my life, I was like the Cisco Kid without a Pancho. I had a bike, I had a .22 air rifle that I could strap to the crossbar, and every weekend and school holiday to hunt, shoot, fish and look.

On Saturday mornings, my favourite was to bike to Hessle where there was (and still is) a park cum nature reserve called Little Switzerland. There were made paths through the trees and gravelled walks for leisurely strollers but I got right off the beaten track, heading always first for the chalk pits. These were old limestone quarries, a piece of the edge of the Wolds become a set of natural ponds rich in all manner of creatures and plants.

On this particular morning the trees were in their full spring leaf, the sun was bright in a blue sky and my own private wildlife sanctuary was busy. You could sit perfectly still and sense it – optimism, new life, growth, everything dashing about on a mission. I had my gun. I was Langdale of the Jungle, making my way silently across uncharted territory, listening for the crack of a twig which might betray the presence of the deadly Uckawi tribe, headhunters of Hessle and District.

What I did hear was silence; then, striking the air with a purity never found in any orchestra, a song thrush. He ran through his repertoire of single notes, warbles and riffs, then did it all again, and again. I could see him, on a branch of a beech tree, high up, telling me and anyone else within earshot that there was nothing, but nothing, better to do on a fine spring morning in England than to sing his finest song. What happened in the next few seconds is a blank in my mind. I wish the rest of it was a blank too, but it isn’t.

The song stopped and the bird tumbled from the tree. A few tiny feathers floated in the space where he’d been and began their slow zigzag down, in and out of the shafts of sunlight, while their former wearer’s fall was halted in some branches a few feet off the ground. I threw my gun aside and swiftly made the few steps to the beech tree. As I reached it, the gods of the forest shook those branches and the dead thrush dropped at my feet.

I looked at it. I could see one eye half closed. After maybe a minute I made myself pick it up, a warm, damp bundle of nothing with two teardrops of fresh blood on its chest. Moments before, it had been singing the hymn of life. I cannot begin to tell how horrible I felt.

I could have dropped to my knees and begged forgiveness, or sighed and sobbed over the death of poor cock robin. Instead I threw the body into a pond and made a simple promise to myself, that I would never, ever, do anything like that again as long as I lived.