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The Story of a Squirrel 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 straight away 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 51
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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 wardrobe 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.
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The Story of a Squirrel 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, 53
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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 traycloth 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 54
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The Story of a Squirrel 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.