It continued with Charles, already perturbed by the rate at which the water was gushing into the yard, worrying about the boiler. A strange house, he said, a system we didn’t understand… heaven only knew how the pipes went in this old place. He thought we’d better take out the fire.
We did, which was why that first night our quiet country retreat strongly resembled a scene from Faust. Water pouring like Niagara into the yard. Charles and I appearing alternately at the back door in our dressing gowns carrying buckets of coals which, as soon as the wind touched them, burst spectacularly into flame. Dramatic moments when
– for, so far as the onlookers could see, no particular reason at all – we pushed the buckets under the overflow with a shovel and doused them in clouds of steam…
Nobody interfered, of course. One or two cars going down the lane slowed abruptly for a moment and then, in the manner of well-bred Englishmen, drove on. Only from the gate – from a little knot of awed spectators on their way home from the Rose and Crown whose attention was divided equally between our activities and those of a large buck squirrel who was intently watching the proceedings from the kitchen window – came any comment. Just one solitary, awestruck voice. Later we learned it was Father 55
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Adams, but we didn’t know him then. ‘God Almighty!’ it said.
We stopped the overflow eventually by climbing into the roof and lifting the ballcock. What we couldn’t stop, of course, was the talk that went on. At the farm at least people had known us before we had Blondin – and, in the manner of village life, when we did have him everybody knew why. All they knew here was that we’d arrived with a squirrel in a birdcage, that there’d been some odd goings-on in our backyard the night we came, and that we were quite obviously mad. It took us a long, long time to live that verdict down – if we ever did.
Part of the trouble was Blondin himself, of course. We were so used to him by now that except for running when we heard him chewing the furniture we took him quite for granted. Other people – even if they’d heard of him
– didn’t.
Sidney, nervous as a hare when he came to work for us and obviously expecting us to start doing war dances round a fire bucket at any moment, nearly fainted in his gumboots when Blondin ambled over his feet carrying a screwdriver in his mouth. The woman who called for a charity subscription – telling us over a friendly cup of tea that she had a little squirrel in her garden too, who ate all the wallflowers – wilted nonetheless when she reached down for her handbag and encountered the tail of our little squirrel, who was busily investigating its contents.
Even the bravest of them – who, when he came to supper, allowed Blondin to sit on his stomach saying this was nothing to what he’d experienced in the Colonial Service
– looked a bit shaken when he got a nut stuffed down his 56
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The Story of a Squirrel trousers waistband and a firm refusal to let him take it out.
Safe from Charles in there, said Blondin, peering down the top and patting it affectionately in place. We retrieved it in the end by persuading our visitor to stand up and shake himself, while Blondin clung chattering protestingly to his stomach, but it put rather a damper on the evening. He never came again.
When, after a succession of incidents like that, we went home from the office one night to find that Blondin had vanished, nobody was particularly perturbed. ‘Gone back to the woods,’ they said when we explained how he had chewed a hole under the kitchen door and squeezed his way out. ‘Never see he again,’ was the gamekeeper’s verdict when we asked him, if he did come across a squirrel on his rounds, not to shoot it but to see first if it was tame.
We thought that he was right. Blondin was a different animal now from the little squirrel kitten who’d been frightened by a crow. Tough, powerful, well able to defend himself – what was more natural than that he should go back to the woods. Nor, in our heart of hearts, could we have wished to stop him. All we could do was to put away his nuts, move a pathetic, half-eaten apple from the mantelpiece, and wish him well.
Odd, wasn’t it, how a little shrimp like that had got us?
said Charles, as we peered out into the rain that night wondering if he was safe. What was odder still was that we seemed to have got Blondin. Two days later, when we went home from the office he was back. Huddled in an armchair looking sheepishly at us from under his tail. A self-willed, sandy little scrap who, though he’d left us at a time when the woods were ripe with nuts and for miles 57
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around there stretched more trees than the most ambitious squirrel could ever hope to climb, had of his own free will come back to us…
Maybe it was affection. Maybe it was just that two nights in the woods, surrounded by strange noises without his hot-water bottle and – worst of all – without his tea, were more than our adventurer could stand. Whatever the reason, he never left us again. For two years after that wherever we turned – unless he was asleep – there he was, swinging on the curtains, chewing at the furniture, peering hopefully down the spout of the teapot.
He died eventually, one cold, wet autumn morning of a chill. For weeks we mourned him, forgetting the mischief he had done and remembering only the fun we had had together. We tried to get another squirrel, but we never could. There were none to be had in the local pet-shops
– and the Zoo, when we asked, said they had a waiting list for squirrels.
Which was why, missing the crash of crockery, overrun by mice who were looking for his nuts – and, as Charles said, definitely not in our right minds – we went in for Siamese cats.
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SIX
Sidney Has Problems
Four years now we’d had Solomon and Sheba and, as Sidney put it, we hadn’t half had some times with them.
We’d had a few with Sidney, too. Life sometimes seemed as full of his little problems as it was with Siamese cats and, right from the time he came to work for us, we were always getting involved.
Take, for instance, the time he was caught riding a motorbike without a licence. There was nothing we could do about the offence itself. Even Sidney admitted it was a fair cop. His friend Ron had offered him a run on his new model; Sidney, with a quick look round for P.C. McNab, had jumped on and tried it up the hill; McNab, to quote Sidney’s own description, had immediately leapt from 59
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behind the phone box like a blooming leprechaun – and there he was. Two pounds fine and no licence for a year.
What worried Sidney, and was where we came into the story, was that he’d just started courting a girl who lived ten miles away. Bit of all right she was, he advised us after his initial date, and the prospects were looking so favourable that he had in fact decided to go in for a motorbike himself, which was why he had been trying out Ron’s. And now, he demanded the day after his appearance in court, where was he? Leaning on our lawnmower as a matter of fact, where he’d been moored for the last half-hour, informing us soulfully that he didn’t suppose we’d feel much like courting either if we had to do ten miles on a push-bike first.