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that he had chewed a hole in a corner just large enough to squeeze his small, fat body through and was regarding us complacently from the top of a cupboard.
After that he was never put in a cage again. Fortunately he had learned his lesson about chewing tins, but he achieved other catastrophes with clockwork regularity. He went through a period of imagining that his tail worked like wings, so that he was continually launching himself into mid-air from the backs of chairs and falling flat on his face.
Then, apparently having decided that altitude might help, he tried it from the top of a six-foot cupboard and nearly killed himself. Fortunately we were on hand to pick him up. His small button nose was streaming with blood and he had sprained his hind paw so that he limped for days, but after screaming hard for several minutes he calmed down, drank a teaspoon of brandy and water with the air of one who hated the stuff but knew it would do him good, and decided to live.
His next escapade was really spectacular. Through his habit of sprawling in his mash at mealtimes the fur on top of his head had become completely glued down with sugar mixture which had hardened into a glossy cap and made him look like an advertisement for brilliantine. We made several attempts at washing it off, but the gloss was immovable.
Blondin himself spent hours vainly trying to comb it out with his claws, sitting up and twiddling away at his top-knot till Charles said he found he was doing it himself when he wasn’t thinking. Finally, however, Blondin’s patience gave out. One day while we were away he sat down and pulled the patch out by the roots. When we got home he 46
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emerged from his basket to greet us, inordinately pleased with himself and as bald as a coot.
This was before the days of Yul Brynner, and we were terribly ashamed of him. People were continually asking how he was and it seemed such an anti-climax to keep producing a squirrel who looked as if the moths had been at him. It was weeks, too, before his fur grew again – until the wrinkled pink tonsure which disconcerted everybody except Blondin himself disappeared, and he looked like a normal squirrel once more. Meanwhile he had progressed beyond the soft food stage and was at last able to eat nuts.
At first they had to be cracked for him, and he had no idea of storing them, but from the very beginning there was an instinctive ritual about his nut-eating. Always, however hungry he might be, he would carefully peel three-quarters of the nut before he began to eat, spinning it round in his paws as he worked. He always held it by the unpeeled portion – and never by any chance would he eat the part he had been holding. When he progressed to cracking nuts for himself he never discarded the entire shell, but used part of it as a holder for the kernel so that there was no need to touch it at all. He ate slices of bread and apple in the same manner, always discarding the part he had held. Tomatoes were his favourite fruit – probably because the first one he ever tasted was one which he stole himself from a bowl on the kitchen dresser – and these, too, he carefully peeled before eating. But far and away above anything else Blondin loved tea. He decided that he liked it quite suddenly one morning at breakfast, while he was sitting on Charles’s shoulder. Without more ado he catapulted himself down 47
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Charles’s arm and dived headfirst into the teacup which he was just raising to his lips.
The tea – fortunately only lukewarm – went everywhere.
Over Charles, over the tablecloth, and over Blondin, who emerged looking as if he had had a bath, wiped his chin on Charles’s dressing gown, and retired blissfully to the back of a chair to lick himself dry. After that he would leave whatever he was doing at the first glimpse of the teapot, and the only way to ensure peace at mealtimes was to give him a saucerful before pouring out our own. Only once I forgot – and when I came in from the kitchen our dear little orphan of the woods, as Grandma still persisted in calling him, was on the table, standing on his hind legs and hopefully pushing his tongue down the spout.
By this time Blondin was quite a sizeable squirrel, and perfectly able to look after himself. The only drawback to his prospects of survival when we set him free was the fact that he was, unfortunately, not the rare Red Squirrel which his sandy baby fur had led us to believe, but had developed into a perfect specimen of the American Grey – and as such he was liable to be shot at sight by anybody who saw him.
It was difficult to know what to do. He was so tame that we hated the idea of parting with him – and the fact that he was liable to be shot if he were at large surely gave us every excuse for keeping him with us. On the other hand it seemed wrong to deprive him of his birthright. If he were to be shot, at least he wouldn’t know anything about it until it happened. Meantime he would have led a full life, climbing to his heart’s content in the windswept trees, perhaps even finding a mate and building a drey of his own…
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Finally we decided to compromise – to set him free not in his native woods but in the vicinity of the farm where we were living at the time, in the hope that we should still see him sometimes and that, as everyone in the district knew him by sight, he might escape the gun at least for a while.
So, one fine warm morning in July, we carried him to the far end of the garden and put him gently on a tree trunk. He sniffed about him curiously for a moment, his whiskers bristling with interest, his tail bushed out and fluttering with excitement. Then like lightning, he sped to the topmost branches, chasing himself giddily round and up and down, until at last he had to stop and lie out along a branch to get his breath back.
Sadly we stood and watched him, waiting until he should take it into his head to make for the taller trees on the other side of the wall and pass out of our keeping forever. But Blondin didn’t go. He romped and played in the branches until he was startled by a crow flapping its way briskly over his head – then he was out of the tree, streaking across the lawn and hiding fearfully behind the kitchen door almost before we knew what had happened. He didn’t like the idea of being a wild squirrel, he informed us with chattering teeth as we carried him back indoors and put the kettle on.
He liked us… and tea… and sitting in Charles’s pocket and sleeping in the wardrobe… He was, he announced, regarding us happily over the top of the biggest walnut we could find for him, going to stay with us for Ever.
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FIVE
The Story of a Squirrel
Blondin – sometimes we wondered if it was the result of the brandy – was not an ideal squirrel. He threw nutshells and tomato skins on the carpets. He was obstinate and self-willed. When a situation arose such as his deciding to spend the evening in Charles’s pocket and Charles not wanting him to, it invariably ended in Blondin getting tough and threatening to bite. Squealing with rage, battling tempestuously with his claws, peace would descend only when he was curled cosily in Charles’s pocket, with –
presumably it acted as some sort of radar device – his tail hanging down outside.
With me he preferred to be the other way up. He particularly liked me to wear a sweater, when he would sit inside it on my shoulder with his head sticking out of the 50