“That’s alright,” I said. “When do I start?”
“You’d better start on Monday,” he said. “I think on Monday because then I can get all your cards stamped up and straight. Otherwise we get in such a muddle, don’t we? Now, my name’s Mr Romilly.”
I told him my name and we shook hands rather formally, and then we stood looking at each other. It was obvious that Mr Romilly had never employed anybody before and did not know quite what the form was. I thought perhaps I ought to help him out.
“Perhaps you could just show me round,” I suggested, “and tell me a few things that you will want me to do.”
“Oh, what an excellent idea,” said Mr Romilly. “An excellent idea!”
He danced round the shop waving his hands like butterfly wings and showed me how to clean out a fish tank, how to drop the mealworms into the cages of frogs and toads, and where the brush and broom were kept that we swept the floor with. Under the shop was a large cellar where various fish foods, nets and other things were kept, and it included a constantly running tap that dripped into a large bowl containing what at first glance appeared to be a raw sheep’s heart. This, on close inspection, turned out to be a closely knitted ball of threadlike tubifex worms. These bright red worms were a favourite food of all the fish and some of the amphibians and reptiles as well. I discovered that as well as the delightful things in the window there were hosts of other creatures in the shop besides — cases full of lizards, toads, tortoises and treacle-shiny snakes, tanks full of moist, gulping frogs, and newts with filled tails like pennants. After having spent so many months in dry, dusty and desiccated London, the shop was, as far as I was concerned, a Garden of Eden.
“Now,” said Mr Romilly, when he had shown me everything, “you start on Monday, hm? Nine o’clock sharp. Don’t be late, will you?”
I did not tell Mr Romilly that nothing short of death would have prevented me from being there at nine o’clock on Monday.
So at ten to nine on Monday morning I paced the pavement outside the shop until eventually Mr Romilly appeared, clad in a long black coat and a black Homburg hat, waving his bunch of keys musically.
“Good morning, good morning,” he trilled. “I’m glad to see you’re on time. What a good start.”
So we went into the shop and I started on the first chores of the day, which were to sweep the comparatively spotless floor clean and then to go round feeding little knots of wriggling tubifex to the fishes.
I very soon discovered that Mr Romilly, though a kindly man, had little or no knowledge of the creatures in his care. Most of the cages were most unsuitably decorated for the occupants’ comfort and, indeed, so were the fish tanks. Also, Mr Romilly worked on the theory that if you got an animal to eat one thing, you then went on feeding it with that thing incessantly. I decided that I would have to take a hand both in the cage decoration and also in brightening up the lives of our charges, but I knew I would have to move cautiously for Mr Romilly was nothing if not conservative.
“Don’t you think the lizards and toads and things would like a change from mealworms, Mr Romilly?” I said one day.
“A change?” said Mr Romilly, his eyes widening behind his spectacles. “What sort of a change?”
“Well,” I said, “how about wood lice? I always used to feed my reptiles on wood lice.”
“Are you sure?” said Mr Romilly.
“Quite sure,” I said.
“It won’t do them any harm, will it?” he asked anxiously.
“No,” I said, “they love wood lice. It gives them a bit of variety in their diet.”
“But where are we going to get them?” asked Mr Romilly despondently.
“Well, I expect there are plenty in the parks,” I said. “I’ll see if I can get some, shall I?”
“Very well,” said Mr Rornilly reluctantly, “if you’re quite sure they won’t do them any harm.”
So I spent one afternoon in the park and collected a very large tin full of wood lice, which I kept in decaying leaves down in the cellar, and when I thought that the frogs and the toads and the lizards had got a bit bored with the mealworms, I would try them on some meal-worm beetles, and then, when they had had a surfeit of those, I would give them some wood lice. At first, Mr Romilly used to peer into the cages with a fearful look on his face, as though he expected to see all the reptiles and amphibians dead. But when he found that they not only thrived on this new mixture but even started to croak in their cages, his enthusiasm knew no bounds.
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 or 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 fresh water fish that we sold. And the daphnia we used to sell in little pots to fish lovers to feed their fish with.