“Daphnia?” said Mr Romilly. “Feed them on daphnia? But they wouldn’t eat it, would they?”
“Well, if they won’t eat it, why do we sell it to people to feed to their fish?” I inquired.
Mr Romilly was powerfully struck by this piece of logic.
“You’re right, you know,” he said. “You’re right. There’s a little left over down in the cellar now. The new supply comes to-morrow. Try some on them and see.”
So I dropped about a tablespoonful of daphnia into each tank and the fish went as mad over them as the toads and frogs had gone over the wood lice.
The next thing I wanted to do, but I had to do it more cautiously, was to try and decorate the cages and tanks to make them look more attractive. Now, this was a task that Mr Romilly always undertook himself, and he did it with a dogged persistence. I do not think he really enjoyed it, but he felt that, as the senior member of the firm, as it were, it was his duty to do.
“Mr Romilly,” I said one day. “I’ve got nothing to do at the moment, and there are no customers. You wouldn’t let me decorate a fish tank, would you? I’d love to learn how to do them as well as you do.”
“Well, now,” said Mr Romilly, blushing. “Well, now. I wouldn’t say I was all that good...”
“Oh, I think you do it beautifully,” I said. “And I’d like to learn.”
“Well, perhaps just a small one,” said Mr Romilly. “And I can give you some tips as you go along. Now, let’s see..., let’s see... Yes, now, that mollies’ tank over there. They need clearing out. Now, if you can move them to the spare tank, and then empty it and give it a good scrub, and then we’ll start from scratch, shall we?”
And so, with the aid of a little net, I moved all the black mollies, as dark and glistening as little olives, out of their tank and into the spare one. Then I emptied their tank and scrubbed it out and called Mr Romilly.
“Now,” he said. “You put some sand at the bottom and..., um..., a couple of stones, and then perhaps some, er..., Vallisneria, I would say, probably in that corner there, wouldn’t you?”
“Could I just try it on my own?” I asked. “I, er..., I think I’d learn better that way — if I could do it on my own. And then, when I’m finished you could criticise it and tell me where I’ve gone wrong.”
“Very good idea,” said Mr Romilly. And so he pottered off to do his petty cash and left me in peace.
It was only a small tank but I worked hard on it. I piled up the silver sand in great dunes. I built little cliffs. I planted forests of Vallisneria through which the mollies could drift in shoals. Then I filled it carefully with water, and when it was the right temperature I put the mollies back in it and called Mr Romnilly to see my handiwork.
“By Jove!” he said, looking at it. “By Jove!”
He glanced at me and it was almost as though he was disappointed that I had done so well. I could see that I was on dangerous ground.
“Do... do you like it?” I inquired.
“It... it’s remarkable! Remarkable! I can’t think how you. how you managed it.”
“Well, I only managed it by watching you, Mr Romilly,” I said. “If it hadn’t been for you teaching me how to do it I could never have done it.”
“Well, now. Well, now,” said Mr Romilly, going pink. “But I see you’ve added one or two little touches of your own.”
“Well, they were just ideas I’d picked up from watching you,” I said.
“Hmmm... Most commendable. Most commendable,” said Mr Romilly.
The next day he asked me whether I would like to decorate another fish tank and I knew that I had won the battle without hurting his feelings.
The tank that I really desperately wanted to do was the enormous one that we had in the window. It was some four and a half feet long and about two foot six deep, and in it we had a great colourful mixed collection of fish. But I knew that I must not overstep the bounds of propriety at this stage. So I did several smaller fish tanks first, and when Mr Romilly had got thoroughly used to the idea of my doing them, I broached the subject of our big show tank in the window.
“Could I try my hand at that, Mr Romilly?” I asked.
“What? Our show piece?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s... it’s in need of... of a clean, anyway. So I thought, perhaps, I could try my hand at redecorating it.”
“Well, I don’t know...,” said Mr Romilly doubtfully. “I don’t know. It’s a most important piece that, you know. It’s the centrepiece of the window. It’s the one that attracts all the customers.”
He was quite right, but the customers were attracted by the flickering shoals of multi-coloured fish. They certainly were not attracted by Mr Romilly’s attempts at decoration, which made it look rather like a blasted heath.
“Well, could I just try?” I said. “And if it’s no good, I’ll do it all over again. I’ll even... I’ll even spend my half day doing it.”
“Oh, I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” said Mr Romilly, shocked. “You don’t want to spend all your days shut up in the shop, you know. A young boy like you... you want to be out and about... Well, alright, you try your hand at it, and see what happens.”
It took me the better part of a day to do, because in between times I had to attend to the various customers who came to buy tubifex or daphnia or buy a tree frog for their garden pond or something similar. I worked on that giant tank with all the dedication of a marine Capability Brown. I built rolling sand dunes and great towering cliffs of lovely granite. And then, through the valleys between the granite mountains, I planted forests of Vallisneria and other, more delicate, weedy ferns. And on the surface of the water I floated the tiny little white flowers that look so like miniature water-lilies. With the aid of sand and rocks I concealed the heater and thermostat and also the aerator, none of which were attractive to look at. When I had finally finished it and replaced the brilliant scarlet sword-tails, the shiny black mollies, the silver hatchet fish, and the brilliant Piccadilly-like neon-tetras, and stepped back to observe my handiwork, I found myself deeply impressed by my own genius. Mr Romilly, to my delight, was ecstatic about the whole thing.
“Exquisite! Exquisite!” he exclaimed. “Simply exquisite.”
“Well, you know what they say, Mr Romilly,” I said. “That a good pupil needs a good master.”
“Oh, you flatter me, you flatter me,” he said, wagging his finger at me playfully. “This is a case where the pupil has surpassed the master.”
“Oh, I don’t think that,” I said. “But I do think that I’m getting almost as good as you.”
After that, I was allowed to decorate all the tanks and all the cages. I think, secretly, Mr Romilly was rather relieved not to have to urge his non-existent artistic sense into this irksome task.
After one or two experiments I always used to take my lunch hour at a little cafe not very far away from the shop. Here I had discovered a kindly waitress who, in exchange for a little flattery, would give me more than my regulation number of sausages with my sausages and mash, and warn me against the deadly perils of the Irish stew on that particular day. It was one day when I was going to have my lunch that I discovered a short cut to the cafe. It was a narrow little alleyway that ran between the great groups of shops and the towering houses and flats. It was cobble-stoned and as soon as I got into it, it was as though I had been transported back to Dickensian London. I found that part of it was tree-lined and farther along there was a series of tiny shops.
It was then that I discovered that we were not the only pet shop in the vicinity, for I came across the abode of Henry Bellow.
The dirty window of his shop measured, perhaps, six feet square by two deep. It was crammed from top to bottom with small square cages, each containing one or a pair of chaffinches, green finches, linnets, canaries, or budgerigars. The floor of the window was inches deep in seed husks and bird excrement, but the cages themselves were spotlessly clean and each sported a bright green sprig of lettuce or groundsel and a white label on which had been written in shaky block letters “SOLD”. The glass door of the shop was covered with a lace curtain which was yellow with age, and between it and the glass hung a cardboard notice which said “Please Enter” in Gothic script. The reverse side of this notice, I was to learn, stated equally politely “We regret we are closed”. Never, in all the days that I hurried for my sausages and mash up this uneven flagged alley, did I ever see a customer entering or leaving the shop. Indeed, the shop seemed lifeless except for the occasional lethargic hopping from perch to perch of the birds in the window. I wondered, as the weeks passed, why all the birds in the window were not claimed by the people who had bought them. Surely the various owners of some thirty assorted birds could not have decided simultaneously that they did not want them? And, in the unlikely event of this happening, why had the “Sold” signs not been removed? It was a mystery that in my limited lunch hour I had little time to investigate. But my chance came one day when Mr Romilly, who had been dancing round the shop singing “I’m a busy little bee”, suddenly went down into the basement and uttered a falsetto screech of horror. I went and peered down the stairs, wondering what I had done or left undone.