My Animals and Other Family Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  A Bushbaby from Harrods

  Tortoises and Tropical Fish

  Chickens, Guinea Pigs and the Facts of Life

  Two Very Different Dogs

  Talking with Pigs

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  In these five stories Julia Blackburn recalls the significant animals in her life and in so doing gives us a sidelong glance at the human members of her family, her painter mother and poet father.

  First comes Congo the bush baby, from the jungles of Madagascar via Harrods pet department. He slept in an old cap on the back of the door, and could leap about the room via the picture rails. Then there are tropical fish, tortoises, chickens, guinea pigs, foxes (the last three a combustible combination), pigs, and two very distinctive dogs, Julia’s own dog, Jason, a cocker spaniel whose habits of servility and loyalty Julia’s father, Thomas, was determined to undo (‘He’s worse than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, fawning at my heels!’) and Henry, a Parson Jack Russell terrier that Thomas got after his divorce, a dog of great independence, dignity and forbearance, whom his master used to take mountaineering.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Julia Blackburn is the author of five books of non-fiction, Charles Waterton, The Emperor’s Last Island, Daisy Bates in the Desert, Old Man Goya and With Billie, and two novels, The Book of Colour and The Leper’s Companions, both of which were shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the author of seventeen short stories specially commisioned by BBC Radio, a selection of which were published in My Animals and Other Family, and four radio plays, including The Spellbound Horses, which was broadcast in 2011. She is married to the artist Herman Makkink and they live in Suffolk and Italy.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Novels

  The Book of Colour

  The Leper’s Companion

  Non-Fiction

  Charles Waterton

  The Emperor’s Last Island

  Daisy Bates in the Desert

  Old Man Goya

  With Billie

  My Animals

  &

  Other Family

  Julia Blackburn

  For Natasha, Martin & Fiona

  A Bushbaby from Harrods

  I have two photographs of him. In the first photograph he stands on Great-Aunt Molly’s chest of drawers, his arms wrapped around the neck of a bottle of Jamaican rum. Four Barrels rum, and the picture on the label shows a group of men and women being happy on a sugar plantation. He and the bottle are about the same size, although if he stretched his legs to their full length, he would be a bit taller. There is a triumphant look in his round, night-time eyes; he must be slightly drunk, from having licked traces of rum from the edges of the screw-top.

  In the second photograph I am sitting in an armchair which also belonged to Great-Aunt Molly and he is perched on my shoulder. We are both staring straight into the lens of the camera. I am eleven years old, plump and uncertain and wearing a pale blue sundress with white polka dots which has grown too small for me. The little curl at the end of his tail hangs down across the tight bodice of the dress.

  It’s a good-quality photograph, done by a professional. She came to the house with flashlights and tripods to make a portrait of my father for a book cover and then she wandered around and took other pictures as well. In this one you can see the flashlights reflected in his eyes, the softness of his fur which gave his body a misty outline and the little pads on his delicate fingers, each one tipped with a perfect fingernail. You can also see that I am shining with happiness in spite of being plump and uncertain, because I am in love and the object of my love is there, on my shoulder.

  Congo was a bushbaby. I called him Congo because of a poem. I could always learn poetry very easily and so my father taught me huge chunks of it, pretty much as soon as I could speak. I had just started going to Bennett Road County Primary School in Leeds, where Mr Pepper the Headmaster gave us a weekly talk on the dangers of litter, when my father taught me a poem called ‘The Congo’, written by the nineteenth-century American poet Vachel Lindsay:

  Then I saw the Congo creeping through the black,

  Cutting through the jungle with a golden track.

  Then along that river bank

  A thousand miles

  Tattooed cannibals danced in files.

  It didn’t matter that Congo the bushbaby had been snatched from the forests of Madagascar rather than the jungles of Africa; the name evoked my idea of tall trees and the darkness of his natural home.

  He was given to me by a friend of my father’s, a woman called Erica Marx who ran the Hand and Flower poetry press. She came to our house for tea, took one look at me and decided I needed companionship. So I received a letter: a single sheet of thick, creamy paper and instead of an address at the top, there was a drawing of a hand with a flower growing out of it. ‘Dear Julia,’ said the letter. ‘I want you to go to Harrods and choose yourself a pet. Any pet you like and don’t worry how much it costs.’

  I had never been to Harrods in my life because we weren’t Harrodsy people, but off I went now, by bus. I pushed through the heavy swing doors and into the shock and glitter of the perfume department. Then up in the lift to the second floor and there, sandwiched between Pianos and Carpets, was the Zoo.

  I recently contacted the man in the Archive Department at Harrods and he sent me a selection of old advertisements and magazine articles about the Zoo in the 1950s. This was a time when coral reefs were still thriving and jungles were not being reduced to ashes and nobody was going to question the morality of buying a two-toed sloth or an eighty-pound Malay bear if that was what you wanted. A press handout explained that ‘English and foreign royalty, film, stage and TV stars, millionaires, MPs and visiting Americans are among the Zoo’s regular customers . . . One well-known Marchioness paused to look around and bought a five-guinea bullfrog. A customer enquiring about Siamese cats got a Toucan instead . . .’

  For me, as the child I then was, the Harrods Zoo was as close as I had ever been to heaven. I walked slowly past the rows of cages, pens and tanks peering at their occupants in a daze of desire. The air was loud with the cries of parrots and small birds, thick with the scent of fur and faeces.

  After a while I narrowed my choice down to a mongoose or a bushbaby. I had read the story of Rikki-tikki-tavi, so I knew that a mongoose would lay down his life for me if there was ever a cobra in our bathroom, but I chose the bushbaby, for the way he uncurled himself and stared straight at me when the assistant picked him up and placed him in my hands.

  I took him home on the bus in a cardboard box lined with hay to keep out the cold London air. The cardboard box also contained a tin of live mealworms, those yellow scaly maggoty creatures that live on bran and make a rustling sound as they go about the business of doing what they do. I had instructions to feed my bushbaby on chopped fruit, Nestlé’s sweetened condensed milk and about four mealworms a day.

  There was a room next to my bedroom that was too small and narrow to be used for anything much, a sort of appendix in the body of the house. It had a window looking out on to the garden and it contained little more than a sink, a tottering pile of old National Geographic magazines and a heap of my father’s climbing ropes. A discarded fur coat of my mother’s was draped over a hook on the door and an old cloth cap that must have once belonged to my father was perched on top of it. This room was given to Congo and during the daylight hours when he wanted to sleep he would climb up the soft fur of the coat and post himself into the little hollow of the cap. r />
  From the moment he came to live with me, my whole world took on a different shape and focus. I almost forgot about the problems of family life. If my father got drunk and came home coughing his chiming-clock cough that meant he was looking for trouble, then I hardly noticed the fights and shouts that were sure to follow. And if my mother wept and said she wished she had a husband who loved her and who was faithful to her, I no longer felt that my fragile world of family was about to collapse and I must do something to save it. I had my own life now, my own independent existence.

  I’d come home from school at four o’clock, just when Congo’s nocturnal day was ready to begin. Sometimes he was already awake, or else I would lift the cap from the coat to watch him uncurling himself, yawning, and blinking and eager to get started. I’d put him on my shoulder and he would gently pull a curtain of my hair to one side so that he could grasp my ear and explore it with his nose, licking my skin, feeling the contours of my face with his small hands.

  My mother’s studio was next to my bedroom. It was a big room which also served as a sitting room, so as well as an easel and a table covered with tubes of paint and brushes and a wooden rack stacked with paintings there was also a sofa and the mahogany chest of drawers. Every space on the walls was covered with my mother’s paintings, which were hung on long wires descending from one of those old-fashioned wooden picture rails that ran all around the room, about fifteen inches from the ceiling.

  The studio became an urban jungle. Congo could leap from my hand to the easel, from the easel to the chest of drawers and then from the chest of drawers up onto the open highway of the picture rail. Like a tiny kangaroo, he would bounce on his long hind legs round and round the upper layer of the room, his tail poised in a balancing curve. And if I called him, he would stop at the sound of my voice, gaze down at me, fold up the catapulting energy of his long legs and leap out in a great arc to land on my outstretched hand, as soft as an answered wish.

  After a while, every room in our ramshackle house took on the sweet and musty smell of bushbaby. Thanks to the picture-rail highway, the wallpaper in the studio, as well as the paintings themselves, were soon streaked with long thin stains where Congo’s pee had trickled down. And there were little grape-seed piles of excrement on every available surface: on the chest of drawers, on the back of the old chaise longue with its Empire stripes and even clinging to the glass dome of the clock which some sombre Huguenot ancestor was said to have brought with him to England while escaping persecution in France. I suppose guests must have found the overriding presence of a bushbaby a bit disconcerting, but my parents were far too busy with their battles to notice and I was too much in love to be bothered by such details.

  I think it was my mother who, in spite of her own experience of the perils of matrimony, decided that Congo needed a wife. And so we got a second bushbaby and I called her Liana, after the dangling jungle vines that I felt she must have once grasped in her hands. She was much bigger than Congo and it was immediately apparent that she belonged to a very different variety of the species. The two of them had little in common. True, they slept wrapped in each other’s arms and tails in their cloth-cap nest, but that was the limit of their relationship. Congo continued with his evening social life, while Liana spent all her time in bed. Every day I would persuade her to eat a bit of fruit and crunch a few mealworms, but although she kept healthy she had no interest in this alien world she had been brought to and she never lost her look of homesickness, reproach and despair.

  That summer we went on a week’s holiday to Cornwall and a family friend agreed to stay in our house to look after the bushbabies. We took ropes and climbing shoes because that was what we did on all our holidays. We slept in a building belonging to the Climbers’ Club and each morning we set off up granite cliff faces, threaded together on a length of nylon rope, like three beads on a string. My father led the way, chain smoking and grunting, but happy to be back on the rocks, I came next and my mother followed behind.

  ‘Come along, darling, there’s a ledge just a bit further to your left.’

  ‘I can’t reach it!’

  And then my mother’s voice. ‘She can’t reach it!’

  ‘Yes she can!’

  ‘No I can’t!’

  ‘Look, she’s managed it. I said you could, darling. I’ll secure the belay while your mother comes up.’

  The seven days of our holiday were soon over. We were driving home and I was sitting in the back seat of our Austin Princess with its odd rubbery smells. My mother turned to me and said she had some bad news. The friend who had been staying in our house had telephoned: one of the bushbabies had died.

  ‘Congo or Liana?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  How terrible to be wanting one death in preference to another. To be reciting a little circular prayer as the car rattled its way towards London: ‘Dear God, if you are anywhere and if you are listening, let it be Liana who has died.’

  But it was Congo. The window had been left open a tiny bit and he must have stood there in the darkness of the night, staring at the trees and the northern stars while the cold air crept across his belly and entered him and took his life.

  I buried him in the rose bed. I kept Liana for a few weeks, but she became sadder than ever and so I gave her to the Lesser Mammals Department at the London Zoo. In return I received a free entry pass which lasted for a year.

  At that time the Lesser Mammals were kept in a solemn red-brick building that could have served as the waiting room for a Victorian railway station. The daylight streamed in through the tall windows, and as a result all the nocturnal animals remained fast asleep during visiting hours.

  There was not much more to see than bundles of rounded backs, softly breathing fur and perhaps the occasional blinking eye. But I can still remember the mixture of sadness and joy that overwhelmed me when I entered that room. I would go straight to the cages that contained the sleeping bushbabies, crouch down on my knees and press my face as close as I could to the wire mesh. Then I would take a deep breath, to inhale that sweet and bitter, musty fruity earthy smell deep into my lungs. And with that all the memories of the first great love of my life would come rushing back.

  Tortoises and Tropical Fish

  I must have collected money somehow, pocket money perhaps, and when we went to visit my grandparents, the ones in Hove, then just as we were saying our goodbyes – my father tight-lipped and bobbing up and down with eagerness to be gone – my grandfather would suddenly grasp hold of my hand and prise the fingers open and press a hot half-crown into the palm. So, I had money to buy things and what I bought mostly was tropical fish.

  The tropical fish tank was in my bedroom, resting its great weight on the chest of drawers. It was an old tank and little rivulets of rusty water were always finding their way into my knicker-and-sock drawer. There was a sheet of glass on top of it, and a simple metal light fitment with a 25-watt bulb sat on the glass. I never had one of those aerating systems that create a gurgling blanket of sound in doctors’ waiting rooms, but when the balance of life was right, it worked beautifully: a luminous oasis of trailing, floating, spiralling plants, through which all sorts of fish moved and had their being.

  Most Saturday mornings I’d set off with an empty jam jar and an old woollen sock and I’d make my way to the shop that sold tropical fish. Down the road and then first right, past the lugubrious church run by the Reverend Hope who lived with Mrs Hope and their family of little Hopes in the house next to ours. Godfrey Hope was the same age as me but much smaller and whenever he was nervous or caught telling a lie then his eyes would blink at a tremendous speed. He came into our house once and saw the Tibetan Buddha sitting poised and smiling on its wooden stand on the mantelpiece. ‘Is that a heathen god?’ he asked, his eyelids flickering as fast as the needle on my mother’s Singer sewing machine. ‘My father says you are all heathens.’

  So, past the church and then left, down to the poor end of the high street, the road
getting dirtier and sadder, and there on a corner was the painted sign proclaiming, ‘Tropical Fish’.

  The lady who owned the shop was small and wispy; she had her grey hair in a bun and she wore a flowered apron. I used to wonder if it was her husband’s shop and then he had died and she had taken over without really wanting to. The narrow room was crowded with rows of tanks and she would sigh mournfully as she tried to catch a particular fish with a soft net. I don’t remember ever seeing other customers there.

  I loved the daze that took possession of me the moment I walked into that shop; it was like breathing in some soporific drug. I would drift from tank to tank, from the shoals of zebra fish moving in perfect unison, to the nervous, luminous neons and the gentle-faced, flat-bodied gouramis with their tendency to eat anything smaller than themselves. Black widows, platties, mollies, angel fish, leopard eels, and the wonderful Siamese fighters, their trailing tails and fins like shot silk in reds and purples. Best of all I loved the catfish, for their whiskery moustaches and the look of embarrassed surprise in their round eyes as they worked like little vacuum cleaners on the gravel floor, standing on their heads and sucking up all the rubbish they could find. Catfish were not glamorous, but they were good at surviving. I remember a disastrous power cut which snatched the colour and the life out of all of my fishes, except for that one determined and bewhiskered gentleman.

  Sometimes I would simply stare into the tanks and buy nothing, or nothing more than a pennyworth of those clumps of red tubifex worms that tropical fish find so delicious, or a bag of fearful, bouncing water fleas that did their hopeless best to avoid capture when you tipped them en masse into the tank. If I was getting a new fish, it took ages to decide on one in particular and then the shop lady would sigh and mutter as she hunted it down and flipped it into my jam jar and helped me to pull the sock over the jar to keep the water warm. I walked home clutching my prize, with as little bounce as possible in each step.