30. Pets and
other animals

I used to have a dog called Sooty. When he wasn’t fighting the other dogs in the street or trying to get the female dogs in the neighbourhood pregnant, he was chasing cars and attempting to bite their tyres. He never gave up … not even after he was hit by a car.

He just got back up, coughed a bit of blood, ran home, went into his kennel and slept for a whole weekend. And then on Monday, yep, you guessed it, he was out on the street again chasing cars.

I always admired Sooty’s full-on, joyful approach to life and especially his determination, which is I guess why he appears in so many of the Just stories (‘Playing dead’, ‘The dog ate it’, ‘Cake of doom’, ‘Mudmen’, etc.).

 

The real Sooty in an uncharacteristically peaceful moment.

 

Actually, come to think of it, dogs appear in lots of my other books, too.

The bad dog from The Very Bad Book, the dog on a cog from The Cat on the Mat is Flat and Barky the Barking Dog from The 13-Storey Treehouse.

Other pets I’ve owned over the years are tortoises (kind of sad), axolotls (kind of boring), tadpoles (kind of ‘just to feed the axolotls’ but actually more entertaining than axolotls), tropical fish (kind of expensive), cats (kind of scratchy) and, of course, sea-monkeys.

As a child I was intrigued by the ads for sea-monkeys, which made them look like semi-human creatures that lived in elaborate underwater kingdoms, so I saved up and bought some sea-monkey eggs. I added the water and waited for the magical creatures to materialise. The sea-monkeys came to life, all right, but they were not the exciting pets I was hoping for. After all, they are just brine shrimp—a type of minuscule wriggly bug.

In The 13-Storey Treehouse, Terry’s sea-monkey eggs hatch into actual monkeys!

There are lots of animals in the Treehouse books. The character Jill lives with thirteen flying cats, two dogs, a goat, three horses, four goldfish, one cow, six rabbits, two guinea pigs, one camel and one donkey …

but Silky is definitely her favourite.

Andy and Terry also have animals in the treehouse including ice-skating penguins and man-eating sharks.

Ice-skating penguins from The 26-Storey Treehouse.

TRY THIS

50-word pet story

Tell a story about—or describe—a pet you own or have owned (or would LIKE to own) in exactly 50 words. See how much of your pet’s personality you can convey in those 50 precious words.

It may help to write the story first and then subtract any words that aren’t strictly essential until you have 50. Your title can be any length.