Just as some pervasive spirit of unconventionality seemed to grip all our servants, so, too, were our domestic livestock a memorable collection. My earliest recollection was of a large and rather fierce Australian galah. These are pure white cockatoos, with flaming pink crests, and ours hopped up and down in his cage, screeching angrily, and never succeeding in endearing himself to anyone. Samuel Pepys was the only dog I was ever allowed: for the four short years of his life, we never succeeded in house-training him, and we never broke him of his preference for my grandmother’s hall carpet on which to deposit his mess. This caused furious rows, and when Pepys was finally run over, it was generally agreed that we could not risk a successor taking over his bad habits. So from then on, the house was invaded by a trio of exceedingly unusual cats. It had been my intention to have one cat, but shortly after acquiring a kitten named Roger (after one of the family friends), two more homeless kittens appeared in swift succession—one named Errol, after another friend, and the third Kiska, quite simply meaning ‘cat’ in Russian. These three castrated males quickly developed a most complex game, involving perfect timing and teamwork, with which they amused or startled any six o’clock guests, according to whether or not they were regular visitors. They lay low for a couple of hours before six, gathering strength no doubt for their performance, and then with an instinct for time never more than ten minutes out either way, they would come hurtling down the hall, claws and paws scratching on the parquet floor and—first Roger, then Errol, then Kiska—tear twice round the sitting-room floor, beneath and between feet, at furious pace, and finally launch themselves in formation on the window curtains. Straight up one side of the curtains they shot, across the pelmet, and straight down the other side. Round the room once more, and out.
Unhappily, they were too decorative and frivolous a trio to be any check on the rats which were our next companions. The back door of our house led onto a dirty cul-de-sac, littered with garbage and the decaying fences of older houses than ours. Next door was the back entrance of a restaurant of always suspect cleanliness, and of obviously unsanitary antiquity. I suppose the rats had lived a life of luxury there for years for, when it was suddenly demolished, the indignation and deprivation shone transparently out of their furious eyes as they glared at us in the dark. They literally swarmed into our house, to the extent that I awoke one night to find one perched, fixing me with baffled and reproachful stare, on the end of my bed. This happening finally prodded my father into action: hitherto he had tended to regard the visitors with indulgent amusement and to the female complaints around him was apt to reply, with something like nostalgia, that he’d been accustomed to rats dropping onto his sleeping face when he was in the Navy. But now he turned our problem over to a firm of pest and rodent exterminators called Fletcher & Hawks and, in exchange for a substantial cheque, settled back in preparation for peace.
Various representatives of Fletcher & Hawks appeared, dived into manholes, cracks and crevasses, flirted with the rats, and disappeared again. The rats’ eyes grew angrier and more reproachful, but they rallied and it seemed that their ranks closed into something more like formation tactics. Various key personnel took up permanent posts around the house, so that one could almost be certain of meeting a particular rat at a particular time and place. My father passed this information on to Fletcher & Hawks; more money changed hands, and more white-coated men appeared. More rats also appeared, and the din around our dustbins at night was now impossible to ignore. One had to walk down a narrow passageway past the dustbins in order to reach the garage, so that this became an occasion for apologetic explanation whenever a guest was winded in passing by a disturbed rat. Short of asking the Fletcher & Hawks staff to come and live with us awhile to observe our condition, my father, by now exasperated, could get neither satisfaction nor his money back, and now in possession of a handsome fee, they were inclined to by-pass his letters as hysterical exaggeration.
He composed what proved to be his final letter with some care and enjoyment. Presuming that there were indeed a Mr Fletcher and a Mr Hawks, he addressed his letter to them personally and, after setting out in detail the lengths to which he had gone to provoke satisfactory action, and the remuneration they had received for their services, he asked that their efforts be redoubled. But, he added, it would be with some sense of loss that he would witness the passing from his life of his now two most familiar companions: one, an active and industrious rat who lived in the floor boards under his desk, and whose chirpings and burrowings accompanied his working hours and lightened the clinical quiet of his surgery; the other, a large and friendly rat who nightly lay in wait behind the dustbin lid, and as he walked to his car, came hurtling forth in response to the merest flicking of his fingers and to whom he hoped he might still have time to teach a few tricks. In view of their long association and of the way these two had flourished under their patronage and care, he had taken the liberty of naming them respectively, Fletcher and Hawks. By these names were these two mildly notorious rodents becoming known to the inhabitants of the ‘Cross’ and to his large circle of patients.
The following week Mr Fletcher and Mr Hawks arrived in person, and within a few days the ranks of the rats dwindled and faltered, and soon they had all disappeared.