Apart from pathological lying, cruelty to animals is high on the Hare psychopathy checklist. In fact Schopenhauer, who was a big fan of poodles, said: ‘A person who harms or kills animals cannot be a good person at all.’ Not surprising, then, that it did not cross my mother’s mind to think of asking me to foster her orange-and-white cocker spaniel after her death. More suitable adoptive parents were found.
The earliest animal memory I have is of Dad hauling baby bunny rabbits out from beneath the shed and bagging them. He is angry. Two rabbits have become twelve rabbits. He orders Sean to dig beneath the shed, and reaches into the holes that now ravage the lawn. I watch how the bags squirm, and wonder why bags are a good place for rabbits. Sean tells me that the bags are for taking the rabbits to the river. All I can feel is that I am glad I am not a rabbit, but not because they are going to the river. That might be nice. I am glad, because somehow they make Dad furious.
In those days we lived at St Ninian’s Terrace in Morningside, Edinburgh, next to a Mr and Mrs Keddie, who, amongst other things, complained about the rabbits. I never remember seeing the Keddies, but we heard them most days, hammering on the party wall, screaming for us to shut up. Sean’s footballs, rugby balls, tennis balls, golf balls, all sailed over the Keddie wall, never to be seen again.
Dad had tried scaring Mrs Keddie shitless on a number of occasions, belting her front door with his fists and yelling through the window, but she was made of steelier stuff than anyone else he’d ever met. In the end, our Peugeot packed up for a holiday, the engine running, Dad crammed a very old and smelly kipper through her letterbox. Winning was important.
We would go on to parent animals of every denomination. Budgerigars shrieking from the curtain rail, goldfish won at the fair, many dogs, a cat, rabbits, mice, five bantam hens, and a turkey bought cheap for Christmas. Maybe someone thought that hanging him upside down in the basement would be enough to kill him. He seemed to take days to die.
I wonder if the reason our house was filled with fur and feather was because one of us was an animal lover, but I hesitate to imagine who that might have been. Deaths were not marked by flowers and songs in the garden or by planting a new tree. Instead there would be an announcement over breakfast – one more animal was a goner.
The afternoon we lost the mouse, I was an accessory, leaning against the side of the bath, the edge of it denting my chest. Sean had the tap on and the plug in. The water thundered out of the faucet, two plastic boats rolling in its wake. There had been floods before, but not that day, only because Sean did not want me to be able to touch his boats. They bobbed out of reach. One had a paddle wheel, and Sean wanted to see if, like the neighbour’s hamster, the mouse would make the wheel turn.
A year later two budgerigars were found flat on their backs one morning. They had, in their hunger, eaten the tomato plants. Fairground goldfish, appreciated for their limited life expectancies, were often, if they made it beyond a week, recklessly flushed down toilets where they had been put for safekeeping during a clean.
Throughout this period Trudy, our white miniature poodle, remained understandably nervous. Being in her presence was like looking in the mirror. Morning and evening she was taken out into the garden and yelled at by Dad to ‘BE QUICK’. Promptly, without fail, she was. Until, with age, she became not quite quick enough. Inevitably there were accidents on the new lino, and these embarrassments were fatally hard to forgive.
Dad, you see, was a dab hand at potty training, claiming he’d done me in a weekend. A success that perhaps he should not have crowed over in my hearing; I had seen him train the dogs. If they made the mistake of committing to a hesitant piss in a far corner, he dragged them by the scruff, walloping them all the way through to the garden. All the dogs, bar the last – that much-loved orange-and-white cocker spaniel – lived in fear. Their eyes were glazed with it.
On the whole I would have put the unseemly number of deaths and any attendant zoological panic down to inexperienced parenting, if it weren’t for Cindy.
Cindy was a tabby, a stray, all heat and loyalty. We took her, or more reasonably stole her, from St Ninian’s Terrace when we moved. Mum and Dad locked her into the derelict interior of the new house with only butter on her paws for sustenance. There were mice. She lived there alone for the six months it took to renovate, only to be disappeared a year later, in the autumn of 1977.
Mum thoroughly disliked cats. Her nose wrinkled at the sight of them. When I asked her what had happened to Cindy she said: ‘She went to stay on your uncle’s farm. She joined a whole load of other cats on the farm.’ What’s dubious here is the repetition.