I heard the front door go and the sound of the kettle being put on. A few minutes later, Carol came in with some hot lemon and honey and two small white pills.
‘Marvellous,’ she said, keeping her face perfectly straight. ‘These modern antibiotics. So much power in a tiny tablet. Thank the Lord for medical science, that’s what I say. Two now, two every four hours thereafter.’ I swallowed the pills and washed them down with hot lemon. ‘You’ll be all right for work the day after tomorrow, and completely all right by the end of a week. Only thing with these pills is – no alcohol.’
The police, the police surgeon and the ambulance men who came to pick up Alf’s body, all complained about having a couple of flea bites but nobody thanked me for taking almost the entire swarm away with me. Social services had to fumigate the house twice before anyone would go in it again. York office found homes for all the cats and, after three months, an elderly couple who had lost their own dog offered to take Buster, so my first big job in my new world had had a happy ending, as I repeatedly told myself while hoping that none of my more athletic fleas had managed the leap from me to his lordship’s gingery Harris tweed suit.
Fleas or no fleas, being an RSPCA inspector seemed to me the perfect job, as if I’d been born to it, which I must have been because I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by animals.
Where I grew up (in the fishing town of Hull, close to the docks) and when (in the 1960s), nobody thought anything of kids roaming free. I don’t quite know how my mother decided when I was old enough to go out alone, but the minute she did I was off and away. Had I been able to range across the Serengeti I would doubtless have marvelled at the big exciting animals but probably missed the detail. As my range was somewhat more confined, being the old railway sidings by the docks, I uncovered all sorts of details, like rare flowers, butterflies and beetles. Great crested newts, or horse newts as we called them, were quite hard to find then but I knew where they were.
I soon expanded my territory to the streams, woods, open country, hedgerows and, of course, the sea. It was fifteen miles to Spurn Point and it took all day to walk there and back, but that didn’t matter. Lizards lived there. A bit nearer, between Hornsea and Withernsea, was Aldbrough, where there’d been a bombing range during the war. Some of the clusters of bomb craters had turned into ponds, and wherever there’s a pond there’s a whole world of life to find. There, I could see grass snakes, and dragonflies, and gather frogspawn to hatch at home, and collect live daphnia for my fish tank.
I had friends, too, young adventurers and explorers like me, who were interested in the things that lived in ponds and woods but they weren’t as interested as I was. We were all happy doing our Just William thing, roving about the countryside and along the seashore but, unlike William Brown, my mates also liked to play cricket and football in the street, or go to watch Hull KR play rugby league. I wasn’t against any of that. I joined in, but with me, the priority was the wildlife. The exploits of F. S. Trueman and D. B. Close held a certain fascination that was soon overtaken by the problems of catching a certain eel, with which I’d become acquainted by staring for hours on end into a stream.
All this meant that I really only had two reliable companions. One was our dog, Skipper, who did have some of that archetypal Yorkshire canine in him, being part whippet and part a lot else besides, and the other was Brian. Anyone who has seen the film Kes has seen Brian, the pale, skin-and-bone, out-of-place raggedy boy, except Brian’s scruffy head had blond hair growing out of it. Brian’s large family had no visible means of support and so, without our modern social security system, they had nothing at all. If I ever grumbled about lack of generosity in the pocket-money department, I was invited to exchange my paltry income for whatever Brian or any of his half-dozen siblings might be on. Or, instead of our handing down our old clothes and anything else useful to Brian’s lot, we could reverse the flow of trade.
Although slightly wealthier than Brian, I still felt the urge to increase my stock, and one of the ways I did it was by dealing in pigeon futures. Quite a few of us had lofts and we’d race between ourselves, and occasionally we’d find ourselves in possession of a possible contender. Even more occasionally, a real pigeon fancier, one who raced for money, might pay us something well below market value for such a bird, but our best customer was Mrs Atkinson.
We were all terrified of Mrs Atkinson. She had a face like a herring gull and a voice to match. She could slice wedding cakes at a hundred yards with that voice. When we had to read Macbeth at school, there in all our minds instantly were three Mrs Atkinsons in the opening scene, and when we went to see The Wizard of Oz, there she was again, the Wicked Witch of the West.
Mrs Ack didn’t have a pigeon loft. She didn’t race pigeons. She just kept them. The walls of her back yard and part of the outside of the house were decorated in the manner of a loft, in stripes of dark green and white paint to help the birds find their way home, but they were not kept in at all. They sat around, perched on every available inch of space, cooing and chuckling, and Mrs Ack presided, feeding them royally.
If something surprised them, they’d take off in a great clatter, a cloud of pigeons wheeling about the sky, and then they’d return, pushing each other off window sills and guttering until all were settled once more.
There was a mystery about Mrs Atkinson and her pigeons. She never refused to buy from us, at a threepenny bit per bird, yet her population seemed to remain constant. Yet, she claimed no pigeon ever flew from her care because of her unique discovery as regards homing instincts. By experiment and intellectual endeavour, she had found that three minutes was the ideal time for her to hold a pigeon’s head in her mouth, lips closed around its neck. These special minutes removed all primitive desires to wander and made Mrs Ack’s back yard the pigeon’s magnetic home, sweet home.
We also observed her holding the heads of certain birds under the cold tap, for three minutes by her watch. These were ones that she could tell in advance would not respond properly to the mouth treatment and so needed their brains washing ‘like the Chinese do’. Neither the Chinese nor the mouth method ever worked for us, possibly because we didn’t have the knack of telling which bird should have which, and we were reduced to the orthodox way of developing a homing response by keeping new birds locked up for a few weeks.
So, if Mrs Ack’s birds never deserted her but their numbers stayed at the same yard-filling maximum despite our constant additions, there could only be one conclusion. Pigeon pie. That such an awe-inspiring old hag could be telling us lies never occurred. It had to be pigeon pie, or possibly she used some of them in spells.
Anyway, this was the marketing end of our business. The production side was much more risky, not financially, because there were no costs, but personally. Our source of supply was the massive flock of retired racing pigeons and descendants thereof that lived in among the heavy timbers of the old jetties by the docks. These pigeons, without the benefit of Mrs Ack’s Chinese treatments, had fled their former owners, or their ancestors had, and become feral. They bred and bred, at all times of year, and the import-export trade in grain and other foodstuffs through the port of Kingston upon Hull gave them plenty to eat at every season.
Our target was the squabs, the near-fledged but not flying, sitting in the nest waiting for the journey of life to begin. Brian and I would walk along the jetty decks, peering through the gaps in the planks to find a suitable nest. When we did, Brian would stay there while I ran back to the shore. Brian was my navigation beacon. His shouts guided me to himself and the nest. My route depended on the state of the tide.
If it was out, I could stay at a low level, climbing