Perhaps I felt as if I had done my pet-owning bit and didn’t want to go there again. Our family had had so many pets, and non-pets, too, the results of which were not always happy.
When I was a child growing up in England, I remember that we had goldfish and then budgerigars by the dozens, so not really pets, as such. In the 1950s, they been a second income to my parents, who ran a mail order business breeding them and shipping them all over Britain. Our house was full of fish tanks, and we had a large aviary in the back garden. We also had three egg-laying chickens in a battery.
When my family emigrated to Southern Rhodesia in 1956-7, no matter where we lived in numerous flats and the occasional house, we always had a cat. My brother John loved our cat so much that he would sleep with it curled up on his pillow beside his head. I had to be a little more distant because sometimes I would sneeze and sneeze in the presence of cats, though the word “allergy” or “hay fever” was never mentioned to me. I didn’t even know that such an affliction existed, in fact. I know now, from decades of experience, that I am not allergic to all cats; just to some, depending on how much dander they produce.
Hamsters were common in our household, too, especially when we moved into the centre of Salisbury, into a flat on the second, then the third floor of a small building. I think that we acquired our first hamsters from a local pet shop who sold us two males, who were supposed to live happily together in their single cage, on our balcony, safe from our cat.
We three children, aged 14, 12 and 8 years, loved those hamsters. We fed them carrots, and vegetable scraps from the kitchen, and played endlessly with them, running them over our hands, enjoying the feel of their warm furry bodies, and their tiny feet pattering against our skin. We loved their inquisitive eyes, their quivering noses, and their playful antics.
Our two hamsters had names, though I can’t recall what they were now. We were happy to welcome them into our family, and the hamsters, too, must have been very happy, indeed, since, about two weeks after their arrival, one of them suddenly gave birth to a litter of babies! We were stunned one morning to find several hairless knobs lying in the straw, obviously alive! How could this be possible if our originals were two males? Someone, somewhere, had obviously made a mistake, because our two hamsters continued to produce more and more baby hamsters, at an astounding rate. We gave the babies to friends, we gave them to neighbours, we took them to the pet store, and did everything possible to find homes for our newborns.
