I don’t know what happened to our hamsters in the end. We moved many times in the next few years, so it is hard to know when these creatures departed for good. I recall very clearly that one of of them survived a drop of three storeys. This occurred when my brother, Peter, playing on our balcony with one of our hamsters, watching it run over his rotating hands, was horrified when the animal suddenly gave a spurt forward, launching itself over the edge of the balcony, from which it fell three floors into the garden beds below. Never had Peter moved so fast! Screeching at us all that he had dropped the hamster, he charged down the stairs to retrieve what we all expected to be either a badly injured bundle of fur, or a corpse. Not so, though. That little animal looked momentarily stunned, but when Peter put out his hand, it simply took up its normal habit of running over the top of his hands, none the worse for wear. We could hardly believe it.
Our one and only dog wasn’t as lucky. He was a little puppy, a white fluffy mongrel of some kind, which looked rather like Tintin’s dog, Snowy, in the comic book series. Indeed, we named him Snowy, though I am not sure that this was because we knew about Tintin at that time. We had only recently emigrated from Britain and were living in the bush. I was 10 years old; John was 8 and Peter only 4. Perhaps, a local resident, whose pet had given birth to a litter, had asked my father if we would take a puppy. My father, who had himself grown up with dogs around the house, accepted, probably thinking that a young dog would help us all adapt to our new life. It would be fun to watch the puppy grow up. He was cute and cuddly, he would play with us children and might even help lift my mother out of her depression, too.
We were enthralled by Snowy. We adored him, but his fate was sealed, when, soon after arrival, he managed to escape into the back yard from the stable door in our kitchen at the precise moment that my father was reversing the car out of the carport nearby. Poor Snowy was crushed to death under the rear wheel of the car. It wasn’t my father’s fault, because it all happened so quickly, but our family was distraught. It took us such a long time to get over the trauma, in fact, that we never again owned a dog. My father buried the dog, but I don’t know where, probably somewhere in our large yard.
