Another burial took place when one of my brothers found a tiny shrew somewhere and brought it home in his pocket. This creature was only a couples of inches long, rather like a small mouse, but it didn’t live, I regret to report. We children organized a funeral for the shrew, packing it into a matchbox as its coffin, and burying it outside, where we even made a little wooden cross for it.
The last pet that came to stay didn’t belong to us. It was an African parrot, belonging to friends of ours, who had asked us to look after this large bird whilst they were away for a month or so. The parrot was the ugliest thing imaginable, since it had caught a disease in its youth and had lost almost all its feathers. We knew that we were to treat it with great care, because its owner had stressed the fact that the bird must be kept out of the sun, and away from drafts.
So, keeping all the car windows shut to prevent said drafts, my mother and I drove back from their house with the bird in its cage. Once at home, we put the parrot in the corner of our living room, by the window (closed, of course), and looked after that scrawny bird as if he were the crown jewels. We covered him up at nighttime and uncovered his cage in the morning, whereupon he would talk away. We were so anxious about any drafts, however, that we kept windows closed, despite the heat.
The bird seemed perfectly fine during its stay, and happily remained in its cage, eating this, that, and the next thing, as we’d been advised by the owners. However, his appearance was very off-putting, and we made all sorts of jokes amongst ourselves about buying a raw chicken and putting it in the cage, instead, just before the owners returned. We wouldn’t ever do anything as cruel as that, of course, but we laughed all the same over this scraggy creature, which could hardly be called handsome.
Unfortunately for us, and for its owners, too, the bird died within a week or two of being returned to its home. We were so shocked when we heard this. Aware of how much we had looked after the parrot, we knew that its demise was not our fault. However, we were never quite convinced that the owners of the parrot thought likewise. It was a sad way to end a month of perfect care and handling of a beloved pet, even though this one didn’t belong to us.
This was the final straw, the end of pet ownership for our family for evermore.
