Long-ago goodbyes of pets who shared my childhood - Ian McMillan

Lurch just ran away. Pussy Cat just faded away. Bunny Fluff just kicked his back legs one last time and went as stiff as a floorboard.

I wept, of course, because that’s what you do when your childhood pets shuffle off the animal equivalent of this mortal coil, but then quite soon my tears dried up and I got on with my life which at the time mainly consisted of reading The Beano and half-making Airfix kits of World War Two fighter planes.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about that trio of pets and how they were a big part of my life and then suddenly they weren’t a part of my life at all, after they’d stopped being a big part of their own lives, if you get my drift.

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Lurch was a tortoise, named after the butler in The Addams Family, and he did very little, to be honest with you. That’s the tortoise, not the butler.

Poet Ian McMillanPoet Ian McMillan
Poet Ian McMillan

I remember there was a bit of a fad for having tortoises as pets at that time, maybe because they’d got one on Blue Peter; readers of a certain age will remember that the tortoise was called Fred and then suddenly it was called Freda, which left a lot of red-faced 1960’s parents with some explaining to do.

I remember Lurch’s disappearance more than his everyday existence, which perhaps shows how mundane his everyday existence was.

One day he strolled out of his cardboard box and lurched towards Mr Page’s garden, perhaps because Mr Page’s peas were just growing nicely.

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Lurch had gone into the garden in the past, and Mr Page had just turned him round and he’d come back. Except on this particular day he’d gone to chapel so Lurch sauntered on, maybe all the way to the bus stop. He was never seen again.

Bunny Fluff had eyes the colour of blancmange and fur the colour of rice pudding. His hutch was a luxurious detached pad that my dad had made from timber and wire netting and Bunny Fluff enjoyed bounding around his apartment and then gambolling in the fenced off bit of the garden that was his domain.

Indeed, his hutch appeared so big that I bet my mates that I could get inside it and lie down. I managed to squeeze in and I have to report that it wasn’t comfortable in any way; indeed it was like one of those city hotels where the room is so small you have to stand outside to blink.

Just as I was developing painful cramp in my legs my mates put the bolt across the door and went home, leaving me banging on the roof to attract someone’s attention.

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Eventually Mr Page came and let me out, singing ‘Please Release Me’ in his chapel tenor.

And, as I said, Pussy Cat just faded away. She was my mother’s constant companion while my dad was out at work and there were hours of one-sided conversations between my mother and the (usually sleeping) cat.

My mother was a fan of the Radio 4 soap The Archers and she would spend ages explaining the plots to Pussy Cat until I was sure that if there was such a thing as Animal Mastermind, ‘Ambridge Past and Present’ would be her specialist subject.

Eventually, as I said, she became almost invisible on the settee, the constant engine of her purring gradually coming to a halt.

I sometimes imagine all three of them in a well-appointed pet café in the sky, talking about The Archers, and peas, and the joy of gambolling on a lawn.

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