Some of our pets

Some of our Pets

We didn’t have many pets at Number 54. A few dogs came and went, a couple of cats, a guinea pig or two and a white mouse. There was one dog, a brown mongrel that didn’t last very long. He'd developed a taste for clean washing hanging on the line, no matter how high it was he would just jump up and down trying to grab it with his teeth. Bedding ended up in shreds, I’m not sure where the dog ended up but I can guess.

I used to deliver papers on Sundays, it didn’t pay much, Scrooge’s grandson who owned the paper shop paid the grand sum of half a crown each week. Some of this enormous wealth went on my bike but I managed to save some and bought a white mouse in a cage. On the way home I must have thought “This isn’t a really good idea – Mum doesn’t like pets in the house, especially mice”. So Plan A went into action, keep the cage in the top cupboard of my closet, easy – no one will ever know.

Well for a while everything was fine, I used to go to bed at night, take the mouse into the bathroom and let it run around in the bath. I was in there for ages which lead Mum and Dad to believe I’d turned over a new leaf and was actually bathing. It was really difficult to clean out the cage – so I didn’t, this was my downfall.

Mum went in my room one day and wondered where I’d hidden my smelly socks, she could smell something – and it wasn’t a rat. So she found nothing in the main closet, got a chair and stood on it to look in the top cupboard. All she could see was the end of what looked like a yellow metal box so she pulled it out, just at head level, coming face to face with a really cute white mouse!

From what I remember she went downstairs and tried to tell my Dad, the story goes something like “Do you… do you know…what… do you know what your son has in his bedroom?”. Wonder what happened to the mouse, I was in trouble again.