Shuttlecock

[5]

And why did I want a pet hamster?

It was because of the hamster we kept in our class-room at primary school — in a green cage, beside the dank-smelling sink where we used to wash out paint brushes and jam jars. Every week two of us would be chosen as monitors to look after the hamster, to feed it and clean out its cage, and every Friday one lucky person would be selected to take the hamster home, to be its guardian over the weekend.

Our class-master was a man called Forster. Perhaps it was Forester, but that, maybe, is just fanciful association. One of the subjects Mr Forster used to teach us was Nature Study. From what I gather from Martin and Peter, Nature Study is not a subject they teach any more in primary schools — and that, I can’t help thinking, is a bad thing. Our school was in Wimbledon. There is quite a lot of Nature in Wimbledon, as London suburbs go; but I never really thought of Nature as something ordinary and familiar. Mr Forster’s twice-weekly lessons gave me an impression of Nature as a rare and mysterious commodity. I didn’t think of it as a principle, as a word, or even as a collection of multifarious items, like the pictures of buds and toadstools Mr Forster drew on the blackboard. I saw it as a stuff, which could be gathered, or mined like gold, if only you knew where to find it. Above all, it was something quite separate and distinct from me.

Our class-room was a dim, gloomy room with a view of a dim, walled-round asphalt playground. I don’t remember it too well, but I remember its smell: a mixture of chalk, floor-polish, water-colour paints and the various, spicy and ever-fascinating smells of my class-mates. In those days I registered other people not by their names and all the other identity tags but by smells and indefinable peculiarities. As if people were really only, somehow, indistinct outlets from which exuded scents, hints of some far-off source. I have forgotten the names of my class-mates, but I still remember their smells. There were certain girls who had a sharp ammoniac smell, and certain boys with a soft, dull smell, like that of much-used India rubber. Mr Forster had a reassuring, reliable smell, like the smell of wood, and just above his upper lip he had a strange and intriguing birth-mark, like some dark, fossilized fruit. As for myself, I believed I was odourless and nondescript — as if I were made from something that didn’t exist.

Then one day Mr Forster carried into the class-room this green cage with a wire-mesh front and something living inside it. And in producing the hamster before us, like a conjuror, he used the words — as if he were revealing to us a fragment of some precious lost treasure — ‘a part of nature’. It was these words, I swear it, and not any sentimental child’s craving for a ‘pet’, for a fluffy thing with legs, which sowed the seeds of my desire for a hamster of my own. How conscientiously I carried out my duties, when it came to my turn, as weekly monitor. How yearningly I waited for my moment, which was only to come once in the school year, to bear the hamster home on Friday afternoon. How jealously I longed to possess a part of nature.

But, when my parents at last yielded and took me one Saturday to the pet shop, what became of this reverence? Did I get up every morning to take out my little golden piece of nature, cherish, love and adore it? No. I turned into this sadist, this power-monger, this refiner of cruelties. What became of my love? For what else is love — don’t tell me it is anything less simple, less obvious — than being close to nature? What became even of my possessiveness? I remember that near the back door of our house in Wimbledon there was a little kitchen garden, a patch of walled-in earth in which my mother planted mint, sage, parsley and, for good measure, a clump of lavender (these plants, by the way, she used to talk to, just like Marian). On this patch of earth, one warm day, I once made the experiment of letting out my hamster from its cage. When it was placed on the ground it sniffed cautiously at first. Then instinct took hold of it. Making a sudden dash for the corner of the patch, it began tunnelling, at a staggering speed, into the earth. I made a move to pull it back by the hind legs. But I had been so taken by surprise, and it was digging so frantically that by the time I attempted this it was already too deep to be grasped. I could see its pink tail-stump and frenetic haunches disappearing beyond recovery. I recall quite distinctly what my feeling was at this moment. It was not fear that I might lose my precious hamster, as indeed might have happened. It was outrage, it was fury, that it had got itself into a position where I no longer had control over it. I started to claw blindly at the soil. In fact, I need not have worried. Instinct had returned, but without a clear sense of direction. The little thing had tunnelled into one of the corners of the patch, and after a short while it came up against the concrete foundations of the retaining walls. Here it huddled, enjoying a few moments of spurious liberty, before my digging hands discovered it. Needless to say, I punished it severely.

Now let me tell you something. We are all looking for a space where we can be free, where we cannot be reached, where we are masters. Let me tell you something else — about my hamster. Before I got it I was a pretty unruly child — the only child of my parents but more, very often, than they could cope with. I made their life hell at times — my father’s wallopings and my mother’s exasperated pleas proved it. Once I even bit my father’s hand and I swear my teeth touched the raw bone in his finger. At school Mr Forster — or Forester — was about the only teacher who could command my obedience. But after I had my hamster all this changed. I became a docile, dutiful, even an exemplary son. The ‘Conduct’ entries on my school reports underwent complete transformation. I remember it was that year that I actually volunteered to read the lesson in morning assembly — ‘Consider the lilies’ if I recall it correctly — and that I astonished my parents by little kindnesses such as making tea for them on Sunday mornings and offering to weed the garden. And all that changed again when my hamster — my golden hamster, my Sammy whom I remembered today with such pangs — died.