Hazel (5 page)

‘Hazel,’ he said, ‘if someone was to come along and offer me a cabbage stalk, I shouldn’t say no.’

‘I should,’ said Hazel.

Early in the morning, a guinea pig does not always listen to what his wife is saying, so Tobacco continued, ‘Or a nice bit of lettuce. I shouldn’t say no to a nice bit of
lettuce.’

‘Don’t feel like eating,’ said Hazel.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s all right,’ said Hazel. ‘Just don’t feel too like my food, that’s all.’

‘Are you all right, girl?’ asked Tobacco, suddenly anxious for Hazel’s welfare.

‘Oh, I’m all
right
,’ said Hazel. ‘Just got a
twinge
, that’s all.’

‘A twinge, eh? What sort of a twinge? A twinge of hunger?’

‘More like just a twinge,’ said Hazel. ‘A twinge inside, like.’

‘You’ll be better when you’ve got a drop of grub inside you,’ said Tobacco.

‘All the same,’ said Hazel, ‘think I’ll just go into the bedroom. Have a lie down in the hay.’

An hour later Mum brought Tobacco his breakfast, and after she had put some bran in his bowl and some lettuce leaves on the living room floor, she opened the bedroom door and peered into the
hay. Then Mum called, ‘Children! Children! Come and see!’

Tobacco had been thinking that his wife was being a long time in the bedroom. He wondered what all the excitement was about and between mouthfuls of a really delicious piece of lettuce he called
through, ‘Everything all right, dear?’

‘I think so,’ Hazel called back.

‘Grub’s up,’ said Tobacco.

‘Ar.’

But she did not come. So Tobacco pushed his nose into the bedroom. And there he saw Hazel and three bedraggled little guinea pigs lying beside her in the hay.

‘Now how did
those
get in there?’ was Tobacco’s first thought. And then he realised what had happened. He knew why Hazel was so quiet that morning. He stared at the
mystery of it. Half an hour before, Hazel had just been an overweight guinea pig. And now – here were three
new
guinea pigs. He knew where they had come from, but even so it felt
like magic. And the magic feeling made him both sad and happy at once.

By then Mum and the little girl were opening the bedroom door and peering inside.

‘Don’t touch them,’ said Mum. ‘Just look.’

‘Oh, look!’ said the girl. ‘She’s going to feed them.’

The little guinea pigs, who still looked rather bedraggled and surprised to be existing at all, were beginning to cluster around their mother for some milk.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ asked Tobacco.

‘Yes,’ said Hazel.

‘Oh listen, they’re
squeaking
,’ said the girl.

‘Squeaking or speaking,’ said Mum.

And then, instead of feeding the babies all at once, Hazel lay down and … had another baby!

It was a very small baby, not much bigger than a mouse, and for a while it lay perfectly still. Mum and the little girl and Tobacco all watched, and they all feared the worst. But the baby was
not dead. Hazel was a good mother. She cleaned it up, and she licked it, and she petted it, and soon the tiny, mouse-like little guinea pig was staggering about with the others.

‘That all?’ asked Tobacco. Naturally he was proud and pleased to be a father, but enough is enough.

‘I
think
so,’ said Hazel.

And before long the four babies had all been suckled, and were lying contentedly against their mother’s soft, furry body.

There was no room for all six of them in one hutch. Mum insisted after this that Tobacco be moved into a separate hutch, which made him very desolate and lonely. His hutch was
at right angles to Hazel’s, so they could see each other through the wire. Every morning he would call out, ‘All right, girl?’ And Hazel would reply, ‘Right you are.’
Each evening Tobacco would say, ‘Sleep well, girl!’ and Hazel would say, ‘Right you are.’ But all through the day and night, he was lonely without her. She was not so lonely
without him. She had four other guinea pigs for company and found it an exhausting occupation keeping them fed and trying to teach them some manners.

The guinea pigs themselves did not know about Mum’s decree. Mum had decreed that two guinea pigs were enough and, rather meanly, Dad and the boy had agreed with her. It had been further
decreed that when the guinea pigs were four weeks old, they should be taken to the pet shop. This was only sensible.

‘So you must not get too fond of them,’ said Mum to the little girl. ‘There really is no point.’

Of course there is no
point
in getting fond of anything. It was easy to say that they should not get fond of the guinea pigs. But if you were seeing them every day, as the little girl
was, you couldn’t
help
getting fond of them.

So it was agreed that the babies of Hazel and Tobacco should be called One, Two, Three, and Four. ‘One’ was a cheeky, rather brash guinea pig, nearly all white with a few brown
patches on his back. He was the first who started to eat solids, and he strutted about the cage as if he owned it. ‘Two’ was a tortoiseshell and white male, slightly more mysterious in
character. He was very fond of his food and kept himself to himself.

‘Three’ was an amiably stupid brown and white female who very early on took to imitating her mother’s phrases. But she never knew the meaning of them. If Hazel called out,
‘Come and have some milk!’, ‘Three’ would rush into the bedroom saying, ‘That would be right.’ If Hazel licked ‘Three’ behind the ears and said,
‘Why can’t you be
neat
?’, ‘Three’ would answer, ‘Right you are.’ And when she was settling down to sleep in the hay, very sleepy with her eyes
shut, ‘Three’ sometimes murmured, ‘Wouldn’t mind a nice run on the lawn.’

So much for the guinea pigs known as ‘One’, ‘Two’, and ‘Three’.

But ‘Four’ was the little girl’s favourite. She liked ‘Four’ because she was small and brown and vulnerable. She liked ‘Four’ because she chirruped when
you picked her up. She liked ‘Four’ because she was the baby of the family. Most of all she liked ‘Four’ because she was ‘Four’. In fact the girl liked
‘Four’ so much that she secretly called her by her proper name. When she was alone by the hutch, the girl would say, ‘Hello One! Hello Two! Hello Three!’ to the first guinea
pig babies. But when ‘Four’ appeared, looking round to make sure that no one was near, the girl whispered, ‘Hello, Beryl!’

So of course Mum was right, and there was no point in getting fond of them. But by the end of the month the girl was very fond of the baby guinea pigs, especially of Beryl.

It had been agreed that the girl should go with Mum when she took the little pigs to the pet shop.

‘I bet you blub,’ said the boy.

‘I shan’t,’ said the girl. And she had really made up her mind that however sad she felt in the pet shop, she was not going to cry.

They took the guinea pigs to the pet shop in a basket which they showed to the pet shop man.

‘Oh!’ he said. ‘They
have
been well looked after.’ And he got them out of the basket, One, Two and Three.

‘Just three is it? They all seem fine healthy specimens.’

‘No,’ said Mum, ‘there are four. There’s another one down in the hay.’

‘So there is,’ said the man, lifting out Beryl. ‘She’s not such a fine specimen as the others, is she?’

‘She was born last,’ said Mum.

‘That would account for it,’ said the man. But to the girl at that moment it seemed perfectly obvious that Beryl was the most beautiful guinea pig in the world.

‘Right-ho!,’ said the man. ‘I don’t know if I can sell this last one – but the other three, I could give you one pound each.’

And the girl thought, ‘Oh
good
, I shall be able to keep Beryl after all.’

But Mum said, ‘Please take all four. We simply don’t have room for the last one – if you didn’t like it, I’m afraid we should …’

The girl looked despondently at Mum. What
did
she mean? There would be
plenty
of room in the two hutches for just one extra guinea pig.

‘Oh, all right,’ said the man. ‘But I can give you only fifty pence for the little one. She
is
the runt of the litter.’

The man put the little pigs into a cardboard box and oh! how they squeaked. Seeing the girl’s face become anxious the man said, ‘I’m just putting them in here until I’ve
got the window ready.’

And then Mum and the girl went home, saying goodbye to the pigs in the shop. The girl had been very good and not cried. Walking home, the girl was also very good and didn’t cry. But when
she got home, she ran down to the hutches to talk to Tobacco and Hazel, and there she did cry – quietly, but for a long time.

Guinea pigs have shorter memories than we do. About ten minutes after the little pigs had gone to the pet shop, Tobacco called across from his cage to Hazel’s, ‘Everything all
right?’

And she had replied, ‘Right you are.’

‘Kids all right?’ he’d asked.

Now
kids
. Hazel knew there had been something on her mind. She had run into the living room to get them, and at that moment she had got distracted. A bowl of bread and milk it was that
distracted her. And by the time she had eaten her fill, she had forgotten that she was looking for her children. Tobacco’s question reminded her.

‘Don’t know where they’ve got to,’ she called back.

‘They’ll be in the run – that’s it,’ said Tobacco. ‘Out on the lawn.’

By the time the girl came to commiserate with the grieving parents, both Hazel and Tobacco had more or less forgotten that they had ever
had
any children.

‘Are you sad, darling Hazel?’ asked the girl through her tears.

But Hazel called back politely, ‘Thank you for the bread and milk, ma’am. Very tasty.’

‘That’s right,’ joined in Tobacco. ‘A very tasty piece of bread you give me over here and all.’

‘Oh listen
how
they are squeaking and missing their babies,’ said the girl.

Mum had come to join her.

‘They’ll be all right,’ said Mum. ‘They’ll get over it.’

‘If you could ever manage to get us a
parsnip
,’ called Tobacco. ‘Now speaking for myself – I very much like parsnip.’

‘Oh it is
sad
,’ said Mum. ‘I think he really does miss the little ones.’

The girl slept, but she woke every early the next morning. She knew as soon as she woke up that there was something to be sad about but, at first, she could not remember what it was. And then
the memory of yesterday returned with dreadful force, and she thought of the baby guinea pigs, squeaking in that box in the pet shop. She got up and put on her red flannel dressing gown and went
downstairs and opened the back door. Outside in the garden the weather was sunny and cheerful. The birds were singing in the eaves of the house and in the forsythia bush. And somehow the fact that
the world of nature looked and sounded so cheerful made the girl all the sadder. She went to the garden shed and opened the door.