My family and other animals pt 1

Because I am still sick and therefore doing not very much at all I thought I'd try and remember all the animals I have had in my life.

My very first actual animal memory is of a very large ginger cat. It was enormous and was sitting on a very high window sill that came all the way up to my eyes. It was waving its tail. I would have been around three. And I have the scar above my eye. I also remember being told it was my fault as I shouldn't have bothered the cat!

This was in West Africa (Sierra Leone) in the late '50s and it was around this time I remember watching out a window and seeing a snake come out of a stone retaining wall and eat a frog.

The next pet memory I have is of Hong Kong. We hadn't been there long and were still staying in a hotel waiting for our accommodation to be arranged. Somehow we managed to adopt a small black kitten. She had a Siamese meow and my father said she sounded like the Chinese singer the hotel provided for the regular evening entertainment. She thus became Ming Ming. This was 1961. We moved into a flat and adopted another cat. This was a black and white male with a squinched up tail who was named, obviously, Squinch.

Something happened to Squinch and we ended up with another black and white male. I can't remember his original name but after he tried to catch the fish in the fish tank and knocked a plant pot on his tail breaking it (the tail, not the plant pot) he became Squinch II.

Whenever we went back to the UK on leave we would stay with or near my maternal grandparents and they always had animals. 

In 1967 we were on leave when the Hong Kong riots escalated and it was decided I would be safer in boarding school as the secondary school I would have been starting was on the other side of the harbour. I had no say in this, by the way, being the ripe old age of 10. My younger brother had just been diagnosed with Perthes disease and I wasn't that keen on being left behind when the rest of the family headed back to HK. I was placed in a boarding school while the family ended the holiday in England. I was not impressed that I was stuck in school while they were having a wonderful time gadding about the South of England. When they did head back I would see the awful incidents reported on the nightly news. I was too young to understand that news generally reported the bad shit. (For a long time I used to think that Brief was a country in SE Asia as every evening they would say "here is the news in brief" and show commentary on the Vietnam war). I spent the summer holidays with my grandparents and they bought me a black Labrador who was named Jonathon after a black lab my mother had when she was a kid. He and I used to spend hours wandering through the woods and fields behind my grandparents cottage. He was a good companion for a lonely 10/11 year old girl.

By the end of a year at boarding school my parents heeded my constant pleas and I was taken out and sent to a new secondary school that had opened early on the Island and was therefore closer and safer to access. I used to take the Peak Tram to school and back every day! (Jonathon lived to a right old age and was much loved by my grandparents. I saw him twice again).

In 1971 we left Hong Kong. Ming Ming and Squinch were taken to a new home. I now realise that the new home was the one way ticket to the vet.

After a stay in Perth (there was no work for my father) we came to Melbourne and when it was apparent we would stay here my mother got a Siamese cat. They were watching a show one night on Lions. Dad (again!) commented "those are Maxi Mogs - that's a mini-mog" and she was thereafter known as Mini - which mum said was short for Wilhelmina ... yeah mum.

Once we bought a house here my parents were able to get a dog and we welcomed Sally - a gorgeous black lab who failed at being a guide dog.

She was followed by Sandi, a yellow lab. I think I had moved out of home by then.

Part 2 will come another time where I start getting my own animals!