I don’t remember who chose the names for our two gorgeous wee guinea pigs, Cocoa and Bramble, or where we got them from – most likely the sawdust-scented pet shop I always begged to visit on any garden centre trip – but I do remember the night my mum saved those little beauties’ lives.
They weren’t our first pets, or our last. We had a budgie, a hamster and two incredibly loving dogs that I, as a young child, wished were horses and often tried to clamber on to, much to their annoyance.
The guinea pigs, however, felt a little bit more like my pets, perhaps because I held them more than the other pets; they didn’t fly away from me or flee back to their wheel when I tried to grab a clumsy cuddle. They sat on my lap, all tawny-russet patched, soft and snuffling. They let me stroke them and feed them; the sound of them greedily munching clover was a favourite soundtrack of my early childhood. I would say that I looked after them, but I am sure it was my mum who did most of the caring and cleaning of cages.
The night she saved their lives is for ever imprinted like a slow-motion movie in my mind. My mum was always saving people’s lives, or at least that is how it seemed when I was a kid. She was a nurse at the local surgery and walking through town holding her hand was like strutting a red carpet; every second person we met was a patient with something to thank her for. Every week, she returned from work with presents people had bought her to say thank you – for saving their lives, I assumed.
Until that night, however, I had never seen this in action.
It was deep into the darkest hours of sleep when I heard my mother screaming in the back garden. I dashed out of my bed and down the stairs to peer through the glass panelling of the back door. There, in the middle of the garden, bare feet freezing on the dewy grass and with the chill of the November night nipping at her bare legs, stood my mother, still in her nightie. She had Cocoa tucked under one arm, Bramble under the other, and was shouting and swinging her body fiercely to fight off a ferret who had come hunting our beloved pets – and who was, at that moment, dangling from my mother’s arm, its teeth firmly clamped in the flesh of poor Cocoa.
The battle ensued for what seemed like hours to a sleepy seven-year-old. Finally, my mum was victorious: the ferret fled and Cocoa received the best nursing aftercare in the region.
How my mum heard the squeaky commotion at 2am from her bed on the other side of the house I will never know; nor how she convinced the ferret to let go. Either way, that image of her stuck for ever in my mind, the guinea pigs cuddled in her arms to protect them from the world, just as I would be each night for a story before bed.
The ferret, so far as I know, never returned to feast on our furry friends. But the guinea pigs did eventually die from … well, having finished their life, I think? I hope.
Their passing was my first experience of mourning. Shoebox coffins were meticulously prepared – a curious craft project – and a small wooden cross strung together for the garden patch where first one, then the other, was buried. I still think of them, and the comfort they brought, whenever I spot a big juicy patch of clover in any field I am walking through.
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