A Young Man's Passage Read Online Free PDF Page A

he was soft and sleepy, his wild staring amber eyes replaced at some point with plain black buttons. I see him now on a shelf in my bedroom, looking kind and long-suffering despite being covered in a thin layer of dust.
    Anyway, once we were all loaded into the car at the crack of dawn, my father cast a final eye over his troops. He glared at Tiger in his gorgeous silk frock.
    ‘We’re not going anywhere till Tiger takes that dress off,’ he said with an air of determination.
    From an early age I sensed that I wasn’t quite the only son my father had in mind. I wasn’t very boyish. Football and cars weren’t my thing, try as he might to interest me in them. He tried to involve me in decorating once, telling me it would be a useful skill when I was grown up.
    ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘I’ll get a man in.’

    WHEN I WAS seven we moved from the police flats in Surbiton to a police house in Teddington: 37 Blandford Road. It had a garden and everything.
    When the time came for us to set off on our annual holiday, the Zephyr’s roofrack and boot loaded up with luggage, it was pouring with rain. My mother began one of her long, improvised stories, which lasted until we reached our destination. It was about a disastrous family holiday when it rained all day every day and there was nothing for it but to go and buy a puppy. As it happened it never stopped raining for us either and so the story came true.
    At a loss to entertain three children who were expecting fun in the sun, ice creams and sand castles, and unable to keep us cooped up in the damp cottage in St Ives all the time, my parents drove us all around Cornwall, stopping at various kennels to view the puppies. We saw all sorts and then had to decide. I was quite sure I wanted a beagle but they weren’t ready to leave their mother and would have had to be sent to London by train in a box, so we decided on a long-haired miniature dachshund and called him Monty.
    My grandmother wasn’t impressed when she heard the news. ‘Fancy getting a German dog!’
    Our choice was not a wise one as things turned out. As the months passed it became apparent there was nothing miniature about Monty at all. He grew and grew until he was the size of a low hairy sofa. Bad tempered and destructive, he would bare his teeth and growl at anyone who so much as looked at him.
    I had a farmyard animal set supplemented with lions, elephants and a hippo. I’d shove a plimsoll under the green rug in my bedroom and have an instant hillside. Tom the farmer rode round on his tractor tending to his sheep and cows, then moved further up the hill to where the more exotic creatures lived. One fateful day, Monty chewed off both his legs. His arms, which until then had reached out at 90 degrees, the better to clutch the steering wheel, were also nipped and twisted. They no longer boasted two manly cupped hands, forever in the gripping position – not that Tom let that stop him. He carried on as normal. As did his wife, I’m pleased to say. Jill, a bucket-holding, pinnied farmer’s wife, lost both her legs up to the knee in the same incident. But she was there, leaning against the farmhouse door the very next morning.
    Monty didn’t just snap and nip and chew small plastic things, he attacked with intent. Excuses were always made for him until he bit my father. Then his days at Blandford Road were numbered. Off he went to live a life of luxury in the Manor House in Norfolk. As I recall the plan had been to have him put down but we children were so distraught at the thought of such premeditated murder that my grandparents stepped in and saved his bacon. The country life suited him and within weeks he was a placid, good-natured animal, doted on by his new keepers.
    Despite this experience, my interest in animals grew. We got a black cat called Cindy from the RSPCA. She disappeared over the back of the garden into Bushey Park and didn’t come home for weeks, and I lay awake at night imagining her creeping