A Young Man's Passage Read Online Free PDF

through the undergrowth, hungry and bedraggled but determined to find her way home. I was euphoric when she eventually turned up.
    Then a neighbour’s cat had kittens and we chose Robinson, a black-and-white number who did nothing her entire life but sleep in a cardboard box by the radiator. She died of kidney failure eventually, probably brought on from lack of use.
    Rodents were the next phase. After a moderate amount of pleading and assurances that we would do all the looking after, all three of us were allowed to go to the pet shop and make a selection. Frances chose Jasmine, a guinea pig whose ginger and white fur grew into pretty floral swirls but who was otherwise devoid of personality, just blank, distrustful, staring eyes. A bit like people who live in Chatham.
    My guinea pig Hildebrand, on the other hand, was as charming and delightful as a Jack Russell. She could recognise my footsteps as I minced down the garden path and would let out a cheery whistle like a London cabdriver passing a leggy blonde.
    She had long flowing black and white hair which I used to comb endlessly with a baby’s brush set and which billowed out behind her as she scampered behind me across the lawn. She was the Scarlett O’Hara of the cavy world, cocking her head coquettishly if she thought I had some celery or dandelion leaves hidden about my person.
    Beverley, to be different, got a mouse. Pip was beige with pink eyes and, as it turned out, pregnant. When she gave birth to six hairless, slug-like young, we opened the top of her cage to get a better look and invited the neighbouring children in too. Mice take it badly if they’re not left in peace at such a private time and Pip made her feelings clear overnight by eating her babies.
    The next morning Beverley ran in from the shed screaming. It was a scene of terrible carnage: Pip sat in the middle of her cage, a look of Myra Hindley about her, her stomach swollen with her own consumed offspring, the sawdust around her and her manic mouse-face red and wet with their blood. Scattered around her like mini footballs were their heads. Clearly Pip wasn’t the mothering type. This traumatic incident may well be the root cause of my dislike of all things beige.
    There was more horror to come when the Labrador from the children’s home at the end of our road leapt over the garden gate one sunny afternoon and attacked the guinea pig run. We came back from the park to find Jasmine dismembered on the lawn. I thought Hildebrand must have met a similar fate, but half an hour later she waddled out from under a rose bush and nibbled my toe.
    Jasmine was replaced with Patch, a seriously tan boy guinea pig, so named because he had a small white dot between his ears. To say Patch was oversexed would be an understatement. His low machine-gun-like mating call could be heard streets away and he would slowly hop from one back leg to the other as if the weight and urgency of his guinea-pig semen was a source of some discomfort. Fortunately Hildebrand was a keen recipient. Unlike Pip, Hildebrand was a proud and fastidious mother. I would skip round the garden, she would follow me and her brood would follow her, conga-fashion.
    When I was nine, my parents joined the property market and we moved to our first ‘proper’ home: 39 St Mark’s Road in Teddington, a fairly typical semi-detached three-bedroom house built in the 1920s.
    It was also directly opposite the Sacred Heart Primary School, which was very handy for me. I made friends with a boy called Barry Jones who lived up the road, the son of a big emotional Italian woman and a small, serious, preoccupied man.
    He had guinea pigs too, and took on several of Hildebrand’s litter. When his started breeding he just kept them all. They had a big walled garden and his brood lived in a disused greenhouse. I remember going round there several years later and the whole place was completely overrun with wild and untamed guinea pigs of every shape and size, dozens