My mother was not a great lover of animals although she was a member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds ( RSPB ) and a supporter of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ( RSPCA ). It was not until I was in Nairobi in the 1970s that I had an animal in my life…a Rhodesian Ridgeback whose purpose was to keep Black Kenyans away from the house…more guard dog than pet.
However my Swedish wife grew up with cats in the 1950s so when we moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1980 with our two young children cats returned to her life…and entered mine. Female cats take a shine to me…singling me out from the group for their feline affections. But unlike the English Country Set…I have never devoted significant waking hours to the care of dogs and horses…and the destruction of foxes.
I do not dislike animals and have never been instinctively cruel to them like many small boys…preferring to step over small crawly things rather than squish them underfoot. But I have never been one to form deep attachments to my fellow creatures…my vegetarian tendencies being driven by factory farming and health concerns. But I am an astute observer of human nature and notice that others have rather different Animal Lover Credentials to myself.
Over the course of the year Miss Kendall has spent many happy hours tapping away at a keyboard a couple of feet away from me in Rye Library. As her heap of scribblings got bigger and bigger my curiosity got the better of me and I asked her what she was up to. ‘Family History…everything I find out I write up and send to others in the family.’
One thing led to another…as these things do…and I enquired about other things…like the wicker basket attached to her shopping trolley. ‘That,’ I was told in no uncertain terms, ‘is Upsie!’ I peeked inside the wicker basket and…lo and behold…inside was a real live pigeon cocking its head and peering back at me. ‘That,’ I was told disdainfully, ‘is not a pigeon but a collared dove. And It is a He and has a name. Address him as Upsie if you please’.
My mother had a bird table in the back garden and dutifully fed the Robins, House Sparrows and Blue Tits each winter…and shooed away the Pigeons. My reading of Andy Capp had prepared me for the fact that ‘oop-north’ they race pigeons. But the idea of taking dickie birds out for walkies struck me as medieval. King John took hawks out hunting 800 years ago but encountering someone on Lion Street walking the dove was something else.
Mind you Connie would come home from time to time with a Swan or a Heron under her arm…broken wings usually from the power lines on Romney Marsh. Then there was Harry the Pigeon who made a mess of the Cockpit Bunk for a couple of weeks before Connie released him back into the wild…at the second attempt. The first time she let him go downstream and he never made it across to the other bank so she ended up rowing frantically to fetch a very damp pigeon in the dinghy. Pigeons don’t swim. Two days later she walked him to a copse and put him on a branch.
Upsie died four days ago. Miss Kendall came into Rye Library looking rather upset. I offered my condolences and mumbled something about an Ode to Upsie-Daisie. Two days later I got two pages of hand-written details on the Life and Times of Upsie…and a dossier of coloured pictures. Miss Kendall tells me she finds it easy to bond with other species and she is quite certain Upsie was happy being fussed over for their two years together. He loved going out with her to the fields…instead of being indoors…to see other birds and enjoy the fresh air, sunshine, trees and sky.
Upsie was ill and unable to move when Miss Kendall found him in her garden on Udimore Road. He was suffering from a virus that caused him to lose his balance. He struggled to stand up but would eventually topple over onto his back. But he was a brave little fellow and it was not long before he was walking up and down the hall…even flying short distances although his right wing was droopy. Indeed after his first moult it never regained its flight feathers.
Upsie had two years of good health but the virus he had when Miss Kendall found him is one of those that lay dormant…like Malaria in humans…and can flare up at any time. A few weeks ago Upsie started to have neck spasms…a sign that the virus was active once more. The local vet…a young South African woman…was called out and ended Upsie’s suffering with a lethal injection. To Miss Kendall Upsie was Family so she saw nothing in the slightest bit surprising about grieving for a Collared Dove as she might for a son or a sister.
