Hamster-gate continues. Last Saturday, Caroline and I went out to dinner, leaving the children playing with Roxy in the company of a babysitter. I told them to put her back in her cage before they went to bed, making sure that all doors, etc. were securely fastened. In order to make sure they complied, I stressed that the consequence of her escaping would be certain death — just as I had before we lost Roxy Mark I.
When we came home at midnight, I checked the cage just to make sure the children had followed my instructions and, to my horror, discovered that the lid to Roxy’s sleeping compartment hadn’t been screwed down properly. Sure enough, the little Houdini had escaped. I looked in all the obvious places — under the sofa, behind the fridge, up the chimney — but there was no sign of her. She had vanished.
The following morning, the children were devastated. After a flurry of accusations and counter-accusations, the culprit was identified: Ludo, my seven-year-old son. He’d been tasked with putting Roxy back in her cage by the babysitter and, instead of using the main entrance, he’d lowered her into her bed and then forgotten to shut the lid.
‘I’m sorry, daddy,’ he said, fighting back the tears. ‘It was an accident.’
Sasha, my eight-year-old daughter, was unimpressed.
‘Murderer,’ she said.
After another fruitless search, we had a family conference and weighed up our options. Should we buy yet another hamster or just face the fact that we’re incapable of looking after one? This was Sasha’s view.
‘We’ve already lost two, not to mention our cat,’ she said. ‘We’re, like, the family that kills pets.’
But the three boys were keen to have another go, particularly Ludo who didn’t want to be responsible for the fact that we’d never own a pet again. So it was decided that we’d plonk down £10 and invest in Roxy Mark III.
Trouble is, would the owner of our local pet shop sell us one? Last time round, when Ludo had let slip that we’d lost Roxy Mark I, he’d subjected me to a 60-minute lecture on the dos and don’ts of hamster ownership. (I could now write a book on the subject.) We concluded that Caroline ought to make the purchase, hoping he wouldn’t recognise her as the buyer of the original Roxy three months ago. Children were banned from accompanying her on the grounds that they couldn’t be trusted not to disclose the fate of the previous two.
‘But let’s wait a couple of days,’ said Caroline. ‘You never know, she might turn up.’
Sure enough, she did re-materialise the following evening — at least, it seemed that way. At around 11 p.m. on Sunday night, I heard a scratching sound coming from behind the skirting board in the kitchen. It was slightly frenzied, as if poor Roxy was trapped in there, but short of jemmying the skirting away from the wall with a crow bar there was nothing I could do. About five minutes later it suddenly stopped and I thought, ‘Oh God. She’s probably died of a heart attack, consumed by panic as she fought to get out of a cramped, dark space.’
But no. On Monday night at around 2 a.m., after returning from a trip to Oxford to debate the future of journalism with Stephen Glover and Carl Wilkinson, I heard the scratching sound again, only this time it seemed to be coming from the downstairs lavatory. Could she have got all the way there via the skirting board?
I squatted down next to the loo to try and pinpoint exactly where the noise was coming from and that’s when I saw her. She was standing up on her hind legs in a little wastepaper basket, having evidently fallen in a few minutes earlier and been unable to climb out. I immediately scooped her up and returned her to her cage.
I cannot tell you the relief. You know how you attach special significance to an object that’s been lost and found? Well that goes double for hamsters. Ludo was literally dancing with joy the following morning and even Sasha acknowledged that the Young family might not be a bunch of evil pet killers after all. Best of all, it meant we didn’t have to return to the dreaded pet shop and face down Mr Sanctimonious.
Now if only we could find the first hamster and our cat, things really would be looking up.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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