[2007] THE1950s

0155 Chinchillas and My Cat

With me to support at public school, my parents were always looking for moneymaking schemes.  They started a number, but – rather like me much later - never succeeded in any.

One of these was breeding chinchillas.  We read an article travel in a magazine about chinchillas, coming from the high Andes, which had the most beautiful fur in the world.  I only ever saw one chinchilla coat and that was worn by one of most elegant women I glimpsed -- who was, unfortunately, clearly the mistress of a Mafia godfather!

The article also explained how people were farming chinchillas to make money from selling their pelts. So my father went off to make a number of cages - which would be kept in the outhouse -- confident that they would soon to full of young chinchillas bred from just one pair.  We bought them from a gentleman who lived in the best part of Chester. We naively thought he must have made a fortune from them.  They had actually appeared on television in one of the animal programs!

They were great fun to watch. They were well and truly acrobatic; rushing round the sides of the cage like a wall death rider.  Their coats really were beautiful, and would have made wonderful coats. Unfortunately the one thing they didn't do was breed!  We later found out that chinchillas aren't very good at doing it, unless they see other chinchillas doing it around them!  They eventually did produce a litter of two young. One of these died, closely followed by its father -- so we ended up with two chinchillas. These were sold, for pelting, for the princely sum of £5; when we had paid several hundred [pounds for them.  Most of my parent’s moneymaking schemes ran into the sand in much the same way!

I will add a footnote here, about my one and only pet, Smoky. He was a grey cat, who I loved dearly. He was always getting beaten up by other cats, and I spent a significant amount of time throwing clods of earth at these – to no avail! His one great adventure was when our car, the Ford, skidded and turned over on the way to the cottage. He escaped from the car and disappeared into the distance. As it was something like five miles from the cottage, across the hills, we thought we would never see him again. However, a couple of months later, Sid was at the cottage when a very thin Smoky came up to him. How he had found his way over the hills we never found out.

I have always preferred cats to dogs, but we have never had a cat since that time. In the 1970s we did have a dog, for a short period, since Miles pestered us to have one; ‘He would look after it’! Of course he didn’t. What was worse, although we bought an adult Golden Labrador because we had been assured he was fully trained, he was a menace. The final straw was when he dragged me headlong through the stream in Bushey Park. After that he went to a new home!

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