Gerald Durrell - Fillets of Plaice

Quite close to the flat where we were staying was a shop which always had my undivided attention. It was a place called “The Aquarium”, and its window was full of great tanks full of brightly coloured fish and, what was even more interesting, rows of glass-fronted boxes that contained grass snakes, pine snakes, great green lizards and bulbous-eyed toads. I used to gaze longingly in the window at these beautiful creatures and I had a great desire to possess them. But as I already had a whole host of birds, two magpies and a marmoset in the flat, I felt that the introduction of any other livestock of any shape or form would bring down the wrath of the family upon me, and so I could only gaze longingly at these lovely reptiles.

Then, one morning, when I happened to pass the shop, my attention was riveted by a notice that was leaning up against an aquarium. It said, “Wanted: Young, reliable assistant”. I went back to the flat and thought about it for some time.

“They’ve got a job going in that pet shop down the road,” I said to my mother.

“Have they, dear?” she said, not really taking any notice.

“Yes. They say they want a young, reliable assistant. I... I thought of applying for it,” I said carelessly.

“What a good idea,” said Larry. “Then, perhaps, you could take all your animals there.”

“I don’t think they’d let him do that, dear,” said my mother.

“How much do you think they’d pay for a job like that?” I asked.

“Not very much, I shouldn’t think,” said Larry. “I doubt that you are what they mean by reliable.”

“Anyway, they’d have to pay me something, wouldn’t they?” I said.

“Are you old enough to be employed?” inquired Larry.

“Well, I’m almost sixteen,” I said.

“Well, go and have a shot at it,” he suggested.

So the following morning I went down to the pet shop and opened the door and went in. A short, slender, dark man with very large horn-rimmed spectacles danced across the floor towards me.

“Good morning! Good morning! Good morning, sir!” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“You, um..., you want an assistant...,” I said.

He cocked his head on one side and his eyes grew large behind his spectacles.

“An assistant,” he said. “Do you mean to say you want the job?”

“Er..., yes,” I said.

“Have you had any experience?” he inquired doubtfully.

“Oh, I’ve had plenty of experience,” I said. “I’ve always kept reptiles and fish and things like that. I’ve got a whole flatful of things now.”

The little man looked at me.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Sixteen... nearly seventeen,” I lied.

“Well,” he said, “we can’t afford to pay very much, you know. The overheads on this shop are something extraordinary. But I could start you off at one pound ten.”

“That’s alright,” I said. “When do I start?”

“You’d better start on Monday,” he said. “I think on Monday because then I can get all your cards stamped up and straight. Otherwise we get in such a muddle, don’t we? Now, my name’s Mr Romilly.”

I told him my name and we shook hands rather formally, and then we stood looking at each other. It was obvious that Mr Romilly had never employed anybody before and did not know quite what the form was. I thought perhaps I ought to help him out.

“Perhaps you could just show me round,” I suggested, “and tell me a few things that you will want me to do.”

“Oh, what an excellent idea,” said Mr Romilly. “An excellent idea!”

He danced round the shop waving his hands like butterfly wings and showed me how to clean out a fish tank, how to drop the mealworms into the cages of frogs and toads, and where the brush and broom were kept that we swept the floor with. Under the shop was a large cellar where various fish foods, nets and other things were kept, and it included a constantly running tap that dripped into a large bowl containing what at first glance appeared to be a raw sheep’s heart. This, on close inspection, turned out to be a closely knitted ball of threadlike tubifex worms. These bright red worms were a favourite food of all the fish and some of the amphibians and reptiles as well. I discovered that as well as the delightful things in the window there were hosts of other creatures in the shop besides — cases full of lizards, toads, tortoises and treacle-shiny snakes, tanks full of moist, gulping frogs, and newts with filled tails like pennants. After having spent so many months in dry, dusty and desiccated London, the shop was, as far as I was concerned, a Garden of Eden.

“Now,” said Mr Romilly, when he had shown me everything, “you start on Monday, hm? Nine o’clock sharp. Don’t be late, will you?”

I did not tell Mr Romilly that nothing short of death would have prevented me from being there at nine o’clock on Monday.

So at ten to nine on Monday morning I paced the pavement outside the shop until eventually Mr Romilly appeared, clad in a long black coat and a black Homburg hat, waving his bunch of keys musically.

“Good morning, good morning,” he trilled. “I’m glad to see you’re on time. What a good start.”

So we went into the shop and I started on the first chores of the day, which were to sweep the comparatively spotless floor clean and then to go round feeding little knots of wriggling tubifex to the fishes.

I very soon discovered that Mr Romilly, though a kindly man, had little or no knowledge of the creatures in his care. Most of the cages were most unsuitably decorated for the occupants’ comfort and, indeed, so were the fish tanks. Also, Mr Romilly worked on the theory that if you got an animal to eat one thing, you then went on feeding it with that thing incessantly. I decided that I would have to take a hand both in the cage decoration and also in brightening up the lives of our charges, but I knew I would have to move cautiously for Mr Romilly was nothing if not conservative.

“Don’t you think the lizards and toads and things would like a change from mealworms, Mr Romilly?” I said one day.

“A change?” said Mr Romilly, his eyes widening behind his spectacles. “What sort of a change?”

“Well,” I said, “how about wood lice? I always used to feed my reptiles on wood lice.”

“Are you sure?” said Mr Romilly.

“Quite sure,” I said.

“It won’t do them any harm, will it?” he asked anxiously.

“No,” I said, “they love wood lice. It gives them a bit of variety in their diet.”

“But where are we going to get them?” asked Mr Romilly despondently.

“Well, I expect there are plenty in the parks,” I said. “I’ll see if I can get some, shall I?”

“Very well,” said Mr Rornilly reluctantly, “if you’re quite sure they won’t do them any harm.”

So I spent one afternoon in the park and collected a very large tin full of wood lice, which I kept in decaying leaves down in the cellar, and when I thought that the frogs and the toads and the lizards had got a bit bored with the mealworms, I would try them on some meal-worm beetles, and then, when they had had a surfeit of those, I would give them some wood lice. At first, Mr Romilly used to peer into the cages with a fearful look on his face, as though he expected to see all the reptiles and amphibians dead. But when he found that they not only thrived on this new mixture but even started to croak in their cages, his enthusiasm knew no bounds.

My next little effort concerned two very large and benign Leopard toads which came from North Africa. Now, Mr Romilly’s idea of North Africa was an endless desert where the sun shone day and night and where the temperature was never anything less than about a hundred and ninety in the shade, if indeed any shade was to be found. So in consequence he had incarcerated these two poor toads in a small, glass-fronted cage with a couple of brilliant electric light bulbs above them. They sat on a pile or plain white sand, they had no rocks to hide under to get away from the glare, and the only time the temperature dropped at all was at night when we switched off the light in the shop. In consequence, their eyes had become milky and looked almost as though they were suffering from cataract, their skins had become dry and flaky, and the soles of their feet were raw.