The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (25 page)

I went inside to fetch the hedgehog a saucer of milk, vaguely remembering the time – probably in 1986, or 1987 – when my mum and dad had fed the same thing to a hedgehog that their friend Jean had accidentally stepped on outside our back door. By the time I came back, though, the hedgehog was gone. As it transpired, this was a good job, since I soon found out that hedgehogs are dangerously lactose intolerant. It turned out that ‘it’s good to feed hedgehogs milk’ was one of those misguided bits of folk wisdom I had been told as a child in the eighties, along with ‘Cats on the continent prefer to be stroked backwards’ and ‘Girls like you more if you use hair gel’. Milk could in fact be considered one of hedgehogs’ main enemies, alongside slug pellets, badgers and cars.

As someone who lives in the British countryside, it’s easy to take hedgehogs for granted. If you’d never heard of hedgehogs and you saw one in your garden, you’d probably run up to the next human you saw, grab them furiously by the lapels and tell them that some kind of apocalypse was coming, but because we see them so often, we tend to think ‘Oh look – a creature entirely covered in needles who lives in the undergrowth: how normal’ instead. They’d always seemed like gentle souls to me, victims of the animal world – arguably more likely to strike up a friendship
with a cat like The Bear than with one of life’s ostensible winners, such as Ralph – and, feeling sad that I’d scared this one off, and to learn that their numbers had fallen by twenty-five per cent in Britain in the last decade, I decided it was time I found out more about them.

One surprising detail I learned about hedgehogs is the common belief that the first thing you should do if you see one is weigh it. A hedgehog that weighs under 600 grams – which will usually be one that has been born late, in June or July – might not survive the winter, and needs to be rehabilitated by someone with proper hedgehog knowledge before being released back into the wild. Unfortunately, I’d not known this when I’d seen the hedgehog with Ralph – nor that the fact that it had been out in the open in daylight was a bad sign – and could scarcely have presumed it. Weighing just isn’t the first thing on my mind when I see a wild animal. I don’t spot, say, a skinny muntjac deer and think, ‘RIGHT! Time to get the scales out.’ What I tend to think is, ‘Maybe this one won’t be like all the others, and will come and live permanently in my garden, and let me call it Bruce, or Clive.’ But, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, there are a large number of underweight hedgehogs wandering through the undergrowth of Britain, as industrial agriculture reduces the amount of macro-invertebrate prey available to them. This reduction in prey has meant that their competition with badgers for it has got nasty. Hedgehogs don’t tend to run in packs, and would probably find it hard to take down a grown badger
even if they did. So – and I realise there aren’t many opportunities to make this statement at the present time – the badgers are winning.

Here are a couple of other surprising things I found out about hedgehogs: it’s illegal to drive them through the state of Pennsylvania, and the well-known 1980s nature TV presenter David Bellamy sometimes eats them, often accompanied by herbs. I learned the latter in the section about hedgehogs as a roadkill delicacy in Hugh Warwick’s definitive hedgehog memoir-cum-bible,
A Prickly Affair
. Warwick also taught me that hedgehogs have been known to scale walls and turn up in people’s first-floor bedrooms. Julie, a friend of a friend in Norfolk, who could be found fostering around a dozen hedgehogs at any one time, told me that they can travel up to twelve miles in one night. Warwick puts it at more like four kilometres. Whatever the case, they move more swiftly than many of us give them credit for.

A month or so after Ralph’s dalliance with the hedgehog in the garden, I visited Shepreth Wildlife Park in Hertfordshire, which hosts one of the country’s biggest hedgehog hospitals, and met its curator, Rebecca Willers. With her hardworking team, Rebecca was researching better ways to care for and understand hedgehogs, including the possibility of fitting them with GPS tracking systems. Underweight or injured hogs – one, tragically, had been the victim of a garden strimmer – were usually brought to Shepreth by thoughtful members of the public. ‘One hedgehog arrived here alone in a taxi,’ Rebecca told me. ‘The driver said the fare was already covered. It had come
forty miles, all the way from Watford.’

Rebecca and Julie both emphasised the point that people shouldn’t try to turn wild hedgehogs into pets: that their true home is in the wild. When I visited Julie and her hedgehogs at her barn conversion, ten miles or so from my house, she showed me a hedgehog whose spines were half-white, rather than the usual browny-beige. ‘It’s probably mated with one of the domesticated albino ones people have as pets,’ she explained.

Julie’s teenage daughter, Jessica – who got the idea of looking after hedgehogs after overhearing a conversation in her local pet shop involving a lady who said she had ‘a load of poorly birds and hedgehogs running around her front room’ – loves caring for the hogs but, after they’ve recovered and reached a healthy weight, they go back into the wild. The one exception was George, the hedgehog who lived in Julie and Jessica’s garden. George was perfectly at liberty to go elsewhere if he wanted to, but seemed to prefer to stick around.

‘We named George after a vet we took him to when he was poorly,’ Julie said.

‘He’s not Californian, by any chance?’

‘Who, the hedgehog?’

‘No, the vet.’

‘Yes. He is, as a matter of fact. He really loves hedgehogs, too, and knows lots about them. Do you know him?’

I thought back to George the vet’s kind, valiant efforts to cure Shipley, and recalled how Gemma and I had cooed his name experimentally
at Graham a few months previously. I wondered just how many different animals my neighbourhood supervet now had named after him.

I headed out into Julie’s garden with her brother-in-law, Phil, who lived next door, to meet George (the spiny version, not the undervalued zoological genius), but at first he was nowhere to be seen. There was a creature in one of the small, doorless wooden hutches where George liked to sleep, but it plainly wasn’t him. For a start, this creature was significantly bigger than any hedgehog I’d ever set eyes on. Second, it was covered in dusty dark grey fur. Third, it was, to all intents and purposes, dead.

Phil’s reaction to seeing this creature surprised me, largely because it didn’t involve him screaming ‘Sodding hell! What the buggery is that? I’m calling a top nature expert this instant.’ I mean, I
assumed
it was a rat, but I couldn’t quite be sure: it seemed much bulkier than the rats I’d seen Shipley and Ralph bring in. ‘Oh, we get ones that are loads bigger than this,’ said Phil, poking it with a stick to confirm its crusty deadness.

Thankfully, we found George in his other hutch, curled up safely for the winter. I looked at him and said, ‘Ah,’ but in the end there wasn’t a lot else to do. He was a hedgehog and, for all the quirks of his species, in this somnolent state he was a lot like other hedgehogs. With that, we headed back inside, leaving him to what appeared to be a blissful sleep, safely away from Penn sylvania, David Bellamy, badgers, main roads, and the kind of fool who might feed him milk or try to cajole him into a romance with a large, unkempt, narcissistic tabby cat.

A week after visiting
Julie, I received a text message from her. I was playing the last few holes of a golf course in Bedfordshire at the time and, as my partners, Robin and Pat, lined up their putts, I snuck over to a small stand of trees to give the message proper attention. ‘There’s a hedgehog that needs picking up and taking to the vet not far from you,’ said Julie. ‘I can’t get over there just now and I was wondering if you are available. She said it’s running around her bathroom, making a mess.’

I replied, asking Julie when I needed to be there. She texted back within what seemed like a second of me pressing ‘send’, announcing that the hedgehog ideally needed picking up within a couple of hours. If the traffic was fairly clear, I could get back to Norfolk from this end of Bedfordshire in just over two hours. Tempting as it was to stride back onto the green, putter in hand, and announce to Pat and Robin, ‘I have to go – a hedgehog is in trouble!’ I thought it more sensible to decline.

This, I was starting to realise, is how eccentricity works: it’s a slow drip, so quiet that you aren’t even aware of it as it gradually fills up your personality. Some people are properly unusual when they’re young, but nobody is properly eccentric. It takes time for those off-kilter hobbies and affectations you thought might be a bit unusual or fun – wearing a ridiculous hat, for example, or taking a sheep to a pub, or maybe even having a drawing of a hare in every room of
your house – to mould themselves to your character and grow extra organisms. There’s also something about ageing and the concomitant awareness of the fleeting nature of existence that tends to make you less worried about being ridiculous, and less judgemental about the quality of ridiculousness in others. I remembered how, at fifteen, I’d despaired as my granddad, driving me to a golf tournament, had stopped his car smack bang in the middle of a country lane, directly behind a horse, fetched a spade, which he just happened to have in the car at the time, and shovelled its manure straight into the boot. I couldn’t quite imagine myself doing the same thing, but the episode had seemed progressively less embarrassing to me with every passing year. What was to say that, by the time I was seventy, or even sixty, I wouldn’t view it as a perfectly normal part of rural driving?

My dad had recently been scheduled to attend a big and rather fancy publishing party in London. He’d never been to an event like this before, and seemed excited, even by his standards. An hour or so after he’d left, I spoke to my mum on the phone. ‘He’s been really looking forward to it,’ she told me. ‘He’s taken a bag of courgettes from the garden. I told him it might not be a good idea, but you know how he is – he won’t listen to anybody.’ I laughed, but then I thought back to a scene a few months earlier, when I’d been foraging on the north Norfolk coast and stopped off in Norwich on my way home to visit Boots the Chemist. Upon reaching the counter, I’d realised that my wallet was at the bottom of my bag, which was still
full of the day’s findings; in order to retrieve it, I had to empty a considerable proportion of them onto the counter.

In a way, we were probably looking here at the same genetic predispositions; the only difference was how far the sense of embarrassment had decayed. First the man in his thirties, visibly fumbling with some wild spinach in a shopping mall in front of a queue of people and a nonplussed sales assistant in an attempt to purchase shampoo and conditioner in the ‘3 for 2’ range. Then the man in his sixties, offering a large, phallic vegetable to a Booker prize-shortlisted author. Finally the man in his seventies, standing behind a horse with a shovel in his hand, a grin on his face and a cringing teenager watching him through a gap between his fingers.

At twenty-five, I probably would have thought the idea of genuinely considering abandoning a golf tournament to drive 100 miles to rescue a stranger’s hedgehog a fairly ridiculous one. That was my age when I’d first met The Bear. I remembered the day, because it was a busy and fairly pivotal one. I’d spent the morning writing, probably breaking off to read a couple of humorous email circulars, neither of which were about cats. Then I’d caught the Tube into town from Finsbury Park to meet with the literary agent who had just signed me up after reading the sample chapters of my first book. After that I’d told myself I would do some more writing ‘in a café’ but, as was so often the case, I actually spent it browsing in secondhand bookshops and record shops. I’d then got a bus to Camden, where I was reviewing a gig in the evening for a newspaper – a gig by a band that lots of people were predicting could be huge at
the time, but whose name, if you mentioned it to anyone under the age of thirty now, would draw only a blank look – and meeting the girl I’d just started dating. From there, I’d gone, for the first time, to meet her cats, Janet and The Bear: the cats who would soon take me into a completely different life.

Even back then, The Bear had seemed like an animal with a dark past who’d lived several lives. Now here he was, twelve years later, at seventeen, still by my side. No living soul had spent more time in my company since then, and I’m sure he could tell me a lot more about myself, and how I’d changed, than I could. Sometimes I would look up from my work to find him staring at me analytically, and wonder just how long he’d been sitting there. The Bear always had the most perfect, almost balletic, posture at moments such as these, belying his old bones. He had never been a slack or sloppy cat, but when he assessed you, he almost always sat up in an especially alert manner, back straight, paws meticulously arranged in front of him, as if he didn’t just happen to be staring in your direction, but felt he was
doing a job
, and intended to do it well.

He’d been gathering data on human weakness for a long time now. He’d watched me become a tiny bit more rumpled with every passing year, a new crease or wrinkle burgeoning here, a few more hairs lost or gone slightly salty there. Sure, due to the battles he’d had when he was younger – which I was sure were defensive rather than aggressive – his ears looked like they’d been clipped by an overzealous ticket
conductor on the Norwich to Liverpool Street line, but I couldn’t even blame fighting for my physical deterioration. He’d witnessed my bad decisions and my good ones. He’d met me while I was living a very metropolitan life. Maybe he’d known even then that, ultimately, it was an aberration? He’d seen me in the middle of the last decade, feeling a little trapped, a little bruised from a property mishap, and becoming a workaholic to sustain a life that was more materialistic than I’d ever really wished it to be. He’d probably known that the things that would ultimately make me happy were the same ones that had always made my family happy: animals, walking, books, music, nature. I sensed he probably could have told me all this in advance, but I doubted that, given the ability to speak, he would. He might even have been able to tell me my future, but I don’t think he’d want to. Because that would defeat the object, and undermine the value of life. As John, the lovely chap who’d fitted the microchip cat-flap, had observed, The Bear did seem to know things, but he knew them ‘in a good way, in a kind way’.