Scampi Fails The Pet Show

We were not allowed pets when I was very young - my father claimed that caging or domesticating animals was intensely cruel (although I suspect he just felt they were smelly) - but when I was around eight or nine, after many years of cajoling, I finally persuaded my parents to let me have a hamster. I guess my Dad reasoned it wouldn't take up too much space, or last for very long.

My mum took me to the Otley pet shop on Kirkgate where I selected a handsome, sand-coloured hamster. I named it after my favourite food at the time, Scampi, and carried it home in a small cardboard box. Scampi was a vivacious wee beastie and immediately set to work gnawing her way out through one of the airholes. By the time we'd reached the playpark opposite the Yew Tree she had her entire head through the hole, and my mum and I were forced into a clumsy gallop to get the hamster home before it made a full break for freedom.

Although hamsters are solitary creatures, after about a week we realised that Scampi had Known The Touch Of A Gentleman, as she suddenly gave birth to five babies. I suppose this explains why her body had been too fat to fit through the hole she'd gnawed in the cardboard box. Pet shops may look like prisons to us, but to hamsters its the equivalent of booze-fuelled week in Ibiza.

So, much to my father's dismay, I had in one year gone from having no pets at all to having six hamsters. Although they were all very cute bundled up together in their little nest, my mum learned from a piece of paper in the library (this was before the internet) that there comes a point in a Mother Hamster's life when she switches from feeding milk to her young, to feeding upon her young. This helps to explain why they are solitary creatures (indeed, I remember reading as a child that the hamster was for a long time presumed extinct, and that all domesticated hamsters descend from a single extant family which was found in a burrow in Syria. Superb timing - if the explorers had come a week later they might only have found a single, very fat hamster and the species would be lost).

We immediately launched a programme to rehouse the babies. My brother took one called Chips, Peter Jackson accepted Sherry and my arch-nemesis Sarah Parkar bought one for 50p which she mysteriously named Captain Scampi (the nautical theme still baffles me). Alistair Howtown bought the nicest one, but I cannot recall its name (as previously recorded, it was his white lie about this hamster's pregnancy which drove a wedge between us). The fifth we sold to a stranger recruited through a postcard placed in the newsagent's window (again, this was before the internet), and deep down inside me somewhere I can still feel the loss, and wonder what ever happened to that hamster (Solution: probably dead within 18 months). Each time I delved into Scampi's cage to steal another of her young to sell I felt like a Nazi raiding a Jewess's crib; however, I knew of course it was a necessary evil if she was not to make a meal of them herself.

Hamsters are relatively dull things so it's hard to dredge up many memories of what it was like to have Scampi in the year that followed. She crawled around on my arm of course, and occasionally ran up the sleeve of my jumper. She also ate sunflower seeds and drank water, and kept me awake at night by running on her wheel (as pets go, choosing a nocturnal rodent for a child who sleeps lightly is a bad choice).

Anyway, skip to the end: about a year and a half after Scampi gave birth, our Headmaster announced at assembly that there was to be a pet show on the Chevin. I was thrilled at the prospect of showing off my hamster and, as my parents were very indulgent, on the Saturday I found myself being driven up the Chevin, with Scampi in her cage on my lap. The Chevin is a huge valley wall which rises up on one side of Otley and utterly dominates the horizon. It's covered in forest, rocks and meadows and so was not the ideal place for a nine year old to be trotting in a hurry with an elderly hamster in a cage.

Sure enough, I tripped over a tree root and the whole cage went flying, crashing down in the dirt. I fished Scampi's body out of the remains. She was drenched from the explosion of her water bottle, and was breathing very heavily.

An organiser kindly loaned me a towel, and although I tried to dry Scampi out she still looked like a drowned rat. I took my place in the Pet Show barn, and watched as the judges went about their business inspecting vibrant and excitable animals of all sorts. Finally, a kindly judge came to me. "What have you got here, then?" he asked, peering at the drenched hamster which had by this point entered a coma from which she would never recover.

"My hamster, Scampi," I said proudly.

"Quiet little thing, isn't it?" he said archly before moving on, and by quiet I now realise he meant dead.

I went home distraught not to have won anything, but it was only the next day I realised something was seriously wrong with Scampi as she had still not woken up. She never did, and a day later I looked into her cage I saw her breathing had stopped, and a day after that the room was filled with that terrible sweet stench of decay and my mum insisted we bury her.

As is typical of nine year olds, I was utterly devastated and inconsolable until my mum suggested we go buy another one, at which point I was immediately thrilled. The replacement was a tortoisehell hamster called Brandy, who lived a long and happy life (that is for a hamster) until contracting cancer.

Cancer in hamsters is particularly unpleasant. The cells which make up a human are the same size as those which make up a hamster, so when hamster cells go cancerous the growth is just a voracious and yet relatively speaking far more destructive. Brandy grew a growth on his back half the size of his own body, a vile and crusty thing which leaked blood. My parents were incredibly indulgent about this too - the logical response would be stamp on it with your boot and toss it in the trash, but instead they indulged me with two trips to the vet for morphine injections to help him cope with the pain, before finally accepting the inevitable and allowing them to put the poor creature down.

We buried Brandy next to Scampi and Chips, followed by a good seasoning of cat pepper, and I haven't had the strength to buy another pet since.