Free Fillets of Plaice, by Gerald Durrell by Fillets of Plaice Page A

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.
    I knew that suggesting to Mr Romilly anything so drastic as putting them into a new cage with some damp moss would horrify him beyond all bounds, so I started surreptitiously to try and give the toads a slightly happier existence. I pinched some olive oil from my mother's kitchen for a start, and when Mr Romilly went out to have his lunch hour, I massaged the oil into the skin of both toads. This improved the flakiness. I then got some ointment from the chemist, having explained — to his amusement — why I wanted it, and anointed their feet with it. This helped, but it did not clear up the foot condition completely. I also got some Golden Eye Ointment, which one normally used-for dogs, and applied it to their eyes with miraculous results. Then, every time Mr Romilly had his lunch hour I would give them a warm spray and this they loved. They would sit there, gulping benignly, blinking their eyes and, if I moved the spray a little, they would shuffle across the floor of their cage to get under it again. One day I put a small section of moss in the cage and both toads immediately burrowed under it.
    “Oh, look, Mr Romilly,” I said with well-simulated surprise, “I put a bit of moss in the toads' cage by mistake, and they seem to like it.”
    “Moss?”