Peter’s Ferret Story
Robin’s laid low by some inconsiderate bug* and I don’t want her sitting up till 2.48 a.m.** keeping the world cheerful with bell-gossip, or whatever, so the world’s going to have to put up with a stop-gap.
Somebody mentioned ferrets.*** Almost all I know about ferrets I learnt from my mother, who got it from my father, who learnt it one Sunday in School Chapel at Eton in 1913. (He was bottom scholar in the worst year on record, until I came along in 1941.)
You’ve probably seen photographs of the school uniform. The school went into court mourning on the death of George III, 1820, and never came out,† so in my father’s day it was black pinstripe trousers, formal black morning coat with tails, and a top hat. (We only wore top hats on Sundays. It was part of the war effort.††) Those coats are more practical than they appear. Each tail has inside it a pocket large enough for several books.†††
A friend of my father kept a ferret in his room (illegally, of course) and used to take it rabbiting on Sunday afternoons. One Sunday he lost it down a rabbit hole, and by the time he got it out it was too late for him to take it back to his room before evening service, so he stuffed it into his tail pocket and took it into chapel. The boys sat in allocated places on banked pews facing each other down either side of the central aisle, twelve or so to a pew. Masters and their wives and families sat in the back pew, with one master per block of pews on either side to check that every boy was in his place and none of them misbehaved.‡
My father’s friend settled into his place at the end of a pew. The ferret, exhausted by the frenzy of rabbiting, slumbered through prayer after prayer, several hymns bellowed by six hundred young male voices, two readings from the Bible, a psalm, and a choir giving its all to a Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, finally stirring into life half way through the sermon. My father’s friend, also near dormant after the rabbiting and further lulled by the ponderosities of the preacher, didn’t notice what was happening in time to prevent his pet slipping out of his pocket and away along beneath the pew. By sheer chance the boy at the other end of the pew happened to be looking down when the ferret emerged and poked its nose into the open. Being another friend of its owner he knew enough to lean down, under the pretence of a fit of coughing, and grab it by the scruff.
He straightened, passed it from hand to hand beneath his knees, nudged his neighbour in the ribs, and muttered to him out of the corner of his mouth to pass it on. Unawares the boy took it by feel. The ferret bit him. It is said to have bitten every one of the boys who handled it on its way back to its owner. Not one of the invigilating masters noticed anything amiss.
* * *
* Yes. The world is spinning, etc. The hellhounds are in heaven. Not only have they been on the sofa most of the day but they were on the bed this morning. Uh oh. Dreadful precedent.
** Ha ha ha
*** I mention ferrets quite a lot because there’s this ferret on the forum that keeps insisting he can kill me with his brain. This has marked me you know.
† This is one of those, and the British ran an empire? stories
†† It was what?
††† Well, but this is tail coats generally, isn’t it? I have an old tail coat and it has pockets in the tails.
‡A whisper to one’s neighbour, if noticed, invoked a penalty of several hundred lines. Persisted in, a thrashing. I was present on one appalling occasion when an unfortunate canon on the staff, who minded terribly that he had never been asked to preach to the school, at last was allowed to stand in for the scheduled preacher. He began with a confident proclamation: “Boys! There are parts of the body that we cannot see . . .” Nobody heard a word after that. He didn’t help by desperately riffling through his notes under the microphone looking for a fresh place to begin.
Unfortunately he’d written them on paper that made a sound very like the rather severe toilet paper that was standard then. The masters’ children in the back rows joined in. Masters and their wives stuffed handkerchiefs into their mouths. The hysteria lasted almost ten minutes. Next day the headmaster thrashed twenty boys, chosen at random as far as anyone could make out. (A legendary Victorian head was said to have personally thrashed the whole school, I can’t remember what for, but that was over a series of days.)^
^ Yeeeep.
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