The Battle of Bubble and Squeak by Philippa Pearce

Author:Philippa Pearce
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141929514
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mrs Sparrow had a delightful holiday from the gerbils.

On the first Saturday Bill Sparrow gave up his usual gardening and took his wife into town. They went shopping. They chose new curtain material for the living room, and Bill Sparrow put down the money for it. Afterwards they had some tea, and then they went to the cinema.

The next day Mrs Sparrow spent some happy hours making up the new curtains. From the old curtains she made new cushion covers. From the old cushion covers she made new dusters. She already had a large number of dusters, but Mrs Sparrow did a good deal of dusting.

Meanwhile, the gerbils had settled into the Mudd household. The Mudds were easy people. Mr and Mrs Mudd had never bothered much with television or books or conversation: Mr Mudd was preoccupied with his pigeons; Mrs Mudd knitted. If Dawn wanted two gerbils in her room for a bit, that was all right. If her friend, Peggy Parker, wanted to stay for the night, while the gerbils were there, that was also all right. There was a put-you-up bed, and Peggy brought her own sleeping bag.

It was also all right if Peggy’s brother, Sid, came every day to attend to his gerbils. He had forbidden Peggy and Dawn to take the gerbils out of their cage except when he was there. He was afraid of some mishap in a strange house. But he came regularly to renew the gerbils’ food and change their water, to give them a quick run, and to see them securely home again.

When Sid had gone, it was very quiet in the Mudds’ house. The distant cooing of the pigeons from the bottom of the garden, the hymning of Mrs Mudd as she knitted downstairs – that was all. Peggy lowered her chin on to her arms, spread on the table in front of the gerbil cage, and stared at Bubble and Squeak. Bubble and Squeak stared back.

She wondered what it was like to see everything through bars, to have beneath your feet a little sawdust-covered metal floor instead of the vast Mongolian desert. To have bars above you, and above the bars a white ceiling, instead of blue infinity.

‘I suppose it’s their home,’ she said aloud.

Dawn said, ‘What is?’

‘Their cage. They were born in this cage, or one just like it, at the Garden Centre. Their home. Just as our house is our home.’

‘But they can’t walk in and out, as you walk in and out of your house.’

‘Sid lets them out.’

‘Sid puts them back.’

‘I go out of our house; I come back.’

‘No,’ said Dawn Mudd. ‘It’s not the same at all.’ She thought carefully. ‘At least, it’s not quite the same.’

‘Do they long and long to be free? I think they do. Sid thinks they don’t, but that’s because they’re his gerbils. He wants them to want to stay his.’

‘Nobody knows what gerbils long for, for certain,’ said Dawn Mudd. ‘But they wouldn’t get peanuts anywhere but in that cage.

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