The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar Read Online Free Page A

where he would take food from my fingers and eat it on the glove. I hoped that when we had achieved this I could let him fly loose around those parts of the flat where he couldn’t do much damage or injure himself, enticing him back to my fist with occasional treats. I would give a particular whistle whenever I showed him a snack – and only then – and in time I hoped that he would come to the whistle alone, bribe or no bribe. We would then be well on the way to the sort of relationship that I confidently expected.
    The problem was that Wellington clearly hadn’t beenattending when I explained all this. Night after night, week after week, he would crouch (briefly) on my fist with all the relaxed confidence of a scrap-metal dealer confronted by auditors from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. For a bird of Wellington’s diminutive size I had to cut up the squidgy, yolk-filled chicks with scissors – a repulsive task. Suppressing my shudders, I would take a slimy gobbet from the saucer by my side and hold it out to him, whistling and crooning with what I hoped was seductive charm. Wellington would bob and weave, deliberately avoiding it, and keeping his beak welded firmly shut, like a toddler watching the approach of a spoonful of creamed spinach. I would dangle the disgusting treat before his furious eyes; I would rub it on his beak; after an hour or so I could barely suppress the urge to prise his stubborn mandibles apart and shove it in with the end of a pencil. All was to no avail; unlike his glorious and convivial namesake, Wellington dined alone in his quarters, or not at all.
    * * *
    The borrowed box-cage was obviously only a temporary expedient. So that Wellington did not have to be confined whenever I was not holding him on his leash, I first built him a ‘cadge’. This was simply a portable table-top perch, mounted in a tray wide enough to catch natural fall-out and to allow short strolls on his leash. A seed box, a bit of log fitted with a small swivelling ringbolt for the leash, and last week’s
Sunday Telegraph
were soon assembled and set up on top of the box-cage. Tethered there during his firstweekend in the flat, he could watch further developments.
    My plans for Wellington’s permanent quarters were dictated by the layout of my flat. From the windowless, L-shaped hallway the first pair of rooms – the bathroom, and the bedroom that I used for my office – led off to left and right, the latter with a window overlooking a small balcony. Beyond these doors the hallway led on to my own bedroom straight ahead, with the kitchen to the left and the large living room to the right. This latter had been the main reason that Roy and I had chosen the flat; it was big, light and airy, with an almost complete wall of floor-to-ceiling windows along the south side. This overlooked an open vista of tall buildings against a big sky – a sort of mini-Manhattan view, equally impressive in bright sunlight or spangled with lights after nightfall. The room caught the sun all day long; at the far end another wide window faced westwards over low roofscapes, towards the rising green swell of the old Croydon airfield a couple of miles away. (If the flat had existed in August 1940, it would have afforded a striking view of Hawker Hurricanes scrambling through the smoke from blazing factories to intercept German fighter-bombers.) To the right of this end window, a glass door led sideways out on to the balcony outside the office window. This was really only a glorified concrete shelf, darkly roofed in by the balcony of the flat above, but it was big enough for a couple of deckchairs and a case of beer on sunny afternoons.
    What I wanted to construct was a cage that would fit on the balcony, about the size of a large wardrobe, bigenough to allow Wellington to fly up and down for a few wingbeats. He could doze there in the fresh air while I was out at work during the day and it would give him a more interesting view by night, all