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A three-day wait followed. I felt the strain and I’m sure Sid did as well – especially when he passed the heating pad. Within 24 hours, his appetite had returned and a rat had been devoured. Mr Patel was over the moon.

‘And guess what, mate,’ he exclaimed, ‘I tried putting another plug on the heating pad … just on the off-chance.’

‘And …?’

‘It still works.’

Crystal was also pleased at the outcome. ‘You made the right decision not to operate. It would have been risky.’

I squirmed in Sid-like fashion. But when she went on to say there were a couple of interesting cases that had cropped up at the Wildlife Park and would I like to take a look at then with her some time, I almost tied myself in knots.

Beryl cawed with alarm and nearly toppled from her perch when I wrapped my arms round her, gave her a squeeze and told her the news. After all, it was she I had to thank for having pushed the exotics my way.

BIBLE BASHER

I‘m not sure when I was first asked the question, but I’ve a feeling it was soon after I’d started at Prospect House, back in June. Heavens … was that really only six months? Seems aeons ago. And the person who asked it was Mrs Paget. Ah, yes, dear Cynthia Paget – the lady with whom I had lodged. The lady who saw me struggling to cope with the rigours of veterinary practice and offered to help by allowing me extra time in her kitchen – not to mention extra freezer space. She’d asked me to have a look at Chico – that little chihuahua of hers – now dead, a casualty of a road accident. Back then, the only casualty was my heels. If I’d been an angel, the place where I’d have feared to tread most would have been in Mrs Paget’s hallway as I was constantly being nipped there by Chico.

Mrs Paget, in her loose-fitting, pink-quilted housecoat, suggested I examine Chico in her bedroom. ‘He’s much calmer on my bed. It’ll be easier to see what’s up,’ she explained, her housecoat slipping down a few inches. I wasn’t having any of it – well, certainly not from the likes of Mrs Paget. He – and not she – found himself being manhandled in the sitting room where overgrown nails were clipped and the only thing bared were the usual teeth.

‘Had I always wanted to do it?’ she asked as the last nail clawed its way across the carpet.

The question was also asked by Mandy, while I was deep inside a Great Dane bitch trying to locate her reproductive organs.

And the answer? Yes – I’d always wanted to be a vet. Well, at least since I was ten years old.

At that time we lived in Nigeria, my father an army officer. In our large, corrugated, red-roofed bungalow with its sprawling compound, I amassed a large menagerie of pets. No surprise that my favourite book was Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. I, too, had my animals: a cat called Sooty; three tortoises; some rats; five ducks; several chickens; an African Grey parrot called Polly; a monkey – the species of which I never did find out; and, most treasured of all, Poucher – a Labrador-cross with the sweetest temperament you could ever have wished for.

I’ll never forget the time she went missing. For three days, we lived in fear that she’d been attacked by some wild animal and was lying out in the bush slowly dying. We searched high and low but found no sign of her. She eventually crawled home, her right leg nearly torn off at the thigh. The army doctor saved her, patiently stitching up the muscles, tendons and skin while I stood by and watched, riveted to the spot … fascinated. And, as I nursed her back to health, encouraged her to take her first meal, helped her to limp round the garden, saw in the dark brown eyes the trust she put in me, I knew I couldn’t possibly do anything else with my life other than take the path that beckoned – the path that led to becoming a vet.

Of course, I didn’t put it quite like that to Mrs Paget, otherwise I’d have had her falling at my feet, kissing them as Chico bit them.

But I had achieved my ambition.

So was