THE ANMAL RESCUE: A BULMERSHE COLLEGE FANTASY...

 THE ANIMAL RESCUE: 

A BULMERSHE COLLEGE FANTASY…

The two of us used high-pitched, over-exaggerated Cockney accents for exclamations and outbursts but on this auspicious occasion they culminated in one marvellous, legendary statement, issued by both of us at exactly the same time: 

“Cor, look at that cow…”  

It was brilliant. A brown and white fibre-glass model of a cow, one metre and a half long and over half a metre high was lodged over the entrance to a delicatessen. My fellow conspirator insisted, “We’ll have that…” A rescued outcast from a fibre glass herd would certainly be a fine mascot for us students…

The animal had no doubt once been a marvellous advertisement for the delicatessen, located with its parent dairy behind it but the main problem in rescuing the cow would be the occupied apartment windows immediately behind the animal’s torso…

Someone would be sure to see or hear us. This would need careful planning, accomplices and nightfall. It was early winter, frosty but truthfully, little happened in Reading after 10pm, so the signs were promising, maybe…

That night, we set out to rustle the cow as a mascot… 

A mate and his girlfriend agreed to be lookouts and snog on a street-corner, though it was doubtful if they would actually be able to disentangle themselves long enough to notice any lurking danger anyway… I wore a T-shirt but also a long cardigan, which was to disguise the animal beneath on our return to college. 

We set out around midnight I reckon and we saw only a rare, passing vehicle as we strolled down to the scene of the rustling. It was a crisp, cold night and very still, as my accomplice and I left the snoggers on the all-important street-corner near a street-light. The perpetrators jogged on and quickly we reached the lonely pasture above the dairy. I gave my partner’s foot a lift and in a jot he was up there, crouching alongside the object of our desire. It was quite a sight from below, rather like an offering before an altar but then with sheer consternation and frustration, he whispered breathlessly down to me: 

“It won’t move, it’s bolted on…”

“Leave it, come on, let’s get out of here…” I retorted. I then noticed our lookouts, so heavily into their bit-parts, that they would have been no help at all in a crisis… And then it happened… 

My head was turned by the straining of bolts being wrenched out of their housings and as I looked up, my mate was standing there with a broad grin across his face and a cow held high above his head like a trophy… The curtains were still drawn across the windows of the flats behind him but they were fortunately still in darkness. I panicked a little and motioned him down, so the idiot jumped and as he landed one of the back legs of the cow fell off and crashed onto the pavement… Gods… 

We ran, our lookouts took off too, presumably with their lips clamped together and we all went our separate ways. I caressed the cow beneath my cardigan as I moved briskly past houses, sweating in my T-shirt, despite the freezing air chilling my fingers. And then a beat policeman appeared in the distance… 

Unlucky? Me? Surely not… I moved quickly, dropped the cardigan-shrouded animal over a privet hedge onto someone’s lawn then turned onto the next pathway and ducked into an enclosed entry to wait for the plodder to go past. Yet I was sure he’d seen me… What was I to say? I was cornered, defeated, lost, cold and alone…

But unbelievably he plodded on and I was able to collect the rescued animal from behind the hedge and return to college. Superb… Absolutely superb… We had our cow and we hid her in the loft area for a few days until we deemed it safe to put her on show…

Fascinatingly, the next evening a couple of us strolled down to the precinct for a bag of chips each. Whilst waiting, my eyes spotted the headline on the front page of the Reading Evening Post, which was sold in the chippy after the newsagent had closed his shop. It read: ‘COWS STOLEN IN READING’… My heart skipped a beat and I shivered… This was sickening…

Apparently though, two REAL cows had been rustled, stolen or removed from a field on the night of our own foraging… I admit to being badly shaken by the news…

Another mate shared the largest room on the corridor with my accomplice and when the mascot made her first public appearance there, she became a real feature. She was displayed upon a kind of stage-block in front of a pillar. An empty milk bottle had been used to replace the missing leg, which seemed rather fitting, or perhaps ill-fitting…

Unfortunately, one of our mate’s ex-landlady forced the premature loss of this most wonderful and unique capture… He had formed a close relationship with his landlady unfortunately, who was a mother-of-two and bore no resemblance at all to the character of our friend. He was a tall, genial student, harmless and utterly likeable. And he had slithered into a dreadful relationship with a somewhat domineering older woman. It was his own fault of course and was in too deep to extricate himself with any honour at all… 

Quite obviously, when he moved back into residence with us, the relationship had suffered and although she visited our corridor a few times, she hated me because I was wickedly sarcastic towards her. I understand that our mate had wanted to end the relationship and the rest of us must take some of the responsibility for that, for we constantly urged our unfortunate friend to do so. 

She was vile and quite unpleasant to him and seemed to order him around, so that he appeared to be quite frightened of her. However, his reluctance to stay in the relationship forced her hand. He had likely broken promises to her and he had been an utter fool, for sure…

Inevitably and understandably, the woman wrote a complaint to college and mentioned our escapade at the dairy, which would soon have repercussions for the rest of us and of course, the cow… The older cow disliked us all so much…

I believe that our mate escaped lightly on a personal note but a memo to the rest of us stated that both the dairy and the police would take no action against us, providing that the cow was returned. Why the hell the cow needed returning at all, we had no idea…

So one evening, our accomplice, the male lookout, pulled his car up to the hostel’s main doors, I smuggled the cow onto the back seat under my cardigan and our unfortunate friend (we needed a tall chap to help us…) took up the passenger seat. However, a PE lecturer just had to poke his nose in. He approached the car, our driver lowered his window and was asked one or two leading questions. My tall accomplice craned his neck with a nod towards me, so I thrust my face against that of the cow, as if I was snogging with someone. The lecturer apologised but I guess that was the only time I ever kissed an old cow…

We drove down to the shop but to our horror it had closed down, just a week or so after coffee was being served and cheese was being sold… We parked the car in a side-road and decided to deposit the cow in the dairy’s yard for ease and speed of getaway. Crates were piled high inside the surrounding fence and our tall friend's height proved most useful, as the cow was left on its side on the very top crate of a pile of empties. A sad moment indeed…

The following day, the cow having disappeared, we rued an inauspicious end to a superb animal rescue…

THE RUSTLING VENUE, 15 YEARS ON, AROUND 1987, WHEN I RETURNED...

This fantasy was no fantasy at all. 

It really happened. 

I know, because I was there…