Cy

Cy was named after Cynodon, or, as we children used to call it in south-eastern Australia, Windmill Grass, one of the commonest weeds in lawns and cricket-pitches. He had spent the first half of his life as an experimental rabbit, involved – so far as my childish understanding could make it out – in research into allergens and the production of antibodies. Specifically, I think, Cy’s duties involved sitting in a very small cage and producing antibodies to the pollen of Cynodon. He was so desirable for experimentation because he was a lop-eared rabbit, and therefore had large veins in his ears, suitable for bleeding by syringe. And here – again, remembering that in witnessing all this, I thought and understood as a child – was where the alchemy played its part. When my father reads this, he will explain it all, so that it becomes not alchemy, but science. Here is the childish version:-

 

The blood – or more precisely, as I knew, the serum (or was it perhaps the antiserum?) was somehow conveyed to microscope slides covered with a clear gel with the consistency of agar. Each slide was like a transparent domino: it had five pits in each half, arranged like tessaries in a mosaic. (I was, incidentally, and still am, a demon dominoes player, which is odd considering my outright, rabbit-dazzled fear of mathematics). This was immersed, along with several other slides, symmetrically arranged, into a gleaming, prismatic glass box, which was filled with the purest lilac liquid. This liquid smelled alluring but astringent, like a chemical absinth. After this, I was at a loss. Things happened, by laws immutable, and the memories are untrappable, as bubbles in an alembic.

 

And here is the glorious part: my father – who suffers from hay-fever as I do, and no doubt is allergic to the pollen of Cynodon, unable to countenance the callous euthanasia of Cy when he reached middle age, brought him home to me in a cardboard box. In fact, he didn’t just bring Cy: he brought Lo (short for Lolium, a parti-coloured rabbit with different-coloured eyes, and ever a jester), and he brought Z-2 (the provenance of his name eludes me, but he was the most gloriously beautiful rabbit, with precisely the colouring of a chocolate brown Burmese cat, but with more than a hint of purple), and several others whose names elude me, all of them baptised in grass pollen. I am almost certain that my father was in contravention of article such-and-such, subsection so-and-so of the labyrinthine legislation which ties into pretzels almost everything that people try to do in the Australian Capital Territory (a Utopia for bureaucrats), but he brought an excess of delight to the heart of a four-year-old child. The retired experimental rabbits were joined by a more conventionally domestic rabbit, Potterishly christened Benjamin, but it was Cy who lived the longest – at least eight years, and possibly more – and it was Cy who crystallised my thinking on Life and Death.

 

Cy was, you see, the Black Rabbit of Inlé. Readers whose childhoods were culturally dominated, as mine was, by Richard Adams’ twentieth century classic Watership Down will instantly understand what I mean. Other readers will not, so I beg the patience of the former. The Black Rabbit of Inlé was the Grim Reaper of rabbits: everything that was chthonic and terrifying. In Garfunkel’s song, ‘Bright Eyes’, he is the blank-eyed silhouette who arches across the hedgerows like the shadow of a crow, beckoning caricatured bunnies to their allotted Valhallas. In the original novel, he is much more: he brings myxamatosis, ‘the White Blindness’, the rabbits’ Black Death, and he compels El-Ahrairah, the archetypal rabbit, to substitute his own ears for dock leaves which have to be constantly replaced when they grow limp, for fear of the fleas that spread the virus. He dwells in the bowels of the earth, a bit deeper-down than other rabbits, and his eyes shine like red-hot coals. He would perhaps be a slavish allegory of the Christian Devil if he were not so merciful when the rabbit was at the snare, or in the teeth of a snarling fox. This was no fiction for me: it was an everlasting Truth, stringent as scripture, and Cy was my living, lolloping proof.

 

I say ‘lolloping’ because this was precisely the word my mother used at a moment I can remember, but cannot place in time. It is not a word that in forty years I have encountered in any other context, but it precisely describes the gait of Cy, in which the actions of four rabbit-hopping legs were augmented by a pair of large and flaccid ears. In a surge of testosterone, Cy once fought with another rabbit (Lo, I believe, and Cy unwittingly caused his demise when the wound became infected), and in the course of that epic conflict, one of his ears was ripped, if not from side to side, then certainly well beyond the median line. And so Cy’s ears lolloped even more, like lopsided chandeliers in a ramshackle museum after the Blitz, and my ducks - Waddly and Scratch (the genius of whose naming I can rightly claim, and who came into my life when I was four years old) - were decidedly exhibits. They sat there, staunch and starched as Tenniell Dodoes, as Cy snitched the bread from under their bills. They chuntered “tus-tus-tus” (as Muscovies often will: they do not quack) when he ran them ragged while the wheat was winnowed out for the chickens. (My ducks were, incidentally, lesbians by necessity, and used to almost empty the garden pond in their love throes, much to my childish amazement; Scratch, the big white one, was invariably on top. Cy cared nothing for this.)

 

For the life of me, I cannot remember the time when Cy died. He lived by human terms to be a Harry Patch at least, but the details are lost to me. But I do remember digging up his bones a few years later, deep in the vegetable patch where my new passion for herbs was in its embryonic phase. And this was the curious thing: his bones were deep red, as though sprinkled with ochre, and the orbs of his skull gazed at me with an omniscient vacancy. In a life in which digging has been a recurring theme, and in which uncloseted skeletons have played a preternatural part, I confess that I have never before or since, when arrested by the face of kindly Death, re-buried the bones so quickly.

 

Photograph by Giles Watson, aged about 10 years.

 

My father has added the following notes:

 

Dear old black rabbit Cy had been used to produce antiserum for the pollen of CYNODON DACTYLON, colloquially called 'Couch' in Australia (where it is used for cricket pitches), and Bermuda Grass in Britain (where it is rare) and in the USA (where it originated). We demonstrated via the antiserum from Cy and friends that hay-fever sufferers sensitized only to the pollen allergens of Cynodon were unlikely to be allergic to pollen from (e.g.) the main lawn grasses used in England (Lolium, Agrostis, Dactylis), and vice versa; and drew attention to the undesirability of medical allergy specialists and commercial suppliers of grass pollens intended for medical applications using colloquial names (since 'Couch' means different things on different continents). The point being that you can be sensitized if they 'desensitize' you with the wrong extract!

 

Done