MY FIRST PET by B. Sibley (Form 3)

My first pet was Fred the fly. Later we had a hamster called Hamlet (because he was sort of blonde coloured) but Fred came first.

Fred moved in at the end of autumn and stayed more or less until the beginning of spring, although as my dad says, to be truthful we never actually saw the going of him.

Being a housefly, Fred was already completely house-trained and never did any of those rather disgusting things that the ‘Children’s Encyclopaedia’ said flies do - or, if he did, we didn’t ever see him doing them.

Fred was a very intelligent fly and always sat on one corner of the TV screen watching everything from nature programmes like ‘Tales of the Riverbank’ to ‘Dr Who’ (mainly when they were fighting insect-type aliens), though my mum always said he would damage his eyes by sitting that close.

He also showed good taste when it came to music and would sit very still on the arm of our gramophone player for the whole side of a long-playing record. Fred's favourites were ‘The 1812 Overture’ (with live canons) and the soundtrack from ‘South Pacific’ and my dad said he was probably the reincarnation of Beethoven, but we couldn’t test this out, as we didn’t have any Beethoven records.

When I grow up and can afford to buy a few more records, I’d like to have another fly and carry out some experiments to see if all dead composers become flies in the end.

The End

[Image: Serene Fly Control]