My father came home one day with a monkey, whom we named Mietsy. I can’t remember who came up with the name (which sounds like merci in French) and on what basis. Probably my eldest sister who was the creative one when it came to party ideas and fun things. We had a dog named Boo Bear (after Yogi Bear’s sidekick), another called Skopje (which we used to pronounce as skop-jay until years later when I discovered it is skop-yay, the place in [the former] Yugoslavia).
Mietsy lived in the fig tree next to the garage (just a roof, no walls), onto which my brother’s room opened. My brother had a bunch of mates who came round constantly to our house. They were all born in the same year — 1950, which is the year of the tiger, so they called themselves the Tiger Club.
One day the Tiger Club returned from a fun fair at which they’d won a bottle of whiskey from the Ring A Prize stall. The make was Duck Brand, and it tasted foul (well, what do you expect of a whiskey named after a fowl?), so after a sip each, they gave it to Mietsy, who happily lapped it all up. Soon, he started to feel sleepy and tried to climb onto his perch in the fig tree, which was only about two feet above ground in the tree trunk where all the major branches forked, thus providing a broad perch for Mietsy. It was as if the two feet of tree trunk had been oiled with anti-climb: Mietsy kept slipping and sliding down. In the end, he gave up and went to sleep at the base of the tree.
The next morning, we found him sitting in the same spot where he’d gone to sleep, wrapping his head with both arms, nursing a hangover.
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