Ah! Childhood…

Our family’s pet Nazi’s favourite toy was a lemon-flavoured killing machine. The toy had come all the way from Honolulu as a free promotional gift with the pearl necklace of pinless hand-grenades which my mother had ordered as part of her retail therapy.

            My mother had tried all of the mainstream therapies: psycho-therapy, dream-therapy, behaviour-therapy, electro-convulsive-shock -therapy, primal-scream-therapy, shouting-at-the-kids-therapy, religious-zealout-therapy and blame-everyone-else-for-my-problems-therapy.

            My mother’s therapist was a psychotic nun who lived in the grey landscape of her abandoned subconscious.

            The psychotic nun said that every socially mobile family needed a pet. My mother was allergic to rabbits, dogs, cats, fish, gerbils, birds and all the other animals. My mother was not allergic to Nazis.

            The family pet Nazi was trouble from the start, and for his twenty-seventh birthday present we took him to the vet to be destroyed.

            He swallowed his cyanide capsule without fuss.