Cackles was not technically a pet, I suppose, and certainly not the border collie I desperately craved, but she was my favourite goose. She was difficult to pet physically, but I tried my best, stroking her long, muscular neck. I sang to her nightly while she sat there quacking along. Or quacking in protest. It was hard to know the difference.
I was very proud of her. No one else I knew had geese, except for the Ballantine’s distillery down the road, who had about 100 guarding the whisky. But no one from Ballantine’s went to my school, so that didn’t count. In short, it was unusual in the 80s to have geese, especially where we lived. But we kept a few at the old wreck of a cottage with a bit of land that my parents had managed to buy cheap – a tiny scrap of country in the middle of a council estate in Dumbarton.
