The pet I’ll never forget: Emmeline the tiny bat taught me the power of empathy
When I was growing up, there was a woman in our Devon village called Sylvia, who was known as the Bat Lady. She didn’t live in a grotto dripping with stalactites, but in a 1960s detached four-bedroom house, with carpeting up the side of the bathtub and a serving hatch in the kitchen.
She was known as the Bat Lady not because she stalked alleys in latex, but because she rescued and rehabilitated injured bats. She kept them in her cool, dark loft, in cages she crafted from green netting and planks of recycled wood.
One day, when I was about nine, my mum took me over to Sylvia’s house. The bats hung there, blinking blearily through beady nocturnal eyes. Their wings were wrapped around them like leathery papooses, and they snuggled inside, like gothic babies suspended in the gloom.
Entranced, I asked if I could have one. Sylvia laughed her tinkly laugh and said I could look after a bat if she ever went on holiday. True to her word, when she did go off on her travels, probably somewhere like Easter Island or Borneo – Sylvia didn’t do anything by halves – I was allowed to foster Emmeline. She was a pipistrelle, one of the world’s smallest bats, weighing in at 3g. The size of a conker.
She arrived with her bespoke cage and a container writhing with live mealworms. I insisted on keeping Emmeline in my room, and was comforted during the night by the papery sound of her wings as she flitted around the cage. I was terrified at night as a child, and loved the thought of a conscious creature waking up and doing things just as I was going to sleep. She was looking out for me.
Once, weighing her gently between thumb and forefinger, feeling I could crush her at any minute, I held a mealworm aloft, and a tiny tongue flicked out to taste it. Then, with surprising ferocity, she lunged forward and gulped down the whole thing. I was impressed. It would be like eating an entire Subway footlong in one bite.
In that moment, Emmeline taught me empathy in the most literal and physical of ways. The fact that she was utterly reliant on me for sustenance and life hit home in one of those childhood lightbulb moments you remember for ever. It was my first experience of sole responsibility for another living thing – and my last, unless you count the cactus that sat on my desk from 2015 to 2020. It was chucked in the bin when lockdown hit. Emmeline, however, made a full recovery, and flew free.