Ohmigod !! She's got a knife !!

"Don't panic !! Aunty Eloise is a licensed vet," I reassured the young children.

Young children on the Island are unfailingly polite and very respectful. Which is just like "Respectable" as in the Mel and Kim song but with a slightly different ending. Several youngsters would often drop in to the clinic and help with cleaning the cages, feeding the animals and if they were tall enough, hanging the laundry on the line. They were great kids. One of them, April, an 11 year old, was on more than one occassion, a life saver. She would often say, " I'm here to help," unprompted and anyone hearing her would think what a great kid. She would often mention how she wanted to be a vet and was going to start saving, "After she bought an X-box." She also would always seek confirmation that she was doing the right thing - so if she wanted to give some more food to, Mons, her favourite cat, named after a Norwegian cat food if you want to know, she would come up to me and ask if it was alright and then I would say "sure" and she would then go and make sure I knew what I was talking about by asking one of the professionals like "Aunty" Eloise. Y'see, the young refer to their elders as Aunty or Uncle as a sign of respect. Eloise and all the girls were always addressed with the Aunty prefix.

I at one stage made the mistake of admitting to April, I was only a volunteer and not a nurse or vet, "I'm just like you. We're volunteers," I said. From then on, no Uncle for me and April always called me, Peter. That was as good as it got, and I should have been pretty stoked with that cos in fact, Tarangi, April's cousin often used to call me Dave !

Still, I may not have ever been called Uncle but I knew I had made some impression, taught April something about the world when on the last day we were checking the animals in the hospital and she looked at a small cat in one of the big cages usually reserved for dogs and she turned to me and said with the wide eyed wonder of the young, " Peter, that cat is in one big assed cage." She could only have learnt that from me.