Cats in the Belfry (10 page)

  It was bad enough on the outward journey. Kittens in the wheelbarrow; kittens tumbling out of the wheelbarrow; Sugieh marching alongside shouting to ­everybody she passed to Look At Us Going for the Leaf-Mould; and after the first few minutes somebody, usually Solomon, wailing frantically far in the rear to Wait For Him, He'd Got Left Behind!

  On the outward journey, however, they did at least know they were going
somewhere
, and in case it should be somewhere interesting – none of that lot were going to miss anything if they could help it – we usually got there more or less as a unit. The real trouble started on the way back, when they realised with dismay that they were only going home.

  Then they started shinning up every tree they came to, saying they were going to stay there and be little birds – all except Solomon, who sat at the bottom and said he was going to be a mushroom. They hid in the long grass and then, while I called them frantically in one part of the meadow, suddenly came leaping over the moon-daisies like a troop of kangaroos, from a different direction altogether. They prepared endless traps for one another. What with the stealthy stalking of the ambusher and the even stealthier approach of the victim that game could be guaranteed to take ages, particularly if the victim was the she-kitten who didn't like being jumped on and immediately started going back the other way. Even when we got back to civilisation they wouldn't behave. Then they dawdled at everybody's front gate, either bawling for me to go back for them, Sugieh included, because they were Afraid to Go Past – or, if there was something interesting inside, like a baby in a pram or an open front door, marching in in a body and having a look.

  Often when I got back from one of those trips I was so exhausted I had to go and lie down to reassemble my shattered nerves. Not that I got much rest. If I left the cats in the garden I lay there wondering what they were up to. Once, indeed, I came down to investigate an unnatural silence just in time to spot them marching away into the distance, off to do the leaf-mould walk all over again. If I took them upstairs with me they either played tag all over the bed or sat heavily on me in a body and said they were going to sleep as well. If I left them downstairs, that was usually the signal for Sugieh to show them how to knock down Shorty.

  I always got up and reeled wearily down the stairs when I heard the crash, just in case – and it was fortunate that I did. One day I went down to find that the armchair was not in its usual position and Shorty, tail-less as usual and completely grounded, was running madly round on the floor trying to face up to a circle of all four kittens at once while Sugieh, seated maternally on the chair-arm, encouraged them with soft cries to play with the pretty birdie, he couldn't run away.

  I remember that so well because it was the last adventure they had as a family. The next day one of the blue boys, after a final game that brought a stupid lump to my throat as I saw his small paw poking excitedly at his brothers and sister through the air-holes of his basket, went to his new home. And the day after that Sugieh – suddenly, tragically, unbelievably – was dead.

TEN

S
ugieh died after an operation for spaying. We had decided not to breed any more kittens. It wasn't that we had grown tired of them. Even though they had wrecked the house and shattered our nerves, there was nothing we would have liked more than to go on raising noisy, despotic, fascinating Siamese for ever.

  From the practical point of view, however, we found that in our remote part of the country it wasn't easy to sell the kittens; and that the people who did make enquiries nearly dropped dead when we asked four guineas each. They expected kittens, like cabbage plants, to be cheaper in the country. One woman said outright that the Siamese cat business was a racket. People with ordinary kittens, she said, were only too glad to give them away. Cats bred like flies, kittens cost nothing to rear, and where was the difference she would like to know?

  The difference was that we paid a lot more than four guineas for Sugieh. We had also paid to have her mated to a first-class tom and the kittens had been raised, not on scraps or bread and milk, but on the properly-balanced diet that is essential for Siamese. Ordinary kittens leave their mothers at four to six weeks, but Siamese kittens are slow developers and no breeder worthy of the name would sell a Siamese kitten under ten to twelve weeks old.

  The first of the blue boys was fourteen weeks old when he left us, and though it hadn't been as much in the early days, of course, by that time the four kittens and Sugieh were costing us more than thirty shillings a week to feed. Including the cost of having them inoculated against feline gastro-enteritis – and that, too, was essential; the mortality among Siamese kittens from that disease was terribly high – if we sold them at four guineas we would barely break even.

  Obviously we couldn't go on breeding them to sell at a loss. We were told that breeders often had this trouble with their first litter, and that once we became known we would sell them quite easily. Against that, however, we weighed the fact that we had bought Sugieh primarily as a pet, and that since having the kittens she had been so preoccupied with them she had undoubtedly grown away from us. She had become very thin and nervous too. We didn't want her to be like that all her life. We decided that we would prefer to keep her and Solomon as pets. So we had her spayed – an operation which, in these days, is perfectly safe ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Mimi, when she had the same operation later on, came through it perfectly. But Sugieh died.

  Numbly we buried her under the apple tree where only the night before, her blue fur ruffling in the breeze, we had watched her playing tag with her three remaining kittens. We shut them in while we buried her so that they shouldn't see her go; but when we went back into the house and what was left of the posse came galloping out to greet us we felt as if we were murderers.

  We never forgot Sugieh. For a while, indeed, we thought of buying back the other blue boy and keeping her family together; but that was impossible. Not only would the cost of feeding them, when they grew up, have been colossal but – putting sentimentality aside –
four
of them, taking up all the eiderdown, bossing us round the place and getting us into trouble at every turn… No. It would have been too much.

  So the second blue boy went to friends over whom, like a true Siamese despot, he lorded it from the start. They christened him Ming, which was a complete misnomer by any standards. He neither looked the least bit fragile himself, nor had any regard for anything that was. Every time we heard of him after that he had just smashed something fresh. He told them, they said, that his family did that every day when he was home. The she-kitten stayed on with us to take the place of her mother and was – more aptly than we realised at the time – christened Sheba. And Solomon adopted me as his Mum.

  Sheba hardly missed her mother at all. Sugieh had much preferred her sons anyway, and Sheba had long since transferred her affections to Charles, whom she could enslave with one blink of her blue eyelashes any time she liked. But Solomon had been his mother's favourite, and he missed her dreadfully. The night she died we let the kittens come to bed with us, as much for our consolation as for theirs. Sheba and the blue boy settled themselves methodically on a corner of the eiderdown, washed each other's ears and fell asleep at once. Solomon, however, spent a long time plodding forlornly up and down the bed saying he was hungry – at fourteen weeks he, alone of all the kittens, had still not been completely weaned – until at last he gave up the search, crept into my arms, and, with a small, sad 'Wooh', said if Sugieh didn't want him any more, then I had better be his Mum.

  Touching though it was, being Solomon's Mum had its snags. It meant, among other things, having to sleep cheek to cheek with him any time he and his sister managed – by hiding under the bed or looking particularly forlorn – to avoid being shut in the spare room for the night. Sheba, after one brief attempt at cuddling up to Charles, took to sleeping on top of the wardrobe. Nobody fidgeted up there, she said.

  Not so Solomon. Whichever way I turned, if I opened an eye in the middle of the night there would be a small black head on my pillow, bat ears semaphoring gently as he slept, snuggled as close as he could get to mine. Solomon had loved his Mum, and so had I, and it seemed the least I could do to comfort him. I drew the line at some things though. The nights he had fish or garlic sausage for supper, Solomon – wail woefully though he might about being an Orphan and people ought to be Kind to him – slept next door.

  Being Solomon's Mum also meant that I was the only one he would come to when called (though that was counter-balanced by Charles being the only one who had any influence over Sheba); and that I was expected to rescue him from any trouble he got into. With Solomon still the indefatigable Walter Mitty of the family, that was pretty well a full-time job.

  The first thing he did, free from Sugieh's stern, if spasmodic control, was to start a campaign against dogs. From now on, he said, no dog would be allowed even to look through the gate. If they did, by gosh, they saw something that struck terror into their hearts. Solomon looking back at them.

  Actually, while Sheba could look very fierce indeed when she was annoyed – she had a way of flattening her ears so far down towards her eyebrows it looked as if she were wearing a cloth cap, and when she crossed her eyes as well the effect was really horrible – all Solomon succeeded in doing was looking worried. It worked though. The Rector's wife and her Pekinese – he extended his activities in their case to crawling under the gate and following them up the lane, walking sideways like a crab with his back arched and threatening to attack – were absolutely terrified of him. He scored a monumental victory over a Dalmatian called Simon who, so his owner told me, had been badly scratched as a pup and had been scared stiff of cats ever since. Simon, sniffing soulfully at a spray of cow parsley just outside the gate, nearly fainted on the spot when he saw Solomon squinting myopically at him round his own back leg. He gave one anguished yelp and fled up the hill as if the devil were after him, after which we heard so much from Solomon about All the Dogs being Afraid of Him, Even the Ones as big as Elephants, that Sheba got fed up and went and sat on the sitting room door to teach him a lesson.

  That was another thing we had to remember now. Always to look at the tops of doors before shutting them, in case Sheba was sitting up there to annoy Solomon. Whenever she got browned off with his swanking, or with his knocking her down to show he was bigger than she was, she just leapt lightly on to the top of the nearest door and looked at him with meaning.

  Solomon knew what the meaning was, all right. She was reminding him that he couldn't jump, and it never failed to cut him to the quick. Forgetting all about being most important and dogs as big as elephants, he would sit on the back of an armchair, which was the nearest he could get to her, and wail with mortification. Except, that is, for the day he had his bright idea. Halfway through the first howl he got down off the chair, tore upstairs, and after a series of muffled thumps that sounded as if the roof were coming in, announced with a bellow that he was on a door too. Come and see! He was indeed. The thumps had been him heaving himself laboriously up Charles's dressing gown which hung behind the bedroom door, and now he was balanced shakily but triumphantly on the top. Charles and I praised him extravagantly and pretended not to notice the dressing gown, but there was nothing magnanimous about Sheba. She went round behind the door, sniffed pointedly at the hem, and – as she rode away down the stairs again on Charles's shoulder, leaving Solomon to his triumph opened her little blue mouth and said something that could only be interpreted as 'Yah!'

  She was right, too. No sooner had we reached the bottom than there was another almighty yell from upstairs. Only this time it wasn't triumph. Solomon, marooned at a dizzy height of six feet and unable to work out how to utilise the dressing gown for the descent, was issuing the old familiar call for somebody to rescue him quick, he couldn't get down.

  Shortly after that Solomon gave up his campaign against dogs. One of them chased him up a tree and Solomon, for the first and only time in his life, went right to the very top. Six feet up would have done, but Solly wasn't taking any chances. Right to the top Mum had always said, and right to the top he went. Unfortunately he chose a forty-foot fir tree on a sloping hillside, and we had to call out the fire brigade to get him down again. 'Looks like a liddle star on a Christmas tree, don' 'ee,' said the man who worked the winch, gazing tenderly up through the branches to where old Bat-Ears, clinging panic-stricken to the tip, swayed sadly to and fro against the evening sky. That wasn't what the man who had to go up the ladder said. He said if he was us he'd keep him in a cage. It taught Solomon a lesson, though. He never hunted dogs again. He took up chasing cats instead, and Sheba came down out of the damson tree and joined him.