More Cats in the Belfry (15 page)

  One of the most remarkable instances of this sort I've heard was told me by a breeder who'd sold a kitten to some people who'd never experienced the proclivities of Siamese before and kept ringing her to tell her what he'd been up to. It seemed that they'd been having their house re-wired and the kitten kept going under the floorboards and coming out somewhere else. They did their best to stop him, but given the chance he was underground like a flash, and it took ages of expensive working time to get him out. Then the electrician hit on the idea of tying a length of string to the kitten's collar, putting him under the floorboards, calling him from across the room where they'd taken up another board, and the kitten would nip across underneath, emerge gleefully from the new hole – and the electrician would tie the string to a length of flex which he then pulled through and connected up. 'Saved hours of taking up floorboards,' said the breeder proudly. I would have been scared of the string's getting caught round a joist and their having to take up floorboards even faster than before to get the kitten out, but maybe he was an exception. Maybe he's working even now as an electrician's mate. I never heard the sequel. Only wondered, thinking of Saphra using the carpenter's ruler as an extension of his arm, what one might have made of him with a little encouragement.

  I hear lots of stories about intelligent cats. Not always Siamese. All breeds, including 'ordinaries', have their A-level types. There was the tale I heard from a chemist in a neighbouring village, whose enormous, battle­scarred ginger neuter suddenly took to staying out for hours at a time and then coming home smelling of Chanel No.5, which the chemist recognised because he sold it in his shop. Intrigued, one day he followed the cat, which walked a long way up the road, scorning the lesser houses, and finally turned in at the gateway of the local 'big house', proceeding up the drive as if he owned it. He went to the front door, lifted the low-level letter-box with his nose and let it drop. Within seconds the door opened, a voice said 'There you are darling, come right in' and the cat disappeared inside – to reappear at his home several hours later smelling once more of Chanel No.5. The chemist said a wealthy old lady lived in the big house and was obviously feeding and making a fuss of him, hence the smell of the expensive scent, which the cat apparently didn't mind. 'Yet he looks like a prize-fighter,' he said incredulously.

  The same cat, more in keeping with its appearance, once ate all the fish in the chemist's friend's garden pond. The friend, who also lived a long way up the same road, said he couldn't understand why his fish were vanishing. 'Perhaps a heron's taking them,' suggested the chemist, who had no idea of the truth – until one day he met his cat walking down the middle of the road with the last – and largest – goldfish in its mouth, tail flapping on one side, head wagging on the other. The chemist tried to rescue it, but the cat wouldn't let go, so he had to carry the cat home, fish and all, as fast as he could, before anybody could see them. Next time he met the fish-owner the man said he was re-stocking the pond with small ones. Presumably they were beneath the cat's notice, as he never took any again. 'Can you beat that?' asked the chemist. I had to admit that I couldn't.

  Neither could I beat the story about somebody, living in the country with two cocker spaniels, who in an unguarded moment adopted a black half-Siamese kitten from a friend who lived in town. On arrival the kitten stalked into the kitchen, put the spaniels in their places by slapping them on the nose, and took to country life straight away. The following day his new owner heard puffing and snorting coming from an adjoining field and found the kitten smacking the nose of a cow which was standing over him looking threatening. The cow was likewise put in its place. Later, while his owner watched in horror, the kitten leapt on to the back of a bullock, clung to the curls on its neck, and hung on like a rodeo rider while it careered round the field. Encouraged by his success, he was next found sitting behind a cow batting happily at her tail, which the cow, presumably thinking an outsize fly was after her, was swishing angrily from side to side. On another occasion he stalked a magpie, grabbed a tail­-feather as it took off, and was airborne until the feather came away. Picking himself up, the kitten took the feather indoors and it was a treasure for days until it became too dilapidated to play with or take to bed. And when he wasn't dicing with death, finished his owner, he liked to sit in a holly tree by the front door eating the leaves and removing the prickles from his mouth with his paw. What did I make of that? I could only say, weakly, 'It must be the Siamese in him.'

  Half-Siamese resulting from unplanned matings with domestic cats, typified by their elegant lines, plush coats and foghorn voices, are often black and invariably more catastrophe-prone than ordinary cats. The modern pedigreed Orientals which are the result of deliberate crossings between Siamese and other selected cats also have this reputation, but I find it hard to believe, after my own experience and all the hair-raising tales I've heard, that there is anything to beat a full Siamese for causing trouble. Consider the story I was told by the woman who took her Siamese kitten – the first she'd ever had, and she was captivated by the way it accompanied her everywhere like a dog – to a house a couple of streets away to buy potatoes from an old man who sold vegetables to supplement his pension. Frightened by the traffic, which it hadn't experienced before, as soon as the man opened the door the kitten ran up his leg. 'His bad leg, of course,' said my informant resignedly.

  She peeled the protesting Alfred off the old man's back and took him home, and the next time she went round for potatoes – without Alfred for obvious reasons – she was duly shown the wounds on the door-step. Up went the old man's trouser leg. 'See where 'e got I? Cor, I felt that. Hummin' all night it were,' he informed her. Not that she could see anything. She was too busy praying that nobody spotted the display and reported them for indecent exposure.

  'The number of people who say what a beautiful cat he is and then spoil it by saying they knew he must be mine...' she finished.

  I am continually hearing stories like this, though there are people who insist I make it all up and that no cats could ever behave as I say Siamese do. They are non-Siamese owners, of course, and I can only suggest they try it for themselves – like the woman who rang me one day about her chocolate-point Siamese, the first she'd ever owned, wondering if I could help her.

  I shuddered the moment I heard his name. In my experience, to call a Siamese Ming, as being the epitome of Oriental fragility and perfection, is courting disaster. All the Mings I've ever come across have been outstandingly diabolical as if their one mission in life is to disprove the connotation, and this Ming was no exception.

  His owner, Connie, explained that she had recently retired from teaching science at a girls' boarding school and had moved into a new flat. The garden of her previous flat had opened on to a large field in which it had been safe for Ming to roam while she was away, and there he'd set up his personal dictatorship. He'd fought all the other neighbourhood cats – in particular one called Ginger Bates, whom he'd loathed with deep Oriental loathing. He'd stolen things from the neighbours and brought them home to her as gifts and she'd had to find out whom they belonged to and return them. He'd walked the world like a feline Dick Turpin and now that his owner had brought him to a flat more convenient for her – near the first one but round the corner on the main road, with the garden wired in for his safety and Ginger Bates and his beloved field on the other side of an eight-foot fence – he'd embarked on despotic revolution.

  He'd always been a despot, his owner informed me. He'd originally belonged to her vet who had two other Siamese whom Ming, as a youngster, had bullied till their lives weren't worth living – and, as she was catless at the time, the vet and his wife, who were friends of hers, had asked her to take him on.

  He'd settled well with Connie. He liked electric fires, and prawns and steak, and being treated as an only cat of special importance. But he disapproved strongly of the new flat when they moved, and particularly of the wired-in garden. They'd been in residence for three weeks, during which time he'd patrolled the bottom of the fence every day, clawing at the wooden supports, yelling because he couldn't get over or under it, and her new neighbours had started to complain. What could she
do,
short of finding another flat and moving away? she asked. She couldn't part with Ming. He was her friend.

  Get a water-pistol, I advised her, explaining how it had worked with Saphra. I could sense horror coming down the phone wire at the suggestion. What about a flower spray? she asked at last. I understood her predicament. She lived very near the school where she had taught, and still took part in its extra­curricular activities. An ex-senior mistress going round with a water-pistol – or spotted in the local toy shop trying to buy one – would hardly set a good example to the pupils.

  Try the flower spray then, I agreed. But she must
persevere
, not give up on it. The vet had told her to persevere, too, she admitted dismally. It hadn't worked with him, though, when he'd owned Ming in the beginning.

  It worked this time. Three weeks later Connie was on the phone again. She didn't know how to thank me, she said. Ming had given up bawling and accepted the fact that he couldn't get out, though he still peered under the fence for Ginger Bates. So far the latter hadn't peered back, for which she was truly grateful. Ming already had a permanently crumpled ear as the result of an encounter with a magpie whose nest he'd tried to raid in the old free-roaming field days, and she had always been afraid of his getting another from Ginger Bates.

  She gave me a résumé of Ming's eventful history – of his many fights and consequent visits to the vet. He also suffered frequently from tonsillitis on account of talking so much, and had to be treated for that, which was no picnic. The things he'd stolen and brought home to the previous flat to await her return from school, she expounded earnestly, ranged from fillets of steak and a turbot skeleton with its head on to green balls lifted from the public tennis courts when nobody was looking, and parked one on each stair. How he'd carried them home she couldn't imagine, but he had. And only green ones.

  As far as she could she'd tracked down the owners and returned the booty, but sometimes it had been impossible – for instance when she got home and found two pairs of red knickers laid out on the stairs with Ming sitting beside them saying they were a Present. She couldn't go round asking about those, she said: it would have been too embarrassing. She'd put them in the dustbin, but it had always remained on her conscience. Why did Siamese cats do such awful things?

  I roared with laughter. Because they were Siamese, I said. And from what she'd told me I wouldn't mind betting, if we compared pedigrees, that he and Saphra were related. Saphra did things like that because he'd got his character from his grandfather, Saturn Sentinel, of the famous Killdown strain. People were fortunate, or benighted, depending on how one looked at it, if they had one of that line. Life was never the same again. I told her about Saphra and the purple towels and his being expelled from Langford. It was her turn to shudder down the phone.

  By the next post she sent me a copy of Ming's pedigree and sure enough, there it was. Saturn Sentinel was Ming's grandfather, he and Saph were cousins. It didn't matter how far they were removed from their illustrious ancestor, I told her when I rang to break the news. If the genes were there, she was in for trouble.

  We became friends – comrades in distress – at the very thought of it. She came to see my two – Saphra the extrovert Head of the Household, Tani pursuing her role of Fugitive from the White Slavers as usual – and was entranced by them. I went to see Ming, and was immediately captivated by him. Chocolate­-pointed – a paler edition of Saphra – he was very like Saph, except for the crumpled ear. Handsome, tall – impressively so when he put on his Collapsing with the Cold performance, which was one of the first things he tried out on me.

  Connie's flat had gas-fired central heating, with a large electric fire in the sitting-room to boost the temperature when necessary. It was November when I first went to visit her, and I'd met Ming, we'd had tea and were relaxing in the sitting-room when I happened to glance to my left, where there was a long radiator under the window. There, sitting upright, stretched to his full height against it with his head pressed wanly against the metalwork and his eyes closed was Ming. I bent down to look at him. He half-opened one eye, saw me watching him and leaned more heavily still against the radiator. I got the message. He was Suffering. Feeling the Cold. 'Any minute now you'll get the fire routine,' muttered Connie under her breath. A moment later I did. He walked over the electric fire, sat down in front of it and batted the plug, which was lying loose, till it rattled against the wall. 'WOW!' he said with feeling, fixing me with a look.

  To illustrate what he expected to happen next, Connie put the plug in the socket and switched on the fire. As the heat came up and the element began to glow, Ming stretched himself in front of it and rolled on his back. Bliss! said his expression. If he could put the plug in the socket himself he would, said Connie. Any day now she expected him to work out how to do it.

  He'd already worked out one thing that was quite extraordinary. Indeed, it was the most remarkable example of cat intelligence I've ever come across. There was a cat-flap in the kitchen door leading into the fenced-in garden, to which Ming usually had unrestricted access. When Connie was going to be out, however, she brought Ming indoors, put the fastener down on the cat-flap and a small but weighty cupboard in front of the flap. She was afraid that, with plenty of time and no supervision, he might still find a way to scale the fence.