He added a couple more pictures to the pile. ‘You know, us sailors aren’t that different to you cats, really, are we?’ he mused. ‘We go where we’re posted, we fit in and get on with it. Just like Peter Puss here. We do our best. That’s the naval way, you see.’
Captain Griffiths had been in the Navy for a long time. He’d fought in the war. He’d captained a famous ship called the Riou. He’d been courageous, and for his bravery the Navy had given him several medals. He had done his best. He was clearly a fine captain indeed.
But, to me, he was a man who’d been kind, and I would miss him, and I worried about the new captain who was coming to take his place. Would he like me? Would I like him? Would he give me a ‘roving commission’ too? Would he want me to accompany him on his rounds?
There was no way of knowing, and not much I could do about it, either, so I’d just have to do what Captain Griffiths said – get on with it. And it wouldn’t be long now, anyway; I could feel that the engines were slowing. We’d soon be docking in Hong Kong. And soon after that, I’d find out.
He was nearly ready. The small pile of photographs was almost complete, but for one picture that he was removing from the bulkhead particularly carefully. It was clearly old, and I had a hunch it had been stuck up on many a ship before this one. He finally freed it, and placed it down on the pile with the others, before seeming to reconsider. He picked it up again.
‘I never did tell you, did I?’ he mused, tapping a finger to my nose. Then he smiled a strange smile and lifted the picture closer to his face. He touched it lightly with the same finger, and then nodded towards me. ‘You know who that is, Simon?’ he said, holding it out again, for me to look at. It was of a young, beautiful lady (the ‘darling wife’ he sometimes spoke of? Or some other person? Perhaps his mother?) and cradled in her arms was a bundle wrapped in a shawl. It was a baby. I knew because I’d seen lots of pictures of babies now – even a couple their young fathers had yet to meet. ‘That’s your namesake, that is,’ said Captain Griffiths. ‘That’s Simon.’
He didn’t say any more, but he didn’t need to. I’d been with humans now for long enough to understand them so much better. So I knew; I knew immediately, from the way he said the words to me, and from the way he quickly cast his eyes heavenwards as he spoke. That the Simon in the photograph was gone.
And I realised that the distance between cats and humans wasn’t so great. Whoever that Simon was – and perhaps that didn’t even matter – he was up with my mother, among the stars.
Chapter 8
The period immediately after Captain Griffiths left us had been a strange one.
The new captain joined the ship – he was called Lieutenant Commander Bernard Skinner, and he had such a round, smooth and gentle-looking face that I wondered if he’d been one of the boy-sailors in the war – this war that meant nothing to me, but that everyone still seemed to talk about. But though he scarcely looked old enough to command a whole ship, there was something in his manner that seemed to suggest otherwise, something in the way he held himself that put me in mind of some of the cats back on Stonecutters whose territory abutted mine. His was a presence that commanded respect.
I knew it would be some time before we properly got to know each other, but there was good news right away. The first lieutenant assured me that he was a cat lover like Captain Griffiths, which meant my position was probably safe up on the bridge. I hated the idea of giving up my spot on the magnetic compass – not to mention the other spot I enjoyed, in hazy weather: the little box-on-the-wall at the back of the bridge which housed lots of important wires. But I was still keen to make a good impression on the new commander, and immediately set about hunting down a rat to present to him, so he would know I was a cat who pulled my weight.
And there was another change afoot, it seemed. A big one. Within days of Captain Skinner joining us, we celebrated something called Christmas, which was entirely new to me; an odd business that seemed to involve all sorts of peculiar rituals, few of which made a great deal of sense to me (setting fire to your pudding?) and some of which, particularly the things they had appropriately called ‘crackers’, weren’t nice at all. They were terrifying.
Happily, it didn’t last long and, as far as I could tell, the men were rather glad of it all being over, too. After all, though it inspired lots of singing, and a bumper load of extra post when we’d docked at Shanghai, it also inspired a surprising degree of sadness among some of the crew, and, on one unfortunate occasion, following extra rum rations, a leading seaman getting punched on the nose.
But such was the ‘mystery of the human condition’ – a phrase I’d picked up from Captain Griffiths – that, once the ‘festivities’ were done with (along with another bout of bizarre behaviour, to do with ‘seeing in’ the new year, apparently) a collective glumness seemed to settle over the Amethyst, like the sooty spewings of a badly maintained engine.
The rats, in contrast, seemed to be full of the joys of the coming spring; they certainly sprung away with gusto almost every time I got near one, driving me almost to distraction. So it was that I met Captain Skinner before being able to dispatch one to present to him. Instead, I met him quite by accident, a good couple of weeks after he’d assumed command, while keeping Jack company in the wireless room, as usual.
I was taking my rest on some of his Very Important Bits of Paper when the captain appeared, snapping me out of my reverie (about some very important rat-related matters) and making Jack, who had his back to him, jump.
‘Ah, the ship’s cat!’ he boomed, coming in on a cloud of some exotic spicy odour – one that I was fairly sure had not been present on the Amethyst up to now.
He picked me up without further ado (this was clearly the way with captains) setting both my whiskers and nostrils into overdrive all at once.
‘He’s called Simon, sir,’ Jack told him. ‘Well, Blackie, more often that not, sir. One of the ratings found him back last May, sir, on Stonecutters Island. Ordinary Seaman Hickinbottom. Left the ship before Christmas. Mangy little stray, he was. Probably orphaned. Just a kitten then. Nothing of him. Didn’t think he were more than a few months old when he found him. Erm, sir.’
Just as Captain Griffiths had, Captain Skinner now held me at arm’s length for inspection. He had one hand round my tummy, so my front legs dangled over the back of his hand, and the other thoughtfully cupped under my hindquarters. It wasn’t the most dignified position a cat could find itself in, but I’d grown used to the idea that a naval cat needed to be understanding in such situations. I couldn’t expect the captain of one of His Majesty’s frigates to get down on his hands and knees, after all.
The new captain chortled, revealing a row of cheerful teeth. ‘There’s not a great deal of him now!’ he told Jack, as if giving him an order to rethink. ‘Still quite the tiddler, aren’t you, boy?’
‘But he’s an excellent ratter, sir,’ Jack was quick to reassure him.
‘Often the way,’ the captain mused. ‘He’ll be lighter on his feet.’ He brought me back closer to his face then, and I could see he had eyes almost the same colour as my mother had. Warm eyes, like berries. He then put me back down on Jack’s pull-down Morse code machine desk. ‘As you were, old chap,’ he said to me. ‘So now, Signals, what have you got for me?’ and began looking through some of the piles of Very Important Bits of Paper, and various scribbled notes Jack routinely had at his side. And as I settled down to a decent grooming – mangy stray, indeed! – I remembered what Jack had said about ‘when’ I was still a kitten. So I’d been right, then. I’d officially left my kittenhood behind. I was a grown cat not just in my own eyes, but in their eyes as well. I stretched a little taller. Actually felt a little taller. Because it was a quite a milestone, that. I was a cat now. It was official.