Who was it who looked sheepish then – who dropped the brambles as if they were red-hot, muttered something about it being a nice day and slunk embarrassedly through the gate? Certainly not Solomon. Nothing large enough today, he assured them airily from the garden wall. Not even a snake bigger than three feet long. Come again tomorrow, and see what we caught then.
Sheba’s attitude was just as bad. She had perfected a method of putting us in our place which was effective in the extreme. Any time we refused to let her out, or her supper 70
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wasn’t ready, or she was just plain fed up, she sat in front of us, eyed us witheringly, and sighed. It was the sort of sigh my maths mistress used to give when she saw my geometry homework, and I knew quite well what it meant. It was even more demoralising coming from a Siamese cat.
Added to that Sheba, when she was out these days, didn’t come home when she was called. One word from me, or even from Charles whom she normally obeyed as promptly as if she was his Eastern slave, and she was off up the lane like a shot.
Her goal was a neighbour’s strawberry bed up on the hillside. He was – as she was doubtless aware, seeing that she passed several other equally good strawberry beds to get there – the one man in the village who objected to my trespassing on his land to fetch the cats; everybody else’s attitude was that I could get the so-and-so’s any way I liked, so long as I removed them fast.
So there, if she made it first, she sat in her sanctuary of strawberries while we yelled threats at her from the lane and she bawled companionably back. Sooner or later somebody would come by and ask why didn’t we go in and fetch the little dear, not shout at her like that. And the moment we tried to, as sure as eggs were eggs, out would pop the old man shouting one foot in his strawberries and he’d sue us while Sheba, having achieved her object of reducing the neighbourhood to bedlam, melted quietly from the scene and went home.
Something certainly would have to be done about those cats. The question was… what?
Somebody suggested we got another kitten. That, they said, would take them down a peg or two and keep them 71
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in their place. Our answer to that – little knowing what fate had in store for us in that connection – was that we weren’t quite as crazy as that yet. Not only were the trials of bringing up our own two still shatteringly fresh in our minds, but we had examples enough of what happened to people who had kittens.
There were the friends who owned Chuki, for instance.
We’d warned them ourselves what to expect if they bought a Siamese. So, to be quite fair, had the owner of Chuki’s mother. When they went to see her she said sometimes the only way she kept from going mad was to go for a long, long walk and, when she came back, give that cat a darned good hiding. It made no difference. They still bought one.
All it needed, they insisted, was patience and a firm hand, and with an intelligent little thing like that there’d be no trouble at all.
The last we’d heard of them they were thinking of moving. Three months they’d had him. In that time he’d wrecked the furniture, eaten a hole in an eiderdown, nearly been built into a compost heap and got himself locked up at the police station for vagrancy. Not in an ordinary cat-cage, either. Got hisself out of that like Houdini, in an hour, said the sergeant. When they went to fetch him home
– his report sheet said he’d been found wandering in the street at 1 a.m. and picked up by a patrol car – he was sitting triumphantly in a cell.
Added to that their left-hand neighbours weren’t speaking to them because he kept going in and frightening the baby and their right-hand neighbours were complaining about the state of their garden. They were looking, they informed us in their last sad phone call, for a place in the middle 72
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of Exmoor or the Sahara, where he could operate without landing them in jail as well.
If, as somebody else suggested, we’d thought of adopting an ordinary kitten – just to take the edge off them, they said, and so much more manageable than a Siamese – we had the example of the Rector to put us against that. Recently
– inspired, according to him, by the devotion of our own two cats – he had acquired a couple himself. Not Siamese.
Solomon had once fallen out of a tree on to his head and nearly frightened him out of his rectorial collar, and the inspiration didn’t go as far as that. His kittens were Hardy, a sleek black tom, and Willis, his charming black and white sister. Most appropriate they looked too, sitting in clerical dignity on top of the Rector’s wall – until one day he noticed they were developing rather big ears.
He couldn’t have been more alarmed if they’d started sprouting horns – and with equally good cause. Since Ajax, the doctor’s Seal Point tom, had been brought over to mate with Father Adams’s Mimi he had developed rather a penchant for our valley. Nowadays we quite often met him sauntering hopefully down the lane – and if, following her operation, Mimi herself was no longer interested when he called, there were other cats who were.
His progress through the valley was like Alexander’s march through India – in Ajax’s case littered not with fair hair and Grecian noses but with kittens with big ears. They also inherited a marked propensity for trouble. Three of them were already locally notorious. One who was privately owned had eaten six fish out of a fishpond; one at the Post Office had torn up some postal orders and eaten the stamp account; and one at the garage was refusing to let dogs get 73
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out of cars. His place it was, he said belligerently; all his including the petrol pumps, and he’d do them if they did.
It was to guard against such a contingency happening to him that the Rector got his kittens from a farm three miles up the valley – but it was no use. Ajax, he said, gazing at Hardy and Willis despairingly while their ears practically grew before our eyes, had progressed further than he thought.
He had indeed. Faithful to their ancestors, developing their heritage in a style suitable to their surroundings – Hardy had so far been sick on a canon and marooned on the church roof and Willis had bitten the curate’s hat.
By the time we went on holiday we still didn’t know what to do about our pair. We’d had one idea that had helped a little. We’d bought them a tortoise called Tarzan, and for a while that really seemed to work.
It was wonderful to look out of the window, see them slow-marching with Tarzan across the lawn, and realise there was no need to shadow them – that ten minutes later, even if we wanted to go to town, they wouldn’t be on the other side of the village or chasing somebody’s chickens round a field. Just a few inches further on, peering intently under his shell.