I have so many memories of Solomon those last few months. In the garden one day in spring, for instance, when it appeared that he wanted to dig a hole. The ground was hard – Charles and I not being very hoe-minded – so to help him I pulled out a dahlia cane and scratched the earth loose with that. Did Solomon get the message? Not the one I was intending, anyway. He spied suspiciously down the hole in case it held a mouse.
There was the time, too, when he actually caught a mouse.
Charles had taken up bee-keeping. The combination of two cats, a donkey, Charles and a hive of bees had to be experienced to be believed and of that I will tell more anon.
Suffice it for the moment to say that bee-keeping is not as easy as is sometimes thought, we were always having crises and having to send for a bee expert, and this was one of the times.
Charles had lost two swarms in a fortnight. Soon, he kept expostulating, he wouldn’t have any bees at all. As far as I was concerned that would have been a jolly good job, but there we were. The expert expected momentarily, Charles in the garden waiting for him and Solomon mousing hopefully on the lawn.
He’d been sitting there on and off for weeks, in front of a clump of grass that grew over by the wall. He sat there when it was fine. He sat there when it rained.
When it did, for fear of a chill on his liver I took out a wooden box, turned it on its side and in that, to the obvious surprise of callers, he sat imperturbably before 16
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the grass clump like a sentry at Buckingham Palace. It didn’t seem odd to Solomon. That was just when one might come out, he said.
One hadn’t. Or if it had, he hadn’t seen it. No mighty hunter was Solomon, though he tried so hard to make believe he was. And then, the very moment the bee expert arrived, he landed one. A whack ing great grandfather of a field mouse that probably couldn’t get away, it was so fat.
He lugged it to the middle of the lawn, eyed us forbiddingly over the top of it and prepared to defend it against the world. Make believe again, as well we knew. But through the gate right then came the bee expert, who was also a fervent animal lover – and the first picture he had of us
– also animal lovers and pillars of the RSPCA to boot – was of a fierce, slit-eyed Siamese about to torture a mouse, and ourselves standing, apparently unheeding, by.
‘Don’t you take it away from him?’ he demanded. We did, I explained, if it was alive. But this one looked dead – we were watching in fact, to see if it moved – and if it wasn’t dead, its rescue needed strategy.
‘On account of the cat’s so fierce?’ asked the bee expert.
On account, I explained, of the fact that we had for years been rescuing mice from Solomon by lifting him by the scruff of his neck – gently, so that, while his body and forepaws were in the air, his back legs were still on the ground – and that made him drop the mouse and then we caught it. But Solomon had now got wise to that one. When we lifted him he held his front paws out to catch the quarry himself if it fell – and, as a further precaution, bit deliberately through its backbone the moment we touched him.
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‘It would be dead then in any case,’ I explained. ‘So now we wait, see if it moves – and if it does and he lets go, we grab him before he can pick it up again.’
Solomon, as if to demonstrate, laid the mouse carefully on the lawn and looked at us.
‘There you are, you see. Dead,’ I said placatingly. At which the mouse got up and walked away. We would have saved it even then but for the fact that, as we moved forward to pick up Solomon, the bee expert advanced as well. Solomon grabbed the mouse and eyed us direly. Playing dramatically up to the role of a Panther Retreating With His Quarry (always the Walter Mitty was Solomon) he slunk, looking suspi ciously over his shoulder at us at every step, to the corner of the cottage. And there – as, in an attempt to show the bee expert that we weren’t as black as Solomon was painting us, I threw caution to the winds and chased after him – Solomon, of course, killed it.
That was bad enough. What was worse was that when the expert and Charles went off to the hive at the top of the orchard Solomon was tossing the dead mouse in an ecstatic Siamese ballet dance on the right hand side of the lawn. And when they came back again with their mission accomplished there was Solomon tossing another one on the left. It was no good pretending it was the same one, either.
The first one had been big and fat and a field mouse. The second was a tiny pygmy shrew. Not only had Solomon, the world’s biggest duffer when it came to mousing, managed for the first and only time to catch two in ten minutes, as Charles said starkly afterwards, he’d had to do it in front of someone who liked Nature so much, he wouldn’t even wear gloves when handling bees. (If they stung him on his 18
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hands they might get away with it, he’d told Charles very seriously. If they stung into leather gloves, they’d lose their stings and die.)
So there we were. Solomon mousing, tormenting Sheba, going for walks... It was only a few weeks before he died that the Valley was flooded, and there was no sign of anything wrong with him then.
It began with a terrible thunderstorm. Our cats, fol lowing our own example, took no notice of it – but up on the hill Miss Wellington, as well we knew, would be heading for her broom-cupboard, cats and all. I tried to ring her up to comfort her, but there was no answer.
‘Daft old besom’ said our neighbour, Father Adams, when he called with a sack over his shoulder and a gift of cabbages and I told him about it. ‘She takes the damned thing off the hook in case it gets struck.’ I noticed him turn up the hill when he left our gate, nevertheless. Going up to be rude to her, no doubt – and to make sure, himself, that she was all right.
Meanwhile we put Annabel into her stable across the lane… Annabel, who takes good care of herself, poses like Love Locked Out on the hillside behind the cottage the moment it rains, and then stands there and drips disconsolately till we take pity and put her in… We lit a fire because, July or not, it was cold and the sight of it was bright and cheerful. And then we went upstairs to watch the storm.
We get tremendous storms over our West Country hills and this was no exception. The rain fell in a drumming curtain. The thunder growled around the sky like a prowling lion. Lightning flashed like scimitars around the 19
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horned Celtic camp on the hill beyond us. Solomon sat in the spare-room window with us, I remember, and regarded it all with interest.
It was Charles who first looked down and saw water coming under the gate. ‘The bridge must be blocked again,’
he said. ‘We’d better go down and clear it.’ The entrance to the cottage is over a bridge across the stream – a very small bridge under which sticks and leaves sometimes lodge and cause the stream to overflow. That wasn’t the trouble this time, how ever. By the time we got downstairs the water was fanning silently across the garden like a tide com ing in over sand, and, when we looked over the front gate, the stream was a rapidly rising river that filled the lane from side to side.
Things happened quickly after that. We ran for corrugated iron sheets – spare roofing for Annabel’s shed – to barricade the gateway. But even as we got the front gate blocked the water came through the drive gate, higher up the lane, and poured in a wide red waterfall over the terrace wall.
Our first thought then was for the fishpool, down in the lower yard, which would be flushed out like a saucer under a tap by the surging force of the flood. ‘The paving stones!’