More Cats In The Belfry

  Way back when Annabel was young Miss Wellington had tried hard to persuade us to let her have a foal. Every time she went to stay with her friend who lived by the sea in Devon she would send us postcards showing mother donkeys on the beach with their cuddlesome offspring and Some day – this? written heavily across them. 'Old Mother Wellington's at it again,' the postman used to announce when he delivered her holiday greeting; and when we did try to get Annabel a foal – a fine old caper that turned out to be, too, what with her measuring fifty-four inches round the waist (Annabel, that is); collapsing in the lane telling us she could Go No Further, it was her Condition, when we tried to get her to exercise; and keeping us on the hop for three months waiting for a late delivery when in fact she wasn't having a foal at all – a good few people thought we'd been brainwashed into it by Miss Wellington, when what we'd hoped for was a small companion for Annabel.

  Now, Mrs Binney being otherwise occupied in lurking behind her curtains watching for Mr Tooting, it was Miss Wellington who popped up at the front gate just about every time I put my nose outside to tell me what a beautiful little cat dear Shantung was, what a lovely mother she was sure she'd make, and what wonderful companions the kittens would be for me.

  I recalled the one and only litter we'd ever bred: Sugieh's, consisting of Solomon, Sheba and the two Blue Boys who, with Solomon as their self-appointed leader, had terrorised the valley so many years before. Playing ring-a-­roses round the chimneys high up on the cottage roof because in those days, before we'd had an extension built on at the back, it had been possible to jump from the hillside across to the sloping roof of the single-storey kitchen and thunder in a miniature posse up to the ridge.

  I remembered Solomon, who couldn't climb for toffee though he considered he was best at everything, going up the damson tree at the front gate by sheer force of impetus and falling on the head of the Rector, who never came to visit us after that without pausing at a distance to stoop and peer up into the tree to be sure that Beelzebub, as he called him, wasn't up there. Solomon going up a pine tree on the hillside by the same sheer force of impetus when chased by a dog. Right to the Top, Sugieh had always told them, and right to top he went, and had to be rescued by the fire brigade, clinging to the topmost branch like the Christmas star and bawling the valley for help. The lot of them, chewing holes in socks and blankets, fighting, falling in the water-butt and in their food, constantly demanding More like a detachment of Oliver Twists.

  I couldn't stand that again, I told myself. Not my own. Nor could I stand having eventually to part with the kittens, which was the main reason we'd decided against breeding any more in the early days. It had been too much of a heartbreak parting with the Blue Boys, and hearing later that one of them had been run over made us feel like murderers for not having kept them all. Tani wouldn't have a keepable number, that I could bet. With my luck she'd have eight or more, they'd all chitter in chorus when I used the typewriter and I'd go round the bend.

  So at six months she was spayed, and apart from Miss Wellington not speaking to me for several weeks and Saska spitting at Tani when she came back from the vet's, saying that she Smelled (next day, as she was full of beans, I put them out in their garden run to enjoy the sunshine, but we had a sudden summer storm and as I passed their run en route from the garage there was no sign of Tani, obviously comfortably ensconced inside the cat-house, which she loved, only of Saska sitting in the open run in the pouring rain announcing that he Wasn't Going In, she Smelled and he wouldn't ever sleep with her again)... apart from one or two vicissitudes like that, all was peaceful at the cottage.

FOUR

It didn't last long. Miss Wellington took on a family of doves somebody over in the next village didn't want and chaos broke out once more at the top of the hill.

  Given a picture of a pink-washed cottage with lichened roof and lozenge-paned windows, a garden full of lavender, hollyhock and roses, and an elderly lady in a straw hat standing in the middle with a white dove perched on her hand, most people would have said that, for them, was the epitome of rural England. Alas, while that was exactly how Miss Wellington's garden did look, with her raffia-flowered hat adding just the touch needed for the right old-world atmosphere, the snag was that her cottage overlooked the lane, and she'd had the dovecote fixed between her two front bedroom windows. The birds took to their new home at once, but instead of fluttering lovingly down to sit on her hand among the hollyhocks they spent most of their time stumping about in the road, picking up grit and holding up people wanting to drive past.