More Cats In The Belfry

  Once upon a time Father Adams had been the village odd-jobber, but he was now too old and rheumaticky to do more than potter round his own garden. Fred Ferry regarded himself as the old boy's natural successor, but Fred, never seen without the mysterious knapsack over his shoulder, reputed to be given to overcharging mightily for any job he did, wasn't everybody's choice, and when Ern Biggs, who lived in the next village, was invited to do some gardening by a newcomer who'd met him in the Rose and Crown one day, and his reputation for doing a fair job at a passable rate got round, quite a few people – newcomers themselves, who didn t know about village etiquette – switched to him. Now he had become as familiar a sight around our village as if he belonged to it.

  Miss Wellington had always coped with her own small garden and its population of concrete gnomes and toadstools herself, and when it came to Poppy's property, if there was anybody she wasn't going to employ it was Fred Ferry. Not only did she disapprove of the implications of the knapsack and of his rolling home singing from the pub at night to his cottage practically opposite hers, but once, when there'd been a spate of break-ins in the village and Miss Wellington, scared of being burgled herself, had been seen bobbing about behind her hedge with a trilby hat on a stick – presumably to give would-be intruders the impression that there was a man about the place – Fred had seized the opportunity to start the story that she had a fancy man, and he knew who it was, and Miss Wellington had never forgiven him.

  To Fred it was all a joke. Starting rumours is a traditional country pastime and nobody took much notice of his fabrications. But when Miss Wellington, who'd lived in the village as long as anybody could remember (though she hadn't been born here: her family had been a county one, with a big house some miles away, but she and her mother had moved here when she was a young girl, after her father died) when she so far forgot village propriety as to employ Ern Biggs to do her sister's garden, things, in Fred Ferry's eyes, had gone beyond the pale.

  He went round looking daggers every time he saw her and gazing pointedly in the opposite direction when he passed Poppy's cottage. Ern hadn't helped matters by copying an idea he'd picked up at one of the big houses, where a contractor had put a board outside reading ALTERATIONS BY W. BROWN. Ern now carried a board which he put outside places where he was working which read GARDEN BY E. BIGGS and seeing it outside Poppy's place was like a red rag to a bull to Fred.

  Fate having its own idea of fun and games, the next thing was that Ern slipped one day while mowing the steep hillside lawn at Poppy's cottage, broke his ankle and was off work for several weeks. At that point Miss Wellington had no option but to humbly beg Ferry to take on the garden as there was no-one else and Fred accepted. The first thing he did on taking over was alter the wording on Ern's board so that it read GARDEN BY E. BIGGS PUT RIGHT BY F. FERRY. And Miss Wellington, unable to find anyone else to do the work had to put up with it. Father Adams likewise went on record as telling a visitor who looked over his wall, saw his rampant row of raspberries and asked whether he took orders, that he was British and didn't take orders from nobody, and so the summer moved on.

  With it progressed the catastrophe-filled kittenhood of Saphra, abetted by Tani. One of his earliest accomplishments was to break an old oil lamp with a blue glass bowl and engraved shade which I'd treasured for years. It was set, deliberately out of reach of the cats, high in an alcove at the back of the sitting-room. Saph was hiding in a newspaper tunnel on the carpet while I dangled a piece of string enticingly at the opening when Tani, to show she knew he was in there, jumped on the tunnel from behind with all her might. He exploded out of it like a snooker shot, straight across the room, up the wall and into the alcove. He stayed there with his fur on end, the lamp fell out and smashed, and all I got in reply to my anguished wail asking why he had to do that was an answering wail to the effect that he was more important than an Old Lamp, wasn't he, and Somebody had tried to Get Him. Tani had meanwhile vanished discreetly under the sofa.

  In the same week he got into the glass cupboard in the kitchen while my back was turned and broke two sherry glasses (I saw them sail horizontally out of the cupboard as if by magic) and the very next day, tore ahead of me down from the cat-house when I was bringing them in at feeding time, and round the corner into the kitchen, whence came the immediate sound of smashing china. When I panted through the door he was eating his chicken off the floor out of the remains of the broken dish.