Cats in May (7 page)

Actually the last bit was due to Charles rather than instinct. Charles liked nuts too, and one day Blondin caught him helping himself to a particularly fine walnut he had found under a cushion. Incredulously he watched while Charles cracked and ate it—his very own nut—and never offered him a piece. Incredulously, afterwards, he examined the nutshell before he could believe that Charles, his friend, had done this thing to him. After which it was entirely Charles’s own fault that whenever he entered a room he was tailed by a squirrel who leapt on guard as soon as he approached a cushion and who, the moment he went near the hearthrug, patrolled furiously up and down it threatening to bite if he so much as moved a foot.

He knew, too, all about building dreys. We had at that time a bed-settee which we sometimes used for guests and Blondin, when he felt like a nap without the bother of going upstairs, often disappeared inside it for an hour or so, going in by a private entrance of his own through the back. One day, seeing him dragging a tray cloth across the floor and finally, after considerable
effort, getting that through the back as well, we opened up the settee to find a sock, a small screwdriver, a dozen or so paper handkerchiefs which he had stolen from a packet in a drawer, and a good half-pound of nuts. The socks, the handkerchiefs, and the traycloth had been fashioned into a snug little nest in which, when we opened the settee, he was rather sheepishly sitting. The nuts were obviously siege stores. The screwdriver—we had been searching for that for days and Charles said he couldn’t think why Blondin wanted that. I could. To defend himself when Charles went after his nuts.

It was just about then that we bought the cottage. Not because of Blondin. We had been looking for one before he was even thought of—though, as Charles said, it did seem opportune that we found it the week he ate the farmer’s housekeeper’s begonias. It consoled her a little, anyway.

It was a relief to us too. Blondin by this time had the energy of a horse and teeth like a pair of pneumatic drills; we’d been praying for weeks that he wouldn’t start in on the farm.

Now, we said as we drove down the hill to our new
home with Blondin in a birdcage on the back seat, for the life we had planned. Digging the garden; entertaining our friends; quietly, selectively, getting to know our neighbours …

Not so quietly or selectively as we imagined, I’m afraid. On our first night there we gave them the shock of their lives. It began by my having a bath and turning on both taps at once. A thing, as Charles said afterwards, that anybody might do, except that in our case it caused the ballcock to stick in the tank and the tank to overflow into the yard.

It continued with Charles, already perturbed by the rate at which the water was gushing into the yard, worrying about the boiler. A strange house, he said, a system we didn’t understand … heaven only knew how the pipes went in this old place. He thought we’d better take out the fire.

We did, which was why that first night our quiet country retreat strongly resembled a scene from Faust. Water pouring like Niagara into the yard. Charles and I appearing alternately at the back door in our dressing gowns carrying buckets of coals which, as soon as the wind touched them, burst spectacularly into flame.
Dramatic moments when—for, so far as the onlookers could see, no particular reason at all—we pushed the buckets under the overflow with a shovel and doused them in clouds of steam …

Nobody interfered, of course. One or two cars going down the lane slowed abruptly for a moment and then, in the manner of well-bred Englishmen, drove on. Only from the gate—from a little knot of awed spectators on their way home from the Rose and Crown whose attention was divided equally between our activities and those of a large buck squirrel who was intently watching the proceedings from the kitchen window—came any comment. Just one solitary, awestruck voice. Later we learned it was Father Adams, but we didn’t know him then. ‘God Almighty!’ it said.

We stopped the overflow eventually by climbing into the roof and lifting the ballcock. What we couldn’t stop, of course, was the talk that went on. At the farm at least people had known us before we had Blondin—and, in the manner of village life, when we did have him everybody knew why. All they knew here was that we’d arrived with a squirrel in a birdcage, that there’d been some odd goings-on in our backyard the night we
came, and that we were quite obviously mad. It took us a long, long time to live that verdict down—if we ever did.

Part of the trouble was Blondin himself, of course. We were so used to him by now that except for running when we heard him chewing the furniture we took him quite for granted. Other people—even if they’d heard of him—didn’t.

Sidney, nervous as a hare when he came to work for us and obviously expecting us to start doing war dances round a fire bucket at any moment, nearly fainted in his gumboots when Blondin ambled over his feet carrying a screwdriver in his mouth. The woman who called for a charity subscription—telling us over a friendly cup of tea that she had a little squirrel in
her
garden too, who ate all the wallflowers—wilted nonetheless when she reached down for her handbag and encountered the tail of our little squirrel, who was busily investigating its contents.

Even the bravest of them—who, when he came to supper, allowed Blondin to sit on his stomach, saying this was nothing to what he’d experienced in the Colonial Service—looked a bit shaken when he got a
nut stuffed down his trousers waistband and a firm refusal to let him take it out. Safe from Charles in there, said Blondin, peering down the top and patting it affectionately in place. We retrieved it in the end by persuading our visitor to stand up and shake himself, while Blondin clung chattering protestingly to his stomach, but it put rather a damper on the evening. He never came again.

When, after a succession of incidents like that, we went home from the office one night to find that Blondin had vanished, nobody was particularly perturbed. ‘Gone back to the woods,’ they said, when we explained how he had chewed a hole under the kitchen door and squeezed his way out. ‘Never see he again’ was the gamekeeper’s verdict when we asked him, if he did come across a squirrel on his rounds, not to shoot it but to see first if it was tame.

We thought that he was right. Blondin was a different animal now from the little squirrel kitten who’d been frightened by a crow. Tough, powerful, well able to defend himself—what was more natural than that he should go back to the woods. Nor, in our heart of hearts, could we have wished to stop him. All we could
do was to put away his nuts, move a pathetic, half-eaten apple from the mantelpiece, and wish him well.

Odd, wasn’t it, how a little shrimp like that had got us? said Charles, as we peered out into the rain that night wondering if he was safe. What was odder still was that we seemed to have got Blondin. Two days later, when we went home from the office he was back. Huddled in an armchair looking sheepishly at us from under his tail. A self-willed, sandy little scrap who, though he’d left us at a time when the woods were ripe with nuts and for miles around there stretched more trees than the most ambitious squirrel could ever hope to climb, had of his own free will come back to us …

Maybe it was affection. Maybe it was just that two nights in the woods, surrounded by strange noises without his hot-water bottle and—worst of all—without his tea, were more than our adventurer could stand. Whatever the reason, he never left us again. For two years after that wherever we turned—unless he was asleep—there he was, swinging on the curtains, chewing at the furniture, peering hopefully down the spout of the teapot.

He died eventually, one cold, wet autumn morning,
of a chill. For weeks we mourned him, forgetting the mischief he had done and remembering only the fun we had had together. We tried to get another squirrel, but we never could. There were none to be had in the local pet shops—and the Zoo, when we asked, said they had a waiting list for squirrels.

Which was why, missing the crash of crockery, overrun by mice who were looking for his nuts—and, as Charles said, definitely not in our right minds—we went in for Siamese cats.

Six
Sidney Has Problems

Four years now we’d had Solomon and Sheba and, as Sidney put it, we hadn’t half had some times with them.

We’d had a few with Sidney too. Life sometimes seemed as full of his little problems as it was with Siamese cats and, right from the time he came to work for us, we were always getting involved.

Take, for instance, the time he was caught riding a motorbike without a licence. There was nothing we could do about the offence itself. Even Sidney admitted
it was a fair cop. His friend Ron had offered him a run on his new model; Sidney, with a quick look round for P.C. McNab, had jumped on and tried it up the hill; McNab, to quote Sidney’s own description, had immediately leapt from behind the phone box like a blooming leprechaun—and there he was. Two pounds fine and no licence for a year.

What worried Sidney, and where we came into the story, was that he’d just started courting a girl who lived ten miles away. Bit of all right she was, he advised us after his initial date, and the prospects were looking so favourable that he had in fact decided to go in for a motorbike himself, which was why he had been trying out Ron’s. And now, he demanded the day after his appearance in court, where was he? Leaning on our lawn-mower as a matter of fact, where he’d been moored for the last half-hour, informing us soulfully that he didn’t suppose we’d feel much like courting either if we had to do ten miles on a push-bike first.

We saw him through that little crisis, as he no doubt hoped we would, by running him over to Baxton ourselves on courting nights. There being a limit to what we’d do for Sidney, he had to make his own way
back. There was one night, alas, when he didn’t even get there. A dear old lady who’d known him since childhood said she was going to Baxton—she, for once, would take Sidney to his tryst—and when the silly old fool turned up, said Sidney next morning, she had a blooming great dog sitting in the passenger seat, he couldn’t get the rear door open, and to his astonishment, while he was still wrestling with it, she had suddenly said ‘Quite comfy, dear?’ and driven off.

She was deaf, so the fact that Sidney hadn’t answered didn’t register. She also drove with her nose glued to the windscreen—like ruddy Lot, said Sidney, getting quite incoherent when he thought about it—and it wasn’t until she rattled into the square at Baxton that she realised he was missing. Given her a terrible fright, she said it had, imagining poor Sidney having fallen out en route, which was nothing to what it gave Sidney when he imagined Mag waiting by the Baxton turnpike, him not turning up, and—at this point in his ruminations the mower went straight into the paeonies—her perhaps going off with some other chap.

As a matter of fact she didn’t. Sidney had far more
fatal charm than anybody realised. Eventually he married her, honeymooned triumphantly—the penal year being up—on a brand new motorbike, and became the father of twins.

Even that failed to cheer him up, however. He still worried about things. When the Rector caught him sawing logs for us one Sunday morning, for instance—Sidney hid in the woodshed when he saw him coming, and when in spite of this precaution the Rector looked round the door and asked him how the twins were he was terribly worried about that. Bet th’old sky pilot had him down in his little black book now, he said, wrestling gloomily with his conscience after the event. It was no good our trying to comfort him, either, with an assurance that the Rector was broadminded—that he judged people by their principles and wouldn’t really mind. Sidney knew a parson’s duties, and he worried even more. Then he ought to mind, he said.

He worried when the twins kept him awake at night. How long, he enquired—and some mornings, indeed, his eyes looked exactly like a panda’s—could a bloke go without sleep? He worried when he thought he was losing his hair. Actually Sidney’s straw-like
thatch never had been very thick, but once he persuaded himself it was going there was no end to the worrying he did about that. The day he arrived having flattened it down with water that morning—to see, he said, how he’d look when ’twas gone—we had to give him a glass of sherry to pull his nerves together

What raised this particular incident to epic proportions was that unfortunately everybody, when they heard about Sidney’s hair, started giving him remedies. ‘Bay rum,’ said one—whereupon Sidney arrived smelling more pungently than the Rose and Crown. ‘Paraffin,’ said somebody who knew a travelling hardware man who always rubbed his head with his hands after serving oil and
he
had hair like a child—after which we had to be jolly careful not to strike matches when Sidney was around. ‘Goose-grease,’ advised somebody else—at which stage Sheba announced that she didn’t love Sidney any more and Solomon, going round the kitchen like a mine detector, said he reckoned we had dead mice in here.

It passed eventually, like all Sidney’s worries, but it was pretty trying while it lasted. His next one took a different turn altogether. Mag, he said, wanted a fur
coat. Seen one in some magazine, she had—picture of some girl wearing one when she went shopping and she thought ’twould be nice when she went to town. Sidney, sweating at the thought, had already tried diplomatic tactics. Told her she’d look daft in one of they in the sidecar, for instance, which didn’t impress her a bit. Left his newspaper with us on the days it carried those spectacular full-page fur advertisements—whereupon she went next door and borrowed the neighbour’s. What, he asked—absentmindedly eyeing the cats, whereupon Sheba took
her
fur coat up the garden in a hurry while it was still safe—did we think he ought to do now?