A Pride of Memorable Cats
Marmalade and his brother, Jasper, were my first cats. When I
moved into my own house, I contacted a local animal rescue
group with a request for a female tabby kitten, but in January
1982 they phoned to say they had two male cats about three
months old, one black and the other ginger, so I went to see
them... and, as they say, the rest is history. They were thin
and their little legs were so weak that they couldn't jump up
on the sofa when I brought them home - they'd been born in a
garden shed and fed only on the odd saucer of milk - but after
a few weeks of good food, they were fine. The rescue people
had named them Pepper and Tristram, and I toyed with the idea
of Corwin and Benedict, but they ended up Jasper and
Marmalade.
As kittens they were no strangers at the vets, with sticky
eyes and sprained paws from jumping down from high places - in
fact, throughout his life, Marmalade would lift up his left
front paw and pretend to be lame when he wanted sympathy. When
I brought my sister to see them for the first time, they'd
ripped an entire kitchen roll into stamp-sized pieces - when I
opened the door, it was like a snowstorm! They also did a
vanishing act when locked in the kitchen and I spent a frantic
half-hour searching for them, until a tiny paw reached out of
one of the drawers - they'd gone into one of the units,
climbed up and over into a closed drawer and were happily
asleep in it!
Jasper liked to bring found objects home - six feet of inch-
wide plastic tape that must have once been round a parcel (I'm
not sure how he got that through the cat flap!), a pale blue
bath-sponge, half-a-pound of chipolata sausages (I have to
confess that we ate those!) and a partridge in full feather.
In his later life, Marmalade had a second home with an old
lady who lived across the road (she didn't feed him, she said,
just gave him the odd slice off the Sunday roast!)
They both succumbed to kidney failure in the end and had to
be put to sleep, Marmalade just before Christmas in 1993 and
Jasper in August, 1997, aged 12 and almost 16 years old. They
were wonderful affectionate cats, and I miss both of them.
Charlie was a stray tom-cat who gradually moved in with us -
we named him after the cartoon cat in a public safety film
"Charlie says don't play with matches!" because his miaow
sounded the same. At first he came in and stole food, then
he'd turn up covered in bites and scratches after a fight and
I'd administer first-aid. One night he appeared in the
doorway, soaked and covered in mud, with blood all over his
face from a ripped ear - I took him for treatment and it was
at this point we finally accepted that he was our cat. We
never had him neutered, as our vet said that he was too old
for it to change his behaviour, and he always caused a
sensation at the surgery, as the nurses weren't used to seeing
such a big male cat with 'swollen cheeks' and so much muscle
on his neck that the vet often broke needles giving him
injections!
Despite being a full tom, Charlie was a big, silly softy of a
cat, and he never fought with any other cats in the household.
He fathered several litters of kittens and would visit them
each day to check on their well-being - in fact, he always
assumed that every kitten that appeared was his. When we
brought Cally home, Charlie sat with his paws folded, beaming
from ear to ear in paternal pride. He did fight with other
tom-cats in the area - I remember the evening when I went out
to see what all the wailing in the garden was about, just in
time to see Charlie and a black-and-white tom roll down the
path like a ball, with paws flailing and the occasional puff
of ripped-out fur - pure Tom and Jerry! (both of them walked
away, more or less intact).
As he grew older, he retired from combat. Most of the
neighbourhood toms were scared of him by that point, so he
rarely had to fight, which was just as well, since he'd lost
all of his fangs (we suspect that they were left in other
people's heads!) and he could no longer bite, although he
could give you a nasty suck! Our nickname for him was 'Big Old
Bugger' and Gus, Dread and Pit are his children. Terry
Pratchett met him before writing 'The Unadulterated Cat', so
perhaps there's a piece of Charlie in there somewhere. He
always suffered from recurrent respiratory infections - the
vet thought he'd had cat flu as a kitten. He died in October
1996, probably due to that - he came into the house at three
in the morning, made enough noise to wake both of us and then,
when we were both with him, simply died. He must have been 16
or 17 years old - when he first turned up in 1982, he was a
full-grown cat, so he must have been born in 1980 or before. I
always regret that I didn't know him as a kitten - he would
have been a cute little guy! He had been abandoned and
mistreated - he was initially very wary of men and if you
moved suddenly, he would cower and run away, and it was years
before he stopped eating every scrap of cat-food put down, on
the assumption that he might never get another meal. He found
a good home with us and, although I'd never have chosen to
keep a tom-cat, I was surprised how gentle and friendly he
was. I trust he earned himself a place in Cat Valhalla, our
soppy Big Old Bugger, Charlie.
One of our neighbours had a small black cat, which I
nicknamed Little Orphan Annie, who gradually moved in with us
because her owner didn't really care about her. I fed her, let
her sleep in my house, weaned her kittens and found homes for
them. In the end, he moved and simply left her behind, so I
was able to have her spayed. She must have had a touch of
Persian in her ancestry, since she had short legs, a flat face
and a squashed nose, which made her wheeze at times - she was
the only cat I've known who actually snored! She was also a
very bad-tempered little cat - just like Queen Victoria, she
was never amused - and she used to express her anger with an
odd "burff-burffing" sound. We used to refer to her as The Ann
or Femalevolent. One of her favourite places to sleep was
half-way up our open-plan staircase - one day, she rolled over
in her sleep and fell off, landing in a cardboard box. There
was a ten-second pause, then this little black head with
slitted yellow eyes and flat ears emerged from the box like a
submarine periscope, and glared at Dave, burffing furiously,
as it was obviously
his
fault that she'd fallen!
The Ann was a fearless soul - she stood her ground and
defended her kittens against a yapping terrier - dogs didn't
scare her. One day there was a terrible commotion, with cats
flying in through the flap with tails like Christmas trees,
and I knew there must be a dog in the garden, so I rushed out,
yelling "Shoo!", only to be faced by a rather large Doberman.
Just as it occurred to me that this might not be a very clever
thing to do, the dog turned to leave and found that the gate
was blocked by Annie, fluffed up to maximum size and hissing.
What I taken to be a big, fierce dog looked back at me and
whimpered for help, so I ended up rescuing the Doberman from
the Ann, rather than the other way round!
The Ann was never a healthy cat; with her pushed-in nose, she
used to suffer from winter snuffles and had to have numerous
courses of antibiotics. She had a stroke - I came home and
found her hovering at the top of the stairs, unable to walk
down them. She seemed weak on one side and was holding her
head strangely. The vet told me that strokes are quite common
in cats - sometimes they're so bad that they can only walk
round in a circle due to damage on one side of the brain.
Annie recovered well, although it left her deaf in one ear -
if she was asleep on a chair with the good ear down, you could
hoover all round her and not wake her up. It also meant that
the other cats could creep up on her. She'd jump in surprise
and snap at them, since they must have done it on purpose -
Jasper has his ear ripped for committing such a sin. She also
had a cancerous growth in her mouth - the vet advised us
against heroic surgery and, after a few months, it
mysteriously vanished. On another occasion I found her
collapsed in the garden, unrousable - I think she'd had a
cardiac arrest. I shook her until she started breathing again
and rushed her to the surgery and, although he treated her, I
don't think the vet held out much hope for her survival. He
rang me at ten o'clock that night to ask after her - he was
that worried - and as he was on the phone, Annie rose from her
sickbed, staggered into the kitchen and started eating. After
a few days, she was fine.
Over Christmas 1992, Annie started to lose weight and drink
too much, classic warning signs of illness in an old cat - at
a guess, she was 12 or 13 then. She never admitted she was ill
- her attitude was rather like that of the old dears in French
& Saunders ("Stuff and nonsense! Illness - don't hold with
it!") but, after many visits to the vet and a week when she
refused to eat, we had to have her put to sleep in January
1993. On a weird night - the sky was orange and there was a
howling wind - Dave and I buried her in her favourite spot,
where she used to sleep in the sun until her black coat was so
hot you could fry eggs on it! She sleeps there still, under a
pink hellebore and a statue of a small black cat.
Tessa was Charlie and Annie's daughter, born in 1984 at the
time of the Olympic Games, hence her name, Tessa Sandibum. Her
brother was called Daley Tom-cat and her other sister, Vicky
(no athletic connections here - I called her that because she
was the image of the other local tom-cat, all black with a
tiny square of white on his throat, who we called The Vicar)
Vicky and Daley went to good homes, but I kept Tessa - she was
the little tabby she-cat I'd always wanted.
Tessa was a mistress of Kat-Fu. We had a transparent cat-flap
at that time and I once saw her spot an unauthorised cat
walking down the path, whereupon she sprang through the flap,
turning in mid-air and landing almost eight feet away,
sideways on, with all her fur fluffed up and one forepaw
raised to strike, all the while emitting a banshee squeal,
just like Bruce Lee! There was also the time she was hunting
birds when it was snowing - I watched her sit very still until
she was covered with snow, even her ears, which were flat as
it was very wet, sticky snow. She didn't quite catch the
blackbird though - it just escaped when what it thought was a
snow-covered tussock exploded into a tabby-thing with teeth
and claws.
Tessa went missing in June 1988. When I went to bed that
night she was asleep on a chair, but next morning she was
gone. We searched for weeks, in vain. Of all the ways to lose
a cat, I found that the most painful - lost is worse than
dead. I still think she might be alive - she'd be 15 now.
Gus was the son of Charlie and Cally, born in March 1989.
Cally gave birth under my bed and I had to hold her paw while
she did. Pit was born first, so she's known as Pit the Elder.
Dread came out next, bottom first, which must have really
hurt, because Cally almost bit through my thumb, and Gus was
last, tail and back paws foremost. He was a lovely pale
ginger, with stripes like ripples in the sand after the tide
has gone out, and he went from being a big kitten to an
enormous, but not very bright, cat. I have a theory that
gingerness in a cat affects both brain and behaviour - they
tend to be fierce and stupid. Gus was clumsy and never looked
before he leapt, but he was a gorgeous great cuddly lump - one
of my names for him was Big Ted. We called him Gus as a
contraction of Greedy Guts, but his proper name was Charles
Augustus Fortescue ("the nicest child I ever knew" from the
poem by Hilaire Belloc)
When he was three, Gus lost one of his nine lives. Late one
night, he came home dripping blood from his nose - so, off we
go, on the emergency dash to the vets. It turned out that he'd
split his soft palate, which is an injury in cats resulting
from falling (they call it "High-Rise Syndrome", because it's
what happens if you throw a cat out of a flat in a tower-
block) and he had to be kept overnight, in case of brain
damage or associated internal injuries, and have an operation
to repair it the following day. Fortunately he didn't seem to
have any other problems and he got over the op very well,
although it took a great deal of nursing and a lot of tuna to
convince him to eat again. We never discovered how he came by
the injury.
In April 1995, Gus vanished overnight. I found him the next
morning, about a hundred yards from the house, on the verge of
the dual-carriageway, dead. I had no idea he went that far; in
retrospect, I realised that he probably got his split palate
playing with the traffic, and cats rarely get away with that
game a second time. It's a special thing to watch one of your
cats being born - and finding him dead broke my heart.
Iggy was Ozzy's brother and his full name was Master Ignatius Broadbottom. He was a clumsy ginger boy with a tiny splash of white on his chest, a clown of a cat with back legs that looked a little bandy and a long nose. He'd mastered a wonderful look of disapproval and would glare at you if he felt that you were laughing at him, and he had a delightful habit of reaching up with one front paw to touch you in greeting.
He was the greediest cat I've ever owned and would snatch food from my plate - he was incredibly dextrous at handling things with his paws. When he wanted a tit-bit, he'd put on his "Harry" face, squinting up at you just like the character from "Third Rock from the Sun".
When he was a kitten, his favourite toy was a plastic stick topped with bright pink, blue and purple feathers, which he would chase until he was dizzy, catch it and haul it out of your hand, and then drag it off into the corner, growling. Even when he was grown up, he loved playing with it - I used to joke with Dave that we were training him to hunt parrots! Even if he was nowhere to be seen, you could pick up his stick and swish it through the air - and he'd appear like magic.
Tragically, our Ig was run over on 24th February 1999, just behind our house. The people who hit him were decent enough to stop and find out where he'd come from. Dave was at home, but there was nothing to be done - he must have died instantly. We buried him with some feathers he'd ripped out of his stick a few days before. Poor little soul, he was only three and a half. The
house seems very quiet without him, although I'd never noticed that he made all that much noise,
except for scraping the food bowls along the floor as he moved them around the kitchen and banging about when he jumped up anywhere, because he was just so clumsy. Perhaps it's quiet because I no longer have my clown-cat to laugh at. I think that Ozzy is missing him a little too.