by Chris Pascoe
The basket lay in exactly the same place as it had done within her prison, and her litter tray was still near by. Like some of her equivalent prison inmates in the human world, she’d become happy where she was and didn’t want to be released. The ‘facing your fears’ therapy had worked. Her claustrophobia was cured. She now had agoraphobia.
We considered there to be every chance she’d reoffend just to get her cage back and as, in her case, reoffending meant plunging over a twenty-foot wall, we left her to her own devices and let her adjust to freedom in her own time. She gradually came out of it, slowly got used to walking around the house, eventually made her way through the cat-flap. And there was a bonus. That steroid reaction didn’t go away. She was suddenly a much happier and far better-balanced cat. Why locking her up and pushing horrible things in her mouth should have cured a lifetime of neurosis I have no idea, but she’s developed a cheerful confidence about her that had never been there before.
The greatest indication that Sammy has now, more or less, recovered from her early life traumas is a game she’s started playing with Maya – hide and seek.
And they really do play this game properly. First Maya will hide and Sammy will stalk the house until she finds her. Maya isn’t too hot at the game really, not yet understanding that clamping your eyes shut doesn’t necessarily make you invisible, and so standing in the middle of the living room isn’t technically hiding. As soon as Sammy finds her, usually within a couple of milliseconds, she herself hurries off to hide.
No longer does Sammy fear dark spaces. She actively seeks them out and waits patiently for Maya to find her in them. Maya strolls around the house repeating, ‘Now, where’s Sammy gone,’ and Sammy waits with glee to be discovered. She is so good at hiding that Maya shouldn’t really have a cat-in-hiding’s chance of finding her.
It’s the purring that gives her away.
View from a Kite
‘More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows.’
Seventeenth-century proverb
Soaring through the skies, I can see for miles. I see trees, I see fields. A green, quiet world below me. Behind me my home in the highest trees and before me the noise and chaos of the town.
I glide on the wind, through the blue sky, surveying the ground far below. The same wind ruffles my feathers, fills my consciousness with its buffeting, soothing rhythms. I see a shape below, a familiar shape on the edge of the town. I have seen this creature before. It’s eyes are as mine – the eyes of a hunter – yet its movements are of fattened prey. I feel a kinship with the beast. Surely at some forgotten time our races were one, and yet, as I have progressed to become what I am, this thing has become a wall dweller, its only purpose to balance, badly, upon its dwelling. I swoop low, we exchange glances, at one with one another for the briefest of moments, an understanding of all things natural and beautiful passing between us in that instant. It staggers backwards. It looks surprised. It falls from its wall . . . again.
Time passes. Days, weeks. The seasons change. I hover high and watch my world. I watch for the creature, my wall-dwelling cousin. A connection has been made. It is time to meet, to reach out and know my kin.
I see him far below. My heart beating with anticipation, I swoop from the sky, diving as I would to kill, but there will be no killing today. I land suddenly beside the creature. His coat is wet. Is he also a creature of the water? His eyes widen in . . . what? Recognition?
No, terror. Shock and frenzied terror. As sudden as our meeting is his maddened departure. He is screeching, running on four legs, moving faster than I believed his clumsy body would allow . . .
Ah, I see he is a creature of the water.
Mrs Chippy & Co.
‘Stubborn, fearless?
Call it what you will,
A cat may climb the mainmast,
But ne’er against his will’
Little Jimmy Daley
Aglance through the annals of history throws up many great human names from the fields of exploration, science and heroism. Surprisingly, it throws up the odd cat as well.
Actually, when you stop to think about it, that shouldn’t be so surprising. Cats have lived with us as companions for at least seven thousand years, ever since they moved in with our ancient ancestors to protect their grain from rodents. Now, cats don’t lend themselves to heroism as easily as dogs or dolphins, mainly because they can’t be bothered, but in all that time one or two cats should reasonably be expected to have left their mark. And they certainly have.
Simon of the Royal Navy is one such hairy hero. Simon was a black-and-white tomcat, drafted aboard the HMS Amethyst in the late 1940s. His job, the job of many shipboard cats throughout history, was to kill mice and rats. As is the knack of cats, Simon managed to ingratiate himself, no doubt through much leg-brushing and over-the-top feline friendliness, with the ship’s captain. So much so that he got use of the captain’s bed by day, and even slept curled up in his officer’s cap at night. I would not often compare our Brum to such a cat, because Simon was an expert mouser and an all-round proper feline. But what happened to him one day in China is very Brum-like.
It was during the Chinese communist uprising. The neutral HMS Amethyst was on routine patrol down the Yangtze river, when a jolly communist battery decided they’d try to sink her for a laugh. Simon lay blissfully snoring on the captain’s bed when a missile came screaming straight through the cabin wall and blew his bedroom to pieces. With eyebrows heat-shrivelled and whiskers burnt off, a dazed Simon stumbled on to deck coughing and spluttering and wondering what on earth he could have eaten.
Brum in disguise? No. Simon was destined for much greater things. After a few days in the ship’s hospital, poor Simon dragged himself back on to deck. His timing was impeccable. His beloved captain had died in the communist attack, and Simon arrived bang on time for his funeral. It is said he sat in silence throughout and turned sadly away when it was all over.
And things were to get worse for Simon. The new captain didn’t like him, on account of his being a cat. To add to Simon’s problems with the new boss, the overall situation wasn’t good aboard his damaged ship. Not daring to rerun the gauntlet of the guns in a dash for the sea, the Amethyst was trapped up-river in China and provisions were running low, with an ever growing rodent population destroying what little supplies remained. The gallant and wounded Simon soldiered on, fighting the rats with every ounce of his diminished strength and earning the respect of every sailor aboard. He also spent time in the ship’s hospital, visiting and cheering the wounded men. The captain grudgingly had to admit that Simon was handy to have around, but he still wasn’t keen. And then, to make matters worse, the captain fell seriously ill. Despite the captain’s hostility towards him, Simon kept up a vigil on his bed until he recovered.
While totally agreeing that Simon did a lot for that crew, I wonder about this captain-vigil thing. We all know that cats dive on the laps of the nearest cat-hater. In a row of ten cat-lovers and one hater, they’ll always cosy up to the latter. It’s what cats do. I have this sneaking suspicion that Simon jumped on the captain’s bed and remained there not because he cared in the slightest about his condition, but more because he knew the poor man hated cats and didn’t have the strength left in him to object.
The Amethyst finally made it to sea, slipping downriver under cover of darkness. And here’s a feel-good thing – the thus far feline-detesting captain, so moved and touched by Simon’s efforts and enforced companionship during his illness, awarded him a medal and promised to take him in as his own on their return to England.
He was true to his word, regularly visiting Simon in quarantine (ship’s cats had to spend six months in quarantine on return to the UK) and looking forward to the day he could collect him. But he never did. Simon grew weak from his wounds during that long wait, and on 28 November 1949 he died.
Simon remains the only cat in history to have received the Dickin Medal for animal valour. He was also the first animal ever to be
decorated by the Royal Navy. He was buried with honours, his coffin draped in the Union flag. He lies in the PDSA animal cemetery in Ilford, Essex, and his impressive stone monument reads:
IN MEMORY OF SIMON SERVED IN HMS AMETHYST MAY 1948–SEPTEMBER 1949 AWARDED DICKIN MEDAL AUGUST 1949 THROUGHOUT THE YANGTZE INCIDENT HIS BEHAVIOUR WAS OF THE HIGHEST ORDER.
Very commendable stuff, and about as far removed from Brum as it’s possible to get without falling off the edge of the world. ‘Unsinkable Sam’ was more of a seafaring Brum. Unsinkable Sam was a floating fluffball of bad luck. The fact Sam’s first posting was aboard the ill-fated Bismarck says it all. The Bismarck was duly torpedoed to smithereens, and a desperately catty-paddling Unsinkable was rescued from the sea by the crew of HMS Cossack.
With Sam aboard, the Cossack sailed on. A few months later, they too were blown out of the water. A fed-up Unsinkable was once more blasted out to sea, only to be dragged half drowned from the water by a sailor aboard HMS Ark Royal.
The Ark Royal’s crew were now in serious trouble. They had Unsinkable Sam aboard. They never stood a chance. They were pummelled with torpedoes and soon sinking fast. Unsinkable, no doubt believing this sort of thing to be all part of life at sea, swam over to HMS Legion and was once again rescued.
By now Sam was famous. And not in a nice way. His new crew knew exactly what they’d pulled out of the water and it was to their immense credit that they didn’t throw him back. With the jinx aboard they sailed very carefully back to England and put him ashore. Wherever he ended up living, let’s hope it was miles inland and well away from any boating lakes.
Another famous seagoing cat was Mrs Chippy, and Mrs Chippy was another cat Brum could have identified with. Just like Brum, he was dogged with bad luck from the start, and ‘he’ isn’t a misprint. No, Mrs Chippy was a boy. His owner was a carpenter, and so some wag immediately awarded him the position of ‘chippy’s wife’. How dignified is that? To make matters worse, Mrs Chippy’s husband decided it’d be a splendid idea for them to leave the warmth and safety of Britain and head for the coldest and most inhospitable place on Planet Earth. Hence Mrs Chippy and Co. sailed away aboard the Endurance, bound for the South Pole.
He turned out to be a popular cat, but not necessarily a bright one. One day, as the ship sailed through the freezing cold Southern Ocean, he suddenly and inexplicably launched himself straight through a porthole. The crew stared aghast as he dropped like a stone into the icy waters below. It took ten minutes to stop the ship and haul him out, by which time he was nearly dead. Not clever behaviour. Not clever at all.
The Endurance fared badly. Approaching Antarctica, it became trapped in ice, never to be freed. Hundreds of miles across an empty, frozen sea from anywhere and anything, the crew were stranded, hungry and miserable. Mrs Chippy decided that this would be a smashing time to wind up a pack of vicious and desperately hungry sled-dogs. The resulting mêlée resulted in the pack’s handler swinging Mrs Chippy by the scruff of his neck and trying to throw him to the dogs. A caring crew member rescued him, but this cat was most definitely a danger . . . mainly to himself.
While the crew toiled and scrimped to survive, Mrs Chippy slept below decks, actually putting on some weight! But he was a comfort to the crewmen and many believe that his mere presence and total lack of concern for his precarious situation were an inspiration and comfort to the trapped sailors, and so vital to their chances of survival.
I always wonder, when I read about cats in these extraordinary situations, how Brum would have fared. In this case, I don’t think he could have done much worse, because Mrs Chippy managed to get himself shot.
The captain, Shackleton, decided that all unnecessary things had to go, and Mrs Chippy was one such thing. It was a terrible shame. Mrs Chippy really wasn’t that much of a burden. The men were devastated by the decision, but loyal to Shackleton and so duty bound to carry out his order. One by one the men said there tearful goodbyes, thanking Mrs Chippy for being such a good friend during the long hard voyage together.
Then they gave him a bowl of sardines and shot him. Oh well.
Incidentally, the entire crew made it back alive, owing in most part to the excellent leadership and ingenuity of their captain. But we don’t care about them, do we. They shot Mrs Chippy. Stuff ’em. There is, however, an unexpectedly happy ending to all this. After struggling back from the jaws of seemingly certain death, the crew arrived back in England only to be sent off to the First World War and, fittingly, shot. Hah!
I don’t really mean it. Then again . . .
Mrs Chippy may have travelled to the worst place on earth, but half a century later another cat managed to get off the earth altogether. Felix, the Astrocat, became the first cat in space in October 1963.
Again, with a piece of dogged Brum-style rotten luck, Felix was plucked from a peaceful existence on the streets of Paris, stuck aboard a high-powered French rocket and blasted over a hundred miles into space. And Felix survived! Separation took place in space and a bemused and wide-eyed Felix drifted back to earth on a parachute. What a cat! A face on numerous worldwide stamps, Felix was, for quite some time, the most famous cat in the world.
But before Felix was even a twinkle in his mother’s eye, the seventeenth century’s ‘Most Famous Feline’ award would undoubtedly have fallen to a black cat owned by King Charles I. King Charles did many worthwhile things during his reign, the most notable of which would have to be starting a war that claimed the lives of a quarter of a million of his own subjects, and didn’t even involve a foreign enemy.
The English Civil War began in 1642, and King Charles and a certain black cat were two major Royalist figures. The cat became important for strategic reasons. And also rather silly ones. Charles got it into his head that if the cat died, he’d die. Such was his reliance upon the luck exuded by his feline friend, he had him heavily guarded and lavishly waited upon throughout the conflict. The real luck here seems to have all been with the cat, who suddenly became England’s most pampered pet.
As the war became bloodier and bloodier and Charles’s colleagues, friends and a full one eighth of the English people fell butchered to the floor, you’d think somebody would have noticed that nobody was having an awful lot of luck. But nobody did. The cat got away with it.
There is a strange little twist in this tale. The black cat finally died from natural causes in the latter days of that terrible conflict. The very next day Charles was arrested, and subsequently beheaded. Maybe he was lucky after all, if, that is, the luck revolved around Charles having a head.
A century or so later in France, some more famous royal felines became involved in the French Revolution. Not running around shouting ‘Vive la France’ and dragging people to the guillotine involved, but involved as the pets of Queen Marie Antoinette. The curious historical distinction of these six long-haired Angoras was that, when a ship arrived to rescue the French queen from the horrors unfolding around her, it was they and not she who boarded and made it to the safety of America. Whether having cats around you is actually a decapitation preventative I don’t know, but as Marie Antoinette’s half dozen cats sailed happily away to a new life in New England, she herself was having her head cut off.
Despite the dramatic scenario they left behind, the cats are better remembered in American history than they are in French! This isn’t because they did anything extraordinary in the New World, but because they did something extremely ordinary – they mated with local cats. In doing so they famously founded the Maine Coon breed, now one of the most popular cats in North America.
I should mention that the above fact is scientifically disputed. But virtually every scientific fact is scientifically disputed, and this theory certainly stands up better to scrutiny than another Maine Coon idea – that the breed originated from the mating of cats and raccoons, hence the name. Despite being a genetic impossibility, the theory still holds sway in certain quarters – probably heavily wooded and remote mountain quarters, but it holds sway
nevertheless.
One man who caused more scientific debate than most in his lifetime was the remarkable Sir Isaac Newton, who postulated incredibly-ahead-of-his time theories on mathematics, optics, chemistry and gravity, but most importantly of all invented the cat-flap.
Not many people realise that the cat-flap is responsible for humanity understanding planetary motion, the ebb of tides, the effects of gravity and every other concept Newton explained to us. You see, so irritated was Sir Isaac by the constant miaowing of a pointy-eared furry companion wanting to get in and out of his home that he whipped up a small swinging door to prevent the bewhiskered nuisance further interrupting his train of complicated thought.
I think that, of all the cats I’ve talked of in this chapter, Brum would have hated being Kitty Newton most of all. Sure, he’d have found being missiled in his bed like poor Simon annoying, and being constantly blown into the cold sea like Unsinkable Sam rather inconvenient. He’d have been positively furious at being shot into space like Felix, and no doubt incensed about being executed like Mrs Chippy.
But an existence as Kitty Newton would have to be his worst nightmare, because Brum has every reason to look back in anger at Sir Isaac Newton. Not only did the man bring the accursed cat-flap into his already problematic life, but Newton also discovered Brum’s worst enemy – gravity. Without gravity, Brum could have had a bruise-free life, completely devoid of twenty-foot horror-falls.
Newton has much to answer for.
The Bovine Tiger
‘You are what you eat.’
Proverb