by Derek Tangye
But in the last year of his life there was no need to go away, and although sometimes we were absent during the day we were always with him at night. He recovered splendidly from the dust poison, and by the early summer he was his usual beautiful self. ‘Oh, what a beautiful cat!’ some hiker would say as he passed through Minack, seeing Monty perched aloofly on a stone. ‘How old is he?’
No one believed he was nearly fifteen. Nor did I for that matter. Time deceives in its pace, luring years into yesterdays, garlanding memories without intervals, seeping the knowledge of age into one’s mind. I did not want to say how old he was. I did not want to remember that for so long he had been the recipient of our secret thoughts. Each of us had talked to him in that mood of abandon which is safe within friendship. Maybe it was only a cat’s friendship, but secure, never to be tarnished, easing problems because the aftermath of confession did not breed the fears of disclosure.
He was an integral part of our failures and successes at Minack, and a hulky miner from St Just whom we once had helping us called him the foreman. ‘Look out, the foreman’s coming,’ he would shout as he lunged away with his shovel in a potato meadow, ‘we’ll get our cards if we don’t do our job properly.’ Monty would appear and walk leisurely down the row where he had been digging, sniffing the discarded potato tops which spreadeagled on the side as if he were checking that all the potatoes had been collected from the plants. It was always a solemn inspection. There were no games. And when he had completed it, and had left the meadow, disappearing out of sight, the hulky miner would stab his shovel into the ground, rub his hands together and call out: ‘All clear boys. We can have a smoke now.’
He was sometimes an inconvenience when we were picking flowers. At daffodil time the pace of picking has to be so fast that there is no time for distractions; and yet Monty would often insist on accompanying us, walking ahead between the daffodil beds at a very slow pace of his own choosing so that our feet tumbled over him. ‘Hurry up, Monty,’ I would say, but at the same time I did not want to sound too brusque. I was glad that he wished to be with us; and so I would stop the rhythm of my picking and bend down and stroke him. Then, if he did not move, I would step over him.
He had a passion for violet plants and, in his time, we used to grow three or four thousand every year. The variety was called Bournemouth Gem and each plant bushed dark green leaves that perfumed the meadow in which they were grown even before the violets themselves appeared. Monty liked rolling among them. The rich orange of his fur against the dark green was a pretty sight and although you would have expected him to do damage, little damage was done; the plants were such fat cushions that the few broken leaves had plenty waiting to replace them. So we let him roll and only became alarmed when he jumped on a plant, gathered as much of it as he could with his four paws, turned on his side, and proceeded furiously to disembowel it. The fact is he liked the smell of violets. I have often seen him walking on his own down a row, his tail pointing like a periscope above the leaves, smelling the plants on either side of him. ‘Monty’s picking violets,’ I would say to Jeannie as a joke.
He enjoyed sitting on the bench in the packing shed hemmed in by galvanised tins of wallflowers or jars of violets or anemones. He would sandwich himself in a space and if you looked in from the outside you would see through the window a splendid array of early spring and in the midst of it all the dozing face of Monty. I remember a flower salesman coming to see us one day who was so amazed by what he saw in the packing shed that he nearly forgot to discuss his business; for there was Monty among the daffodils, and Tim the robin up on a shelf warbling a song from a jar of anemones, while Charlie the chaffinch was looking up at us, calling his monotonous note from the floor. These three had three flower seasons together and this particular occasion was the last. First Monty, then Tim eighteen months later, and Charlie six months after that. And all the while up there on the roof was Hubert, observing everything, majestic, so compelling a character that neither of us would dare to let him remain hungry if he were demanding a meal, however busy we might be. ‘Jeannie!’ I would call out as I was stacking flower boxes in the Land Rover ready for Penzance station, ‘Hubert’s hungry. Have you got anything?’
Monty was always tempted by boxes. If a parcel arrived and Monty was in the room when we unpacked it, he was certain to fill the vacant space. Perhaps he was born in one. Perhaps a psychiatrist would be right in saying that parcels and cardboard boxes recalled exquisite incidents of kittenhood. He certainly loved flower boxes and the tissue paper we put in them; and many a time we used to relieve the intensity of our work by pretending Monty, lying in a flower box, was indeed a flower. ‘Shall we send him to Covent Garden?’ one of us would say absurdly. ‘They’d certainly call him a prize bloom,’ the other would reply equally absurdly. When we were working at great pressure, it was a relish to have Monty to distract us, in so kind and pleasant and trivial a way.
Monty feels it’s up to him to guard the precious flower crop after inspection
16
One of Monty’s lovable characteristics was the way he enjoyed going for walks with us, trotting along like a dog at our heels. Sometimes when we wanted to go on a proper walk, a walk far longer than he could manage, we would sneak down the path planning to get out of sight without him realising we had gone; but from some hide-out in which he was spying upon us, he would suddenly appear, all smiles as if he were saying: ‘Going for a walk? Good idea, I’ll come too.’ Then, of course, we had to cancel our plans and go on a limited walk instead.
He played games on these walks, some of which were vexing, some charming. He had the usual whim of a cat to tear up trees as if the wind were in his tail, but as many of the trees were elders he never climbed high. It was at night that these climbs were annoying.
We would be taking a late-night stroll and wishing to return to go to bed when he would race up the elder which is opposite the old barn and obstinately stay there. My voice would at first sound coaxing, then commanding, and then frankly I would lose my temper. ‘Come on, Monty, come down!’ I would shout at him. He would not budge, so in the end, with Jeannie standing beside me holding the torch, I would climb the tree towards the pair of phosphorescent eyes which stared down from above. I would be up there among the branches trying to grab him, while Jeannie was laughing at both of us in the darkness below.
He had an endearing game he played when he thought a walk required livening up; or perhaps because he decided we were not giving him enough attention. He would wait until we had gone several yards ahead of him, crouching meanwhile on the path and shifting his paws as if he were about to spring . . . and then race at terrific speed up to and past us, coming to a full stop a couple of yards away. Thereupon we inevitably bent down and made a fuss of him. Then we would go on, and soon the game would be repeated.
The longest walk he used to take was to the Carn we can see from our windows at Minack and which stands above a cascade of rocks that fall to the sea below. It is a rough walk most of the way, a track through gorse and brambles and bracken while on either side of a long stretch of it there is a whole series of badger setts. In springtime the land around is sprayed with bluebells while may trees plume white from among them; and ahead is the Carn and the panorama of Mount’s Bay.
We used to make it an early-morning walk when the dew was still wet on the grass, and a peaceful one if Monty was in a docile mood; but there were times when we would pass the badger setts thinking he was behind us, and suddenly find he had disappeared down one of the cavernous holes. It would take us a few minutes before we found which hole he had chosen, then we would see him looking up from the dark, just out of reach. I found myself thinking on these occasions he was taking a mischievous revenge on the only time I ever had power over him. . . when he wanted me to open a door or a window; for there he would be holding up the walk, and nothing we could do except await his decision to rejoin us.
His favourite walk, or stroll I should call it, was fifty yar
ds down the lane to the stream; a stream which rushed water from November to June, then dried up and became a dip in the roadway. It was a stroll that now has a significance for Jeannie and myself because it represents in our memories the joy of his first stroll and the sadness of the last.
The first night on which we came to live at Minack the moon was high, and after I had transported our luggage to the cottage, we celebrated the freedom we had captured by taking this stroll. The moon was shining, except for the murmur of the sea and the hoot of owls, on silence.
Monty, who in the first week or two was going to be shy in daylight, came with us, nosing his way down the lane which to him was full of imaginary dangers, sniffing, hesitating, taking no action except to advance steadily towards the sparkling water that ribboned ahead of him. And when at last he reached it and put out a paw in puzzlement I felt this was an occasion when I must not allow him to have any further apprehension; and so I bent down to pick him up and carry him over. He was quick to expose my foolishness. He slipped from my hold, and with the grace of a gazelle he leapt the stream. From that moment, this miniature valley across the lane has been called Monty’s Leap.
It was in daffodil time that his illness began to threaten the normality of his days. Nothing sudden, no pain, just a gradual ebbing of strength; so that first the bluebell walk to the Carn had to be abandoned, then the one we used to take along the top of the cliff, and then even the strolls to the Leap became less frequent. I would watch him from the corner of the cottage wending his way down the lane, and my heart would yearn to see a spring in his movements I knew I would never see again. He would reach the stream, drink a little, then turn and come slowly back. This stroll was the yardstick of our hopes, and sometimes Jeannie would come running to me: ‘He’s been twice to the Leap this morning!’ . . . and her voice would have the tone that the inevitable was going to be defeated.
But I knew sooner than Jeannie that there was nothing we could do, nothing that her loving care and nursing ever could achieve. Each time I saw him set off for the Leap I was on guard; and there was one evening, the last evening, when on seeing him, from our window, start down the lane we ran to follow him only to find that after a few yards he had lain down. Then on a few yards and down again; and yet he was such an old warrior that when I picked him up he tried weakly to struggle free . . . as if he were saying: ‘Let me be, I can make it!’ I gently gave him to Jeannie to take home to the cottage, and as I watched her I realised that she too now knew that our life with him was over.
He died on a lovely May morning in his sixteenth year. I had hurried to fetch the vet and on my return I found Jeannie had taken him out into the warm sun and he was breathing gently on a bed of lush green grass. Up above on the roof was Hubert, quite still, his feathers bunched, as if he were waiting for something; and within a yard or two of Monty were his other two friends, Charlie and Tim. No sound from either of them. Tim on a rosebush, Charlie on a grey rock. They were strange mourners for a cat.
The next day, soon after the sun had risen above the Lizard far away across Mount’s Bay, we carried him down the lane to the stream and buried him beside it. Between his paws we placed a card:
Here lies our beloved friend Monty who, beside the stream that crosses the lane and is known as Monty’s Leap, is forever the guardian of Minack.