by Tom Cox
The abstract painting my mum did of the Magic House during my final year there says a lot about the place’s character. She chose to focus on the Gothic, ecclesiastical-looking side of the building, but there’s nothing dark or ominous about what she came up with; it is orangey and earthy and verdant and welcoming, redolent of the finale of winter when lots of amazing events are happening just under the surface of the soil. There is something very optimistic and progressive about it, very 1925, very Dartington. I wanted to write about the house’s unique personality, and Dartington’s, but something was stopping me getting directly down to it. The place hadn’t quite had enough time to ferment in its spot inside me. I also had the additional concerns that come with living with a minor celebrity: something which I’d been in denial about, but had recently been forced to face up to more honestly. Around a year before my move to Devon, I had started a Twitter account for The Bear called Why My Cat Is Sad, which had taken off, gaining him around 330,000 followers, and more than twice that number on Facebook. Intended to support the books I’d written about his life, it played on his wide-eyed soulful looks, every tweet featuring a new photograph I’d taken of him accompanied by a new, preposterous reason why he was sad. For example, to accompany a photo of The Bear looking small and sweetly forlorn next to a camp bed, some toilet rolls, a pack of Uno cards and a ukulele, I used the caption ‘My cat is sad because he has been sitting here trying to hitchhike to Glastonbury for hours but nobody will pick him up.’ The Bear’s placidity and stillness, and the fact he spent a lot of the day following me around and staring deep into my eyes, made photographing him in a variety of scenarios an easier task than it would have been with 99.9 per cent of other cats.
I enjoyed being creative with the tweets but saw the whole enterprise for the bit of nonsense that it was, as did the majority of the people who followed The Bear’s daily adventures online. A minority, however, took it more seriously. People sent me photographs of cats that had been run over by cars, and messages announcing that they were coming to my house to kill The Bear. A group of young journalists discussed the party they would have when The Bear died and was no longer on Twitter. Some people told me I was exploiting The Bear, by putting his photographs on the Internet, as if they viewed The Bear as a cat who had strong moral views – which, admittedly, in the patently absurd online persona I’d invented for him, he was. A man in Eastern Europe wrote to ask if he could pay me several hundred pounds for his girlfriend to spend an hour with The Bear. I said no, just as I did to other ways to make money from The Bear, besides selling a small amount of cards and calendars featuring his face, which enabled me to buy him even more cooked chicken than I already did, which was a lot. I was careful on the Internet not to mention precisely where I lived, or photograph the Magic House in a way that made it instantly recognisable, but even so, to my knowledge, by 2016 at least three sets of people had come to the Totnes area to try to ‘find’ The Bear. The Bear himself remained blissfully ignorant of all of this, sleeping much of each day away beneath the sentinel yews, having the occasional cuddle with Roscoe and slurping up the stagnant, mossy water in the old grey can near the back door, which I could only conclude was some kind of elixir for eternal life.
The Bear was a cat who peaked in old age, becoming more mellow and plump after an anxious and scraggy early life. Looking back at photos from his seventeenth and eighteenth years, I am startled anew by his amazing plushness, his neatly packaged, compact bulk. It had only been during the months directly prior to my move to Devon that he had begun to look his age, his fur getting less sleek, his spine feeling more brittle, his eyes losing their brightness. I’d worried he wouldn’t survive the six-hour drive to his new home, but Dartington soon made him young again, or, at the very least, young-old again. I have no doubt that the Magic House extended his life, although I’d feared it would do precisely the opposite. He’d been mutating into an indoor cat prior to the move but his new habit was to stay out in Devon’s frequent rain, coming through the cat-flap with sparkling eyes and a drenched coat, then delighting in the ritual of having his back towelled dry by me and warming up next to the log fire. Some suggested his new love of rain was a mark of senility; I thought he had merely got wise to the way the liquid that poured from the south Devon skies could make him flourish, like everything else in the garden. By the time the trees were fully green in 2016, as The Bear approached his twenty-first birthday, Roscoe’s fur regrew over her scars, Shipley made his unfathomable recovery from kidney disease, and the now almost fifteen-year-old Ralph lounged among daisies and buttercups looking not a day over five, I had arrived at the conclusion that I was living with four Miracle Cats, in a Miracle Place.
It is only now, looking back at my diary, that I realise how many genuinely trying events had taken place in my life in the short space of time between December 2015 and March 2016. As well as Roscoe and Shipley’s narrow survivals, I’d lost the entire 23,000-word manuscript of the book I was writing. I’d thought I was over the relationship I’d left the previous year, realised I wasn’t, met a couple of blatantly wonderful women who liked me, got thoroughly irritated with myself for not being capable of liking them back in the same way. The sky was oppressive and full of coal. But spring re-dignifies you, especially at Dartington. Inspired by The Bear, I put a lot of rain on my own fur, and it appeared to work. Myopic checkout operators sometimes asked me for ID. By May, the whole of the TQ9 postcode looked young again. In town, I played a game I called ‘Old Person or Young Person’. This involved me trying to guess whether the person in front of me on the street was an old person or a young person. I frequently got the answer wrong. Teenagers around Totnes often dress not dissimilarly to their parents, who are often more than a typical generation’s span older than them, but – to further confuse matters – tend to look younger than they are. People in their fifties and sixties often had long, thick manes of hair and look slim and toned, so it was only when you saw their healthily lived-in faces that you realise they were no longer in the prime of youth. Billowy skirts, tie-dye, chunky jumpers and ponchos abounded. Even in summer, everyone looked cheerfully woven. It was a look that went beyond just clothing. In the post office, I queued behind women wearing big fishermen’s jumpers full of leaves and burrs who answered the verbose existential questions of small children tugging on their yoga pants. ‘HUGGING HOUR!!’ announced a sign in the marketplace. ‘Have you had your fourteen a day?’ Another poster advertised an upcoming course for the niche, devil-may-care sector of the population who had always yearned to learn meditation and archery simultaneously.
‘Lick my organic cheese!’ shouted a rejuvenated Shipley at the front gate, as I arrived home, weighed down with bags of food and cleaning products from the supermarket, which, if I was fully committing to the Totnesian lifestyle rather than just being an accidental garden escape, I would have boycotted. I worked hard and rewrote what I’d lost. But also, in the refined, easier picture memory creates, my friends and I did nothing but swim, watch bats, listen to folk rock and burn logs in my fire-bowl in the Magic House’s garden. October arrived. ‘Trick or twat!’ shouted Shipley, at the gate. November elbowed its way in behind it. ‘All the leaves are brown, and the sky is an overwhelming bulbous cock!’ shouted Shipley, at the gate. A few yards behind him, as fat rain fell, The Bear, now finally legally old enough to drink in America, slept soundly, in a plant pot.
In my heart of hearts, I knew that what had happened to The Bear and Shipley that summer could only be an encore, albeit a glorious one. The Bear was seriously old now, and seriously deaf. He weighed little more than a parrot and spent long intervals meowing at walls. I drew his Twitter account to a conclusion, not wanting to turn it into a picture board of his decline. In autumn, he developed a large and putrid abscess in his ear. He recovered, but not long afterwards the vet found a tumour between his jaw and eye socket. Yet The Bear did not seem unhappy. He retained a good appetite and, from time to time, still permitted Roscoe to sleep on his back.
His unretractable claws and dainty posture made him appear to tap dance through the three rooms of the Magic House that were carpetless. Sometimes, he’d try to scratch an itch with his back leg but, due to his arthritis, not be able to reach, scratching thin air instead. If I was around, I’d try to find the spot and scratch it for him. I never quite got the right place. Every time he woke up he looked even more wide-eyed than the time before, as if pulled by a finer and finer thread back into reality and increasingly bewildered by his continuing hereness. I’m pretty sure I know the exact moment he died because at about 2.40 a.m. I woke with a full-body jolt that felt like a benevolently intended electric shock and the Magic House felt very different to how it had ever felt before. A few hours later, as the lazy winter sun was finally beginning to rise over the line of bare trees overlooking the Magic House, I arrived downstairs and found him on his side in the hallway, lifeless. It was 16 December 2016: a year to the day since the second of Roscoe’s life-saving operations. I wrapped The Bear in the towel I’d recently been using to dry him after cleaning his increasingly matted fur, and buried him in the garden. I wanted to dig a grave for him under the one of the yews he’d like to sleep under so much, which would have suited The Bear, what with the folkloric links between yews and immortality, but this winter had not yet been as wet as the previous three and the ground was too firm. Instead I buried him on the opposite side of my house, near my shed, close to some self-seeded verbascum. I dug the hole deep, recalling that badgers had made their setts near here in the past, then remembered that there were virtually none of them left now, because they’d been culled by sorry excuses for humans.
I had been alone during the final hours of The Bear’s life, and – although I had friends nearby whom I knew I could look to for support – opted to continue to be alone during the few hours that followed. I struggled, as I knew I would, with an emptiness in the house, where a small comical, loveable and apparently deeply thoughtful presence once was. There was a part of me that felt that by burying him only mere hours after I was stroking him in his favourite spot on his chest and making him purr, I had in some way thrown The Bear away. I knew it was an irrational thought but also, in the circumstances, probably not an unusual one. Also not unusual, perhaps, was the way my mind tended to dwell on its more upsetting final images of him. In fact, maybe it was an important part of acknowledging what had happened. Mixed into the ache in my chest, there was a feeling that, above all, something here should be celebrated: a longevity so extreme and death-defying it made you laugh, a unique character, and an end that could have been far worse. Many would argue that kindness isn’t in a cat’s nature but if there was ever such a thing as a kind cat, it was The Bear. To my knowledge, he had never killed or even attacked another living being. When other cats – and, on the odd occasion, seagulls – appeared keener for food than him, he willingly moved aside. When I was poorly or sad, he seemed to know, and would move in closer. After seeing the poorly state he was in on the night before his death, I had steeled myself and decided that the next morning I would take him to the vet to be put to sleep, that it was the best course of action for him, the only course of action. But I utterly, utterly dreaded it. That he saved me that particular agony might be viewed as his final act of kindness. I was compelled to match it with one of my own. Experiencing tunnel vision, with soil from his grave still on my hands, I grabbed every bit of cat food in the house and garage, loaded it into the back of my car, drove to the pet-food shop in the village and then the supermarket, bought enough sacks and sachets and cans to fill the remainder of the boot, then drove the whole lot to the Animals In Distress shelter, five miles away, in Ipplepen.
The relationship between Shipley and The Bear had changed markedly in their last year together, Shipley no longer his tormentor, but undergoing a transformation into a tolerated, mouthy sidekick. In the weeks leading up to The Bear’s death, I often found them sleeping in the same spot, sometimes with light fur-on-fur contact. From the moment The Bear died, Shipley’s health went dramatically downhill again. He stopped swearing at me when I entered the gate, no longer followed Roscoe and Ralph and me up the hill into the Gardens, drank and drank and drank, picked at only the squelchiest parts of his food, and soon became as scrawny as he had been the previous winter when he’d been kept in on fluids at the vet’s for several days. One Saturday in February I returned home from a misty walk on the Dorset coast to find him unsettled and agitated, struggling to support his back end. Despite his obvious discomfort, he managed to greet me with a hoarse swear-yap, and I fed him, gave him two of the five pills the vet had advised he should take every day, and treated him to a cuddle in his favourite position: on his back, on my lap. He purred and air-padded in a faint way but felt a little limp. Half an hour later he vomited and started to act more unusually, walking in constant circles, unable to settle. While I was on the phone to the vet’s out-of-hours emergency line, he collapsed on his right-hand side on the carpet in front of me, his eyes glazing over. I placed him gently on a blanket in a cat carrier and rushed him to the surgery, fearing he might no longer be alive by the time he arrived there. The nurse attached a catheter to him and got him settled in a kennel and we waited for the vet to arrive, which took just over twenty minutes, although at this point I had lost almost all sense of time as a concept. The vet told me that Shipley was still alive, but his heart rate was very fast, his temperature was very low and he was unable to get up.
Two options were open to me: treat Shipley’s condition very aggressively with fluids and medication and hope it might help; or the other one. The vet asked me about Shipley’s behaviour before his collapse and, with the extra evidence of my answers, said it was likely he had suffered an embolism. I asked the vet several questions about the likelihood of Shipley having a good and comfortable life, if they were able to lift him out of his current pain. Upon hearing the answers, I made the choice to have him put to sleep. He was brought into the examining room so I could say my last goodbye to him. I kissed him on the head several times and told him how much I loved him. He looked directly at me with apparent recognition and seemed far more aware of his surroundings than he had half an hour earlier, which made what was happening both worse and better: worse because I suddenly questioned, again, whether I was doing the right thing, and better because I wanted him to be conscious enough to be aware of just how much he meant to me. I wanted what he saw at the very end to be someone who’d adored him every day since he first saw him leaping boisterously over a garden pond in Essex in autumn 2001. He died at the exact moment that dusk turned to dark. As I drove away from the surgery, I burst into proper tears – full, uncontrollable tears, that barely allowed me to see the road ahead – for the first time in years.
I had anticipated that Shipley’s death would hit me harder than The Bear’s, and I was correct. I have loved all the cats I’ve lived with in varying powerful ways, but the line separating Shipley in the period immediately before his death from Shipley not being here any more was much thicker than the line that separated The Bear in the period immediately before his death from The Bear not being here any more. The Bear was never very cat-like, a little furry island of Almost Cat who did his own thing, and in his final months that island had drifted farther out to sea. Shipley, though clearly in pain, was still shouty, demanding, boisterous, right up to the very end. He was a cat who seemed to need me much more than The Bear did. Much like Ralph, Shipley would be always seeking you out in the house, wanting to know what you were doing and whether he could join in. The space he occupied was huge and I was going to notice that space for a long time.
Many cats love boxes but Shipley’s love for them was more ardent and impatient than most. Any time I brought one home and emptied it – and very frequently before I’d had chance to empty it – he’d be inside it within seconds, swearing his head off. Even if he’d been in a deep sleep somewhere in the bowels of the house when I opened the front door, his boxdar would kick in and he’d quickly locate the ca
rdboard. Before I went back to the vet’s to collect his body, the vet nurse on duty, Catherine, had asked me over the phone if I wanted to bring his carrier to put him in. That might have seemed more dignified to some but I don’t think Shipley would have viewed it that way. I asked her if, instead, she had a cardboard box she could put him inside. We probably tell ourselves all sorts of nonsense about our pets’ thoughts in order to feel better in times of grief but I had a strong belief that, with his particular predilections, Shipley would have preferred this method of transport. After I refilled the hole with earth I noticed the slogan on this box: ‘Understanding your needs. Innovating the solutions.’ If Shipley was a person, he’d no doubt have been the kind who wouldn’t be able to resist remarking on the idiocy of a slogan like that. ‘Corporate cock sponge!’ I could almost hear him meow, in typical insurrectionary disdain. I buried him behind the pond, on the opposite side of the house to The Bear, just on the off-chance Shipley decided to become his torment-or again in the afterlife. Both would fertilise the good Dartington soil and spend eternity in this place of culture: the intellectual and the punk poet.