by Doreen Tovey
'Are you...?' I began to say to the girl, then stood there open-mouthed. Many people who have read about the cats and Annabel come to see us, but it was the first time one had brought her Siamese!
We couldn't invite her to bring him in. Our two were already looking at him out of the window. Sass with interest, Shebalu with her ears flattened and her tail up. Her tail up... Oh crumbs, no! I thought in despair. I visualised her marching over to the earthbox, standing up when she thought of the Cheek of It, my not being there to sit her down... Oh well, I thought, smiling brightly, preparing to greet my visitor as a grateful author should.
After we'd chatted for a while and she'd seen our two through the window she asked if she could exercise Simba up on the hill. Of course, I said, but if she'd excuse me I'd better go in. Our two would be getting awfully jealous.
They already were. Shebalu was on the piano, swearing horribly with her eyes crossed. Sass had his tail bushed. It only bushes above the bent bit and looks all the more fearsome for that. I was still soothing them down when the girl returned, put Simba in the van and drove off. We'd already said goodbye so there was no need for me to go out. Which was why, seeing a stranger putting a Blue Point Siamese into a van right outside our cottage with neither Charles nor I in sight, Tim Bannett thought it was somebody kidnapping Shebalu and was hammering on our door within seconds.
He'd spotted the incident as he was coming down from his field and had scratched the number of the van in the dust. Pretty smart thinking. Had it really been Shebalu we'd have got her before she left the county. If only Tim had been around the morning that Seeley went out... As it was, Charles came up with a new hazard. Supposing somebody fancied them if we left them in the caravan in a camping field and forced the door and carried them off?
You'd think, from the complexities we thought up, that they were a pair of priceless diamonds. To us, of course, they were, added to which there was always the thought of Seeley, which made us so much more wary than most. I remembered a story Pauline Furber told me when I'd rung her to ask about having a kitten. She'd quoted it to reassure me that lost cats often do get found – that while she thought Sass was made to measure for us, Seeley might still come back.
It seemed that some people from Manchester took their Siamese queen to a caravan site near Weymouth and halfway through the fortnight she disappeared. They searched for her, put up notices in the local shops, extended their holiday – but in the end they'd had to go home, asking the site-owner to contact them if there was any news, though by then they had little hope. The season ended, the winter passed – it was the bad winter of 1967. Even in Dorset the conditions were arctic. There was no hope at all now, thought her owners.
It was nearly a year later that Pauline's mother-in-law, who lived near the site, saw a slender tail and black-stockinged legs going past her sitting-room door. Food had been vanishing from her kitchen for some time, though she had never previously managed to spot the culprit. She called her son. They went to the door and peered round the corner. It was a Siamese all right. Thin but fit-looking, with a coat that had thickened like a bear's – proof that it had lived out all the winter. It was carrying a fillet of haddock in its mouth. The son followed it across several fields. There, watching a family of kittens devour the fish, under a tree-root in a hedge, was undoubtedly the missing Siamese.
He crept quietly away and told the owner of the caravan site, who phoned the people in Manchester at once. They drove down the same day. It was their cat, all right. She came when they called as though she hadn't been away for more than five minutes, bellowing a greeting, making a fuss of them, inviting them to Come and see what She'd Got. They took her back to Manchester, black and white kittens and all, saying they intended to keep the lot of them. Whether that had been the reason she'd wandered off – that she was in season and looking for a mate (though this wouldn't have been the original litter, there must have been a lot of half-Siamese around). Whether she'd simply felt the call of the wild as some Siamese seem to – we'd heard of so many who'd vanished from their homes and been found safe and well months later, having walked in on some other family with an air of condescension and just taken over the place... her owners were lucky; they'd got her back, thanks to a glimpse of a tail going past a doorway.
Pauline had told us this story when we first met her, before we'd ever thought of having a caravan. I'd forgotten it in the interim but now it came back with a bang. Supposing our two managed to get out of the caravan despite our taking all precautions? Enlarged the hole round the sink-pipe, for instance, or managed to prise open one of the windows? The window over the cooker wasn't a very tight fit. I could just see Sass sitting there winkling it open. I visualised the pair of them disappearing across a field themselves, one long bent black tail accompanied by a small but valiant blue one. Our coming back to find them gone. The frantic search. The months of wondering. Two little cats living wild in a wood. Winter coming on. The pair of them cold and hungry... My imagination was building it up into an Orphans of the Storm scenario when Sass singed his feet on the cooker and my mind was definitely made up.
He was mooching round the kitchen one morning when I took a pot off the stove. Normally he isn't allowed in the kitchen while I'm cooking, but somehow I'd overlooked him. Realising, presumably by ESP since he couldn't see it, that there was now a vacant space on the stove-top where it might be advantageous to stand, he took off from the floor in one of his leaps, straight for the red-hot ring. Fortunately I saw him coming and have learned to be fast-moving from long experience. As I raised the saucepan and his head appeared underneath, much as I hated doing it I knocked him flying with the other. He vanished under the table wailing that I'd Hit Him, in a strong aroma of singed Sass. He was quite all right, though. His pads weren't even blistered. Only the hair around them was scorched. But if he could do that in the kitchen, what could happen in the caravan, with gas rings, not much room and two of them about the place? It was no good, I said. My nerves wouldn't stand it. For our first trip, at any rate, we'd have to board the cats.
How lucky we were. When I rang Pauline Furber to ask if she knew of anyone she could recommend she said she could take them herself if we liked. People had asked her so often that she'd just put up three houses and runs especially to take her own ex-kittens when their owners went on holiday.
I could hardly believe it. She understood Siamese as thoroughly as the Francises did and loved the kittens she bred so much that, when we bought Sass from her she'd said that if Seeley did come back and we didn't want Sass any more, would we let her have him back, not pass him on to anyone else. I had assured her that Sass was ours for good, whether Seeley came back or not. Not for nothing had he wrapped that small bent tail around my heart as soon as I saw him. Not for nothing had he fixed me with his strange, hypnotic stare. The stare he still, as a grown cat, uses on occasion when he wants to bend me to his will, such as when sitting between me and the television he decides it is his bedtime and tries by telepathy to make me get His Milk, and hurry up and hand over His Chair...
Yes, the houses were separate, Pauline assured me. And they did have locks on the doors. And the runs were paved so they couldn't tunnel under... Had I forgotten she had Sass's father, and that several of the kittens she boarded were his? Built like Alcatraz was her motto, and it would be nice for Sass to see his Dad.
When we aimed the caravan up the hill a few weeks later watched by a group of interested neighbours – most of them were at the bottom, ready to push, but Miss Wellington appeared to be praying at the top – at least we didn't have to worry about the cats. They were safe with Pauline at Burrowbridge.
Twelve
We made it. Eyes closed, gripping the edge of my seat, I just about willed that caravan up. There was a tense moment halfway up the hill when Charles stopped to check that he could take off again. He did it at the behest of one of our friends, who said if we could take off from standstill there we could take off on anything. He'd eat his lunch with
a much better conscience, he said, if he didn't have a vision of us somewhere on a hill going backwards.
It was a wonder his vision wasn't realised there and then. It felt as if we were being held by a heavy anchor. I was wondering at which point we ought to jump – then once more we were moving upwards. Past Miss Wellington – hands clasped, eyes closed. Round the corner by the Rose and Crown. The landlord came out to wish us Bon Voyage and see that we didn't hit his wall.
On round the bend, in more ways than one. Through the main part of the village. It was a Saturday morning and there were quite a few people about, glancing at the car and recognising us. Charles said did I have to look as if I was airborne at thirty thousand feet? I attempted to relax... to smile graciously at them, like the Queen. It wasn't an easy task. I don't suppose she'd feel much like smiling, either, towing a caravan for the first time behind her coach.
The friend who'd lent us the magazines was right, though – after half an hour we hardly realised it was there. Our confidence grew with every minute of the journey down to Dorset and we drove into the camping field with aplomb. It was a Caravan Club Certified Location site – one of their small, five-caravan-only ones, which we had looked at some weeks before. It had seemed ideal for our initial try out, with its left-hand turn-in that led through an ample gateway and along a wide, well-gravelled track. There was plenty of room on the flat, grassy site, too. It would be the easiest thing in the world to park.
Overcome by the success of our journey, Charles announced that he would now back into place. He hadn't backed a caravan before. Equally overcome I got out to direct him, trying to look as though we'd been doing it for years. I was so impressed with the skill with which he was managing it – it is quite a difficult business, one has to turn the steering wheel in what would normally be the wrong direction to start with and it's easy to jack-knife the whole thing, but there was the caravan, as if by magic, gliding expertly into line – that I failed to notice the black smoke pouring from under the car until one of the other caravanners came running up.
'You've got the caravan brake on,' he shouted. 'This your first time out? We all do that at the start.'
I should have remembered that the caravan brake goes on automatically when the car is in reverse. It is a safety measure, to hold the caravan if anything goes wrong on a hill. If you want to back the caravan the brake lever has to be held up by an assistant, or fixed with an elastic band. It was my job, I'd forgotten it in the excitement of the moment, and Charles had been reversing nearly a ton of caravan against the force of its very efficient brakes.
When I asked if it mattered, Charles said not so you'd really notice it. We'd probably ruined the clutch. No doubt burnt out the brake linings, too, but what was a little thing like that? He gave a hollow laugh and kicked the caravan wheels. At least they didn't fall off.
Actually our car is pretty tough and it didn't appear to have done it any harm. When I rang Pauline she said the cats were alright too, and eating like little pigs. Yes, she was feeding Sass separately. She saw what I meant about his being a gannet. (Sass not only ate twice as fast as Shebalu, he'd also perfected a system of bolting the first part of his own meal, looking across at Shebalu's dish and deciding that she had More, nipping over and grabbing half of it in one mighty Sass-sized mouthful, then scooting like lightning back to his.)
No, she said, he hadn't blotted his copybook. (I'd warned her about his obsession with wool. He hadn't wet his blanket for a good while now but there was no knowing when he might start. Away from home, where he could let us down thoroughly, would be an obvious incentive to him, particularly if he decided that not doing it was the reason he was there.) He was using his box as good as gold, said Pauline. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. As for Shebalu, she was a poppet – exactly like her Dad. (Valentine, Shebalu's Champion of Champions father, had also been one of Pauline's cats.)
So, content that they were in good hands and that hopefully the clutch and brake linings had survived, we spent our experimental week in Dorset. Charles liked caravanning so much he got carried away and bought a recorder to play in the evenings. This was the life, he said, pausing between piercing blasts while a cow answered him from over the hedge. The gipsy spirit. The feeling of freedom. Why hadn't we done this before? He reckoned he could compose on this recorder. He hadn't felt so inspired for years.
That wasn't what he said at the end of the week when, on our way back to the cottage, we found ourselves going the wrong way through Langport. I was navigating and had missed the turning. I realised as soon as we'd passed it. But you can't pull a caravan outfit into the side of the road and reverse it as you would a car. We had to go on, down the steep winding hill into the main street, which in Langport is very narrow. There was traffic building up behind us, traffic coming towards us... What the hell, demanded Charles, did we do now?
'Take the next turning left,' I said. Charles frantically swung the wheel. We found ourselves in a cul-de-sac in front of some garages. Charles said he couldn't reverse the caravan there, either, unless I fancied one that looked like a concertina.
There was only one thing for it – to unhitch the caravan and turn it round by hand. We could just reverse the car on its own. And while we were heaving at the coupling and covering ourselves with grease (the book said to lubricate the tow-hitch liberally and Charles always takes instructions at their word) a gang of small children materialised from nowhere and squatted down to watch us with interest.
'That your caravan?' one enquired.
'Yes, it is,' I said.
'Why did you bring it up this lane?'
'To turn it round,' I told him.
'What do you want to turn it round for?'
'So we can go the other way.'
'Why do you want to go the other way?'
'WHY DO YOU THINK!' I said. Which was why, as a lesson to me to be patient in future with innocent, enquiring youth – as I bent with Charles over the two-bar, struggling to heave the hitch into position, several handfuls of gravel hit me on the seat of my slacks and a chorus of little voices said 'Yah!'
All it needed after that was for us to go on to Burrowbridge, having arranged to collect the cats on the way, to learn that halfway through the week Sass had gone on strike against his box and had been using a hole in the paving of his run instead. It was hardly more than a crack, where a small stone had come out. Pauline said the accuracy of his aim was quite amazing. He sat on it looking so earnest, too, as though he was performing some sort of rite. He was, I said, though goodness knew what it was. All we could do was be thankful that he hadn't performed it on his blanket.
Things didn't change much, did they? said Charles as we drove home across the moors. Siamese just existed to let one down. They thought up things one couldn't possibly imagine. Who would have expected that addle-pated cat to use a crack in the paving as a lavatory?
Who, either, could have envisaged the trouble we were to have at the cottage when he evolved an even better system of opening doors – to the extent that we had to keep the back one locked because we kept finding him swinging from the handle, with Shebalu sitting beside him with her paws folded waiting for Genius to let them out?
That one was easily taken care of by our locking the door, of course. It was the doors we couldn't lock that were the trouble. The pull-down flap in front of the cooker grill, for instance, which had foxed our other cats for years. I used to put things in there from the freezer when I wanted to thaw them out. The first time I found the conspirators in the kitchen gnawing a half-thawed chop between them, I thought I must have forgotten to close it. I removed the cats, got out another chop, grilled the chewed one for them for their own lunch... separately, on a piece of foil, I assured Charles, who is particular about germs...
The next day I found them chewing at a string of sausages and this time I knew I hadn't left the grill door open. I decided to keep watch. I replaced the sausages, closed the flap and took the cats with me into the sitting-room. After a momen
t or two Sass departed nonchalantly in the direction of the kitchen. Equally nonchalantly Shebalu followed him. Creeping across to peer through the door-crack, I saw the ultimate in cat co-operation.
Reaching up on his spindly back legs, Sass hooked the grill flap down with one pull. He did it as one who had practised it, putting his paw in at one side, no amateurish fumbling about with the handle. Shebalu, who'd been watching him from the top of the cooker, now got down on the flap and crawled inside on her stomach. She is smaller than Sass and the pair of them had obviously worked out that this was her part of the job. She backed out carrying the sausages, which she dropped to the floor with a frozen thud. Sass moved in to tackle them, she jumped down to join him... till then they'd worked like a couple of commandos, but at that point natural instinct took over. He growled at her and said the sausages were His and she hit him on the nose.
They carried out this joint technique at every opportunity after that and I had to give up thawing meat in the grill compartment. For a while I used the oven instead, but it so happens that I make my own bread and I kept putting in liver, for instance, forgetting it was there, and then later I'd turn on the oven, ready to bake the bread... I fused so many helpings of liver to their polystyrene trays I could almost have started a glue factory.