by A. N. Wilson
Stray
Also by A. N. Wilson
Furball and the Mokes
Hazel the Guinea-Pig
The Tabitha Stories
First published in Great Britain in 1987 by Walker Books Ltd.
This paperback edition published in 2013 by Corvus,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Text © 1987 A. N. Wilson
The moral right of A. N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 074 0
E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 075 7
Printed in Great Britain.
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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contents
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
chapter thirteen
chapter fourteen
chapter fifteen
chapter sixteen
chapter seventeen
chapter eighteen
chapter nineteen
chapter twenty
chapter one
Like all our race I was born blind and it was some days before I opened my eyes. Even when I could see I did not make much of what I saw. I suppose that this is partly because I was so small and the world was so big. I could see my brothers and my sister, snuggling, as I was, next to our mother. And I could see my mother – then. Often since I grew up I have seen a female cat suckling her young and I have tried to remember my own mother. I know that she was tabby with white markings – as I am myself – but I cannot remember her features. I can only remember the feeling of warmth and security I enjoyed for those first few days and weeks of my life, when I was alone somewhere, in a room, with just my mother and my brothers and my sister and no intrusion from the human world.
My mother must have had decent human minders. They had let her give birth to us. They had not drowned us as so many people drown kittens; and, as I say, they left us in peace. Being born and coming to life was for me like waking up after a long, delightfully deep and lazy sleep. There was no hurry about waking up. As I have told you, little grandson, for the first few days I did not even open my eyes. And then for quite a few days more I simply lay there, squeaking and purring with my tiny voice, and with a constant supply of delicious warm milk always laid on by my mother. Although I cannot remember her appearance, how well I remember that feeling of well-being, when I was cuddled up beside her – I think we were in a large open drawer at the bottom of a bed or a wardrobe – the warmth of her fur, the tenderness with which she licked us and groomed us and taught us to be clean.
After I was about a fortnight old I became aware that the world was not entirely populated by cats. My mother had begun to tell us that there were people in the world. But what could that mean to me when I had no idea what they were like? Then gradually, over the next few days or weeks, my brothers and I got to know the human look and that human smell. The drawer where we were lying peacefully would be roughly shaken and one would hear a grown-up human voice say, ‘Just peep at them, mind! Don’t touch them, yet, or it will disturb them!’ or ‘Aren’t they gorgeous.’
Of course I reconstruct what they said but this is the sort of thing I have heard drooling, well-meaning two-footers say when staring at kittens. And who can blame them? There are no creatures in the world more endearing than young kittens with large eyes and large paws and soft, fluffy little coats. Yes, even I was a young kitten once, though you may find it impossible to believe. Young and frisky and as silly as you. The first thing which struck me about the human beings was not what they said but what they looked like. I remember, when we had been visited a number of times by them, trying to focus my eyes on the enormous red faces which peered so closely at our own. At that stage nothing had happened to make me dread or fear the human race; but I think I did fear them. They seemed so large and, by the refined standards of my own mother, so very coarse and ugly. I remember the extraordinary smells they gave off as they peered at us – you know the human stench already and how horrible it is to animal nostrils.
But, as I say, though I was in the house of human kind, they were reasonably good specimens. Gradually, as we grew older, the people fed us with eggs and boiled chicken until we were used to solid foods. And before long they were feeding us on tinned foods and minced offal, and playing with us. We left the room where we were born and were carried down some stairs in a basket; and there, in front of a big fire, we would scamper about, chase balls of wool, and amuse ourselves and the people in whose house we had been born. They were still happy days, I suppose, but for me the days of pure and true happiness will always be the days in that bedroom, when it was just cats and no human interruptions.
Bright of eye and light of step, Tabitha came down the slope at the side of the house. She had just been having a quarrel with her neighbour Bundle. Not a serious quarrel but the sort of quarrel which both sides enjoy. Bundle had hissed at her and she had hissed at Bundle and then she had trotted off home, feeling pleased with herself. She was a mackerel-grey tabby cat with alert green eyes and a chin and chest of purest white. And Tabitha was Pufftail’s daughter.
Although she was only a year old, Tabitha had already given birth: to a litter of four kittens, in the previous autumn. Three of her kittens had gone to what the people who looked after her described as ‘good homes’. And one had been retained. The people called him Kitchener because he spent so much of his time in the kitchen. He had a pink nose and bright green inquisitive eyes, a little like his mother Tabby’s own. And he was a black and white cat, though largely black.
Old Father Pufftail lived in the street, but he was not a member of any human household. When it was very cold he crept through the cat-door at Number Twelve and slept in the kitchen there. Sometimes he lodged in a garden shed or a garage. But Old Father Pufftail was a proud and independent cat who called no man or woman or child his owner. He even resented being called by a name, though everyone in the street called him Pufftail; and he was, in fact, a much-loved local ‘character’. Tabitha loved her father. She took him for granted. She did not realize how unusual it is for a cat to know their father. Kitchener’s dad had visited Tabitha the previous summer from far away; and she still cherished the memory of him – a plump black tom with mysterious eyes. The evenings he had stood howling for her on the shed roof were very dear in her memory; and the warm, moonlit nights which had followed. But he was only a figure in her memory and she did not expect to see him again. Whereas Pufftail, who made such a thing of being wild, and a stray and independent, always hovered about.
Though he lived among dustbins and potting-sheds, though all his food was begged or stolen, Pufftail wa
s every inch a gentleman – a gentleman of the road perhaps. Tabitha did not quite know the half of her father’s life. She knew that people had been unkind to him and she knew that he had endured great adventures before he met Tabitha’s mother. But of the details her father had told her little.
And there he sat, in the afternoon sunshine, on top of the garden wall with his grandson Kitchener, looking as sober and domestic as a neutered pedigree in a vicarage.
‘Grandfather is telling me about the good old days,’ said Kitchener as they saw his mother approach.
‘Your ears are dirty,’ said Tabitha, instinctively licking her son. ‘You’ll end up looking like your grandfather if you don’t wash.’
‘Oh, charming,’ said Pufftail. ‘You see what it is to have a loving daughter? You see why I hover about your house, with such irresistible compliments as this falling from your mother’s lips?’
‘What’s a comp thingamy?’ asked Kitchener with a look of innocence.
‘It is a nice thing you say about someone,’ said Tabitha. ‘And Grandfather was making a joke. He thinks I was being rude about him.’
‘And were you?’
‘A little,’ said Tabitha with a smile. ‘Now, Father, would you like me to go into the kitchen and see what I can see?’
‘Dear girl, you are kindness itself!’
Tabitha remembered that the people who shared her house had the extravagant habit of eating only the meat on lamb chops. There had been lamb chops for lunch and lots of nice fat left on the bones at the side of the people’s plates. She trotted indoors to get a couple of chops for her father’s supper, leaving Pufftail talking to little Kitchener. And all summer long that conversation went on. While Tabitha went about her useful tasks of making things neat, of snoozing, of bringing out food or chasing birds, or quarrelling with the neighbours, Pufftail sat at the dustbin end of the garden and told little Kitchener all about the old days. This is the story as he told it to him.
chapter two
When you have lived as many long years in the world as I have, you too will be full of memories which you want to share; and I hope that you have a grandkitten, as I do now, who will sit patiently and listen to you! With the onset of my old age I talk too much. I know that. One of the reasons I want to tell you the story of my life, however, is to try to teach you to be brave and free and independent, for you are a cat and not a slave to any other creature in the universe. But before I begin I have to admit that there is hardly a cat to be met with in our part of the world who is not pathetically dependent when young upon the human race. I do hear tell that in other worlds there are wild cats who live far from the habitations of men and who lead the free and wild and unfettered life which all cats are meant to lead. But it is not like that in our world, the world of streets and houses and dustbins. Nearly all the cats who are born in that world owe their survival to the human race. Coarse, smelly, ugly creatures, they may be. But it was two-footers who had it in their power, at my birth, to drown me or to save my life; it was two-footers who brought me food and who gave my mother warmth and, although it sticks in my throat to say so, it was two-footers who decided my fate.
I do not know how long it took before we were all weaned and independent of our mother. But I think that I was about eight weeks old when the happy security of my world was for ever broken. There were to be no more long hours snuggled with some old clothes in the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe, clinging for comfort to that most wonderful of all mothers; no more innocent little journeys downstairs in a basket, no more happy gambols in front of a burning log fire, as the kind but foolish people played with us.
It is my belief that these people were trying to find us what human beings call ‘good homes’, for a number of two-footers came galumphing into that sitting-room to gawp at us as we played with balls of wool by the fire. I can remember with a very distinct horror the first time one of them picked me up. It was a powdery woman in spectacles with a very long nose.
‘Hello, darling!’ she said, holding me within an inch of her benign face. ‘Aren’t they sweet – but no, I think my heart has really gone out to the black and white one.’
So she took my sister instead. I have amused myself, many a time, by wondering what sort of a life my sister had with this kind spinster lady with the spectacles and the powdery nose. I should think that by now my sister is very comfortable and very genteel. Probably if she met me she would turn up her nose with the utmost disdain and rush indoors to her spinster-mistress with squeaks of indignation. ‘Squeak-squeak,’ she might say. ‘I very nearly came face to face with an alley-cat.’ So you did, my darling, so you did. For an ‘alley-cat’ is what I am and proud of it – as you shall hear. Not for me the comfortable parlour where my sister probably, at this very moment, snoozes while her mistress watches a boring programme on the electrical picture box. Not for me the ‘Naughty! Mind the potted plants’, whenever you feel like jumping on their ridiculous furniture. Not for me the whole horrible business of ‘Have you put the cat out, dear?’ And then the servile little trot to the back door, the saucer of milk, before being shut up for hours in the kitchen with a litter tray. If this is civilization, you can have it. Why your mother submits to it I do not know.
One of my brothers also went to a ‘good home’. We hardly noticed he was gone. Some children came round to have tea with the family where we lodged and at the end of the meal, after a session of quite gratifying cat worship, they walked out with a basket.
‘I think they will look after him,’ one of the human beings said when the children were gone.
‘Oh, I’m sure they will. And didn’t you see the look of excitement on Giles’s face?’
No, I had not seen it. But I saw the look of sadness on my mother’s face late that afternoon as she paced about the sitting-room looking for my brother and my sister. After a while she gave up the search. Being a cat – as you will soon discover if you do not know it already – is a story of unending and unexplained loss. We seldom know where our lost ones are and whether they have died, or been taken, or just moved on. This was my first glimpse of the fact; the sight of my poor mother, her tail swishing (yes, I can remember the swishing of that tail, even though all her other features – her face, and her colouring – elude my memory), hunting for her children and refusing to be comforted because they were not there.
The people in whose house I was born were a man and a woman and some children. In the few days after my brother was taken away there were endless conversations about what would become of the ‘other two’ – that is of me and my remaining brother. I really believe that they were on the verge of keeping us but the father of the household opposed the plan. It appeared that they were about to go on holiday and their house was to be occupied by some friends of theirs.
‘We can’t expect the Robinsons to look after three cats for a fortnight,’ he said one evening when my brother and I were sitting with our mother by the fire.
‘But,’ said a child, ‘they are such dear little kittens. Please, Daddy, please let us keep them.’
‘That was never the idea,’ said the man.
‘They’re very sweet now,’ said his wife, ‘but think what a handful they will be when they grow into tom cats.’
‘I’d help feed them,’ said another child.
‘It’s such a pity that the Harts let us down,’ said the woman. ‘Very unreliable, the Harts. They seemed so interested in the idea when we told them Georgina was expecting.’
‘They decided in the end on Siamese,’ said the man from behind his newspaper.
I never know why human beings have this habit of holding newspapers in front of their faces but presumably it is because even human beings find each other as ugly as we find them and they wish to hide themselves.
‘I think the obvious answer is to give them to a pet shop,’ he said from behind his newspaper-hide.
‘Oh, no!’ said one child.
And another said, ‘But Daddy.’
But Daddy said, ‘No buts.’ And then he put one of those small paper chimneys between his lips and lit it and began to fill the room with an unpleasant smoky smell.
So, that evening, my brother’s fate and mine was decided. We were both so young that we did not understand what the human beings were talking about. And I think our poor mother cannot have had the heart to explain to us what the discussion had meant. Recalling it now, that last night with my mother, it seems that she snuggled against us and licked us with particular tenderness. She cried a lot next morning when we were put into a basket. Till the day I die I will remember the sweet noise of my mother crying. At first my brother and I thought that we were merely being put into a basket in order to be taken downstairs to play. But this was a different kind of basket, with a sort of cage at the front. And I remember peering through the grille of that cage and looking for my mother and being unable to see her. I could only hear her plaintive voice calling to us her last sad goodbye. We never saw her again.
chapter three
We were taken to the pet shop by the woman of the house. Evidently, she had made some previous arrangement with the pet shop man because he expressed no surprise when she entered his shop and placed the basket, with us inside, on the counter.
‘Good morning, Mrs Wentworth. These are the little fellows, are they?’
‘It’s very sad to part with them,’ said Mrs Wentworth, ‘but I’m sure they will go to good homes.’
‘Oh, deary me, yes,’ said the pet shop man. ‘I never sell to anyone unless I’m quite sure they will be responsible owners. Now we have all the details, don’t we? You have had them injected?’
Apparently all these so-called necessities had been gone through and we had been taken to a vet and injected against all the various diseases which human beings fear we would catch. Funnily enough, I remember nothing about it. Presumably it was in that very basket where we now sat in the pet shop. All the other memories of what has happened to me since have overlaid the trivial one of visiting a vet.