by A. N. Wilson
Those were happy years on the whole. Granny Harris lived in a small terraced house on the eastern side of the town. Downstairs there was a tiny little front room, a tiny little back room and a scullery. Upstairs, there was her bedroom, and another bedroom, always empty, a bathroom, and in the bathroom that well they sit on for getting rid of their business.
Nowadays, I feel no desire for a regular human habitation, such as you have, little kitten. I am happy enough to get my kip wherever the fancy takes me. If it is a warm day I often find myself falling asleep on your garden wall while you and your mother play on the grass down below. When it rains there are not a few garden sheds up and down the street where I can take refuge. Some cats I know sleep in garages but my heart is made sick by the sight of the engines of murder which people store there and by the smell of the liquid which they pour into them. On very cold nights, when the world becomes white and hard and our Mother-of-Night shines brightly above us, I sometimes push through the cat-door and sleep in the kitchen at Number Twelve and lie by the warm cupboard there. But night is no time to sleep. The hunting is better at night and no food tastes as good as the food you have caught yourself.
But in those far-off days we were happy enough, my brother and I, to lodge in Granny Harris’s house. She had had a cat before, whom she called Sammy; and her son-in-law Jim had put a little cat-flap into her back door to enable Sammy to get in and out of the yard without disturbing her. For our first few months there she kept us locked up in the kitchen at nights. But when we were old enough she let us roam free and we began to experience the delights of the chase.
My brother was an expert hunter. I will never forget the excitement, one dawn, of catching our first thrush. We were playing in the yard, practising fisticuffs, when he suddenly froze and hissed to me between his teeth, ‘Look! Look, there!’
On the other side of the yard, only a few feet away from us, a plump male thrush was cracking the shell of its breakfast snail. It was a magnificent bird, with speckled plumage on its breast and nut-brown feathers on its back and tail. The task of cracking the snail was so absorbing that it did not seem to notice us staring at it. You know the excitement – your whole body tingling with the thrill of it, your fur on edge, your heartbeat quickened; though as yet, Grandson, you are too impulsive and you miss too many chances. My brother taught me the importance of absolute stillness and patience.
Hammer, hammer, hammer!
The thrush had its back to us. Neither of us said a word. We communed silently. At exactly the right moment my brother pounced, with claws out, and cuffed the bird on the side of its head. He had been so swift that it still had the snail in its beak when he knocked it off its legs. The bird began to flap and squeak but by then I had pounced on it and bitten one of its wings so that it could not fly away. Then, after the first excitement of the chase, there came the glorious surge of blood-lust. It is a wonderful feeling, isn’t it, the knowledge that you have the bird completely in your power, the certainty that soon you are going to be feasting on some warm really fresh meat. At this stage, the desire to delay the moment of the actual kill is irresistible. I know that some people, especially children, consider this part of the sport cruel. They are fine ones to talk about cruelty! Now that I am old and know of what cruelty people are capable, I think there was something pretty innocent about the pleasure my brother and I took in tormenting that bird. It tried to fly but because I had almost torn off one wing, it couldn’t, so the more it flapped, the more hopeless its situation became. Then it hopped about despondently on its curious scaly little legs until my brother cuffed it again. I was just about to plunge my teeth into its neck when my brother said ‘No! We can get a few more runs out of it yet.’ So we withdrew a few feet, giving the poor silly creature the impression that it was free – though I don’t know what sort of freedom it imagined itself possessing with a broken wing and two young cats looking down on it. Then it tried hopping across the flagstones of the yard and we descended on it again, teasing it with our paws and growling and breathing on it. Then, very suddenly, we decided to end it all. When it was limp and still we began our feast.
The blood was delicious but after a few careful mouthfuls (and I couldn’t help swallowing some feathers) my brother paused.
‘Our First Blood,’ he said proudly. ‘Hadn’t we better tell the old woman?’
‘Will she be pleased?’ I asked.
‘Pleased? I should say! Think of how pleased she was when Jim got – what was it called? Promotion? And when Tracy got those things.’
‘CSEs,’ said I; as you will have noticed I have a curiously retentive memory for the things people say.
‘Those are the things,’ said my brother. ‘Don’t know what they are, do you?’
‘No idea,’ I said.
But they are things people like getting, like money and engines of murder.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps we ought to show her our thrush.’ I coughed a little bit, having swallowed more feathers than was good for me.
My brother took the stiff still thrush in his mouth and led the way back into the house through the cat-flap. We went into the small tiled hall and up the stairs, and stood outside Mrs Harris’s door. We could hear from her room those loud noises which human beings make when they are asleep. I think they do it because for some reason they don’t know how to keep their mouths shut at the same time as sleeping. Strange creatures they are!
Mrs Harris’s door was ajar and I pushed it open with my nose. By now, I had become completely convinced by my brother that there could be few things which would give the old lady more pleasure than to be woken up early in the morning in order to be presented with a dead bird. So I jumped on to her bed with great confidence and began to claw the eiderdown impatiently. As soon as the snoring stopped, I put my nose against hers and said, ‘Wake up, Mrs Harris, ma’am, you’ll never guess what we’ve brought you.’
‘Bless us, what are you miaowing about so early in the morning?’ she asked. ‘Hungry already? Eaten all the lovely Katto-tin I put out for you last night?’
Then my brother jumped up and dropped the thrush on her sheet and we stood back proudly, awaiting her delighted congratulations. But, you see, this is where human beings are really extraordinary. Instead of being pleased, Mrs Harris let out a little squeal of horror.
‘Oh, you naughty boys!’ she said. With great indignation she elbowed herself up into a sitting position among the pillows. ‘That poor little thrush! How could you do such a cruel thing? And it’s dirty, too, I shouldn’t wonder, fleas and that, like Her Opposite always feeding the pigeons and they do say she even has pigeons in the house bringing in filth and fleas.’
‘We thought you’d like it,’ said my brother, really very crestfallen.
‘There’s no good you miaowing at me, young man, I’m very cross with you. And you,’ she said, shaking her finger at me.
I had meant to put up an eloquent defence of my brother’s action. I was going to point out to Granny Harris that First Blood was one of the proudest moments in a young cat’s life. I was going to say that people ate meat and although I didn’t know how they got hold of it, I shouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t employ cats to procure it for them. Eating meat and then complaining that hunting was cruel was pure hippo— hippo— something. I knew there was a word for making a great song and dance of condemning the very things which you like doing yourself – a word apart from human that is. Hippo-something. But at that stage I couldn’t think of it, for the feathers which had stuck in my gullet came satisfyingly up through my throat. I leaned forward and started to choke and then – the truly delicious sensation of vomiting.
‘And now you’re being sick all over my bedroom floor,’ said Granny Harris, ‘like Her Opposite’s lodger, so-called, who comes home swaying like a ship in a stormy sea of a Friday night. And it serves you right, young man.’
I have never got the hang of this human idea that being sick is something bad. True, it is not so reliably
enjoyable as eating, hunting or making love, but I would rank it as one of the very highest pleasures in life. But Granny Harris considered that being sick, far from being one of the incidental pleasures of my First Blood, was some sort of punishment which I had brought upon myself. She heaved herself off the bed and shooed us out of the room.
‘Off, out, the pair of you,’ she said. And we were banished to the garden while she cleared up. At first I supposed that she merely intended to mop up my vomit (and I did very much regret having been sick on her bedroom carpet). But after a few minutes the back door opened and we saw her come out into the garden wearing a dressing-gown. She was carrying the thrush we had killed in a little dust-pan.
‘Would you believe it,’ said my brother. ‘She’s going to bury it.’
‘I thought the least she could do would be to eat it for breakfast,’ I said. ‘Really, they are...’
‘Extraordinary.’
These last four words became a sort of catch-phrase or joke between my brother and me, and whenever we caught ourselves being once more amazed by an example of human eccentricity one of us would start up, ‘Really!’ and the other would chime in, ‘they are extraordinary!’ And we found this hilariously amusing. When we find something sublimely funny, we shut our eyes and swish our tails and smile. We don’t go in for this heaving of the shoulders and barking that the human race do when something tickles their childish humour.
chapter six
Well, our First Blood had one good consequence anyway, and that was that Granny Harris decided to get rid of her budgie. Compared with open-faced beautiful creatures like robins or thrushes, I even then considered the budgerigar an ill-favoured specimen of bird life, with its flat face and squashed up little beak. I am fairly sure that Granny Harris had tired of this creature after she had decided that it had nothing to say for itself.
People, you will discover, consider themselves the only creatures in the universe capable of communication, and unless you ape their particular set of noises they think you can’t ‘talk’, as they call it. An idiot parrot who can be taught to screech ‘skin you!’ is thought to be very clever. Two house-martins calling to each other the exact directions of how to get from London to East Africa are dismissed as ‘dumb creatures’ who are ‘only twittering’. Well, the budgerigar could ‘only go tweet tweet’ as far as Granny Harris was concerned. And she announced that she did not want any ‘trouble’ for it from us. So it was decided that her daughter June should have it instead, and one day June and her husband Jim came to collect it.
My brother took an instant dislike to June and Jim, and so did I. I do not need to explain to you that there are some people that one knows to avoid. Jim and June were perfectly harmless. They were never going to torture us or knowingly make life a misery. But they were aliens, whom we shunned. Whenever they made one of their rare visits to the house, my brother and I always conveniently vanished.
On this occasion, June picked me up and held me in the air.
‘You wouldn’t eat a budgie, Fluffie, would you?’ she said.
Being waved in the air makes me sick, even without looking into June’s face. It is a very moist face – or it was. Whether she is still alive, I neither know nor care. It is a sort of pinky brown, and she has put paint around her eyes and her lips. How she can stand the agony of it I do not understand.
‘Oh, Fluffie, Fluffie, Fluffie!’ she exclaimed. ‘You wouldn’t hurt a budgie, would you? Not my mum’s budgie?’
Well yes, I have to admit that they called me Fluffie. I have concealed it from you until now. My brother was Bootsie, because he had a black body and white legs. And I was Fluffie! Just think of it. Your own grandfather, Fluffie. This Pufftail nickname they all call me by in the street is bad enough. I will not answer to it or acknowledge it. But at least it is only a nickname, used by people who know no better – what’s that? Yes, yes, and by some cats too – because they do not know my name, and they do not realize that I, like all cats, am a creature of no name. But, Fluffie! While June was waving me in the air and saying that if I would eat the budgie I would be a naughty-wauty little diddums (that silly way they talk to animals and children, some people), Jim was telling her not to be so daft. And then she asked him whether he wanted to see mum’s budgie killed by a couple of cats, and he had said that it was his idea, not hers, that they should take the budgie. And she had disputed this, and soon they were having one of their regular set-tos. That was my real reason for disliking Jim and June; the endless arguing about everything. It made their company pretty tedious.
I haven’t really described June to you apart from that moist, painted face. She had blue fur on top of her head, hardened into a sort of helmet shape. Jim had almost no fur at all. His fur-style reminded me of the pet shop man, where we suffered our first imprisonment. What little fur he had was swept back and oiled. Jim and June both smoked the paper chimneys quite a lot, too.
‘Left to me, I’d drown the whole blooming lot of them,’ said Jim, ‘I mean – animals! Is it worth all the fuss?’
‘You’re the one making a fuss, not me.’
‘I like that.’
During these ding-dongs, June’s mother, Granny Harris, kept absolutely quiet, and said nothing. But she did eventually ask, ‘Well – are you taking the budgie or aren’t you?’ And Jim and June took it.
They did not call again on Granny Harris for weeks – months perhaps. They rarely did. When she had a few words with the milkman, or with the lady next door with the horrible children, or even, on days when she was desperately lonely, with Her Opposite, Mrs Harris would imply to them that she saw her family all the time. While we frolicked on the pavement outside her house, or in the backyard, we would hear her giving long descriptions of what Jim and June were up to: how Jim was now the manager of whatever it was he worked for, and how their child was shaping up. I am sure that my mother, if she is still alive, is not telling her neighbours all about me. It is not natural for parents to take an interest in their children, and I do not believe that Granny Harris really took any interest in June and Jim. She always seemed quite glad when they had gone. But she had to behave as if her life revolved around them. It is so silly.
What’s that? Why, if I think like that, do I take so much interest in Tabitha? Your mother is a very remarkable cat, that is why. There are other reasons, which perhaps, if I ever finish telling you the story of my life, you will understand. But I can assure you, little one, that I have been the father of dozens, perhaps hundreds of children, and I do not pretend to find them all interesting. Granny Harris would have been so much happier if she had not pretended to like Jim and June. And, by all the Gods, so should we!
Now that I look back on those days, when my brother and I lived with old Granny Harris, I realize how lucky we were, and what a good woman she was. Many of our kind lead perfectly contented lives in the company of such as Granny Harris. She fed us regularly. She staggered faithfully off to the shop and staggered back again with tins of perfectly edible, if predictable food. She talked to us, and petted us, and stroked us. Being called by silly names was a small price to pay for such a life.
After all, for most of the time, we were free to lead the lives that our kind have always wanted to live. How often my brother and I have raced each other up and down the back walls of those terraced houses, biffed each other by the dustbins, or chased cabbage white about the little scrubs of gardens which sprouted in patches in Granny Harris’s street. And then, with a delicious drowsiness coming over our limbs, we have trod the wall-top to the roof of her old shed and lain there, basking in the sunshine, and sinking into that warm delicious sleep which always has some of the qualities of the first warm sleep out of which we awoke to find ourselves being licked and purred into life by our beloved mother. Truly of all creatures, we cats have the greatest genius for life. I often thought it as we lay there meditating on the shed roof, and I have often thought it since. Dogs, silly fools, define all their existence in terms of the human race.
They glory in their slavery. They whimper and yelp at their master’s command. Human beings themselves have their moments of ingenuity. Keeping meat fresh in tins, for example, is a brilliant idea which only a human being would have thought of. But – poor silly creatures – how they scurry and fret. I watch them rushing hither and thither, taking on and off clothes, going to shops, driving their engines of murder, sitting in offices, and I wonder how many of them, for much of the time, share our acute consciousness simply of being alive. They are not so much themselves, as we are ourselves. They do not allow themselves the time to be fully human. We, by contrast, can give ourselves wholly and absolutely to being purely feline. And in those years with Granny Harris that was precisely what my brother and I did.
There were times of simple fun, such as I have described. There were times of great joy. Modesty forbids me to boast of the number of amorous conquests which I made in those years. Suffice it to say that I do not think there were many young lady cats in the neighbourhood who had not become acquainted with either my brother or myself. Serenading the pretty creatures by the rays of our Mother-of-Night, and fighting off rivals became our favourite nocturnal occupation.
I have been in so many bad fights since, that the scraps we got into during the Harris era now seem minor. The worst (or most humiliating) duel I ever had with one of our own kind during that period was while I was wooing a beautiful white Persian, who lived two or three streets away. My brother at the time was besotted with the tabby cat next door. When, one night on the shed roof, I said to him, ‘Do you smell what I smell?’ he did not respond rationally.