by A. N. Wilson
There is no moon. There are no stars. Tom-Cat is our only light. Indy is a Yooman Pendance. Yooman names degrades the brotherhood, but it is a privilege to bear names for the sake of our brother Tom-Cat.
This was the sort of drivel which young kittens were taught to lisp by their anxious mothers.
Things had so transpired that the majority of cats in the Commune, although they could not possibly have enjoyed life there, were terrified of anything which threatened it. They must have known with one part of themselves that Tom-Cat was a tyrant and a bully who was organizing a hateful system ruled over by a small gang of thugs. But with another part of themselves, they believed that it was their duty to spy on one another, to tell Tom-Cat’s thugs stories about their friends, even against their own children. For without Tom-Cat, they believed, there would be chaos, without Tom-Cat they would be taken into slavery; without Tom-Cat we should starve were words which every member of the Commune was obliged to say before eating his or her meagre meal. Above all, they believed that Tom-Cat had the power to save them from the Van, and it was the Van, even more than the merciless tyranny of Tom-Cat himself, which they feared. Presumably it was this fear which provides an answer to my question: why did we submit to it? We were afraid of what would happen if we did not.
The Commune was organized on these lines. Ten cats, either males or brother she-cats, would be sent out at regular intervals ‘on the prowl’. It was their task to provide food for the fifteen or twenty other cats who stayed in the garage or its immediate environs. There was a rota system, so you might expect to be sent out on the ‘prowl’ about twice a week. A fairly good way of getting an enemy into trouble was to drop a hint in the ear of one of Tom-Cat’s favourites that this particular cat ate food while out on the prowl. It was a cardinal sin, punishable by three days’ starvation, or even by death if Tom-Cat was in the mood for killing. All food found out on the prowl had to be brought back and given to Tom-Cat for the good of the Commune. No nibbling titbits on the way home. When the heap of rotten bones, old fish, decayed lamb chops or chickens had been laid at his feet, Tom-Cat would then decree how it was to be divided up. Preference was always given to the she-cats of whom he happened at that moment to be fond, or to the more sycophantic of his thuggish bodyguard. But the truth is, there was never quite enough food to go round. Even if Tom-Cat had not imposed his rigorous system of punishments by starvation, some cats would have in any case gone hungry. The advantage of the punishment system was that we all accepted it. Had there been no organization, only the weak would have starved, and fights would have broken out. By making us all fear and suspect each other, and by uniting us in a common fear of the Van, Tom-Cat did stop us fighting among ourselves. No small achievement. But I do not think he would have been able to do it without our common fear of the Van.
As I tell you about my time at the Commune – and I suppose that I must have been there quite some time – I feel that it is hard to imagine submitting to it all. What? I? With all my feelings of fierce independence? Would I not have preferred to fight to the death, to suffer the Great Stillness itself, rather than submit to the tyranny of a worthless bully like Tom-Cat? It now seems to me shameful that I did not resist, but I am sure that the reason Tom-Cat and his hench cats were able so easily to subdue me was that they had convinced me of the terrible danger of the Van. It was the thick-headed ginger (he liked us to call him Twinkle) who first told me of the Van.
‘Yooman vans drive round and round – they are coming to get us,’ he said. ‘Our great brother Tom-Cat, and the only Tom-Cat, could drive a van if he wanted, but vans is yooman.’
‘Vans?’ I asked. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Surely you have seen them roaring up the roads,’ piped in one of the more submissive little cats who was listening to my conversation with Twinkle.
‘The engines of murder?’ I asked. ‘I have been inside one. My brother was crushed by one. They are indeed very dangerous.’
But Twinkle biffed me for saying this. ‘Vans is yooman, but the only Tom-Cat, our brother, has been inside one. You have never been inside a van.’
‘But I have. I didn’t know they were called vans. My brother and I called them engines of murder.’
‘Only Tom-Cat can save us from the Van,’ said Twinkle.
‘Or our own skill?’ I asked.
‘What’s that? Own? Skill? What means?’ asked the submissive little cat. He was a pathetic, skinny, scabby little chap – one of Tom-Cat’s children, who had never known life outside the Commune. His complete ignorance of what it meant to do something on one’s own struck a chill into my heart. And it was then that Twinkle spoke.
‘Look,’ he said, with real urgency and forgetting the claptrap which loyalty to Tom-Cat made him spout. ‘You think only of the dangers of being hit by cars and vans as they roar up and down the roads. But there is a far worse danger than that. We do not fear that any more than the majority of cats fear it. But our brother Tom-Cat has discovered that there is one van to fear above all others. It drives round, not in order to hit us, but so as to pick us up. This Van has yoomans in it who want to capture us. We do not know exactly what they do to us when they catch us. Some say that they eat us alive...’
‘But they don’t,’ I said – thinking of Granny Harris’s mild little television suppers or Sister Caroline Mary’s overcooked refectory meals. ‘Human beings would never eat us alive...’
‘Others think they take us to torture chambers. Some Yoomans enjoy tormenting cats.’
‘That’s true enough,’ I said with a shudder, thinking of the gleeful way which Horrible had shoved me into his sack.
‘Whatever it is they do to us, they try to catch us in the Van.’
‘Is it known where they take the cats they capture?’ I asked quizzically. The dread of this Van had already begun to overcome me. Already I began to feel that unless we all stuck together, there would be no escape from the Van. And I felt this even though I had no idea what the Van was nor whither it took its victims.
About a week later, when I was out on the prowl with Twinkle, I actually saw the Van with my own eyes. We had crossed the patch of waste ground where we lived and were doing some routine dustbin work about an hour before daylight, at the back of a grocer’s shop on the corner of a street.
‘Mostly rubbish,’ said Twinkle, throwing down bins and cardboard. ‘But there is a broken egg here. Too messy to carry back. Why don’t you eat it, brother?’
Our eyes met. I was very hungry and would dearly have loved to eat that egg. But I knew that if I did so while on the prowl, Twinkle would report me to Tom-Cat, and I should be sentenced to starvation punishment.
‘All food belongs to Tom-Cat,’ I said solemnly.
‘Brother Tom-Cat,’ said Twinkle. ‘I shall eat it if you don’t.’
I was unable to tell whether this, too, was a piece of double-bluff – whether Twinkle was tempting me to say disloyal things about Tom-Cat in order to have something to report back to my detriment or whether they were spontaneous outbursts of feeling. Anyhow, he wolfed the egg. He must have known that I was too recent an arrival in the Commune to risk denouncing him to the authorities. But just as he was eating the egg, he froze, and then quick as a flash, hissed, ‘Follow me!’ In a split second he had climbed up a drain pipe, on to the top of a low-lying wall, and across on to a window ledge, where it was possible to be concealed in the shadows. I sat there beside him, my body tingling with the excitement of the chase, and yet at the same time, on the edge of a nameless fear. He made no sound, but with a slight inclination of the head, he indicated what was happening in the street below. Opposite the dustbins which we had been cleaning out, a pretty little Siamese cat was pawing her front door, demanding that a human slave should come and let her in. I could even hear her words – ‘Oh come on – you surely aren’t asleep, you cretins!’ And then, round the corner of the street, there came the Van. It was not a particularly large van, but it stopped, and a man got out of it.
He wore big leather gloves, and a thick coat. He was well protected. Only by flying at his face with claws out would there have been any hope of resisting him. He simply stooped down and picked up the Siamese – and even as she was calling out – ‘Put me down, you barbarian!’ he shoved her into a sack. He opened the back of the Van, threw in the sack, and shut the Van again. Then he got into the front of the Van where another man sat at the wheel. A few minutes later, an old lady who rather reminded me of Granny Harris, opened her door and called out, ‘Millicent Millie, dear! Millie-Millie, Mill-i-cent!’ She looked up and down the street with puzzlement. After that, I never doubted the existence of the Van. Nor could I find reason to doubt that no cat on its own could resist the Van. It was only within the safety of the Commune that one felt able to survive, thanks – yes, the claptrap began to enslave me – thanks to the valiance and courage of our great Brother Tom-Cat.
chapter thirteen
I am not very proud of the fact that, had life in the Commune gone on for much longer, I should probably have turned into one of old Tom’s hench cats, bullying the others, and dreaming one day of superseding Tom-Cat as leader. Remembering the important way in which Jim, while addressing the yellow-shells, had not called himself Jim, but Regional Area Manager, I even dreamed of adopting this title myself when one day I became Chief of the Commune. Had this happened of course I would gradually have ceased to be feline. I would have become a terrible parody of the human world. But Fate spared me, and although I dreamed of power I never exercised it. I never challenged Tom-Cat’s leadership, nor superseded it, nor gave myself the title of Regional Area Manager. Fate stepped in and brought the Commune to a terrible end.
None of us, I think, had suspected the possibility of such a thing for an instant. We had all come to believe quite firmly that the chief end of life was to escape the Van, and that the only means of escaping the Van was to huddle in that garage and accept the bullying regime of Brother Tom-Cat. As soon as one considers the matter rationally, one realizes what an absurd belief this was. I think we were more at risk in the Commune than any ordinary domestic cat with human minders such as your own. Think of the fuss they make if you go missing for more than a few hours! The Van-Man would have a lot of explaining to do if he bumped into your human slaves while he was shoving you in his bag; whereas, no one would complain if he picked up ‘common strays’. Moreover, as I now realize, there was nothing safe about twenty or thirty cats all shutting themselves up in one garage. True, there were a few broken windows through which we could get in and out. But there was only one door, and any human being who commanded that door commanded the Commune.
This in fact was what happened. I suppose we shall never know how they found us. Perhaps they had followed some pair on the prowl. Perhaps they had just decided to check the garage for the odd stray. For whatever reason, the garage door opened one night, a torch was shone round, and in the next ten minutes, Tom-Cat’s huge power was brought to an ignominious end.
The raid of the Van men took us wholly by surprise. We were all huddled in the garage all, that is, except the pair out on the prowl. Some of the kittens were asleep. A few of the fussier mothers were grooming their young, though however much they licked the puny, scabby little bodies of the kittens, they would not prevent them from being anything but mangy urchins. Other cats were pacing about in the dark, smelly garage. Tom-Cat himself sat on the window ledge and stared through the frosted glass at our great Mother-of-Night whose existence, in some moods, he denied. Then, all of a sudden, we heard the noise of an engine of murder outside. Probably it was no louder than most engines, but coming upon our midnight stillness so suddenly and unexpectedly, it sounded as loud as a thunderstorm or a falling dustbin lid. And we had no time to recover from the shock of the noise before the garage door was forced open and a torchlight was shone around us. I was momentarily blinded by its beam and blinked, while, from behind the beam there came an unpleasant human voice: ‘Blimey, there are dozens of the little beggars in here!’
‘I’ll get some more sacks,’ said another voice.
The mention of sacks was enough to make me want to escape. Were these some more men like Horrible who enjoyed throwing cats out of car windows when they were going along? Little did I suspect that these men were in fact driving the Dreaded Van. I ran to the window ledge and said to Tom-Cat, ‘We’ve got to run.’
‘No cat leaves here without my permission,’ he snarled. I could see his eyes gleaming in the darkness and not for the first time I was struck by how deeply stupid he was.
‘But they’ve got sacks,’ I said.
‘What are sacks?’
‘They’ll put us in them and murder us,’ I said.
‘It is only by staying in the Commune that a cat can escape the Van,’ said Tom-Cat flatly.
‘That’s true,’ said one of the hench cats, who started to call out, ‘Stay where you are, cats! Our great Brother Tom-Cat will protect you!’
But not everyone was obedient. Some of the younger cats stormed Tom-Cat’s window-sill, knocked the leader to one side, and escaped into the night. They were the lucky ones. The Van driver and his friend had come back now. Not only were they clad in leather coats and gloves, but they even wore protective masks. And they were experts at their job. They picked up cats by the scruff of the neck and stuffed them into the sacks with as much ease as the pet shop man had shovelled rabbit food into paper bags. Tom-Cat himself was one of the easiest to catch. He had grown used to other cats doing everything for him. Perhaps he had even forgotten how to fight.
I hadn’t. Nor had I forgotten how to hide. As the gruesome work proceeded, I darted out of the glare of the torchlight and hid in the shadows, watching. I reckoned that if I could get to the window ledge while the men were struggling to tie up their sacks, I would stand a pretty good chance of escape. But I mistimed it.
‘This is a good bag,’ said one voice.
‘Must be ten cats in each of these bags,’ said the other, ‘that’s ten quid.’
‘If the laboratory will buy them all,’ said the first man. ‘Some of them looked pretty miserable specimens to me.’
‘They’ll all be miserable specimens after a few weeks in the lab,’ said the second voice with a laugh. ‘I’m sure the lab will buy them. Scientists have a use for everything.’
Probably these words ‘laboratory’ and ‘scientist’ mean as little to you now as they did to me then. I am still not able to explain to myself why these ‘scientists’ behave as they do, but I do know what they do, as you shall hear. For I did not escape them. I leapt towards the window, but in the darkness I kicked against an upturned petrol can and made a terrific noise.
‘There’s another of the blighters,’ said the first voice, and instantly turned his torch in my direction. The second voice was much nearer me than I had reckoned. I could not get to the window. I felt a heavy human hand on the back of my neck, and I was held up in the air like an exhibit, a specimen. That, as it happened, was what I was to be from now on.
‘Oh yes, he’s a beauty,’ said the second voice. ‘Quite a big one. In you go.’ And everything went dark as I was shoved into the sack.
chapter fourteen
I do not like to remember the next period of my life. It is too disgusting. I thought in my most miserable days in the Commune, that I had sunk as low as it is possible for a cat to sink. But I was wrong. For the evils which a cat does to another can never match the immeasurable evil of which human beings are capable. You would be distressed to know all the sorrows which cats suffer in these ‘laboratory’ places, so I will keep my story as brief as I can. I will not tell you of that terrifying journey in the sack, for every second of which I screamed my head off, certain that at any moment I would be thrown out of the Van window. We were all screaming and squirming on top of one another. There was no chance for a rational discussion of the situation, and what must have been the good of such a discussion if we had one? Our noble Leader was screaming as loud as the rest of us. I
cannot say whether any of us knew that we were in the very Van which had been the object of all our fears. After quite a short journey the Van stopped, and we were left there in our sacks for what felt like a very long time. I suppose it was not more than a few hours. The next thing we knew, the sack was being lifted up, and we were being carried (as I later realized) indoors and up some stairs. Then the top of the bag was opened and we were shaken out. Instinct made me run for it. But there was no point. We were being emptied out into a cage.
First voice and second voice, from the night before, had gone now. I am happy to say that we never heard them again. But round our cage there stood a group of equally sinister men and women, all of whom wore white coats and some of whom had eye-glasses.
‘A rum collection,’ remarked a woman peering at us. ‘I reckon we can only use half these. This for instance, wouldn’t survive the course,’ and she picked up a small kitten. I felt immediate envy for that little cat because I naively supposed that, finding no use for him, the woman was about to release him. He was about your kind of age, little Grandkitten, but smaller and punier and a good deal dirtier because of the life he had been leading. You can imagine how I felt when I saw this woman wring his neck with her own hands and throw the little chap into a large plastic dustbin.
‘The ones we keep will need fumigating,’ she said, ‘if they are as flea-ridden as that one.’
You will be wondering where I was and what I was doing there. You might even be wondering why the human beings in white coats were behaving in this manner. I am afraid that I am unable to satisfy your curiosity. I do not know what the place was where they had taken me. And I think that, even by that stage of my life, I had given up asking why human beings behave as they do. As my brother and I would say, ‘Really – they are extraordinary!’
But their extraordinariness is not always comic. I have endured many a fight with my own kind. I have known the cruelty of foxes, and the savagery of dogs; but there is nothing to match the venomous cruelty of human beings.