by Nick Trout
“But I can’t throw very far.”
My father insisted that this wouldn’t matter (alternatively, he may have said, “Just shut up and do as you’re told”) and stood a short distance behind Cleo after placing me and the ball in my hand at her head.
“Hold on a moment, son,” he said, watching and waiting as Cleo forgot about her troubles, focused on the ball, and tried to anticipate which way it would go.
At the time I never noticed how my father was placing the sole of his shoe firmly down to the ground, pinning the trailing end of the wayward hosiery in place.
“Now,” he shouted, and with concentration and enough fierce determination to produce a little grunt as I bit down on the tip of my tongue, I released the airy plastic ball from my hand like a shot put, and it landed about three feet away.
Not far but far enough for Cleo to pounce forward, retrieve the ball, and leave the stocking behind, lying on the ground.
Cleo acted as if nothing had happened and plunged right back into our game, dropping the ball at my feet, ready to go again. Just once, she glanced over her shoulder at my father and the stringy, discolored length of nylon before focusing on me, as if she seemed disturbed by what he was doing, as if she would rather he pick up whatever it was that had become stuck to his foot because it was disgusting.
Although I like to chalk this up as my first, if indirect, canine medical intervention, I should point out that this approach to treating Cleo’s protruding foreign body may have seemed rational but was totally inappropriate. My father should have left well alone and sought veterinary advice. What if the stocking had been lodged in Cleo’s small intestines? What if the nylon had cheese-wired through her guts? Fortunately, as it turned out she was lucky, perfectly fine, ready to graze her way through my grandmother’s lingerie once again. It would be decades before I saw the error in our approach to her predicament.
All three of us walked away from the incident as though nothing much had happened. At no time did my father and I dwell on what we had done, on how our ploy had brought about Cleo’s transition from anxious and uncomfortable to oblivious and happy to play. He never paused to ruminate on the moment when the seed of possibility was firmly planted, to recognize the first inkling of his son’s interest in helping sick animals. Within seconds Cleo and I had returned to the carefree rhythm of fetch and my fickle attention had moved on, my pitching arm quick to tire, boredom setting in, and a more pressing question racing to the forefront of my mind.
“Mum,” I shouted, “when will dinner be ready?”
Being around Cleo was great. She was the perfect playmate. I think the best way to describe our relationship would be to say that I was like a smitten grandparent with my first grandchild—I got to enjoy all the fun stuff, but at the end of the day I could walk away. And when I did tire of canine company, searching out other kids in the neighborhood, Cleo never complained or bore a grudge, happy to pick up wherever we left off on my timetable and not hers.
I should mention that this was England in the 1960s, an era when children led “under-scheduled” lives, kicked out of the house at eight o’clock in the morning, only allowed back in if there was no more daylight, you were suffering from clinical dehydration, or you had sustained an injury requiring nothing less than a blood transfusion or surgical removal of an appendage. Exiled kids, forced to use their imagination, tended to gravitate toward one another, mergers leading to friendships and the emergence of something we were all proud to be a part of—a gang.
Across our street and a few houses down lived Timmy and Keith Toenail. Timmy was a terrier of a boy: squat, scrappy, and determined, cursed with disobedient locks of tightly curled platinum blond hair, making him look a bit like Shirley Temple in Heidi. He and his older brother, Keith, demonstrated all the physical similarities of brothers like Prince Harry and Prince William, that is to say they were both male and that was about it. Keith’s hair was jet black, overly conditioned to a greasy shine, and meticulously maintained in the style of a German World War II infantryman’s helmet by his doting mother. Unlike his younger brother, Keith was prone to tears and a trembling lower lip, a feature accentuated by an overbite that would forever vex his orthodontist.
Across the street and one house up lived a girl several years my senior. Her name was Amanda Ravenscroft and she was my first crush (after the cartoon character of Daphne on Scooby-Doo, of course). Amanda was tall, blond, and muscular. She favored braided pigtails that made her look as though she had just stepped off a conquering Viking ship.
For the most part our playtime together was predictable, rotating between cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians (the term “PC” had yet to be coined), and, of course, “war” (we always fought “the Germans,” not “the Nazis,” since England lacked a significant Germanic component to its general population). Amanda’s maturity made her leadership material and on the whole the rest of us were putty in her hands, as easy for her to manipulate as a group of dolls at a tea party. Strangely, every plot she concocted seemed to include a damsel in distress, Amanda happy to step into the role, living a little fantasy, no doubt enjoying the fierce competition among the three of us boys trying to come to her rescue.
When we tired of make-believe, we would break out our bicycles and tricycles and the four of us would prowl the nearby streets in search of adventure. On one memorable day, we hit pay dirt.
It was Amanda, leading our formation, who made the discovery, noticing something white and writhing tossed into the bottom of a hedgerow. I heard the squeal of her brakes as her bike clattered to the pavement and she dismounted, and watched as she retrieved what appeared to be a dirty old pillowcase.
“Look what I’ve found,” she said, raising the bag in the air like a trophy.
And even before the rest of us had peeked inside, it was obvious what she had discovered given the chorus of muffled cries coming from inside the case.
“Kittens,” Amanda proclaimed, as though the hapless threesome who finally caught up to her might need help identifying the four angry newborn mammals crawling over one another.
It was a good job there were four of them—one all black, one all white, one black with white patches on his paws and chest like a tuxedo, and one white with a black swatch under its nose like a mustache. We all knelt down, formed a circle, and passed them around among us, constantly changing our opinions as to which one was the best, the strongest, the runt, or our personal favorite.
I wasn’t used to cats or, for that matter, any other life form that seemed so upset and vulnerable. Their pointy, triangular faces, their incessant mews, their perfect little paws and claws and plump bald bellies were so very different from what I knew because all I really knew was a dog named Cleo (to my way of thinking Marty the land shark didn’t count).
“I’m calling this one Sugarplum,” Amanda declared, cradling the all-white kitten in her cupped hands and rocking him or her back and forth.
“Then I’m calling this one …” Timmy hesitated, as if he had prematurely pressed his buzzer on Jeopardy! and didn’t really have an answer for Alex. “Um … um … Blackie,” he said triumphantly.
At the time this seemed perfectly appropriate and original.
“I don’t have a name for this one,” said Keith, holding little Mr. Tux, his voice trailing off in a manner we all recognized as a potential preamble to tears.
“Me either,” I said, gently stroking the one with the mustache. Secretly I was pleased with the way our game of “musical kittens” had worked out. In my opinion, Poncho Villa was the best, the runt and my favorite.
Suddenly Keith laid Mr. Tux on the ground and made a lunge for Timmy’s kitten.
“I want Blackie. Who says he belongs to you? Give him to me, he’s mine.”
Timmy sprang to his feet, pulling Blackie into the security of his chest as he backed away.
“Get off me or I’m telling Mum.”
Ordinarily, especially if there was nothing much going on, Amanda and I might
have looked on as the two of them got into it, Keith bigger and stronger, Timmy tougher and more resilient, their fights guaranteed to end in tear-streaked dirty red cheeks all round. But on this occasion, Amanda’s maturity and wisdom were their undoing.
“Do you really think your mum will let you keep him?” she asked.
I wasn’t sure whether the question was directed at Keith or Timmy, but Keith latched onto this perspective, shaking his head.
“Not after you killed our goldfish.”
“Did not,” said Timmy but without conviction.
“I know my mum and dad won’t let me have a kitten or a puppy,” said Amanda, wistfully. “I ask them every birthday and Christmas and they always say no.”
Though no one turned to look at me or ask me directly, I felt as though I was the kittens’ last hope of finding a home. The thing was I’d never really considered why my parents didn’t have a cat or dog of their own. They both seemed to like Cleo, so what was holding them back? Maybe all I had to do was ask.
“I know,” said Amanda, briefly offering Sugarplum up to the heavens before planting a kiss on the kitten’s pink nose. “We’ll go ask the Cat Lady what to do.”
This should have been my cue to raise an eyebrow and work a little apprehension into the reply “Cat Lady?” but Keith beat me to it.
“Do you know her?” he said, with the kind of veiled reverence normally reserved for celebrities.
“No, but I know where she lives and my dad’s met her and I heard him telling my mum ‘she’s a little strange but well-meaning.’ ”
I had never heard of the so-called Cat Lady, making her no less mysterious than Bigfoot or the Wizard of Oz. And what did Amanda’s dad mean by “strange but well-meaning”?
“Come on, it’s just down the street,” said Amanda, already ten yards ahead of us. “We can leave the bikes here.”
So, armed with a kitten each, Keith still whining over being dealt Mr. Tux and the fact that none of us were prepared to swap, we marched off in the direction of a small cottage hidden behind a forest of vines and dense thorny vegetation. If we had celebrated American-style Halloween, this would have been the spooky house no kids in the neighborhood dared to hit up for trick or treat.
“What a pigsty,” whispered Timmy as Amanda knocked on the dilapidated front door.
At a downstairs window a shredded lace curtain fluttered and then a tiny woman appeared at the doorstep looking as if she had just got out of bed in her mauve bathrobe and matching slippers, even though this was the middle of the afternoon. She was not much taller than Amanda, but her skin was waxy and wrinkled, her gray hair stiff and lopsided, as if it had dried in a strong cross-wind.
This is all the description I can offer because my eyes began to water, my vision blurred, and I had an overpowering desire to pinch my nose and run away, gasping for fresh air. The Cat Lady was careful to close the front door behind her, but she had already unleashed a pungent, toxic cloud of aerosolized feline urine into our environment.
To her credit and my surprise, Amanda managed to stay focused and told the story of how we found the four abandoned kittens in a pillowcase and how they seemed hungry and in need of food and shelter. In the meantime Keith looked like he might vomit, the nausea contorting his face fueling a giggling fit that his brother Timmy struggled to contain.
“We didn’t know what to do,” said Amanda, showing Sugarplum to the Cat Lady.
Now, some parents might be reading this and thinking an impromptu visit to a complete stranger with a local reputation for being a bit of a weirdo might not have been a particularly good idea. What if the Cat Lady invited us in and introduced us to her husband, the Big Bad Wolf? In fact, personal danger never crossed our minds. Helicopter parenting had yet to be invented and besides, the old woman’s getup gave her a warm and cozy bedtime aura, as if she might break out the hot chocolate and tell us a story at any moment.
The Cat Lady kept her lips pursed, head angled slightly down, forcing her eyes to roll up as she considered the four of us through wispy gray eyebrows. We held our collective breath (primarily because of the overpowering aroma of cat pee), but she may have mistaken this for worry on our part over what she was going to do.
“Follow me,” she said in a plummy voice that exuded military hustle, leading us down the side of the house—not through it—to a small backyard. There, inside a wooden shed (thankfully well ventilated), was a series of crates and cages containing a couple of older kittens and some adult cats. Everything was clean and orderly, plenty of newspaper and blankets to go around.
“Let’s have a look at him,” said the Cat Lady and held out her hand to Amanda, taking Sugarplum and inspecting his belly, his mouth, and his eyes. At the time I thought this was just another way of judging which one she would choose to be her favorite, but of course she was trying to get a sense of the kitten’s age—whether it still had the dried and shriveled umbilical remnant of a kitten up to three days old; whether it had any nubbins of teeth coming in, suggesting a kitten about two weeks of age; whether, as was the case with our litter, the eyes were still shut.
“You can leave them with me,” she said, “but I’m not promising anything, you understand. They’re more than three days old but less than ten. A difficult age and a lot of work, but I’ll give it a try. You never know.”
One by one we said our goodbyes to the little creatures in our hands and entrusted them to the Cat Lady. We thanked her and headed back the way we came, ignoring any uncertainty about their futures. To our way of thinking, what could be so difficult? Don’t you just give them food and water and watch them grow? The biggest dilemma was whether your mum or dad would let you do it at your house, not whether or not it could be done.
Looking back, I realize that no one earns the moniker Cat Lady by having one or two cats lounging around the homestead. How many cats does it take to go from cat lover to collector of cats? Six, a dozen, a hundred? When does devotion become obsession, become something compulsive, pathological, and terribly sad? All I can tell you is our Cat Lady may have benefited from opening a window or two, neutering all her male cats, and investing in a little Febreze, but from what I saw of her cat rescue operation she was no hoarder of cats. The animals out back appeared to be in good health and well looked after. I simply had no point of reference for the smell of tomcat pee in confined spaces.
To fully appreciate how good we felt that day, you need to know that we were a generation of kids who loved to visit our local movie theater every Saturday morning, basking in the opportunity to throw candy at each other, to stomp our feet to the rhythm of every chase scene, to watch a cartoon, a serial, and a feature-length movie that always portrayed kids our age as would-be heroes who got themselves into, and out of, a tight spot, beating the bad guys and living to play another day. Well, that particular afternoon, we walked away from the Cat Lady’s house with a certain swagger, heads held high and big smiles all around, because for the first time in our lives, albeit with a quartet of abandoned kittens, and in spite of their uncertain future, we believed we got to right a wrong, just like our idols on the big screen.
Time has a knack for distortion—fogging the images from the past, making everything feel bigger than it really was, messing with the collage of mental snapshots pinned to the corkboard of our memory. So I have to believe the clarity with which I still see what took place on an empty beach pounded by an angry Irish Sea as a reflection of its enduring influence on me.
Like most kids, I was blissfully ignorant of my family’s financial and social status. Now I don’t want to give the impression we were Angela’s Ashes poor or anything, but I never saw a banana until I was twelve and thought that trousers were meant to be worn above the ankles, and vacations were something you did for one day and always within driving distance.
On this particular day trip our normal family dynamic was upset by the addition of my grandma and more important, and to my dismay, her four-legged escort, the infamous and menacing Marty.
Quite why we had to take the poodle with us on a car ride to a sleepy seaside town in northern Wales I will never know. What I do know is the six of us piled into our Morris Minor, Mum and Dad up front, Grandma in the middle between me and my sister, Marty perched on her lap. Nobody wore seat belts back then, so for several hours we were tossed back and forth and side to side on winding country roads, my father impersonating a British Grand Prix driver as we sucked down his secondhand cigarette smoke, wondering who would be first to claim car sickness. All the while Marty kept vigil, staring me down, defending his personal space, offering me the occasional snarl and wrinkle of his upper lip, feigning innocence and doe-eyed stares every time I complained to Grandma. There’s a reason why I have always found poodles to be one of the smartest breeds of dog.
When we got there we had a picnic on the beach, adults sipping hot tea from a thermos in plastic cups and commenting on the gritty sandwiches they had prepared, the ominous-looking clouds, and the threat of rain. There was the promise of ice cream later, but first my father had agreed to help Fiona build a sand castle. For some reason I was more interested in beachcombing, so my mum, Grandma, Marty, and I set off on a postprandial walk down to the water’s edge.
This was autumn, off-season, chilly, and there were very few people out and about. The overcast sky blended into the ocean. We were wrapped up in sweaters and overcoats and the tide was way off in the distance, forcing us to head out across wet sandy flats if we wanted to get near the waves and the possibility of washed-up shells. Marty was off leash, having the time of his life, scampering around, quick and dainty, hopping from one tidal pool to the next. He didn’t even mind that I was holding Grandma’s hand.
At the water’s edge it all happened so fast. The tide was still headed out, the surf crashing hard, frothy gray breakers with quite a pull washing over the sand. This was not swimming weather (in this part of Britain it rarely ever was). This was not even paddling weather, the water icy cold to the touch. So you can imagine our concern when one minute Marty was gaily dancing in and out of the lapping foam and the next he was gone, disappearing out to sea, swallowed by a wall of gray water, quickly ten, fifteen yards out and drifting still further away. He didn’t bark—he probably couldn’t from the cold shock stealing his breath—he just tried to paddle, head up, neck outstretched, looking in my direction.