Able Seacat Simon

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  Though I did, I supposed, still have a kind of territory to patrol. No longer one of trees, sand and blossoms, and things that roosted, cawed and crawled, but one of steel and salty spray, enamel, oil and engines, of machines and the materials of men. A territory of ladders, too, which I had finally found the means to negotiate, and which had turned out to be not quite so terrifying as I’d supposed. No, it wasn’t easy to go down a ladder, and at first I’d made laborious diversions to avoid doing so. But when there was no option but to descend one, I had no choice but to be courageous and, bit by bit – to my great delight – I managed to conquer my fear.

  Moreover, it was a territory I found myself sharing very willingly – an occurrence that never ceased to amaze me, not least because of how natural it had quickly come to feel. Should it have? On this point I was still very baffled, because adult cats (as far as I knew) shunned company and lived alone, and that was supposedly the way they preferred it.

  Yet here I was sharing my territory, very happily, with some one hundred and seventy humans and a dog, name of Peggy. A dog. A real, living, breathing, actual dog. Sometimes I’d wake up from a nap in the captain’s cap, then see or hear Peggy, and think I must surely still be dreaming.

  Most pleasing and surprising was how much I loved my human family, and no less was the revelation of how much they seemed to love me too.

  Yes, I’d come on board with George, but he’d laid no particular claim to me, clear from the outset that I (together with the good luck I would apparently confer on their endeavours) was to be there for them all. Though I reported to Captain Griffiths, I was very much there for everyone, and though they couldn’t possibly know just how much I understood of them (that human thing again) it quickly seemed I had another role to play aboard the Amethyst – to be the official recipient of sailors’ secrets.

  Whether I was in one of the officers’ cabins, or somewhere in the packed after-mess, every sailor seemed to have things in his head that he kept to himself. So it was that my role began not just as a rat catcher, but as a confidant as well, hearing all about the things they seemed to find it difficult to share with one another – the same sorts of things, in the main, that I would share with the moon when sitting on the end of my jetty. I heard about crushes and sweethearts, fiancées and wives. About their families, about the children and animals whose images danced across various bulkheads; about the babies a few of my friends had apparently fathered, but, heart-breakingly, had yet to even meet. I heard of memories and musings, regrets and resolutions, recriminations, and sometimes, when days at sea became rain-sodden and endless, it was my job to curl up close while one of my friends had a cry, which was sometimes upsetting for them, but at other times, also a blessing. ‘You’re a good listener, Blackie,’ they’d whisper, furiously drying their eyes. ‘And I know you’ll keep mum.’

  Keeping ‘mum’, I soon learned, was a very important thing. And having responsibility for keeping it (and the men’s faith that I could be trusted to, of course) always made me feel close to my own mother.

  None of this was a part of my mother’s plan for me, however. Far from it. I’d catch myself (as likely when cuddled up in a sleeping sailor’s hammock as when presenting a lifeless rat to the captain) in a state of bemused wonder. Specially at those times when the stars were at their brightest – at three or four or five in the morning, perhaps while I was sitting on some sheltered part of the upper deck, watching flying fish skim the water, perhaps sitting in the humming warmth of the wireless room, perhaps curled up on my favourite spot up on the bridge. I’d be sitting companionably with the captain, or Lieutenant Weston (or even Lieutenant Berger, however much he kept declaring himself not to be ‘a cat person’) and wishing so hard that my mother could see for herself that humans – at least the ones on His Majesty’s Ship Amethyst – were not the monsters she’d supposed.

  It was the strangest thing – I had gone from being an outsider, a loner, a scared, scavenging kitten, to being a valued member of a team. No longer hiding in the shadows, for fear of being seen and mistreated, here I was treated daily to titbits and cuddles and strokes. It made no sense, because these were not things a cat should desire, yet at the same time I had never felt so happy. And as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, I realised that solitude was not only overrated, it was the least likely thing I’d be now inclined to choose, with a human lap the most likely, any day.

  There was a great deal to learn about life in the Navy, and I was eager to learn it. Not least (as it was key to almost everything on board) the many ways my human friends communicated with one another, which was something they seemed to like to do almost all the time, even more so – and this was a revelation too – than the ever barking, ever sniffing, ever tail-wagging Peggy.

  Yes, they spoke to each other, of course, and for the most part, that was easy to grasp. Had Captain Griffiths been a cat, the Amethyst would very much be his territory, though, unlike a cat, he didn’t need to defend it alone; he had all his men, who deferred to him at all times and in all things, to assist him in doing it.

  Then there were things called flags, of which there seemed to be many; not just the ensign that flew from the top of that masthead to let everyone know who we were. There was a big store of flags below, each in its own designated cubby hole, all of them made of a mix of different coloured cloths, all of them enticing to a cat in want of a nap. Though I learned very quickly that a cat in want of a nap might – no, would – do much better to take it elsewhere, because (as the signals officer was at great pains to relay when he ejected me) no one interfered with his bunting. I wasn’t sure what he meant by ‘bunting’ but, as ever, his tone was very clear; that everything to do with flags – hoisting them, flying them and then bringing them down again and refolding them – was taken very seriously indeed.

  Closer to home, there were myriad different ways by which everyone communicated on board. As well as everyone being called different things by different people (which was why I’d been gifted two names, I supposed) there was a big noisy bell, which was rung periodically, as well as a bewildering number of different whistles, which were blown in so many ways, and for so many apparent reasons, that I never knew if there was going to be a sudden invasion of mops and buckets or a very important person coming aboard.

  Most curious of all, though, were the serpentine devices that wound their way around the Amethyst and, by some magic that I had yet to understand (and perhaps never would), enabled everyone to speak to whoever they wished to speak to, in whichever compartment of the ship they happened to be.

  They were strange things – a little too unnervingly snakelike, to my mind – but without doubt, very clever indeed: lidded metal tubes that began in one place – say, the bridge – and ended up somewhere else – say the wireless room or wheelhouse – carrying words wherever words needed to be.

  ‘That’s called a voice pipe,’ the captain told me, when I was up on the bridge with him one morning, sitting on the ship’s compass (which being glass-topped, was always nice to sit on when the sun happened to be shining, though best avoided if there was a nip in the air). The pipe was adjacent, and I was busy making a closer inspection of it. ‘And, let me tell you, young fellow, if you let your curiosity get the better of you and decide to see where it might take you, you’ll be in for an extremely rude awakening.’ He’d laughed then. ‘And probably get stuck fast then, as well, even being the little tiddler you are.’

  I had no idea what a rude awakening might feel like, but I was definitely more than familiar with being ‘stuck’, having never forgotten being stuck up a tree. It was sufficient to deter me from investigating them any further.

  Most fascinating of all, though, were the machines that went tap-tap-tap-tap and lived in the wireless room. It was a place that had quickly become a favourite haunt for me anyway – what with all the paper lying around (‘very important bits of paper!’ Jack would huff, every time he shifted me off from them) – it had lots of
very cat-friendly features. But the machines were particularly interesting. They didn’t look much, but could apparently send important messages all around the world, just by the operator (of which Jack was one) tapping bits of wood against one another.

  There was something mesmeric about the tap-tap machines, so much so that I’d spend long periods dozing beside the telegraphists – Jack in particular. This had initially been because his preferred snack was a herring sandwich, but latterly just because, well, because Jack was Jack, and there was so much with Jack that was tacitly understood. I sometimes wondered if Jack could tell what I was thinking.

  I could see him doing it, despite the fact that the main thing about the tap-taps was their ability to put me, if not quite to sleep, in that delicious drowsy half-sleep that cats like the best; my ‘meditations on the mouse’, as George once had put it.

  ‘Shall I tell you what this is?’ Jack explained to me. ‘This here is what’s known as a code machine. Named after a chap called Samuel Morse – since you obviously want to know that – who was something of a clever man, and who helped devise a way of communicating using pulses of electricity, and that’s really all you need to know.’

  He was wrong about that – ideally I’d have liked to know everything about everything – but I was happy enough, for now anyway, just to understand the principle. And once again to discover that humans, working together, were so much more the sum of all their parts, all of them contributing in different ways to achieving the amazing variety of things humans seemed to want to do.

  But I had another thing to learn in those early months on board the Amethyst. That just when you are growing content, thinking everything is exactly as you like it, life has a way of seeing to it that you get something else.

  Change was a normal part of life in the Navy; I had quickly learned that. You followed your orders and went wherever you were told. As did the Amethyst. We sailed and we docked and we oiled and replaced supplies, and by the end of the year we had travelled all over the ocean – and also up a river; the mighty Yangtse, to Nanking.

  But, as well as that, people came and people went. First George, gentle George, who I would be forever grateful to, and who was posted off to another ship that autumn.

  And there were others, some I’d known, some I’d barely got to know yet – off to different postings, new adventures, exciting places. And in their stead would come new sailors, often pink-cheeked and so innocent-looking they barely seemed men yet, their kit sharp and clean and their caps fresh from their boxes – they were called ‘boy-sailors’, and very aptly so.

  But by far the biggest change – and the most upsetting personally, was the news that Lieutenant Commander Griffiths was leaving us. I found out quite by chance, too, when I wandered into his cabin just before we were about dock in Hong Kong one day, and came upon him packing up his things.

  Being now so much a sea cat (or salty sea dog, which the captain had once called me, rather confusingly) I tended to make myself scarce whenever the Amethyst docked. Once we were alongside a wharf, I had quickly learned, there would be a period of noisy mayhem – people flooding aboard, stores being loaded and unloaded, sailors to-ing and fro-ing and generally being busy, in that way that was peculiar to being in a port. It was the part of the ship’s routine that, though still routine, never felt so to me. Quite the opposite.

  Unlike Peggy, who seemed to revel in the fuss strangers made of her, I preferred to nap my way through the chaos, only emerging back on deck when I could hear the reassuring throb of the boilers making steam again. Who knew what might happen when in port, after all? Just as George had taken me from the dock to start my new life, who was to say that someone might not just snatch me off the Amethyst and take me right back again? Or, less dramatically, but also more feasibly, that I’d accidentally curl up in something that was destined to be returned to land? A basket of laundry, perhaps. Or a trunk. Or some box or crate or bundle. It could happen. No, not likely, but I never ruled it out. I didn’t dare to, because I’d dreamed about it once. About the stomach-churning business of waking up, confused, and seeing my home moving away from me; my dear Amethyst, steaming into the distance, getting smaller and smaller . . .

  It was silly – so silly – but the feeling never really left me. And I didn’t think it ever would. At sea I was happy. On land I had not been. Not since I’d found myself alone and so afraid. I couldn’t imagine living on land ever again.

  Glad as I was to reach the captain’s cabin and escape the mayhem, once inside, there it struck me anew. My beloved captain, who I couldn’t quite believe was leaving us – leaving me – was looking just as he always did when the Amethyst came into port. He was as smart and shiny as the pins the men furiously polished, and as straight and tall as the Amethyst’s mast. As was the custom when entering port, he had dressed for the occasion and was an even more shipshape and Bristol fashion version of his normal self.

  He smiled when he saw me, and I wished, as I did sometimes, that I could find a way to have him tell me what Bristol fashion did mean. I wondered if I’d ever find out now. ‘Well, well, come on in, my little friend,’ he said, patting the bed covers on his bunk. ‘Come to say goodbye, have you? Bless you. I’m going to miss you.’

  He reached down to stroke me, in his usual firm, no-nonsense fashion. I knew he dared not pick me up, though. My white fur had a habit of shedding when he was dressed in his dark clothes; even more so than the black did when he was decked out in his whites. So I sprang up onto the bed so I could at least be close beside him while he gathered together the last of his things. Sadness came over me. I knew I would miss him terribly.

  ‘You know what, Simon?’ he said, reaching out to slide a hand down my back again. ‘For two pins, I’d pop you into my trunk and take you home with me, you know that?’

  I purred as loudly as I could so he would know I understood. I’d have also liked to let him know that a part of me would like that too, even as I was in no doubt that my home now was here. How would they cope with the rats without me? Who would the men confide their secrets to? How would Jack manage without me when he was all alone at night doing his watch, with only his Morse code machine to keep him company?

  But I think the captain knew that too. He continued to stroke me, staring out into space for some time, before starting to pick carefully at the sticky tape at the corners of the small collection of photographs that were clustered above his bed. From the captain to the Chinese mess boys – it seemed to make no difference. Everyone on board seemed to have a collection such as this: pictures of people and places they missed. And, in the captain’s case, of several cats, too. I wondered where they were now – what might have become of them. ‘That’s the thing with cats,’ he said eventually, perhaps reading my mind. ‘You’re so supremely adaptable, you felines. Fit yourselves in just about anywhere. Plop you down wherever and you just get on with it, don’t you?’

  I thought about how little my mother would have expected that I’d be living anywhere other than Stonecutters Island, and decided he was probably right. I had always imagined I would too. Yet here I was.

  He rubbed the little cleft beneath my mouth, and then smiled at one of the photographs, which was of two little girls, sitting in an armchair. He put it down on the bed beside me, and started on another. This one was a boy, who I thought must be his son. How did he feel to know they were so far away? ‘And this here,’ he then said, ‘is Peter Puss.’ He placed another picture on the pile, of him standing in uniform with a cat draped over his shoulder. ‘He’s a she,’ he went on. Then he grinned. ‘I know. Confusing, isn’t it? Ship’s cat on the Brissenden, while I was serving as lieutenant. Just after the war ended, that was. Feels like a long time ago now . . . Anyway, I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that.’ He tapped the picture. ‘Now there’s a cat and a half for you, Simon – she even had a litter of kittens while on active duty. How about that?’

  He added a couple more pictures to the pile. ‘You know, us sa
ilors aren’t that different to you cats, really, are we?’ he mused. ‘We go where we’re posted, we fit in and get on with it. Just like Peter Puss here. We do our best. That’s the naval way, you see.’

  Captain Griffiths had been in the Navy for a long time. He’d fought in the war. He’d captained a famous ship called the Riou. He’d been courageous, and for his bravery the Navy had given him several medals. He had done his best. He was clearly a fine captain indeed.

  But, to me, he was a man who’d been kind, and I would miss him, and I worried about the new captain who was coming to take his place. Would he like me? Would I like him? Would he give me a ‘roving commission’ too? Would he want me to accompany him on his rounds?

  There was no way of knowing, and not much I could do about it, either, so I’d just have to do what Captain Griffiths said – get on with it. And it wouldn’t be long now, anyway; I could feel that the engines were slowing. We’d soon be docking in Hong Kong. And soon after that, I’d find out.

  He was nearly ready. The small pile of photographs was almost complete, but for one picture that he was removing from the bulkhead particularly carefully. It was clearly old, and I had a hunch it had been stuck up on many a ship before this one. He finally freed it, and placed it down on the pile with the others, before seeming to reconsider. He picked it up again.

  ‘I never did tell you, did I?’ he mused, tapping a finger to my nose. Then he smiled a strange smile and lifted the picture closer to his face. He touched it lightly with the same finger, and then nodded towards me. ‘You know who that is, Simon?’ he said, holding it out again, for me to look at. It was of a young, beautiful lady (the ‘darling wife’ he sometimes spoke of? Or some other person? Perhaps his mother?) and cradled in her arms was a bundle wrapped in a shawl. It was a baby. I knew because I’d seen lots of pictures of babies now – even a couple their young fathers had yet to meet. ‘That’s your namesake, that is,’ said Captain Griffiths. ‘That’s Simon.’