Able Seacat Simon

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  He didn’t say any more, but he didn’t need to. I’d been with humans now for long enough to understand them so much better. So I knew; I knew immediately, from the way he said the words to me, and from the way he quickly cast his eyes heavenwards as he spoke. That the Simon in the photograph was gone.

  And I realised that the distance between cats and humans wasn’t so great. Whoever that Simon was – and perhaps that didn’t even matter – he was up with my mother, among the stars.

  Chapter 8

  The period immediately after Captain Griffiths left us had been a strange one.

  The new captain joined the ship – he was called Lieutenant Commander Bernard Skinner, and he had such a round, smooth and gentle-looking face that I wondered if he’d been one of the boy-sailors in the war – this war that meant nothing to me, but that everyone still seemed to talk about. But though he scarcely looked old enough to command a whole ship, there was something in his manner that seemed to suggest otherwise, something in the way he held himself that put me in mind of some of the cats back on Stonecutters whose territory abutted mine. His was a presence that commanded respect.

  I knew it would be some time before we properly got to know each other, but there was good news right away. The first lieutenant assured me that he was a cat lover like Captain Griffiths, which meant my position was probably safe up on the bridge. I hated the idea of giving up my spot on the magnetic compass – not to mention the other spot I enjoyed, in hazy weather: the little box-on-the-wall at the back of the bridge which housed lots of important wires. But I was still keen to make a good impression on the new commander, and immediately set about hunting down a rat to present to him, so he would know I was a cat who pulled my weight.

  And there was another change afoot, it seemed. A big one. Within days of Captain Skinner joining us, we celebrated something called Christmas, which was entirely new to me; an odd business that seemed to involve all sorts of peculiar rituals, few of which made a great deal of sense to me (setting fire to your pudding?) and some of which, particularly the things they had appropriately called ‘crackers’, weren’t nice at all. They were terrifying.

  Happily, it didn’t last long and, as far as I could tell, the men were rather glad of it all being over, too. After all, though it inspired lots of singing, and a bumper load of extra post when we’d docked at Shanghai, it also inspired a surprising degree of sadness among some of the crew, and, on one unfortunate occasion, following extra rum rations, a leading seaman getting punched on the nose.

  But such was the ‘mystery of the human condition’ – a phrase I’d picked up from Captain Griffiths – that, once the ‘festivities’ were done with (along with another bout of bizarre behaviour, to do with ‘seeing in’ the new year, apparently) a collective glumness seemed to settle over the Amethyst, like the sooty spewings of a badly maintained engine.

  The rats, in contrast, seemed to be full of the joys of the coming spring; they certainly sprung away with gusto almost every time I got near one, driving me almost to distraction. So it was that I met Captain Skinner before being able to dispatch one to present to him. Instead, I met him quite by accident, a good couple of weeks after he’d assumed command, while keeping Jack company in the wireless room, as usual.

  I was taking my rest on some of his Very Important Bits of Paper when the captain appeared, snapping me out of my reverie (about some very important rat-related matters) and making Jack, who had his back to him, jump.

  ‘Ah, the ship’s cat!’ he boomed, coming in on a cloud of some exotic spicy odour – one that I was fairly sure had not been present on the Amethyst up to now.

  He picked me up without further ado (this was clearly the way with captains) setting both my whiskers and nostrils into overdrive all at once.

  ‘He’s called Simon, sir,’ Jack told him. ‘Well, Blackie, more often that not, sir. One of the ratings found him back last May, sir, on Stonecutters Island. Ordinary Seaman Hickinbottom. Left the ship before Christmas. Mangy little stray, he was. Probably orphaned. Just a kitten then. Nothing of him. Didn’t think he were more than a few months old when he found him. Erm, sir.’

  Just as Captain Griffiths had, Captain Skinner now held me at arm’s length for inspection. He had one hand round my tummy, so my front legs dangled over the back of his hand, and the other thoughtfully cupped under my hindquarters. It wasn’t the most dignified position a cat could find itself in, but I’d grown used to the idea that a naval cat needed to be understanding in such situations. I couldn’t expect the captain of one of His Majesty’s frigates to get down on his hands and knees, after all.

  The new captain chortled, revealing a row of cheerful teeth. ‘There’s not a great deal of him now!’ he told Jack, as if giving him an order to rethink. ‘Still quite the tiddler, aren’t you, boy?’

  ‘But he’s an excellent ratter, sir,’ Jack was quick to reassure him.

  ‘Often the way,’ the captain mused. ‘He’ll be lighter on his feet.’ He brought me back closer to his face then, and I could see he had eyes almost the same colour as my mother had. Warm eyes, like berries. He then put me back down on Jack’s pull-down Morse code machine desk. ‘As you were, old chap,’ he said to me. ‘So now, Signals, what have you got for me?’ and began looking through some of the piles of Very Important Bits of Paper, and various scribbled notes Jack routinely had at his side. And as I settled down to a decent grooming – mangy stray, indeed! – I remembered what Jack had said about ‘when’ I was still a kitten. So I’d been right, then. I’d officially left my kittenhood behind. I was a grown cat not just in my own eyes, but in their eyes as well. I stretched a little taller. Actually felt a little taller. Because it was a quite a milestone, that. I was a cat now. It was official.

  I couldn’t help thinking about what my mother had told me about bad luck, and kittens, and cages. I supposed I was now grown enough for that protection to be behind me, which made me even more glad (as if I could have been any gladder) to have been chosen to live the seafaring life.

  For there were no men who put cats in cages living here. On board the Amethyst I was free, and I was safe.

  And I was safe, and also free, for a long time. We all were. And Captain Skinner turned out to be much like Captain Griffiths – stern when he needed to be, soft when he didn’t, and as appreciative of a dead rat as the next man. Well, assuming the next man was a naval man, anyway.

  Captain Skinner was also happy to have a ship’s cat among the company. Though he didn’t whistle for me (and it would be impolite to follow him around without permission), he seemed very happy to have me in the wardroom during meal times, particularly when we had visiting naval dignitaries on board, where he liked most for me to entertain them.

  But a ship at sea, previously a warship, as the Amethyst had been, was not always about entertaining visiting dignitaries. Her new role – and her white post-war livery reflected it well – was always to try to help keep the peace.

  So when we were given our orders, midway through April 1949, it was odd to begin hearing whispers around the ship that the peace might not be as robust as everyone thought.

  Though our orders were, to be fair, perfectly ordinary. Having recently spent a while in Shanghai, and had some fifteen young ratings join us, we were now being sent to relieve our sister ship, HMS Consort, which was stationed in Nanking to provide protection for local British residents, and in particular, the staff of the British Embassy. We were also there to bring supplies to the British and Commonwealth residents and, should they require it (which they apparently might, given China was currently such an unstable country) evacuate any nationals.

  We knew Nanking, because the Amethyst had already done a spell of this back in December, the guardships being in place there on rotation. It had been a deployment that had gone without incident. Rather too much without incident, the way I remembered it; the crew that had been there complaining bitterly (we had been moored there for a month) that as protocol dictated they were una
ble to enter the city itself, they’d spent most of the time fed up, too hot, and bored witless.

  Not so, Peggy and I. Peggy because she was largely witless already, and, if strapped for entertainment, would simply chase her own tail. As for me, the word ‘bored’ took a great deal of fathoming, since it was completely beyond my comprehension. You were either busy (killing rats, tormenting cockroaches, eating, playing and so on) or you were dozing (always a pleasure), or you were asleep. So the business of being ‘bored’ (and its sister complaint of ‘getting down in the dumps’) was a concept I found hard to understand.

  ‘Aww, Blackie,’ Jack would often say to me, wistfully, ‘oh, to be a cat, eh? Oh, to have a cat’s life!’ Then he’d sigh theatrically, as if somehow jealous.

  But this time around, it seemed my friends might not be bored. Because though the Amethyst had nothing to do with the Chinese Civil War, she was still about to be pitched into the middle of it. Yes, this had been the case last time and, yes, it was true no harm had come to us, but since that time the Chinese war had begun to intensify, and all the talk in the wardroom that night was of worries that now we might be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The concern lay in the fact that we weren’t even supposed to be there: we were standing in for another ship, the Australian HMAS Shoalhaven. The Shoalhaven had already been in Shanghai, all set to go to Nanking, when the ‘powers that be’, as Captain Skinner put it (and he’d seemed none too pleased about it, either), had changed their minds about the ship being deployed at that point, deciding that, with Anzac Day imminent (a day when Australia remembered her war dead) they were not prepared to send an Australian vessel up the Yangtse, and run the risk of their sailors being put in danger. ‘So that’s where we come in,’ Captain Skinner had explained to the crew the night before we sailed, confirming what was already being rumoured by the officers. That, with the war reaching crisis point, this trip to Nanking could, in theory, put the Amethyst in the line of fire instead.

  Though the nationalists and communists had been at war with each other since the 1920s, a point had been reached where the communists controlled the north shore of the Yangtse river, and, though a temporary truce was apparently in place, they had made it known that if the nationalists didn’t allow them to pass freely, they would make an assault on the south bank.

  In just three days from now.

  If I knew nothing of boredom, I knew even less of war. My only experience of human conflict was the occasional rumpus over something or other down at Stonecutters dockyard – which was usually resolved with no more than angry words being exchanged or, at the worst, someone’s cart being upturned.

  All I really understood about ‘war’ – that human preoccupation that continued to confound me – was that, as far as we were concerned, it was history. War was over now – everyone always seemed to say that. We’d just had the ‘war to end all wars’, and the older sailors on the Amethyst would tell the younger ones about it constantly.

  ‘Back during the war . . .’ they’d say, before regaling them with some spine-tingling anecdote or other. ‘Back when bloody Jerry had the upper hand, or so they thought . . .’ they’d begin, before painting pictures that had the boy seamen’s eyes bulging out as if on stalks. ‘You’re lucky, lads, not to have been through it . . .’ they’d remind them, their expressions stony, before slapping them on the backs and laughing long and loud. But for all that, it was still laughter that held enough of a note of relief to make it clear that being in a war was not a good thing.

  Now war was done with, and everyone was happier as a result of it. All the talk, always, was of ‘keeping the peace’. That was what the Amethyst was there for. To keep the peace. Our job was to patrol the waters around the countries of the Far East, so that no one could be in doubt that – where His Majesty’s Navy was concerned, anyway – that was the way it was going to stay.

  The jacarandas were in bloom in Shanghai as we left it. Blossom was everywhere – the whole hillside was dotted with colour – but it was the jacaranda blossom that most grabbed my attention, because it took me back to my kittenhood, to the same luminous purple that I remembered from when I’d left. So had it been a year? A full year since I’d gone to sea?

  I decided it must have been, because I was in no doubt that the sea felt like home now; by my reckoning it had been home for longer than it had not. So as we slipped that day, smoothly and without ceremony, for Nanking, it was only the usual excitement that I felt. It was another day, another journey, another sea-going adventure. If my friends were bored, I would do my best to entertain them. To jolly them out of their dissatisfaction.

  Little did I know that the truce that the ‘powers that be’ had banked on was not going to hold for as long as they’d thought. And as a consequence, though we couldn’t know it, for those of us aboard the Amethyst, the peace would soon be over as well.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 9

  Yangtse River, near the village of San-Chiang-ying 08:00 hours, 20 April 1949

  Animals have a way of sensing things, often long before humans. All animals can do this, because we have to rely so much on instinct – even creatures as apparently without wits as Peggy. Who knew why my own instinct was so strong that morning? But it was. I just had that feeling that something was going to happen. That all the mutterings I’d heard might have some substance after all.

  But what might happen to us if they did? I didn’t know. Just as I’d never known war, I had never witnessed the extremes of violence that I’d often heard about during my time aboard the Amethyst. Not that I hadn’t seen violence happen. The death of my mother had definitely been an act of extreme violence, even though it had been an accident. I’d also known the kind of violence that was an everyday part of nature; the necessary skirmishes I’d seen animals engage in to protect their territory. But not killing. Never killing. Not the kind of slaughter I’d heard the crew talking about down in the mess. Not killing when you didn’t need to eat.

  But I knew such violence and intent to kill existed. How could I miss it when the evidence was all around me? After all, the Amethyst had been originally built as a warship, as the captain had often reminded me. And with all her guns, it would be difficult to see her as anything else. But, for all the battle drills and the regular rounds of maintenance and inspection of her armaments, I had never known her as anything other than a home. So on the morning we set off from Shanghai, bound for the city of Nanking again, the only war I’d known was the one it was my personal duty to wage – the one against the rats that were still my mortal enemy.

  My only enemy, in fact. Until now.

  We’d weighed anchor at 05:15 hours, under a yellowish dawn sky, only to be forced by fog to drop the anchor again. I remembered the fog that could lie on the Yangtse from the last time we’d travelled up there – a dense, opaque whiteness that would roll out across the river like a blanket. But this fog was different. You didn’t so much see it as have it envelop you, damp and cool and pungent. As the Yangtse was notoriously dangerous to navigate in poor visibility, the captain had decided to stop and wait it out.

  Ever mindful of both my mother and Jack’s words (on one thing they were agreed – never pass up the opportunity to take a nap) I’d then taken myself off for a sleep down in the galley, which was always a good choice when the dawn was breaking, both for the warmth of the ovens (always nice after a rat hunt) and the cook, who’d be busy preparing the crew’s breakfast, which inevitably meant there was a good chance of being given a scrap of bacon. I’d been fast asleep, too, it having been a long night and a busy one, what with all the strange comings and goings in the officers’ wardroom and the many signals Jack was sending back and forth to Shanghai.

  Most telling was that Captain Skinner seemed to be taking the threat seriously. No, this wasn’t our war – I’d heard that said enough times that I could be in no doubt of it – but as we were going to be in what was agreed to be a potential war zone, he had already taken preca
utions. As soon as we’d slipped our mooring at Shanghai, headed towards Woosung and the Yangtse, he’d ordered a detail of ordinary seamen to stitch together several tarpaulins, in order to make two enormous flags. These they then painted in a precise pattern of red, white and blue, to match the Union Jack that had already been painted on the quarterdeck.

  The new flags, not quite dry, were then rolled up over oars taken from the whalers, and fixed from the guardrails with sailmaker’s twine – both ready to be unfurled again at a moment’s notice, so that no one could be in any doubt that the Amethyst was a British ship, going about its lawful business for the Royal Navy.

  My first real taste of war came without warning. And I must have slept deeply, because I was not so much nudged into wakefulness as pitched headlong into it, by the sound of instructions echoing round and round the voice pipes – by orders being relayed with an urgency I’d never heard before; by the furious ringing of the bell that had only one meaning: that the crew were being mustered to their action stations.

  Wide awake now, I lifted my nose to see what I could get wind of on the air, but it was the captain’s tone of voice that told me most. Something had happened. Or was about to. Something bad. I could sense it. I stretched long and hard and jumped down from the stove side. While the cook ran off to where he was supposed to be manning a fire hose, I hurried back up to the bridge to see what was going on.

  The passageways were busy, everyone rushing to be somewhere, looking preoccupied and tense, and I could almost taste the fear that seemed to travel with them. Keeping close to the bulkheads, and out of the way of running feet, I padded quickly along my usual, now long-familiar route, feeling the same peculiar mixture of excitement and anxiety that had accompanied me on that other journey, almost a full year ago now, when I’d been tucked safely out of sight inside George’s tunic. That sometimes felt as if it was a lifetime ago.