The Amazing Life of Cats (2 page)
Is all of this raising the household moggie to dizzy heights?
No introduction to a book on cats should shirk a responsible cat owner’s duty, which is to acknowledge how environmentally destructive cats can be. If every cat owner in the world had always had their cats desexed, attached a bell to the animals’ collars and kept them in at night then the history of bird species around the world would be very different. Sadly, many people have been wantonly careless, creating an apparently insoluble problem worldwide—there are reputedly around 40 million feral cats in the US alone. Conversely, though, there are responsible and caring humans who are trying to help address this problem, as in the moving story of Lisa, the
gattaro
working with feral cat colonies in Italy.
Stories of remarkable and quirky cats abound. There’s Oscar, the nursing-home cat who cuddles up on people’s beds when they are ready to depart this world—his accuracy in anticipating death is such that even the home’s doctors acknowledge he is often right when they are wrong, and I once knew a cat who liked nothing better than to sit on the backs of the horses in the stables where it lived.
Then, of course, there is purring. Let’s face it, there’s nothing better in the world than sitting or lying down with a cat on your lap, and listening to that soft throaty noise of happiness and contentment to make you feel that life is good, no matter what else is going on. Scientists have recently found out what any cat owner could have told them—a purring cat has a beneficial effect on its human! Cats as companion animals have been proved to lower blood pressure, alleviate depression and raise serotonin production.
Myths, like clichés, often spring from grains of truth, and the idea of cats having multiple lives has also been around for thousands of years. Most of us know them as having nine lives, but in certain areas of Spain it’s said to be seven, while in Turkey and Arabian countries it’s six. Cats’ ability to land on their feet when falling is legendary, as is their speed— thank goodness—at climbing trees away from their main predator, the dog. Despite that often vexed relationship, however, there are several stories in the book that illustrate how cats and dogs can be the best of friends, and will even go into mourning when one of them dies.
Personally I think a cat’s natural grace and elegance demands respect. It’s easy to imagine shouting orders at our dogs—
sit
,
down
,
stay
,
get out
spring to mind immediately—but try giving a cat an order and it will look at you with disdain and go about its business. With its air of independence, love of play and ability to curl up and cuddle when it chooses, a cat is a special confidant and companion—you know you’ve been chosen. Feel honoured, because you are!
It’s been a pleasure compiling this collection of cat stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
Candida Baker
The smallest feline is a masterpiece.
Leonardo da Vinci
M
y mother was definitely a cat person. If people can be divided into categories—and I for one am a cat, dog
and
horse person— then she was easily categorised, at least in that respect. Not just any cat person, mind you, but a Siamese cat person.
The gift of loving Siamese cats is not given to everyone. First of all there’s the noise they make, demanding that you put down whatever you’re doing and tend to their needs straightaway. Then there’s their killer instinct, and their charming desire to present you with their victims as presents. Last but not least is their intelligence, which they put to good use—for instance, by ganging up and torturing the family dog (
who, us?
) or making sneaky snatch-and-grab raids on food. Whoever wrote ‘The Siamese Cat Song’ from
Lady and the Tramp
knew what they were talking about, that’s for sure!
When my parents married, my mother came armed with two Siamese cats, a blue point called Roo and Roo’s son, a seal point called John-John. According to my father, the cats not infrequently went with them out to dinner at friends’ homes; carried there in their cat baskets, the cats adopted whatever strange territory they found themselves in for the night with the haughty insouciance that can only belong to a Siamese.
When I was born, my mother refused to countenance that her cats could present any danger to her baby, and so they spent many hours curled up in my crib—she believed they were keeping an eye on me. I think I was about four when Roo succumbed to cat flu and died, and although I don’t remember, and my mother never spoke much of it, my father later told me that she was inconsolable for a long time.
So from the time I remember, it was John-John who was the family cat. John-John by himself was not a threat to our family poodle, Minnie, and apart from being a deadly killer like all Siamese, he was an easygoing chap. Looking back, though, I do recall one thing—he was my mother’s cat, and hers alone, and he knew it. He was an independent, social and friendly cat, but he had one love in his life and that was my mother.
In the later years of his life, we had a new addition to the Siamese family—my younger sister’s cat, Kitty Car. She had been bred by my mother’s cousin, who lived in the nearby town of Oxford, and right from the start she had the most extraordinary amount of character—a little ball of spitting, independent fury much of the time, hell-bent on learning dog-torturing lessons. She also had a loving side to her nature that she mostly reserved for my sister Tessa but would occasionally extend to the rest of us. She and John-John became great friends, and she imbued him with a new-found sense of wicked Siamese purpose.
John-John died at the ripe old age of nineteen, when I was thirteen. He had been getting gradually weaker and weaker, and my mum had been hoping that he would die peacefully at home, but when he seemed to be suffering she decided to take him to the vet’s to have him put down.
It’s funny as you get older the things you can remember as if they were yesterday, and that day is etched very clearly in my mind, because my mother decided to drive me to school, with John-John in the cat basket on the back seat. I was in my second year of high school, and I even remember what we had for lunch that day, and that dessert was a form of shortbread biscuit with tapioca and jam, and that when I sat down with my dessert, I suddenly found that I was crying.
The teacher at our table, my long-suffering maths teacher, asked me what was wrong, and I told him that the cat was being put down. He was very sympathetic and understanding, and even though empathy was not an emotion I had experienced from my fellow students up until that point, they too were kind and talked about their own pets.
When I got home that afternoon my mother told me that when she got to the vet’s John-John was already dead. We cried and cuddled together, but it wasn’t until many years later that I thought about the pain it must have caused her to know that her darling friend of almost twenty years, who had outlasted the best years of her marriage, watched over her four children and been her constant companion, had died in the car while she was driving him to what would have been his final destination.
I had a day off school the next day to recover, but strangely I can’t remember whether or not Mum brought him home to bury him. I do remember how empty the house felt without him; it seemed odd that the absence of one small cat could make such a large impression on a household.
Candida Baker
Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily
her own tail? If you could look with her
eyes, you might see her surrounded with
hundreds of figures performing complex
dramas, with tragic and comic issues,
long conversations, many characters,
many ups and downs of fate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
M
y husband Steve got back from his week at sea just in time to experience the mayhem our new kitten had caused. While he cleaned and tidied the house, I stood at the kitchen bench watching a seagull glide on the updraft from the cliff. The bird and I were at the same eye level. It swivelled the slash of its beak towards me. We exchanged glares.
Not so long ago I’d liked birds, empathised with their struggle. Around the age of eight or nine I’d found a baby thrush on the front lawn. It couldn’t fly. Our cat at the time—Sylvester—was bound to get it if I didn’t do something. I scooped the ball of feathers up in my hands. It didn’t seem to mind resting its reptilian feet on my fingers. Its beak and claws were too big for its body. It was not yet a functioning bird. I had no choice but to take it inside. A shoebox was lined with cotton wool. Holes were punched in the lid with a knitting needle. The thrush took eager gulps of sugared water from an eye dropper. Certain the bird would die overnight, I closed the lid. The box chirruped. Not a call of alarm. Just a chirrup. The box sat on my dressing table all night. I dreaded what I’d find next morning. But when I scrambled out of bed and opened the lid, the bird was sitting upright. Its eyes shone black and expectant. I closed the lid and took the box outside to the front lawn. When I opened the lid again the thrush hopped onto the grass. It wobbled uncertainly, then with a thrilling whirr of wings flew up onto a branch. It perched there for a while, pretending I didn’t exist. I called, but it hurtled across the valley to the pines. I thought it might fly back to thank me. Of course it never did.
The seagull peeled away, swooped down over the ferry terminal and across Wellington harbour. Five weeks had passed since our older son, inside his white coffin, had been lowered into the hills behind my friend Lena’s house. We’d visited the grave a couple of times. I found no comfort on the windswept summit of Makara Cemetery, with its soldier lines of plaques. The first few times we went it took a while to work out where Sam’s grave was in that mosaic of misery. Steve pointed out it was in line with the toilet block. I could almost hear Sam laughing about that. He’d always had a lavatory sense of humour. With typical incongruity he’d been buried between two people who’d lived well into their eighties. Kneeling above him, my tears irrigating the grass, I searched for something of his essence. There was nothing of him in the gnarled bushes bent permanently against the wind. Clouds wrapped themselves in improbable shapes. Sheep bleated. Sam didn’t belong in that empty place.
I felt like an actor wearing someone else’s clothes. On the outside we resembled the same people we’d been a month or so earlier. I drove the same car, went to the same supermarket, but my internal organs felt like they’d been rearranged and scrubbed with steel wool. Shock, probably. I no longer trusted the goodness of being alive. Hatred and fury flared easily. I was angry at the people who lay alongside Sam. They had no right to have lived so long.
Even though the new school year had started we’d decided to keep Rob home for a couple of weeks. He hardly mentioned Sam but he still wore the Superman watch every day. Maybe he thought the action figure on his wrist was a hotline to his big brother. Rob needed a superhero more than any boy I could think of. If only Superman could jump through his bedroom window with Sam laughing in his arms.