That was in a large ugly flat in Earls Court. What was needed, we decided, was a tough uncomplicated undemanding cat able to fend for itself in what was clearly, and at any glance from the rear window, a savage battle for power along the walls and back yards. It should catch mice and rats and otherwise eat what was put before it. It should not be purebred and therefore delicate.
This formula had of course nothing to do with London, it related to Africa. For instance, on the farm we fed cats bowls of warm milk as the pails came up from the milking; favourites got scraps from the table; but they never got meat – they caught their own. If they got sick, and had not recovered in a few days, they were destroyed. And on a farm you can keep a dozen cats without thought of a dirt box. As for the battles and balances of power, they were fought and defended over a cushion, a chair, a box in the corner of a shed, a tree, a patch of shade. They carved out territories for themselves against each other, wild cats, and the farm dogs. A farmhouse is open terrain and therefore there is much more fighting than in a city, where a cat, a couple of cats, will own a house or a flat and defend these against visitors or assailants. What these two cats will do to each other inside the boundary line is another matter. But the defence line against aliens is the back door. A friend of mine once had to put a dirt box inside the house for weeks, in London, because her tomcat was in a state of siege from a dozen others who sat all around the walls and trees of the garden, waiting for a kill. Then the tides of war flowed differently, and he was able to claim his own garden again.
My cat was a half-grown black-and-white female of undistinguished origin, guaranteed to be clean and amenable. She was a nice enough beast, but I did not love her; never succumbed; was, in short, protecting myself. I thought her neurotic, overanxious, fussy; but that was unfair, because a town cat’s life is so unnatural that it never learns the independence a farm cat has. I was bothered because she waited for people to come home – like a dog; must be in the same room and be paid attention – like a dog; must have human attendance when she had kittens. As for her food habits, she won that battle in the first week. She never, not once, ate anything but lightly cooked calves’ liver, and lightly boiled whiting. Where did she get these tastes? I demanded of her ex-owner, who of course did not know. I put down tinned food for her, and scraps from the table; but it wasn’t until we were eating liver that she showed interest. Liver it was to be. And she would not eat liver cooked in anything but butter. Once I decided to starve her into submission. ‘Ridiculous that a cat should be fed, etc., etc., when people in other parts of the world are starving, etc.’ For five days I put down cat food, put down table scraps. For five days she looked critically at the plate, and walked off. I would take up the stale food every evening, open a new tin, refill her milk bowl. She sauntered over, inspected what I had provided, took a little milk, strolled away. She got thinner. She must have been very hungry. But in the end it was I who cracked.
At the back of that big house a wooden stairway led down from the first-floor landing to the yard. There she sat, able to survey half a dozen yards, the street, a shed. When she first arrived, cats came from all around to examine the newcomer. She sat on the top step, able to fly indoors if they came too close. She was half the size of the big waiting tomcats. Much too young, I thought, to get pregnant; but before she was fully grown she was pregnant, and it did her no good to have kittens when she was still one herself.
Which brings me to – our old friend nature. Which is supposed to know so well. In a state of nature, does a she-cat become pregnant before she is fully grown? Does she have kittens four, five times a year, six to a litter? Of course, a cat is not only an eater of mice and birds; she is also provider of food for the hawks that lie in the air over the trees where she is hidden with her kittens. A baby kitten, strolling out from shelter in its first curiosity, will vanish into the claws of a hawk. Very likely a she-cat occupied with catching food for herself and her kittens will be able to protect only one kitten, perhaps two. It is noticeable that a tame cat, if she has six, five kittens, and you take two away, will hardly notice: she’ll complain, look for them briefly, and then it is forgotten. But if she has two kittens, and one disappears before its proper time for going, after six weeks, then she is in a frenzy of anxiety and will look for it all over the house. A litter of six kittens in a warm basket in a town house can be seen, perhaps, as eagle and hawk fodder in the wrong place? But then, how inflexible is nature, how unpliable: if cats have been the friends of man for so many centuries, could nature not have adapted itself, just a little, away from the formula: five or six kittens to a litter, four times a year?
This cat’s first litter was heralded by much complaint. She knew something was going to happen; and was making sure somebody would be around when it did. On the farm, cats went off to have kittens in some well-hidden and dark place; and they reappeared a month later with their brood to introduce them to the milk bowls. I can’t remember having to provide one of our farm cats with a littering place. The black-and-white cat was offered baskets, cupboards, the bottom of wardrobes. She did not seem to like any of them, but followed us around for two days before the birth, rubbing up against our legs and miaowing. When she started labour, it was on the kitchen floor, and that was because people were in the kitchen. A cold blue linoleum, and on it, a fat cat, miaowing for attention, purring anxiously, watching her attendants in case they left her. We brought in a basket, put her in it and left to do some work. She followed. So it was clear we must stay with her. She laboured for hours and hours. At last the first kitten appeared, but it was the wrong way. One person held the cat, another pulled the slippery back legs of the kitten. It came out, but the head got stuck. The cat bit and scratched and yelled. A contraction expelled the kitten, and at once the half-demented cat turned around and bit the kitten at the back of its neck and it died. When the other four kittens were safely born, the dead one proved to be the biggest and strongest. That cat had six litters, and each litter had five kittens, and she killed the firstborn kitten in each litter, because she had such pain with it. Apart from this, she was a good mother.
The father was a very large black cat with whom, when she was on heat, she went rolling around the yard; and who, otherwise, would sit on the bottom step of the wooden flight licking his fur, while she sat on the top step licking hers. She did not like him coming into the flat – chased him out. When the kittens were at the stage that they could find their way down to the yard, they sat on the steps, one, two, three, four, all mixtures of black and white, and looked in fear at the big watchful tom. The mother, finally, would go first, tail erect, ignoring the black cat. The kittens went after her, past him. In the yard she taught them cleanliness while he watched. Then she came first up the steps; and they came after, one, two, three, four.
They would eat nothing but lightly cooked liver, and lightly boiled whiting; which fact I concealed from their potential owners.
Mice were only objects of interest to that cat, and to all her kittens.
The flat had a contrivance I’ve not seen in any other London place. Someone had taken a dozen bricks out of the kitchen wall, put a metal grille on the outside, and a door on the inside; so there was a sort of food safe in the wall, unsanitary if you like, but it filled the place of that obsolete necessity, a larder. There bread and cheese could be kept in the proper cool but unrefrigerated conditions where they remained moist. To this baby larder, however, came mice. They lived in the walls, and had been conditioned away from any but the most vestigial fear of humans. If I came suddenly into the kitchen and found a mouse, it would look at me, bright-eyed, and wait for me to go. If I stayed and kept quiet, it ignored me, and went on looking for food. If I made a loud noise or threw something at it, it slipped into the wall, but without panic.
I was unable to bring myself to put down a steel trap for these confiding creatures; I felt, however, that a cat was, so to speak, playing fair. But the cat had taken no notice of the mice. One day I came into the kitchen and saw the cat lying on the kitchen table, watching two mice on the floor.
Perhaps the presence of kittens would prompt her supposedly real instincts? Soon she gave birth, and when the kittens were old enough to come downstairs, I put the cat and four kittens into the kitchen, withdrew solid food, and locked them all in for the night. I came down towards dawn for a glass of water, switched the light on, and saw the cat stretched out on the floor, feeding the kittens, one, two, three, four; while a couple of feet away a mouse sat up, disturbed by the light, but not by the cat. The mouse did not even run away, but waited for me to leave.
The cat enjoyed, or tolerated, the company of mice; and disarmed a rather silly dog from downstairs who, on the point of chasing her, capitulated because she, apparently not knowing that dogs were enemies, wound herself around his legs, purring. He became her friend, and the friend of all her kittens. But she did show terror on an occasion when, if cats are creatures of the night, on terms with the dark, she should have remained calm.
One afternoon, night descended on London. I stood at the kitchen window, drinking an after-lunch coffee with a visitor, when the air got dark and dirty, and the street lights came on. From full daylight to full heavy dark took ten minutes, less. We were frightened. Had our sense of time gone? Had that bomb finally exploded somewhere and covered our earth with a filthy cloud? Had one of those death factories with which this pretty island is dotted accidentally let off a lethal gas? Were these, in short, our last moments? No information, so we stood at the window and watched. It was a heavy, breathless, sulphurous sky; a yellow-blackish dark; and the air burned our throats, as it does in a mine shaft after an explosion.
It was extraordinarily silent. In moments of crisis, this waiting quiet is London’s first symptom, more disturbing than any other.
Meanwhile the cat sat on the table, trembling. From time to time she let out – not a miaow, but a wail, an interrogative plaint. Lifted off the table and petted, she struggled, jumped down, then crept, not fled, up the stairs, and got under a bed, where she lay shivering. Just like a dog, in fact.
Half an hour later, the dark lifted out of the sky. A contradictory pattern of wind currents had trapped the filthy exhalations from the city which are normally dispelled upwards, under a ceiling of obdurately motionless air. Then a new wind blew, shifted the mass, and the city breathed again.
The cat stayed under the bed all afternoon. When she was finally coaxed down, in a clear fresh evening light, she sat on the windowsill and watched the dark fall – the real dark. Then she licked and repaired her rough and frightened fur, drank some milk, became herself.
Just before I left that flat, I had to go away for a weekend, and a friend cared for the cat. When I came back, she was in the hands of a vet, with a broken pelvis. The house had a flat roof outside a high window, where she used to sit sunning herself. For some reason she fell off this roof, which was three storeys up, into an area-way. She must have had a bad fright of some kind. Anyway, she had to be killed and I decided to keep cats in London was a mistake.
The next place I lived in was impossible for cats. It was a block of six tiny flats, one above another along a cold stone staircase. No yard or garden: the nearest exposed earth was probably in Regent’s Park, half a mile away. Country unsuitable for cats, you’d think; but a large yellow tortoiseshell cat decorated a corner grocer’s window; and he said the cat slept there alone at night; and when he went on holiday he turned it out into the street to fend for itself. It was no use remonstrating with him, because he asked: Did it look well and happy? Yes, it did. And it had been living like this for five years.
For a few months a large black cat lived on the staircase of the flats, belonging, apparently, to nobody. It wanted to belong to one of us. It would sit waiting until a door opened to let someone in or out, and then miaow, but tentatively, like one who has had many rebuffs. It drank some milk, ate some scraps, weaved around legs, asking to be allowed to stay. But without insistence, or, indeed, hope. No one asked it to stay. There was the question, as always, of cat’s dirt. No one could face running up and down those stairs with smelly boxes to and from the rubbish bins. And besides, the owner of the flats wouldn’t like it. And besides, we tried to comfort ourselves, it probably belonged to one of the shops and was visiting. So it was fed only.
In the daytime it sat on the pavement, watching the traffic, or wandered in and out of the shops: an urbane old cat; a gentle cat; a cat without pretensions.
At the corner was a site where three fruit and vegetable barrows stood, owned by three old people: two brothers, a fat brother and a thin brother, and the wife of the fat one, who was also fat. They were tiny people, five foot high, and always making jokes and always about the weather. When the cat visited them it sat under a barrow and ate bits from their sandwiches. The little round lady, who had red cheeks, so red they were blackish, and who was married to the little round brother, said she would take the cat home with her, but she was afraid her own Tibby wouldn’t be at all pleased. The little thin brother, who had never married and who lived with them, joked that he could take it home for company, and defend it against Tibby: a man who had no wife needed a cat. I think he would have done; but he died suddenly of heat stroke. Whatever the temperature, those three people were wrapped up in every kind of scarf, jacket, jersey, coat. The thin brother wore, invariably, an overcoat over a bundle of clothes. If the temperature went above fifty-five, he complained it was a heat wave, and he felt the heat terribly. I suggested he wouldn’t be so hot if he didn’t wear so many clothes. But this was an attitude towards clothes that was clearly foreign to him: it made him uneasy. One year we had a long spell of fine weather, a real London heat wave. Every day I descended to a street which was gay, warm, friendly with people in summer clothes. But the little old people still wore their head scarves and their neck scarves and their jerseys. The old lady’s cheeks grew redder and redder. They joked all the time about the heat. In the shade at their feet under the barrow, the cat lay stretched among fallen plums and bits of wilting lettuce. Towards the end of the second week of the heat wave, the bachelor brother died of a stroke and that was the end of the cat’s chance of a home.
For a few weeks he had luck, and was welcome in the pub. This was because Lucy, the prostitute who lived in the ground-floor flat of our building, used that pub in the evenings. She took him in with her, and sat on a high stool in a corner by the bar, with the cat on a stool beside her. She was an amiable lady, much liked in the pub; and anybody she chose to take in with her was made welcome too. When I went in to buy cigarettes or a bottle, there sat Lucy and the cat. Her admirers, many and from all parts of the world, old customers and new, and of all ages, were buying her drinks and coaxing the barman and his wife to give the cat milk and potato crisps. But the novelty of a cat in a bar must have worn off, because soon Lucy was working the bar without the cat.
When the cold weather and the nights of early dark came, the cat was always well up the staircase before the great doors were closed. It slept in as much of a warm corner as it could find on that inhuman uncarpeted stretch of stone steps. When it was very cold, one or other of us would ask the cat in for the night; and in the morning it thanked us by weaving around our legs. Then, no cat. The caretaker said defensively that he had taken it to the R.S.P.C.A. to be killed. One night, the hours of waiting for the door to be opened had proved too long, and it had made a mess on a landing. The caretaker was not going to put up with that, he said. Bad enough clearing up after us lot, he wasn’t going to clean up after cats as well.
I came to live in a house in cat country. The houses are old and they have narrow gardens with walls. Through our back windows show a dozen walls one way, a dozen walls the other, of all sizes and levels. Trees, grass, bushes. There is a little theatre that has roofs at various heights. Cats thrive here. There are always cats on the walls, roofs, and in the gardens, living a complicated secret life, like the neighbourhood lives of children that go on according to unimagined private rules the grown-ups never guess at.
I knew there would be a cat in the house. Just as one knows, if a house is too large people will come and live in it, so certain houses must have cats. But for a while I repelled the various cats that came sniffing around to see what sort of a place it was.
During the whole of that dreadful winter of 1962, the garden and the roof over the back verandah were visited by an old black-and-white tom. He sat in the slushy snow on the roof; he prowled over the frozen ground; when the back door was briefly opened, he sat just outside, looking into the warmth. He was most unbeautiful, with a white patch over one eye, a torn ear, and a jaw always a little open and drooling. But he was not a stray. He had a good home in the street, and why he didn’t stay there, no one seemed able to say.
That winter was further education into the extraordinary voluntary endurances of the English.
These houses are mostly L.C.C. owned, and by the first week of the cold, the pipes had burst and frozen, and people were waterless. The system stayed frozen. The authorities opened a main on the street corner, and for weeks the women of the street made journeys to fetch water in jugs and cans along pavements heaped with feet of icy slush, in their house slippers. The slippers were for warmth. The slush and ice were not cleared off the pavement. They drew water from the tap, which broke down several times, and said there had been no hot water but what they boiled on the stove for one week, two weeks then three, four and five weeks. There was, of course, no hot water for baths. When asked why they didn’t complain, since after all they paid rent, they paid for water hot and cold, they replied the L.C.C. knew about the pipes, but did not do anything. The L.C.C. had pointed out there was a cold spell: they agreed with this diagnosis. Their voices were lugubrious, but they were deeply fulfilled, as this nation is when suffering entirely avoidable acts of God.
In the shop at the corner an old man, a middle-aged woman and a small child spent the days of that winter. The shop was chilled colder even than the below-zero weather nature was ordaining, by the refrigeration units; the door was always open into the iced snowdrifts outside the shop. There was no heating at all. The old man got pleurisy and went to hospital for two months. Permanently weakened, he had to sell the shop that spring. The child sat on the cement floor and cried steadily from the cold, and was slapped by its mother who stood behind the counter in a light wool dress, man’s socks and a thin cardigan, saying how awful it all was, while her eyes and nose ran and her fingers swelled into chilblains. The old man next door who works as a market porter slipped on the ice outside his front door, hurt his back, and was for weeks on unemployment pay. In that house, which held nine or ten people, including two children, there was one bar of electric fire to fight the cold. Three people went to hospital, one with pneumonia.
And the pipes stayed burst, sealed in jagged stalactites of ice; the pavements remained ice slides; and the authorities did nothing. In middle-class streets, of course, snow was cleared as it fell, and the authorities responded to angry citizens demanding their rights and threatening lawsuits. In our area, people suffered it out until the spring.
Surrounded by human beings as winterbound as if they were cave dwellers of ten thousand years ago, the peculiarities of an old tomcat who chose an icy roof to spend its nights on lost their force.
In the middle of that winter, friends were offered a kitten. Friends of theirs had a Siamese cat, and she had a litter by a street cat. The hybrid kittens were being given away. Their flat is minute, and they both worked all day; but when they saw the kitten, they could not resist. During its first weekend it was fed on tinned lobster soup and chicken mousse, and it disrupted their much-married nights because it had to sleep under the chin, or at least, somewhere against the flesh, of H., the man. S., his wife, announced on the telephone that she was losing the affections of her husband to a cat, just like the wife in Colette’s tale. On Monday they went off to work leaving the kitten by itself, and when they came home it was crying and sad, having been alone all day. They said they were bringing it to us. They did.
The kitten was six weeks old. It was enchanting, a delicate fairy-tale cat, whose Siamese genes showed in the shape of the face, ears, tail, and the subtle lines of its body. Her back was tabby: from above or the back, she was a pretty tabby kitten, in grey and cream. But her front and stomach were a smoky-gold, Siamese cream, with half-bars of black at the neck. Her face was pencilled with black – fine dark rings around the eyes, fine dark streaks on her cheeks, a tiny cream-coloured nose with a pink tip, outlined in black. From the front, sitting with her slender paws straight, she was an exotically beautiful beast. She sat, a tiny thing, in the middle of a yellow carpet, surrounded by five worshippers, not at all afraid of us. Then she stalked around that floor of the house, inspecting every inch of it, climbed up on to my bed, crept under the fold of a sheet, and was at home.
S. went off with H. saying: Not a moment too soon, otherwise I wouldn’t have a husband at all.
And he went off groaning, saying that nothing could be as exquisite as being woken by the delicate touch of a pink tongue on his face.
The kitten went, or rather hopped, down the stairs, each of which was twice her height: first front paws, then flop, with the back; front paws, then flop with the back. She inspected the ground floor, refused the tinned food offered to her, and demanded a dirt box by mewing for it. She rejected wood shavings, but torn newspaper was acceptable, so her fastidious pose said, if there was nothing else. There wasn’t: the earth outside was frozen solid.
She would not eat tinned cat food. She would not. And I was not going to feed her lobster soup and chicken. We compromised on some minced beef.
She had always been as fussy over her food as a bachelor gourmet. She gets worse as she gets older. Even as a kitten she could express annoyance, or pleasure, or a determination to sulk, by what she ate, half-ate, or chose to refuse. Her food habits are an eloquent language.
But I think it is just possible she was taken away from her mother too young. If I might respectfully suggest it to the cat experts, it is possible they are wrong when they say a kitten may leave its mother the day it turns six weeks old. This cat was six weeks, not a day more, when it was taken from its mother. The basis of her dandyism over food is the neurotic hostility and suspicion towards it of a child with food problems. She had to eat, she supposed; she did eat; but she has never eaten with enjoyment, for the sake of eating. And she shares another characteristic with people who have not had enough mother-warmth. Even now she will instinctively creep under the fold of a newspaper, or into a box or a basket – anything that shelters, anything that covers. More; she is overready to see insult; overready to sulk. And she is a frightful coward.
Kittens who are left with their mother seven or eight weeks eat easily, and they have confidence. But of course, they are not as interesting.
As a kitten, this cat never slept on the outside of the bed. She waited until I was in it, then she walked all over me, considering possibilities. She would get right down into the bed, by my feet, or on to my shoulder, or crept under the pillow. If I moved too much, she huffily changed quarters, making her annoyance felt.
When I was making the bed, she was happy to be made into it; and stayed, visible as a tiny lump, quite happily, sometimes for hours, between the blankets. If you stroked the lump, it purred and mewed. But she would not come out until she had to.
The lump would move across the bed, hesitate at the edge. There might be a frantic mew as she slid to the floor. Dignity disturbed, she licked herself hastily, glaring yellow eyes at the viewers, who made a mistake if they laughed. Then, every hair conscious of itself, she walked to some centre stage.
Time for the fastidious pernickety eating. Time for the earth box, as exquisite a performance. Time for setting the creamy fur in order. And time for play, which never took place for its own sake, but only when she was being observed.
She was as arrogantly aware of herself as a pretty girl who has no attributes but her prettiness: body and face always posed according to some inner monitor – a pose which is as good as a mask: no, no, this is what I am, the aggressive breasts, the sullen hostile eyes always on the watch for admiration.
Cat, at the age when, if she were human, she would be wearing clothes and hair like weapons, but confident that any time she chose she might relapse into indulged childhood again, because the role had become too much of a burden – cat posed and princessed and preened about the house and then, tired, a little peevish, tucked herself into the fold of a newspaper or behind a cushion, and watched the world safely from there.
Her prettiest trick, used mostly for company, was to lie on her back under a sofa and pull herself along by her paws, in fast sharp rushes, stopping to turn her elegant little head sideways, yellow eyes narrowed, waiting for applause. ‘Oh beautiful kitten! Delicious beast! Pretty cat!’ Then on she went for another display.
Or, on the right surface, the yellow carpet, a blue cushion, she lay on her back and slowly rolled, paws tucked up, head back, so that her creamy chest and stomach were exposed, marked faintly, as if she were a delicate subspecies of leopard, with black blotches, like the roses of leopards. ‘Oh beautiful kitten, oh you are so beautiful.’ And she was prepared to go on until the compliments stopped.
Or she sat in the back verandah, not on the table, which was unadorned, but on a little stand that had narcissus and hyacinth in earthenware pots. She sat posed between spikes of blue and white flowers, until she was noticed and admired. Not only by us, of course; also by the old rheumatic tom who prowled, grim reminder of a much harder life, around the garden where the earth was still frostbound. He saw a pretty half-grown cat, behind glass. She saw him. She lifted her head, this way, that way; bit off a fragment of hyacinth, dropped it; licked her fur, negligently; then with an insolent backwards glance, leaped down and came indoors and out of his sight. Or, on the way upstairs, on an arm or a shoulder, she would glance out of the window and see the poor old beast, so still that sometimes we thought he must have died and been frozen there. When the sun warmed a little at midday and he sat licking himself, we were relieved. Sometimes she sat watching him from the window, but her life was still to be tucked into the arms, beds, cushions, and corners of human beings.
Then the spring came, the back door was opened, the dirt box, thank goodness, made unnecessary, and the back garden became her territory. She was six months old, fully grown, from the point of view of nature.
She was so pretty then, so perfect; more beautiful even than that cat who, all those years ago, I swore could never have an equal. Well of course there hasn’t been; for that cat’s nature was all tact, delicacy, warmth and grace – so, as the fairy tales and the old wives say, she had to die young.
Our cat, the princess, was, still is, beautiful, but, there is no glossing it, she’s a selfish beast.
The cats lined up on the garden walls. First, the sombre old winter cat, king of the back gardens. Then, a handsome black-and-white from next door, his son, from the look of it. A battle-scarred tabby. A grey-and-white cat who was so certain of defeat that he never came down from the wall. And a dashing tigerish young tom that she clearly admired. No use, the old king had not been defeated. When she strolled out, tail erect, apparently ignoring them all, but watching the handsome young tiger, he leaped down towards her, but the winter cat had only to stir where he lay on the wall, and the young cat jumped back to safety. This went on for weeks.
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