James Bowen - A Street Cat Named Bob

I knew what was likely to happen next but I didn’t want Bob to eat it. Mice were notorious breeding grounds for disease. So I knelt down and attempted to pick up his prey. He wasn’t too happy about it and made a little noise that was part growl and part hiss. He then picked the mouse up again.

‘Give it to me Bob,’ I said, refusing to back down. ‘Give it to me.’

He really wasn’t too keen and this time gave me a look as if to say: ‘Why should I?’

I fished around in my coat and found a nibble, offering him a trade. ‘Take this instead, Bob, it will be much better for you.’

He still wasn’t convinced but after a few more moments the stand-off came to a halt and he gave in. As soon as he stepped away from the mouse, I picked it up by its tail and disposed of it.

It was another reminder of what, to me anyway, is one of the many fascinating things about cats: they are lethal predators by nature. A lot of people don’t like to think of their cute little kitty as a mass murderer, but that’s what cats are, given half a chance. In some parts of the world, including Australia, they have strict rules on cats being let out at night because of the carnage they cause in the local bird and rodent population.

Bob had proven the point. His coolness, his speed and his skill as a killer was amazing to behold. He knew exactly what to do and how to do it.

It set me thinking again about the life he must have led before he had arrived in the hallway of the block of flats. What sort of existence had it been? Where had he lived and how had he survived? Had he relied on finding and eating prey like this every day? Had he been raised in a domestic environment or had he always lived off the land like this? How had he become the cat he was today? I would love to have known. I was sure my street cat friend had a tale or two to tell.

In many ways, this was something else that Bob and I had in common.

Ever since I’d ended up living rough on the streets, people had wondered about my past life. How had I landed myself in this position, they’d ask me? Some did it professionally, of course. I’d spoken to dozens of social workers, psychologists and even police officers who’d quizzed me about how I’d ended up living on the streets. But a lot of ordinary people would ask me about it too.

I don’t know why, but people seem to be fascinated to learn how some members of society fall through the cracks. I think it’s partly that feeling that ‘there for the grace of God go I’, that it could happen to anyone. But I think it also makes people feel better about their own lives. It makes them think, ‘Well, I may think my life is bad, but it could be worse, I could be that poor sod.’

The answer to how people like me end up on the streets is always different, of course. But there are usually some similarities. Often drugs and alcohol play a big part in the story. But in an awful lot of instances, the road that led them to living on the streets stretches all the way back to their childhoods and their relationship with their family. That was certainly the way it was for me.

I lived quite a rootless childhood, mainly because I spent it travelling between the UK and Australia. I was born in Surrey but when I was three my family moved to Melbourne. My mother and father had separated by this time. While my father stayed in Surrey, my mother had got away from all the aggravation by landing a job selling for Rank Xerox, the photocopying company, in Melbourne. She was really good at it too, she was one of the company’s top saleswomen.

My mother had itchy feet, however, and within about two years we had moved from Melbourne to Western Australia. We stayed there for about three or four years until I was nine or so. Life in Australia was pretty good. We lived in a succession of large bungalows, each of which had vast garden areas at the back. I had all the space a boy could want to play in and explore the world and I loved the Australian landscape. The trouble was that I didn’t have any friends.

I found it very hard to fit in at school, mainly, I think, because we’d moved a lot. The chances of me settling into life in Australia disappeared when I was nine and we moved back to the UK and to Sussex, near Horsham. I enjoyed being back in England and have some happy memories of that period. I was just getting back into life in the northern hemisphere when we had to move yet again – back to Western Australia, when I was around twelve.

This time we ended up in a place called Quinn’s Rock. It was there that I think a lot of my problems really began. Because of all this travelling around, we never lived in one house for more than a couple of years. My mother was always buying and selling, moving all the time. I never had a family home and never grew up in one place. We were definitely living some kind of gypsy-like existence.

I’m no psychologist, although I’ve met my fair share of them over the years. There is no doubt in my mind that we moved home way too much, and it was not good for a growing child. It made it very hard for me to become socially adept. At school it was very hard to make friends. I was always trying too hard. I was too eager to impress, which isn’t good when you are a kid. It had the opposite result: I ended up being bullied at every school I went to. It was particularly bad in Quinn’s Rock.

I probably stuck out with a British accent and my eager-to-please attitude. I was a sitting target, really. One day they decided to stone me. Literally. Quinn’s Rock was called Quinn’s Rock for a reason and these kids took advantage of all the nice lumps of limestone that were lying around wherever you looked. I got concussion after being bombarded on the way home from school.

Things weren’t helped by the fact that I didn’t get on at all with my stepfather at the time, a guy called Nick. In my teenage opinion, he was a prick – and that was what I called him. Nick the Prick. My mother had met him when she joined the police back in Horsham and he had come with her out to Australia.

We continued living this same nomadic existence throughout my early teens. It was usually connected to my mother’s many business ventures. She was a very successful woman. At one point she started doing telemarketing training videos. That did quite well for a while. Then she set up a woman’s magazine called City Woman , which didn’t do so well. Sometimes we’d have plenty of money and other times we’d be strapped for cash. But that never lasted for long; she was a proper entrepreneur.

By the time I was in my mid-teens I’d pretty much quit school. I left because I was just sick to death of the bullying I encountered there. I didn’t get along with Nick either. And I was very independent-minded.

I became a tearaway, a wild kid who was always out late, always defying my mother and generally thumbing his nose at authority, no matter what form it took. It wasn’t surprising that I had soon developed a knack for getting myself into trouble, something I have never quite shaken off.

Predictably, I got into drugs, at first sniffing glue, probably to escape from reality. I didn’t get addicted to it. I only did it a couple of times after seeing another kid doing it. But it was the start of the process. After that I started smoking dope and sniffing toluene, an industrial solvent you find in nail varnish and glue. It was all connected, it was all part of a cycle of behaviour, one thing led back to another, which led back to another and so on. I was angry. I felt like I hadn’t had the best breaks.

Show me the child of seven and I’ll show you the man, they say. I’m not so sure that you’d have spotted my future when I was seven, but you could certainly have guessed what lay ahead when I was seventeen. I was set on the road to self-destruction.