Шейла Нортон - Oliver The Cat Who Saved Christmas

Then everything went badly wrong. One day, soon after my ears and eyes had started to work properly, we were all startled by a sudden loud noise, and a gust of cold fresh air. My mother jumped up, trying to hide us all under her body as we kittens scrambled around on the bed in fright. We were only just beginning to learn to walk and, I have to say, I was the best at it. I’d managed to stray off the bedding once or twice, but my legs were wobbly and I couldn’t wait to get back to my mother’s warmth. Now, though, I was cowering under her tummy, shaking with fear.

‘What the hell?’ someone shouted, and there were heavy footsteps coming towards us. ‘Bloody cat – how did you get in here? Bloody shed’s been locked up for weeks. Drat, should have fixed that damned window, might have known all the pesky strays in the neighbourhood would get in. Get out of it – go on, clear off, you manky old thing.’

He was looming over us now. I could feel my siblings shaking as hard as I was. My mother was hissing and spitting, her whole body taut, her tail suddenly twice its normal size. You have to remember I’d never seen a human before, and I had no idea what they were. But this one was big, loud, and very angry, and my mother was making him even angrier.

‘Get off me, you vicious brute,’ he shouted at her as she dug her claws and her teeth into his huge hairy front paws. ‘Ouch! Right, that’s it – I’m gonna get you in this sack and…’ There was a pause. His horrible red face and bulging eyes had come suddenly into focus. ‘Blimey,’ he exclaimed. ‘Bloody kittens too.’

By now we were all squeaking and mewing in distress. Our mother was trying frantically to hide us, but he made a grab for us, one at a time, by our tails, our necks, whatever he could get hold of as we tried desperately to crawl out of his reach.

‘You horrible little vermin can go in the sack first,’ he said, and he pulled our bedding out from under us all, shook it so that it opened into a kind of big bag, and started dropping us in it, one by one. All the time our mother was shrieking at him and attacking him with her claws, until he threw her onto the floor and held her down with one of his huge great back paws. I was the last kitten to be dropped into the sack, and as he grabbed me by the neck I was just in time to see him kick my poor mother so hard, she wailed in pain and shot of the shed door. I can’t tell you how hard I cried as I fell down into the darkness of that sack and joined my siblings in a heap at the bottom.

‘Come back ’ere, you,’ the human was shouting after my mother. I heard him run out of the shed, still shouting, but he was soon back, muttering about catching her next time he saw her. ‘Meanwhile, let’s get rid of this bag of vermin,’ he said, and the next thing we knew, we were being lifted up in the air and swung along, falling over each other and squeaking with fear.

I can see I’ve upset you already, little kitten, and you haven’t heard it all yet. Are you sure you want me to go on? I did warn you it wasn’t a nice story. You’re not going to have nightmares, are you? Look, I can promise you there’s a happy ending. If there wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here with you now, curled up nice and cosy on this cushion together with the sunshine coming through the window, would I? But yes, you’re quite right, that was the last time I ever saw my mother. Well, we all have to leave our mothers, as you know, but I was still too young, and of course, the circumstances weren’t exactly ideal. But since I’ve grown up, I’ve always told myself I’m glad she got away from that horrible man. I know she wouldn’t have left us if she’d had any choice in the matter.

Well, there we all were in that dark sack and, of course, I don’t actually know how long we were in it, or where we were taken, but when we felt ourselves being dumped on the ground, we all started crying as loudly as we could – which wasn’t very loud – to be let out. For a long, long time we heard nothing outside the sack apart from birds singing. We were all hungry, and thirsty, and beginning to get weak. I had an instinctive feeling that we needed to keep still to conserve our energy, but my two brothers didn’t seem to understand this, and kept jumping around, looking for a way out. There wasn’t one, of course – the sack was tied up at the top – and they were just making themselves more and more tired and thirsty. It was hard to breathe, and the two girl kittens were both starting to struggle. Eventually we did all have to lie down quietly because we were too weak to do anything else, even to cry.

We lay there for a long time, maybe hours, maybe days, listening to each other’s shallow breathing getting fainter. And then there was a sound outside – a loud sniffing sound – and the sack was being nudged backwards and forwards. By now I was almost too weak and sick to care what happened, but suddenly a new human voice was calling out:

‘What have you got there, Rupert? Leave it alone, boy. Here! Sit! Stay!’

And then there was light, so sudden and so bright, I had to close my eyes, only for them to fly open again with fright at the terrible noise that came next. Have you met any dogs yet, little kitten? Believe me, you need to give them a wide berth. Some of them are quite friendly to cats, others are complete psychopaths who would kill us as soon as look at us. But the main problem with them is, they’re loud and excitable. Their humans have to tie them onto long straps just to keep them under control, and if they’re unstrapped, they go berserk, running around in circles, shouting their heads off, chasing anything that moves, even though they never seem to catch anything. Well, this was my first introduction to a dog, and it was terrifying. The minute his human had opened our sack, this dog got his nose right inside it and let out a cacophony of horrendous shouting. The human was shouting too, telling him to shut up and sit down, and eventually the dog’s face was replaced in the opening of the sack by the human’s face. After my experience with the first human I’d ever met, you can imagine how I felt about seeing another one – and this one’s voice was just as loud as the first.

‘Kittens!’ he yelled, staring down at us. I tried to give a little cry of fear, but nothing would come out, and I wasn’t the only one – none of my siblings seemed to be able to raise a squeak, either. ‘Half dead by the look of ’em. Poor little beggars. Who the hell would dump a bag of kittens in the middle of a field like that? Criminal, that’s what it is. Well, I’d better take ’em somewhere, though I reckon it’s probably too late to save ’em. Come on, Rupert – let’s go, boy. Back to the car. You’ll have to have your walk later.’

With that, we were hoisted up in the air again and I was tumbling on top of my poor sisters and brothers, all of us too weak to care. I was barely conscious as I felt the sack being put down again. But a few minutes later, there was an even louder noise, if possible, than the din the dog was still making, and I lay there quaking and shivering, sure it must be the end of the world. I’ve since worked out that we were in a car, and the noise – I’ve heard it lots of times since, of course – was the car waking up. They roar at the top of their lungs at first, and then settle down to a kind of loud purr as they run along. It’s horrible being inside one, at the best of times – you can feel the vibrations of their tummies rumbling, and they make all sorts of horrible noises, stopping and starting and sometimes screeching. George plays music inside his car now if he has to take me out in it, and that helps a bit. But I shudder to think how scared I must have been back then, in the blackness of that sack, with no idea what was going on. It’s probably a good thing my memories of that part are quite dim now.