Дорин Тови - The Coming Of Saska

Not as yet I haven’t – where, when people come through our front door, the first thing they see is a whacking great vinyl corner piece over the carpet in front of the living-room door. ‘It’s not to save wear,’ I explain when I see them looking at it. ‘It’s to stop our Siamese chewing the corners.’

You can see their eyebrows lift... a cat chewing the carpet? I bet they go away and say I’m batty.

There is another vinyl protective piece where the living-room carpet adjoins the kitchen door. Until it was put there, when Sass got tired of waiting for his meals he lay down and chewed on that. There are more frayed edges outside the bathroom and bedroom doors, too, whereby hang a couple of tales. Normally Sass wouldn’t bother with the bathroom, there not being anything interesting inside, but one day Shebalu got shut in there by accident, being a great one for hiding behind doors. Sass discovered where she was – we didn’t even know she was missing – but did he howl the place down, as our other boys would have done?

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Doreen Tovey

No. Sass the Resourceful lay down and tried to chew her out. When I went upstairs, wondering where they were, the corners of that carpet had gone.

On the second occasion we’d gone for a walk with friends, shutting the cats out in the hall as usual. They had a hotwater bottle in a nest of sweaters on the bed, an earthbox in the box-room, they could also go into the spare room if they liked and talk to passers-by out of the window... At least, that was the normal arrangement but in the rush of getting ready to go, somebody shut the bedroom door and also the one to the box-room. The only door left open was the one to the spare room, which we use also as a study.

Any of our previous cats would have been perfectly content to be in there – after all, we were only away for an hour – but Sass gets so intense about things, when we got back we found devastation. The carpet in front of the bedroom door was chewed with his trying to get in there.

So it was in front of the box-room door because he hadn’t been able to get in to his earthbox. Ditto in front of the bathroom door, his second attack on that one: it looked as if a dog had been worrying a slipper.

He’d then gone into the spare room, where there was a car-rug on the settee. You can guess what he did to that.

Two puddles, one at either end, to show that This Territory belonged to Sass. Why did he have to do that, I asked him?

Why couldn’t he have held on like other cats? In any case, we’d only been gone an hour – it couldn’t have been necessary to go twice . Sass looked at me reprovingly. I knew how he worried, he said.

He has been with us for over a year now and we can’t imagine the place without him, though we wish – how we wish – there hadn’t been such a sad reason for his coming.

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The Coming of Saska He never wets on wool now... that, he assures us, was when he was a Baby. He hasn’t given up chewing carpets, though: ours still have vinyl corners. As far as possible we co-operate with him by remembering not to shut doors.

Seeley never did learn to push open the hall door from the outside – at five years old he still sat outside and bawled for admission, or waited for Shebalu to open it when he would jump in over her head. Sass had been with us for less than a week – and he’d come as a ten-week-old kitten

– when there was a squeak of the heavy hinges and he came squirming triumphantly through.

His breeder was right about his being exceptional. This capacity of his for retrieving things, for instance... Up on the hill one afternoon, to my amazement, he picked up a fir-cone, brought it to me and put it down – and, when I threw it for him and it fell among a scattering of other cones, he chased it, searched it out by its scent, and brought the same one back. I encouraged him every afternoon after that by throwing pine-cones for him... further and further, till he’d come racing back with them right from the bottom of the hill, then lay them at my feet and sit down, bat ears at expectant angles, waiting for me to throw them for him again.

Fred Ferry spotted us at this in next to no time, of course, and went off to tell the tale round the village. Father Adams was watching from the lane the next time we came down off the hill. Sass, I should have mentioned, always brings his pine-cone back with him, trotting through the gate with it sticking out of his mouth and putting it down on the lawn.

‘Well, if th’old liar weren’t right for once,’ said Father Adams. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for meself...’ And off he went with an addendum to Fred’s story. No wonder people think we are queer.

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Doreen Tovey

As they no doubt do when they see us with the cats on 20-foot leads... in the morning before breakfast, or when it is getting dusk. Never again will we take a chance with them...

which has led to another complication. Sass the Exceptional has proved to be a tremendous jumper. He simply delights in leaping over things, which looks remarkable enough when he does it off his lead... over the wheelbarrow or a pile of bricks, for instance; or me, if I’m bending on the lawn.

But when they are on their leads going into the orchard, and Shebalu demurely mounts the bar across the entrance and steps down the other side – and then Sass, lead and all, clears the whole thing high in the air like a grasshopper... no wonder people who see it look at us rather askance.

Not that we worry. At least we know they are safe, and gradually things have returned to normal. Charles is busy with his fruit trees and his painting. I go riding on Mio...

I have learned to jump on him almost as well as Sass. The Bannetts have got their goat who, when they are away, quite often comes to stay with us.

‘Thass all theest needed,’ says Father Adams every time he sees her on our lawn. She and Sass heads down at one another, Shebalu looking primly on. Annabel bellowing down from the hillside about making a Fuss about Other People’s rotten Goats. That is what we needed indeed, though there are some things we shall never forget. Nowadays, when we holiday in England, Sass and Shebalu come with us. They have seen the sea, and walked on a beach. Sass has even been in a boat. It is a long way from Canada to Cornwall... But that is another story.

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