Дорин Тови - Cats In The Belfry

Not for anything, after that, could we leave Sugieh to be looked down on as the Cinderella of the litter. When we left she went with us, accompanied by a supply of yeast tablets, a bag of minced rabbit and a pedigree bigger than herself which said her father's name was Caesar. That, incidentally, was why we named her Sugieh. We had intended to call her Scheherazade but – though Anna didn't really marry the King of Siam – we decided not to complicate history any more than it was already.

Sugieh herself was so happy that that night, for the first and only time in her life, she rode home in the car without a murmur. She ate her supper down to the last crumb. Even the attack on Shorty was only to show us how in future she was going to defend us against All Creatures, great and small. She loved us so much that when at last we went to bed, shutting her in the spare room for Shorty's sake with a hot-water bottle and a brand new cat basket to herself, she was heartbroken at the separation. She wailed and screamed and howled, shouting that she was all alone and wanted her mother. She got down and cried under the door so that we could hear her better, and dragged in the end of the rug off the landing, ripping at it in a frenzy that would have done credit to Lady Macbeth. When at last it seemed that there was to be no reprieve she gave a final tragic 'Mow-wow-wow' which trailed sadly off into the darkness. Then there was silence.

Immediately we began to worry. Supposing she lay by the door all night and caught a chill? Father Adams said Siamese cats died if they caught a chill. Supposing she was dead already? That silence, after the bedlam of the past half hour, was horribly unnatural. We didn't approve of cats sleeping in the bedroom, and we weren't going to start now. All the same… supposing…

Charles was the first to break down. After ten minutes frantically straining his ears to hear some sound from the next room he got sheepishly out of bed muttering that, after all, we had a lot of money tied up in that cat. When we opened the spare-room door she was curled up in her basket, having apparently fallen asleep from exhaustion – though it struck me that there was a decided smirk on her face. Charles, being a man, didn't see that. He saw, as he was meant to, only that she looked small and pathetic lying there in the basket, and said – as he was supposed to – that perhaps, for the first night at any rate, we ought to have her in with us. Tenderly he carried her in and deposited her in the crook of my arm where, with a happy sigh, she fell asleep again at once. Charles, with a clear conscience, flopped into his own side of the bed, pulled the clothes over his head and went to sleep himself. Only I stayed awake. I stayed awake because all night long, dreaming nostalgically of Anna, she kept smacking her lips hungrily and loudly right in my ear.

We rose next morning to a pouring wet day and another crisis. Sugieh hadn't used her earth-box. The breeder had advised us, as Sugieh wasn't yet used to a garden, to continue using an earth-box until the weather was better, and we had obligingly provided her with our biggest enamel baking dish filled – as the garden was absolutely sodden and Father Adams said Siamese cats got chills from using damp earth-boxes – with a bag of Shorty's sand. We had shown it to her the night before and she had affected not to see it, which was understandable because Siamese cats are very refined and we had only just met. But now it was morning and Sugieh had been with us twelve hours, and still the sand in her box was as untrodden as the Sahara.

All through breakfast Charles and I kept darting out into the hall and dibbling our fingers encouragingly into the sand. Sugieh darted too, and dibbled happily with a small blue paw. But she wouldn't get into the box. When the time came for us to leave for town I was frantic with worry, for we wouldn't be back until evening and by that time, I felt sure, Sugieh would have burst.

When we got home that night the box was still unused and Sugieh was sitting firmly on the floor. Unburst, but obviously reluctant to move. We were halfway through supper, anxiously wondering whether we ought to call the vet, when Charles had his inspiration. Perhaps, he said, she didn't like sand. It was still raining, so we tried her with sawdust. She didn't like that either. In desperation we cast Father Adams's theories to the wind, filled the box with mud straight from the garden, and put that in front of her. The result was miraculous. With one yell Sugieh was in the box and had flooded it to high-water mark. Supper forgotten, Charles dashed out into the rain at top speed, refilled the box, and offered it to her again. There was no false modesty about Sugieh. She leapt into it once more, raised her small spike of a tail and speedily reseated herself, thanking heaven at the top of her voice that we had at last realised Mother had taught her it was Dirty to use anything but Earth.

That was that crisis over. But there were plenty more to follow. There was the first time she went into the garden, for instance. The path was bad enough – she grumbled all the way out that the gravel was hurting her feet – but when we put her down on the lawn and the stubbly grass prickled her paws for the first time she let out one shriek and fled straight up my leg, swearing something had bitten her. She did the same when she saw her first dog, only this time she went on up over my face and stood on my head for extra safety, bawling at him just to try to get her now , that was all.

It was most discouraging. Blondin used to do that too, when he was frightened. One old man I know nearly signed the pledge on the spot the night he met me in the lane just after closing time and saw a squirrel yelling defiance at him from the top of my head with his tail bushed out like a flue brush. All the thanks I got, too, for assuring him that it really was a squirrel and not the first sign of DTs, was that he made a gate-to-gate tour of the village telling everybody I was potty. What they would say when they heard I went round now with a screaming cat on my head I shuddered to think.

When Sugieh's feet toughened up and she began to venture outside on her own we had more trouble. The first time she went into the garden unaccompanied she climbed up to the garage roof, slid down the back slope and fell into the water-butt. She got out by herself, stalked into the house stiff-legged with indignation and delivered such a harangue, while green, stagnant water dripped steadily off her tail onto our poor Indian carpet, that Charles slunk out in self-defence and made a cover for the butt on the spot. Unfortuntately the next time she went into the bathroom and saw Charles lying in the bath she remembered her own narrow escape, gave one horrified yell, and plunged in to the rescue. Charles had his eyes shut at the time and when Sugieh landed on his stomach screeching like a banshee it frightened him so much he leapt up and nearly stunned himself on the first-aid cabinet, which had been fixed over the bath in the first place to keep it out of Blondin's reach.

After that Sugieh fell into the bath so often trying to save us from drowning that we had to tie a notice to the taps reminding us to lock the door before we turned them on. Then – presumably to counteract the effect of getting wet so much – she took to standing, when she talked to us, with her rear bang up against the electric fire. Twice she caught the tip of her tail alight, though she was so busy lecturing us she never noticed it. On each occasion Charles threw himself across the room in a magnificent rugby tackle and put out the flame before it touched her skin, but he said it was bad for his heart at his age, and it wasn't doing mine much good either. In the end we had to buy small-mesh guards that completely spoiled the look of any room they were in, and tie them to every fire in the house with string.