Дорин Тови: Cats In The Belfry

CATS IN THE BELFRY

This edition published in 2013 by Summersdale Publishers Ltd.

First published by Summersdale Publishers Ltd in 2005

Elek Books edition published 1957

(reprinted eight times)

Bantam Books edition published 1993

Copyright © Doreen Tovey 1957

The right of Doreen Tovey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Also by Doreen Tovey:

More Cats in the Belfry

Cats in May

A Comfort of Cats

Double Trouble

The Coming of Saska

The New Boy

Raining Cats and Donkeys

Donkey Work

CONTENTS

1 Can She Catch Mice?

2 Caesar's Daughter

3 Help! Kidnapped!

4 Trouble in the Valley

5 Trouble Everywhere

6 Enter Four Gladiators

7 Solomon the Great

8 Downfall of a Church Organ

9 Call Me Hiawatha

10 The Giant-Killer

11 Beshrewed

12 Death of a Fur Coat

13 Sheik Solomon

14 The Great Pheasant Mystery

15 Solomon's Romance

16 Three Years' Hard

ONE

Can She Catch Mice?

Our first Siamese was called Sugieh and we bought her because we had mice. The only excuse I can offer for such Philistine conduct is that they were not ordinary mice. They were the hangers-on of a pet squirrel we had, called Blondin, and over the years they had developed personalities as distinct from ordinary mice as Blondin was different from ordinary squirrels. As different, in fact, as Siamese are from ordinary cats.

During Blondin's lifetime the mice hadn't worried us overmuch. They were always there. Upstairs, downstairs and trekking to and from the wired-in run in the garden where, as the result of an unfortunate faux pas when he chewed a hole through the bottom of the sitting-room door one day while we were out, to get an apple, Blondin lived during the daytime.

But they were there on business, industriously tracking down the nuts and slices of bread which he was for ever stuffing under carpets and down the sides of chairs against a rainy day. And though it was a little disconcerting the first time I passed one on the landing, pattering along with a nut in its mouth like a dog carrying a bone, in the end I got quite used to them.

There was one who used to play deliberate hide-and-seek with me in the garden house. Eventually he became so tame that at the end of the game he would come out into the open, sit up on his haunches with a piece of bread sticking rakishly out of the corner of his mouth, and look up at me with the expression of an American millionaire wondering how much to offer for Cleopatra's Needle.

There was another one who, finding it impossible to squeeze out between the kitchen door and the outside doorstep one night with a nut in his mouth, left the nut under the door, nipped outside, and ingeniously started trying to hook it up by lying on the doorstep and fishing down through the gap with his paw.

I was scared stiff at the time. All I could see from inside the room was a nut jigging frantically up and down under the door, apparently of its own accord. Blondin, I knew, had nothing to do with it. He was in bed. During the long winter evenings he turned in early, scampering off upstairs to the wardrobe where he slept on a shelf, snoring small but audible snores, inside a pile of Charles's socks. I was so relieved when I spotted the fragile paw of a field mouse groping through the crack and realised that we weren't being invaded by poltergeists that I opened the door and put the nut outside. There was nobody there then, of course – but when I looked out again a few minutes later the nut had vanished.

Had things continued in this friendly vein I might have been writing a book about mice now, instead of Siamese cats. But one wet autumn Blondin caught a chill and died, and within a very short time we were in serious trouble. When the mice found there were no more nuts waiting for them down the sides of the chairs they started chewing holes in the loose covers. When they realised there were none hidden under the carpets they got mad and bit pieces out of those, too. They raided the budgerigar's cage for birdseed and frightened him practically into hysterics – he never had been a very strong bird anyway and was always moulting his tail feathers, and now they were falling out like autumn leaves.

They got into a dresser drawer they had never bothered with in the days of plenty and maliciously chewed all the corners off a big folded damask tablecloth that we only used on special occasions. The next time I opened it, there it was riddled with a pattern of stars and crescents like a Turkish flag and completely unusable. I could almost hear those mice sniggering their silly heads off – and that very night one of them, probably chosen by ballot, ambled airily up the eiderdown and over my face as I lay in bed, just to show me.

The last straw came a few mornings later when I opened the bread bin and discovered a very small field mouse frantically practising high jumps inside it. He must have sneaked in there for a quiet snack, got himself trapped when the lid was put on, and then completely lost his head. He had been trying for so long to get out by means of those tremendous panic-stricken leaps that they had become mechanical, and when I tipped him out onto the floor he covered the first few yards to the back door jumping like a kangaroo until he suddenly realised that he was free and shot out through the door like a rocket.

That was the end. We had already tried to replace Blondin with another squirrel, and had we been able to do so the balance between mouse and man might have been restored. Blondin himself we had found as a baby, lying injured under a tree, and we had never thought of him as a particularly unusual pet. Now, however, as we trudged the town pet shops, enquiring above a murderous cacophony of yelping puppies, mewing kittens, screeching parrots and glugging goldfish for a simple, ordinary little squirrel, it was obvious that the proprietors thought we were mad. Only the Regent's Park Zoo took us seriously – and they, in reply to our anguished pleading, informed us that they had a waiting list for squirrels.

The only thing to do, as we abhorred setting traps for any animal, was to get a cat and hope that after one or two short, sharp executions the mice would take the hint and go away. The trouble was, we weren't particularly keen on cats. We were afraid that if we had one it would attack the birds around the place, some of whom had already become quite tame. In any case, we said, where would we find a cat with the amusing little habits with which Blondin had endeared himself to us – things like biting through the case of Charles's watch to get at the tick, and chewing the corners off our library books or the buttons off people's trousers when they came to tea?