Lynne Barrett-Lee - Able Seacat Simon

I was so full of fear by now that I knew I couldn’t be held responsible for my actions. Yet still Jack held on to me. Tightly. Then came a ‘woof’! Then a laugh. Then another and another. And there before me, as big and brown and horrible as I’d imagined, stood a dog – an actual dog! It barked again.

The details were a blur. Ears and teeth and whites-of-eyes and general brutal fearsomeness. So there was nothing for it. With no thought for skin or cloth or, indeed, tins of herring, I struggled my hardest, and finally scrabbled my way out of Jack’s grip, up his shoulder, over his head and to the highest place available. Which wasn’t nearly high enough (it being the top end of a stowed hammock) as the she-dog called Peggy, who was still barking – ‘Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof!’ – launched herself up on hind legs that were altogether too long for comfort, and kept on going ‘woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof!’, while the men, to a man, just stood and let her!

Well, bar Jack, who was cussing and dabbing at his face. ‘Ruddy hell , Blackie!’ he complained. ‘Thanks a bunch !’

‘Well, what d’you expect?’ laughed a young sailor called Martin, who was standing next to him. ‘That he’d pop a paw out and say how d’you do? Nice to meet you? C’mon, Peg, pipe down, will you? Come away now. It’s just the cat.’

‘He’ll have her eye out, an’ all,’ observed the one called Paddy, looking at Jack. ‘He’s certainly got some claws on him for a little ’un,’ he added, inspecting the blood that was now running down Jack’s face. ‘Quite a scram, that. Here, get him down,’ he said, grabbing Peggy by the thick leather collar that I belatedly realised was fastened around her neck. Which was a relief, but only briefly, because, far from reassuring me of my safety, it only seemed to endorse the fact that she was every bit as dangerous as I’d feared. Still, I was grateful. At least for the half-second before I realised that George (who’d now arrived in the after-mess as well) was intent on getting me down from my place of safety, despite the desperation with which I now hissed at him.

‘You’re alright,’ he soothed, though he wrenched me bodily off the canvas even so. And with scant regard for my claws, which were very keen to stay attached to it. ‘Here you go,’ he said, ‘come on, boy – you might as well get used to her. Gotta rub along, you two have, after all, haven’t you? You’re shipmates! And she wouldn’t hurt you, honest –’

‘It’s not Blackie I’d be worried about,’ Jack pointed out, with apparent feeling. Had I not been so terrified that I thought I might pass out, I’d have had more space in my head to feel terrible about his face. As it was, though, I didn’t, because I was trapped in George’s hands now, and was being manoeuvred to within inches of the slobbering animal’s face. Did they not realise ? Could they not see ? It could eat me in a couple of mouthfuls! Yes, I could see that it – she, whatever – was being tethered to one of my human friends by that collar of hers, but the fact that he not only held her but also straddled her with his knees didn’t inspire confidence. Was she really that difficult to restrain? And if so, what were they thinking? Had the whole ship gone completely insane?

‘Come on, Blackie,’ George was saying. ‘See, she’s just a big old softie.’ For which statement there seemed to only be evidence to the contrary, because even as he said it the dog kept going ‘woof woof woof woof!’ and her tail kept going ‘thwack thwack thwack thwack!’ against Paddy’s legs.

I drew my lips back – I had teeth too, and I wasn’t afraid to use them – and though I couldn’t escape George’s clutches I also had claws. There was nothing for it. I pinged them forth again, shot a paw out and made a sideways swipe at the horrible animal’s nose.

And, inexplicably, I was suddenly free! How had that happened? George must have decided to let go of me, I decided. So I hit the ground running, and I ran for my very life. As I bounded away I heard the bark change to a yowling, and Jack saying, ‘Well, that went well, didn’t it?’

But it seemed Peggy hadn’t followed me – or she hadn’t been allowed to. That was the main thing. So perhaps they weren’t going to let her get to me, after all. Just to be sure, though, I decided I’d abandon that evening’s rat hunt, and hide in the safety and sanctuary of the officers’ wardroom instead. At least till I had recovered from my shock and fright.

Which, bafflingly, nobody seemed to be paying any heed to. I could still hear them all laughing, even out on the upper deck.

So I was living, and I was definitely learning. I soon learned that there were two reasons why it had taken so long for me to meet Peggy – the first being that, being a dog, she tended to sleep when it was dark, like most of the humans, and – as yet, anyway – was never ordered to do any night watches. And the second was that she’d spent several days confined to ‘barracks’, having managed to get a rusty nail wedged in her foot (I remembered my mum telling me that dogs could be prone to such mishaps) and had been made to stay safe inside while it healed.

It healed. And once that happened it became clear that there would be no means of avoiding her, despite the great pains I took over the next couple of days to ensure that I wouldn’t bump into her – or that I wasn’t in a position where I could be forced into a confined space and risk being made to ‘meet’ her again.

But there would be no way around it in the longer term. That was the thing that really galled me and worried me. I would have to find some way to live with this creature, for if I couldn’t, what on earth would I do? I was official ‘ship’s cat’ (a post I was proud to hold now, and which I loved) and Peggy, to my mortification, was apparently the ship’s dog, and since we were aboard the same ship there really wasn’t any way around it. We would both have to do what Captain Griffiths had already ordered. We would just have to learn to ‘rub along’.

But how could that work? I spent many an hour pondering that problem. It didn’t just fill me with anxiety and dread, it went against everything my mother had told me. And not only because of what she’d told me – cats and dogs, kitten. No. And that’s all you need to know – just stay well away from them – but also because it had been a dog that had killed her. How could I ever forget that?

Except, had it? No, in truth, it had not. It had been the car that had killed her. Yes, it was true that it had been a dog who’d been chasing her, causing her to run blindly into the road – something she would never have done otherwise. But it had been the car that had actually killed her, so though it upset me to question my mother, I now did. I no longer had a choice in the matter, did I?

And little by little, despite the clamouring of my instincts, I began to get a sense that the fearsome Peggy she-dog might not be quite as fearsome as she’d first seemed. There were little things, for example, that didn’t make sense to me, such as a couple of days later, when I was taking advantage of a sunny spot up on one of the whalers, and Petty Officer Griffiths – yes, same name as the captain – passed below me. Peggy was trotting at his side – and just getting used to that was hard enough in itself. But then she’d barked at me – as frantically as ever – and I’d naturally hissed down at her, and then Petty Officer Griffiths had said, with something of a note of exasperation, ‘Look, Simon – she just wants to be friends with you. See? Look at her tail going! She likes you. She does .’