Lynne Barrett-Lee - Able Seacat Simon

Which made me think. Her tail ‘going’. What did that mean? Yet another thing to puzzle over. Shouldn’t I be concerned about her tail ‘going’? If a cat’s tail was moving – particularly at the frequency Peggy’s seemed to – that was definitely something for a kitten to be concerned about, particularly if the cat in question was considerably bigger. Was that not so for dogs? I wished I knew.

There were also the things people said, and were still saying to me, like, ‘Go easy on her, Blackie’ and, ‘She’s just a big old softie’, as if (and I really couldn’t fathom this at all) the fearsome one was actually me !

So I continued to observe her, and continued to ponder, and continued to make it my business to avoid her where possible, at least until I could make a bit more sense of things. I might have carried on doing so long into the future if it hadn’t been for the moment which probably had to come eventually, when I rounded a corner and she rounded another and there we were, face to face, on the quarterdeck, all alone.

For once, Peggy didn’t bark. Didn’t blink. Didn’t move. She just stood there for a second or two and stared at me. And, perhaps because she hadn’t barked – as yet – I stared right back at her. And then I noticed her tail, which was wagging behind her, like a jacaranda sapling that’s been caught in a stiff breeze.

Which means she likes you , I reminded myself, because that’s what they’d said, hadn’t they? And I kept trying to remember that, over and over, though with a marked lack of conviction. And then, quite without warning, she began walking towards me, trotting right up across the deck to me, all tongue and ears and eyeballs, and then, to my astonishment, she carried straight on past me!

I spun around. She did likewise. I spun again. She did too. And it was only after we’d danced around each other five or six times that I realised she wasn’t trying to catch me, or maul me, or have me for dinner, but in fact was doing exactly what a cat would (if only to a relative) – just having a sniff, to say hello.

Tentatively, anxiously, I moved around to return the compliment, trying hard to resist the instinct to run away.

I made the appropriate hello back, feeling it was a rather strange thing to be doing. After all, aside from rats and humans (though I’d obviously changed my mind about the humans), dogs had always been my mortal enemy. More importantly, I had no idea how to communicate with a dog either, and wasn’t quite sure where to start.

Happily, as I stood there dithering, wondering if I should continue with the sniffing, two young ratings clattered up the deck towards us, both carrying mops and buckets.

‘Would you look at these two?’ one said, putting his bucket down with a clang. ‘See? Told you they’d be fine when it came to it, didn’t I?’

‘Woof!’ said Peggy, seeing them both. ‘Woof woof woof woof!’

Then she scampered back off down the deck and disappeared into a passageway.

I felt no such compulsion. In fact, quite the opposite. I sat down on the deck and began furiously washing my hindquarters. A dog. I had just been licked by a dog. I really didn’t know what to think.

The stars, when at sea, looked magnificent. They’d be magnificent anywhere, because stars can’t help but sparkle, but when viewed from the ocean, many miles away from the land, they have a brightness and depth and complexity and beauty that is beyond anything that exists on the earth.

They were also a constant – a reminder that no matter how far I travelled, I could look up and see the same sky above me as I had as a kitten in Hong Kong. And it was comforting to think that, no matter where my new life as a ship’s cat might now take me, my mother could – and, I hoped, did – still watch over me.

On board ship, though, every aspect of my life was now different – so much so that I sometimes had to stop and take stock of quite how much it had changed since the day George had smuggled me aboard.

For starters, I was living on the sea rather than the land, which was a very strange business for a cat, not least because my mother had been quite right about water, and how much I disliked being ‘wet through’. Curiously, though, it was a much drier world than the one I’d left on dry land. Yes, there were times when it was necessary to keep away from mops and buckets, but there was never any issue of having to hunt in teeming rain, to leap puddles, or to pad through muddy gloop.

Neither did I now have to defend my ‘territory’ – something I’d only just begun to understand as a concept when George had taken me from the harbour, and one that, as a young kitten, had always loomed rather threateningly. Having a territory might be necessary, but there was nothing nice about it, as it seemed mostly to comprise a non-stop round of boundary-patrolling, invariably involving lots of angry confrontations, facing up to cats with bigger expansion plans than I had.

But all that – to my great joy – was a thing of the past now. Here there would be no such confrontations to have to deal with. Well, bar perhaps the odd one with Peggy. But as it had quickly become obvious that Peggy’s idea of ‘confrontation’ was to greet you as if she loved you more than anything in the world, the only worry there was the foulness of her well-meaning tongue, dogs not being so particular as cats in matters of personal hygiene.

Though I did, I supposed, still have a kind of territory to patrol. No longer one of trees, sand and blossoms, and things that roosted, cawed and crawled, but one of steel and salty spray, enamel, oil and engines, of machines and the materials of men. A territory of ladders, too, which I had finally found the means to negotiate, and which had turned out to be not quite so terrifying as I’d supposed. No, it wasn’t easy to go down a ladder, and at first I’d made laborious diversions to avoid doing so. But when there was no option but to descend one, I had no choice but to be courageous and, bit by bit – to my great delight – I managed to conquer my fear.

Moreover, it was a territory I found myself sharing very willingly – an occurrence that never ceased to amaze me, not least because of how natural it had quickly come to feel. Should it have? On this point I was still very baffled, because adult cats (as far as I knew) shunned company and lived alone, and that was supposedly the way they preferred it.

Yet here I was sharing my territory, very happily, with some one hundred and seventy humans and a dog, name of Peggy. A dog . A real, living, breathing, actual dog. Sometimes I’d wake up from a nap in the captain’s cap, then see or hear Peggy, and think I must surely still be dreaming.

Most pleasing and surprising was how much I loved my human family, and no less was the revelation of how much they seemed to love me too.

Yes, I’d come on board with George, but he’d laid no particular claim to me, clear from the outset that I (together with the good luck I would apparently confer on their endeavours) was to be there for them all. Though I reported to Captain Griffiths, I was very much there for everyone, and though they couldn’t possibly know just how much I understood of them (that human thing again) it quickly seemed I had another role to play aboard the Amethyst – to be the official recipient of sailors’ secrets.

Whether I was in one of the officers’ cabins, or somewhere in the packed after-mess, every sailor seemed to have things in his head that he kept to himself. So it was that my role began not just as a rat catcher, but as a confidant as well, hearing all about the things they seemed to find it difficult to share with one another – the same sorts of things, in the main, that I would share with the moon when sitting on the end of my jetty. I heard about crushes and sweethearts, fiancées and wives. About their families, about the children and animals whose images danced across various bulkheads; about the babies a few of my friends had apparently fathered, but, heart-breakingly, had yet to even meet. I heard of memories and musings, regrets and resolutions, recriminations, and sometimes, when days at sea became rain-sodden and endless, it was my job to curl up close while one of my friends had a cry, which was sometimes upsetting for them, but at other times, also a blessing. ‘You’re a good listener, Blackie,’ they’d whisper, furiously drying their eyes. ‘And I know you’ll keep mum.’