Lynne Barrett-Lee - Able Seacat Simon

But since leaving Gibraltar, something very worrying had started happening; something that was beginning to make me question my previous assumption that, once the Amethyst had been repaired, and the crew had seen their families, we’d be off to our next posting on the South China Seas.

The worry was that strange new word ‘quarantine’. That curious word that Captain Kerans had first mentioned just as we’d left Hong Kong, and which I wished I had paid a great deal more attention to. This strange, worrying place where there’d be no rats to hunt – that much I had at least recalled.

I’d been hearing the word ‘quarantine’ here and there ever since. Not to me, particularly, but always in tones that made me sure it was something not so much to be excited about, but be borne.

I stood up on Jack’s lap now, arched my back and had a stretch, then settled down again and, because I knew he was in his best togs today, took care not to knead my front claws on his knees.

‘Daft, ain’t it?’ said Martin, who was similarly scrubbed up. The whole crew were, because once we docked, the ship’s company were going on parade again – their last in a run of them (I’d never seen so much spit-and-polishing) this one, the main one, through the streets of Plymouth. ‘You’d think they’d make an exception for him, wouldn’t you?’ he argued. ‘I mean it’s not like he’s going to be off being someone’s pet an’ that, is it? Not like he couldn’t just stick around with one of us till we’re off on our travels again.’

‘Yeah, but where?’ Jack said. ‘Someone would have to take him home, wouldn’t they? You know, back out into civvy street. And you’d hate that, you would, Blackie, trust me,’ he told me, running a big hand down my back. ‘Now you’ve got your sea legs, I reckon you’d find it pretty miserable. All those other cats, for one thing…’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Martin, grinning. ‘Who’s to say he wouldn’t meet a nice lady cat? Being such a good-looking tom now, and all.’

‘Not to mention a war hero,’ Paddy pointed out, while I was still trying to work out if I was to be given yet another name. Tom? Where had Tom come from?

‘Hey, Blackie, mate, that’s a point,’ said Jack. ‘You can show all the girls your medal!’

I had no idea why, but they seemed to find this extremely funny, because they laughed so much that they all fell about the mess and doubled up, and Jack’s lap suddenly became a wild, stormy sea. In fact, I only clung on till he choked on his ciggy, upon which I had to leap off and retire to a safe distance till he finished the resultant coughing fit.

He soon scooped me up again, and I wished so much that I could go home with him. With any of them. I’d be proud to. And yet it seemed I couldn’t. It was becoming chillingly clear that I wouldn’t be allowed to.

‘Tell you what, though,’ Jack said, cuddling me, ‘we’re going to miss you something awful. ‘’T ain’t right, is it? You being packed off like this. Perhaps Peggy got the best of it. But then, you’re a hero now, aren’t you? No question of not bringing you home. But don’t you worry, Blackie – they’ll make such a fuss of you once you’re there, you’ll see. Give you a proper hero’s welcome. You’ll be spoiled rotten by all those kennel maids. Just you wait. And we won’t leave you high and dry, mate,’ he added, tugging on one of my front paws. ‘A few of the lads don’t live so far away from where they’ll be taking you, me included. We’ll come visit you, okay? Promise. So you’ll have plenty of visitors to look forward to. You’ll see – those six months will fly by in a flash. Even if it’s that long, and I reckon it probably won’t be. You wait, you’ll pass muster with the powers that be and then we’ll be all of us – well, most of us, I reckon – back to sea.’

I tried to take this all in. In what sense might Peggy have had the best of it? What was the worst of it, then? What were they sending me to? If I was going there, I was going there, so I tried to think like Jack did. Tried to remember I must make the best of it. Tried to remember what Captain Griffiths had once said to me about both sailors and cats being so adaptable. To be reassured that my friends would come and visit me, just as they promised. That the time would pass quickly. That the kennel maids – whoever they were – would indeed make a fuss of me. But six months . Six whole months . That was how long he’d said it might be, hadn’t he? We’d been 101 days aground at Rose Island – which was barely half that. And if that had felt like forever and a day – which was how I remembered Jack himself had put it – then how long would my spell in the quarantine place feel?

I could hardly bear to think about it.

We were due to dock in Plymouth late morning. As we continued north, through a choppy, unfamiliar sea, I could sense a lifting of spirits around me the like of which I didn’t think I’d seen before, the men laughing and joshing with each other as we carved through the water, wearing our battle scars, as the captain put it, like bunting. There was much talk of things that were entirely new and strange to me. Talk of ‘Blighty’ and ‘sweethearts’ and ‘proper ale on draught, finally’, none of which – however hard I tried – I could understand, let alone share. I could only get the sense that, for most of the men, this place called Plymouth was a ‘coming to’ rather than a ‘leaving from’ kind of city; that there were loved ones here, precious humans, some of whose pictures I’d seen often, and who would apparently be waiting excitedly to greet them when we finally drew alongside wharf six.

I thought back to Stonecutters Island, the place where I’d been born, and tried to put myself in their shoes. How wonderful it must be for my shipmates, after everything that they’d been through, to know that soon they might catch a glimpse of the people they’d missed so much, whose few letters they had read and reread so many times. I tried to imagine – though I chased the thought away as if vermin itself – what it would feel like to see my mum waiting there on the dockside for me too.

But that wasn’t to be, and I had no choice but to accept it, however much I wished things were otherwise. I wished that we could sail right past this Plymouth (which from what I’d heard, and could now begin to see, looked cold and grey and regularly beset by sheets of heavy rain) and just head away again, fast, back out to the only home I now knew; the sea.

Instead I was bound for ‘quarantine’. I kept hearing the word in my head over and over again. Quarantine. Qu-ar-ant-ine . It was such a strange word; a word I’d never heard before the captain had mentioned it. And I was no nearer to understanding it when Jack had said it either. Where was quarantine? What was quarantine? In what way did you go ‘into’ it? And what was an animal supposed to do when it got there? For, from what Jack had half-explained, that much did seem to be clear. That only the animals from the Amethyst had to go in there – and since Peggy was longer there, she didn’t have to – and that, given what I’d been through, I’d be treated like a king. But I didn’t feel any the wiser about why we had to go there, or what naval duties might be required of me when I got there. If they didn’t have a rat problem, perhaps they had another. Plagues of lizards, perhaps? Voles? I didn’t think so, or else, why would they have needed Peggy? Peggy could no more catch a vole than her own tail. Was that why she’d left the Amethyst ? Because they hadn’t needed her in quarantine? That was still a mystery to me, too. And I was completely at a loss to know what I’d have to do in order to ‘pass muster’. Only that it was ‘the law’, and as Jack had made clear, no one – man or animal – was above that .