Susan Finden - Casper the Commuting Cat - The True Story of the Cat Who Rode the Bus and Stole Our Hearts

‘What a filthy thing you are, Casper,’ I’d scold. On more than one occasion I said to Chris that our new arrival was a typical boy who couldn’t be bothered having a good scrub until it became absolutely unavoidable.

‘Look at the state of you!’ I’d chide. ‘Your white bits are yellow, and your feet are black! Do you want me to give you a bath?’ He’d stare back at me, and I could almost hear him thinking, ‘Just you dare’. On the few occasions I did take a cloth to him, I was shredded to bits and came to the conclusion that I’d leave him to his own devices. He was a very determined creature in so many ways. This became even more apparent as the days turned into weeks and then months.

Tuppence was the exact opposite. In fact, he washed himself so much, he licked patches of his fur away. When we had KP and Peanut, the sisters, Peanut used to spend all day washing the other cats. She’d travel the whole room and I’d watch some of them following little Peanut with their eyes, waiting for their turn, knowing what a dedicated job she’d do.

Gradually, Casper came into his own. He hid under the bed less and less, but I still kept him and Tuppence indoors. Tuppence had been in the rescue home for two months and Casper for ten, so I didn’t want them to go outside until they fully realized that this was their home and the place they needed to return to when they did escape. I closed off the cat flap and placed litter trays around, but Casper was dead set on getting out – another way in which he showed his determined nature. Eventually, I had to let them out, as Casper in particular was making such a fuss. He never had a proper miaow, just a pathetic little squeak, and I started to melt a bit too easily when he sat at the front door making that sound to get out.

One of our older cats, Clyde, had a bad back, so I’d constructed a ladder for him to manoeuvre his way around. The garden was on different levels, almost sunken in places, and I’d put a plank from the ground to the top of the fence, with lots of smaller pieces of wood going across it. Everyone else would copy, Clyde in order to climb up and walk around the walls.

It wasn’t long before Casper started to disappear. He’d hop up on the wooden planks and skip over into other gardens. I generally tried to get him home after a couple of hours, but he would only come in his own sweet time. I tried not to worry about him, but he was the wanderer of the gang. My anxiety lessened, as I assumed that he was investigating gardens nearby. Then one day, about six months after we first brought Casper home, I got a phone call that enlightened me about the sort of cat we’d brought into our lives.

CHAPTER 6

Casper Finds His Paws

Casper started to go out quite a lot. He changed from being the scared little cat hiding under the bed into a very confident fellow who knew his own mind. I often wondered what was going through that mind, as he frequently seemed to have his own agenda. When we first brought him home, I would never have guessed that he would become so determined to go out on his own terms whenever he felt like it. I always worried about my cats, so I tried to keep them inside whenever possible, but Casper was having none of it.

Once he’d settled with us, he broke a number of windows and even attacked nailed down cat flaps in his desire not to be an indoors puss. I made sure he had a disc attached to his collar with his name and my number on it for when he did wander, in case he got lost or something happened to him I was beginning to think that my initial assessment of him had been spot on: he wasn’t shy or scared when he first came to us; he was stubborn. More of his stubborn streak was being revealed practically every day.

One afternoon, the phone rang as I got back from a shift at work. As soon as a woman asked, ‘Have you got a cat called Casper?’ my heart sank.

I hadn’t seen him that morning before I left and my immediate response came from the heart. ‘Oh my God – he’s dead, isn’t he?’

She laughed kindly, ‘No, he’s fine – actually, he’s in my work car park.’

I asked where that was and was shocked when she said the offices were over a mile and a half away. How on earth had he got there? The possibilities were endless and I had to assume that most likely he’d walked, or maybe he got into someone’s car and popped out when they arrived at work.

As I didn’t drive, I caught the bus to the car park with a basket in my hand. When I picked Casper up, I felt the same mix of emotions that he would inspire in me throughout his many adventurous years: relief that he was safe and anger that he could have been in danger ‘You are a naughty boy, Cassie. Why do you have to get me so worried? Why can’t you just stay at home rather than wander around?’

I couldn’t be cross at him for long as I was so pleased he was coming home again. Although when I realized that the bus had long gone and I would have to walk the full distance after a tiring day at work, carrying a wriggling cat in an uncomfortable wicker basket, I probably did have a few more comments!

Casper’s escapade decided my next course of action: he would have to get chipped. If he had an accident or got lost, then at least I would stand a chance of getting him back again if a vet could scan him and get my details from the national database. I made the appointment for the very next day.

In the morning, I gave him a talking to as I got myself ready. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘This is for your own good. You’re a bit of a wanderer, aren’t you?’ He looked up at me as if he understood every word. ‘Well, it looks like I can’t do much about that, but I can make sure that you can find your way back to me if you ever get lost.’ My tone softened as I gazed at this cat I already loved so much. ‘Oh, Casper, please try to stay close to home. I don’t want to lose you.’

I took Casper into the surgery and plopped him down on the table to have him scanned. ‘He’s chipped already,’ said the vet.

‘What?’ I shrieked. I hadn’t expected that and would have thought the cat rescue people would have given me that information when I took him home.

The vet asked me what I was going to do, but it seemed quite clear to me: Casper wasn’t my cat. There was somebody out there, distraught that their cat had been missing for some time, possibly assuming that he was dead. ‘I have to find out who he’s registered to,’ I said. ‘And I’ll have to give him back, won’t I?’

I went home with a heavy heart. Casper scooted out of his basket and went upstairs without a care in the world, as I threw myself down on the sofa and wondered what I would do without him. He had already become such a big part of our lives that I couldn’t bear to think about giving him up. It would undoubtedly be the right thing to do and I just had to focus on that.

I rang Cats Protection as soon as I felt able to. After I’d told them what had happened and given them the registration number the vet had found, the woman from Cats Protection called the company that keeps all the details. The time passed very slowly as I waited to hear what they’d learned. Within thirty minutes, she rang me back with a request that delighted me, but which perplexes me to this day. ‘Sue, please keep him,’ she pleaded. ‘There’s no way he can go back to the place he came from; it would be heartbreaking. Please, will you let him stay with you?’

Of course this was what I’d wanted all along. I loved Casper dearly, but what was going on? All I could get from her was that he’d been living in a terrible environment and Cats Protection couldn’t allow him to go back there. I got the impression that Casper had escaped from whatever horrible life he’d led and lived rough for a while before being taken to the rescue centre by some kind person ten months before I re-homed him.