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Twice more he emerged like a little black Houdini, until I’d laced down all four corners and, for good measure, all round the sides as well.

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Now he couldn’t get out. In fact, as the weather was warmer we put Sheba in with him for company and he didn’t want to get out. They had a rug in there, their water bowl, a plate of food and an earthbox (the latter two to meet Seeley’s requirements) and at last we had some peace. People spotted the cage through the trees and began to speculate, of course. ‘Wonder what they got in there?’ said one. ‘Looks like they’m keeping rabbits now,’ said another. ‘That’s to stop the new one from getting bitten,’ said somebody else who’d obviously heard about the adder.

Miss Wellington had heard about it, too. She was now going around in slacks. ‘On account of the snakes,’ she told the postman. And though there was no reason why she shouldn’t wear slacks – people much older than she wore them nowadays, though not usually in psychedelic pink – villages being what they are, and Miss Wellington having hitherto been seen only in long tweed skirts except in high summer when she wore long and drooping voiles, there was certainly some excitement over that.

‘They old snakes’d better watch out or they’ll die of shock when they sees she,’ opined Fred Ferry. ‘Got her eye on old Bill Porter, I reckons,’ said Father Adams – Bill Porter being a widower and well over eighty. ‘Not if I sees she first,’ said Bill Porter when they chaffed him, while Miss Wellington tripped skittishly in her slacks among her toadstools.

We, meanwhile, having solved the problem of keeping Seeley safe for a guaranteed hour or two a day, still had to keep watch on him when he wasn’t in the cage. He couldn’t be locked up all the time. He had to have his periods of freedom. And have such periods he did, while I walked with him in the Forestry lane, sat patiently near him while 149

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he investigated the hedgerows and played happy games of tag with him in the grass.

‘He ought to learn to stay in the garden some times though,’ said Charles. ‘Not be like Solomon; always out through the gate.’ So the next thing that appeared on the lawn was a permanent pile of peasticks, and I excavated the clock golf hole.

The peasticks were an accident. Charles, having pruned some of the branches off the nut tree by the coalhouse, left them in a pile on the lawn until he had time to move them (he just had to get on with putting up the nets, he said; those birds weren’t going to beat him) and there Seeley found them and said they made a super ambush. As he could be guaranteed to stay under them for at least twenty minutes after he was first let out in the morning (spying on the birds, leaping out at the bees, and occasionally landing on Sheba) it was obviously worth leaving them there. There they still remain, too, though now they have been there for months, with a little cat lurking under them and people wondering why we haven’t moved them.

The clock golf hole was deliberate. Solomon, when he was young, had been very fond of clock golf. It kept him on the lawn for ages – one of us putting the ball while Solomon either chased it, tail high, across the grass, or practically stood on his head in the hole. He liked it so much that once, when a visitor mislaid her car keys, at a time when Solomon was given to carrying things in his mouth, we’d found those where nobody but he could have put them; down the clock golf hole on the lawn.

Over the years the habit had died out, however. The numbers were somewhere in the woodshed, the hole 150

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had long since filled in. Until I, hoping it might similarly interest Seeley, found the hole and cleared it out and got out the clubs.

It was more than hope. I had the feeling that if Seeley would play this game that was so personally Solomon’s, it would prove there was a connecting link. That there was an inherited line of behaviour running through them which would make Seeley more and more like my first friend.

It was quite uncanny. One tap of the ball into the hole when the game was ready, and it was as though Solomon was with us all over again. The same exaggerated prancing after the ball; the same clowning around the hole; the same excited tearing onto the lawn when I picked up a club in the kitchen. Sheba had never been interested in clock golf; nor had Sugieh, Solomon and Sheba’s mother. Was I right?

One could get another just the same?

Now another big seal-point cat crouched by the clock golf hole while passers-by stared incredulously over the gate. ‘Whass he doing then. Keeping goal?’ enquired Father Adams. And then, unusually for him, who was never sentimental – ‘Takes ’ee back, don’t it… watching

’un,’ he said.

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SIXTEEN

One by one a good many things were emerging to take us back.

When we first had Seeley, for instance, he’d been very scared of cars. Probably his mother had warned him to be careful of them. When one came past, anyway, even if he was safely in the garden, Seeley would crouch in terror and run indoors.

‘At least we won’t have that worry,’ we’d said, remembering the time when Solomon only had to spot a car parked in the lane to be under it, on it – or preferably, if the owner had left a window open, inside it – before we could say Jack Robinson. And now here we were with the lighter evenings, people parking their cars to go for a stroll – and Seeley, at nine months old, as interested in motor vehicles as Solomon had been. Under them, on them – he hadn’t yet found one with the window open, but he peered interestedly in through the windscreens just as Solomon had done.

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‘Doesn’t he look like him?’ I said as we sped out to get him in and to wipe the telltale footprints off yet another car. ‘He does,’ said Charles. ‘And he acts like him, too. I only hope we have the strength to keep on running.’

Spring was now turning to early summer. You couldn’t win, said Charles, coming in from his fruit trees one day. He’d kept the frost off them. He’d kept the birds off them. And now guess what? He’d gone up to see how they were doing and there was a blasted snail on one of them. Under the net, right on the top, just sticking its neck out for a shoot.

It looked like being a good crop all the same. And the weather was warm and the grass was high and Nature was absolutely abounding. Seeley was in his seventh heaven. One day Charles found him out by the stream, happily ambushing the bees. He’d discovered the spot where they came down for water and was crouched there watching them land. Another day, seeing him intently studying another part of the stream

– in the long grass beside the gate – Charles investigated cautiously to see what was there… Seeley, saucer-eyed, was watching a toad. A big one, and beautifully marked, said Charles. We very rarely saw them around ourselves.

Now, too, the time was approaching for the village fête, where for the second year running Annabel had been asked to give donkey rides. We’d been a bit apprehensive the first time because she wasn’t used to it, but she’d behaved herself very well. She’d given twenty-eight donkey rides and earned fourteen shillings, and only stopped dead twice.

Since then, what was more, she’d been trained. A teenager in the village, who was an excellent rider herself, had taught her small sister to ride on Annabel, who was now a fully-fledged riding donkey.