Doris Lessing - An Old Woman and Her Cat

He found Hetty, apparently asleep, wrapped loosely in a blanket, propped sitting in a corner. Her head had fallen on her chest, and her quantities of white hair had escaped from a scarlet woollen cap, and concealed a face that was flushed a deceptive pink – the flush of coma from cold. She was not yet dead, but she died that night. The rats came up the walls and along the planks and the cat fled down and away from them, limping still, into the bushes.

Hetty was not found for a couple of weeks. The weather changed to warm, and the man whose job it was to look for corpses was led up the dangerous stairs by the smell. There was something left of her, but not much.

As for the cat, he lingered for two or three days in the thick shrubberies, watching the passing people and beyond them, the thundering traffic of the main road. Once a couple stopped to talk on the pavement, and the cat, seeing two pairs of legs, moved out and rubbed himself against one of the legs. A hand came down and he was stroked and patted for a little. Then the people went away.

The cat saw he would not find another home, and he moved off, nosing and feeling his way from one garden to another, through empty houses finally into an old churchyard. This graveyard already had a couple of stray cats in it, and he joined them. It was the beginning of a community of stray cats going wild. They killed birds, and the field mice that lived among the grasses, and they drank from puddles. Before winter had ended the cats had had a hard time of it from thirst, during the two long spells when the ground froze and there was snow and no puddles and the birds were hard to catch because the cats were so easy to see against the clean white. But on the whole they managed quite well. One of the cats was a female, and soon there were a swarm of wild cats, as wild as if they did not live in the middle of a city surrounded by streets and houses. This was just one of half a dozen communities of wild cats living in that square mile of London.

Then an official came to trap the cats and take them away. Some of them escaped, hiding till it was safe to come back again. But Tibby was caught. Not only was he getting old and stiff – he still limped from the rat’s bite – but he was friendly, and did not run away from the man, who had only to pick him up in his arms.

‘You’re an old soldier, aren’t you?’ said the man. ‘A real tough one, a real old tramp.’

It is possible that the cat even thought that he might be finding another human friend and a home.

But it was not so. The haul of wild cats that week numbered hundreds, and while if Tibby had been younger a home might have been found for him, since he was amiable, and wished to be liked by the human race, he was really too old, and smelly and battered. So they gave him an injection and, as we say, ‘put him to sleep’.

About the Author

Doris May Lessing was born of British parents in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 and was taken to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) when she was five years old. She spent her childhood on a large farm there and first came to England in 1949. She brought with her the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing , which was published with outstanding success in Britain, America and ten European countries.

For over fifty years she has been writing provocative, inventive and influential works, ranging from novels, short stories and science fiction to autobiography, drama, poetry, essays and operas. Since publishing The Grass is Singing , Lessing’s international reputation has flourished. Among her other celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook , The Summer Before the Dark and Memoirs of a Survivor . She has also published two volumes of her autobiography, Under my Skin (which received the James Tait Black Prize) and Walking in the Shade . The collection of short novels, Five , earned Lessing the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954. The French translation of The Golden Notebook (1962) won the Prix Medici in 1976. In 1982 she received the Austrian State Prize for Literature and the Shakespeare Prize, Hamburg. Lessing has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times: Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Sirian Experiments (1981) and The Good Terrorist (1985) and won the WH Smith Award in 1985. In August 1991, she received an honorary title of Distinguished Fellow in Literature in the School of English and American Studies conferred by University of East Anglia as well as receiving an honorary degree from Harvard University in 1995.

Lessing has turned down an OBE and a Damehood, but accepted her appointment as a Companion of Honour in 1999, awarded to those who have done ‘conspicuous national service’. In 2001 she was awarded the Spanish Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, the David Cohen British Literature Prize and received a Companion of Honour from the Royal Society for Literature. She was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and received S. T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature.

In 2007 Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Read on

A selection of other books by Doris Lessing

On Cats

Doris Lessing’s love affair with cats began at a young age, when she became intrigued with the semi-feral creatures on the African farm where she grew up. Her fascination remained undiminished by the handsome domesticated creatures who shared her flats and her life in London and grew into real love with El Magnifico, the awkwardly lovable cat who in his later years suffered the great indignity of becoming a three-legged beast.

Consisting of Doris Lessing’s celebrated collection of stories, ‘Particularly Cats and Rufus’, and the poignant though unsentimental memoir, ‘The Old Age of El Magnifico’, this book is a brilliant evocation of feline existence.

‘Not really about cats at all, it’s about real characters.’ Daily Mail

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Penniless, rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on London’s Embankment. Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge white bird.

Identified as Charles Walker, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown: both his young wife, Felicity, and his mistress, Constance, have been troubled by his cold detachment; his fellow dons are bewildered by Watkins’s recent anti-social outburst and anarchistic theories on the futility of education. As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually acquires a greater reality than the everyday …

‘A brilliant, disturbing book … her most adventurous, imaginative experiment. She allows her didactic, satirical ideas about our civilization memorable expression.’ TLS

Copyright

Fourth Estate

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Doris Lessing 1972

This short story is from The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two (Flamingo, 2002, previously published by Flamingo 1994, Triad Panther 1979, Jonathan Cape 1978)

It originally appeared in The Story of a Non-Marrying Man

Doris Lessing asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Ebook Edition © 2013 ISBN: 9780007525768

Version 1

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental