Tovey, Doreen - Raining Cats and Donkeys

There was no answer from Charles. Looking around from my position on Annabel's right I discovered that, suddenly, there was no Charles, either. Peering over Annabel's broad brown back I saw him kneeling, red-faced, on her other side. When I asked what he was doing he staggered to his feet and began limping in circles himself. Slipped on the ice, he informed me. Broken his kneecap (which he hadn't, actually; fortunately it was only bruised). Couldn't I do something, he demanded, continuing to reel in circles and at the same time hold his knee, which was quite a feat on the slippery ice. I was laughing so much I nearly fell down myself. Not to make a fuss , I said hysterically. Remember what he'd told me . People might hear , and what on earth would they think?

Charles had to laugh himself at that, and Annabel, chewing placidly away at her cigarette packet, glanced curiously at us over her shoulder. Couple of nut cases was her verdict.

Robertson seconded that before the winter was out. By this time he had taken to sleeping in the garage. Annabel was all right , he explained to us in his reedy little voice the first time we found him there, but she would walk in and out over the snow and it made the straw all damp to sleep on, whereas in the garage there was nice dry hay. Just the thing for a cat like him in weather like this, he wheedled, weaving ingratiatingly round our legs. Helped keep the mice away, he proffered as an additional inducement, seeing that we were obviously wavering. So now he slept in the garage, had his milk in there to make sure he got it himself instead of a donkey who was already overweight, and though Annabel nudged him pettishly when he joined her in the mornings by way of reproach for his absence, he merely brushed his bushy tail against her nose, assured her that he'd been on important business where donkeys couldn't go, and settled down to breakfast.

Solomon's activities at this time being given over to bird watching in the yard outside the kitchen, while Sheba, complaining that it made her feet cold, rarely went outside at all, Robertson now took to accompanying Charles most possessively from garage to donkey-house, and from donkey-house back to garage. Probably for the first time in years he had a feeling of belonging, which was undoubtedly how the trouble arose.

The Hazells went to London for a weekend, asking us to stoke their Aga and feed their ginger cat, Rufus, while they were away. The first night we went up Rufus was ready and waiting, one eye on the Aga and the other on the refrigerator. The next morning he was there too, bawling vociferously for us to get cracking with the tin-opener, that was the tin he fancied today. That night he was missing, however, and it was only after we'd been there quite a few minutes, stoking the Aga and refilling the fuel hod, that I spotted him watching us through the window.

He was sitting out on the lawn, at the edge of the light patch cast by the kitchen window. Perhaps he was suddenly nervous of us, we thought. Resentful maybe of the fact that there were strangers in his house. He had his own way in, but, wishing to see him eat before we left, we went to the door and called him. He came to the threshold but would come no further, so Charles picked him up. His hand raked from stem to stern, Charles hastily put him down again. This was the way to carry a strange cat, I said, grasping him by the scruff of his neck, my other hand taking the weight of his feet, and scuttling speedily in to deposit him in the hall. Rufus bolted immediately through the lounge door, which was open, and sat just inside it, on the edge of the divan. There he stayed in the semi-darkness while we clattered his food-dishes, rattled the tin-opener and made enticing noises from the kitchen. Finally we gave it up, wished him goodnight as we passed, and unlatched the front door. What made me go back and take a closer look at him in the torchlight I don't know – but when I did, it wasn't Rufus at all. It was Robertson.

He'd said he didn't want to go in, he protested as I hurried him out. He didn't like being in houses, anyway, he said as we found the real Rufus hiding behind the coalbunker, carried him in and gave him his supper at last. Only came to go walks with Charles, wailed Robertson plaintively from the garden.

Waving the empty tin under his nose we enticed him home so he wouldn't disturb Rufus, locked him in the garage for the night with some supper of his own, and went back to our fireside. Solomon sniffed suspiciously at us for the rest of the night like Sherlock Holmes, saying we'd been with other cats. Sheba went and sat in the hall as the nearest thing she could think of to leaving home without getting her feet cold. Honestly, we couldn't win!

SEVEN

And Spring is Far Behind

That was the winter we became so friendly with the blackbird. He'd been with us for years; chivvying us for food from the corner of the woodshed roof in the mornings; baiting Solomon, when he felt in a merry mood, by fluttering low across the lawn with Fatso leaping like a trout in pursuit; turning ragged as a scarecrow every summer because he was by no means young and raising families at the rate he raised them certainly took it out of a bird.

This particular winter, however, he took to actually coming into the kitchen when he wanted food, walking flat-footedly through the door at ground level like a clockwork penguin on a pavement in Oxford Street. Sheba, who never missed anything, promptly took to sitting behind the door waiting for him. Solomon – without the faintest idea of what they were in ambush for but he always joined Sheba if he saw her doing anything interesting – took to sitting hopefully alongside her. A situation that gave us a dozen fits a day until we discovered that the blackbird was a lot wiser than he looked. Peer through the partly open door, which had to be kept ajar even in the coldest weather otherwise Solomon used it as a Wailing Wall, battering frantically at it howling to be let out, he couldn't breathe, claustrophobia was setting in – and there, while two Siamese waited expectantly on one side, the blackbird, with his head cocked, stood listening intently on the other. Waiting till they went away before he pattered familiarly in, and he never made a mistake.

He made a mistake in another direction, however. He took to staying up late to see us. If we got home at dusk on a winter's evening, there, long after the other birds had gone to roost, a solitary little black figure sat waiting on the coalhouse roof, chattering, presumably to tell us all the day's doings, as we came down the path.

One night we came home well after dark, trudging down the hill from the farm through the snow, and while Charles opened up the garage to get Annabel's hay, I went on into the cottage, switching on the porch and hall lights as I did so. There was no sign of the blackbird. At that time of night we wouldn't have expected him. I was halfway through the hall when I heard a noise as of a bird crashing against the window and rushed outside again. There was no sign of anything. No bird lying stunned in the snow. No bird anywhere in the garden. Charles said he wouldn't be so stupid, anyway, as to be trying to contact us at that time of night. But – roused presumably by my switching on the porch light – he must have been. The next morning, when we opened the kitchen door, he was squatting on the coalhouse roof with his legs folded under him. Damaged by the bang on the window, and now what were we to do?

He wouldn't let us near enough to catch him, and we were obviously only frightening him by our attempts, so we did the best we could by throwing a large sheet of cardboard on to the lawn where it would catch the sun. Throwing it, because that way it landed like a raft on a three-foot depth of untrammelled snow which even the most determined pair of Siamese were unlikely to cross unless they could borrow a sledge.