Tovey, Doreen - Raining Cats and Donkeys

There usually was. From who pulled the bells wrong on Sunday to the way some hapless newcomer was growing his potatoes, they were always in a state over something. This time, however, it appeared that disaster had really struck.

A Mr Carey had bought a cottage in the lane adjoining the side entrance to the pub. He'd decided to build a garage at the side of the cottage and to alter his existing gate and run-in, which was right outside his front door, to an entrance further along that would also serve the garage. While he was walling up the old entrance he'd further decided to front it with what he considered to be an improvement – a steep bank of earth, in line with the other grass verges along the lane, planted with heather roots that he'd brought back from his walks.

Unfortunately other people didn't see it like that. The old way in, being right opposite the pub's side entrance, had been the one place in the whole lane where cars could squeeze past while the brewery lorry was unloading. Every time there was a beer delivery now there was a queue of car owners honking agitatedly to pass. The brewery driver got bad-tempered having to keep breaking off to move the lorry. Father Adams said it didn't do the beer no good, being rolled in in all that hurry. Mr Carey – a non-drinker himself and entirely unmoved by such sentiments – said why didn't they unload the lorry at the front door of the pub... a suggestion, entirely feasible, which was rejected out of hand on the grounds that the lorry had always been unloaded at the side door and who was he to alter things?

The matter had been referred urgently to the Parish Council. Unfortunately they met only every two months. Meanwhile there was a weekly traffic block at Carey's cottage, a nightly indignation meeting at the Rose and Crown, and considerable speculation as to whether the heather, planted so doggedly by Mr Carey, would grow.

General opinion was that it wouldn't. It grew in the peat on top of the moors, but hereabouts the soil was limestone. Actually it did. In bringing the heather down from the moors Mr Carey had thoughtfully brought the soil to go with it. And there, for the moment, the matter rested.

Things were much more peaceful with us. For one thing Solomon appeared to have made friends with Robertson. I nearly dropped the first time I saw them, Robertson ensconced inscrutably on a hay-bale in the garage and Solomon, on his first post-thaw inspection trip, sitting on the ground in front of him. There was a silence that I expected to be broken at any moment by Solomon hurtling flat-eared into the attack. Then I realised it was a silence not so much of an eve of battle as of a chess-match. Robertson regarded the driveway. Solomon studied the sand-heap. There they sat, if a trifle embarrassedly, like a couple of members of Boodles.

It was some time before Sheba joined them, but eventually she did and now the three of them sat in silence in the garage apparently practising mental telepathy. They weren't practising that, though, the evening we saw them by the woodshed. We'd been off for a week by the sea – Annabel going up to the farm, Solomon and Sheba to the Siamese hotel at Halstock, and the Hazells, in our absence, feeding Robertson. Halfway through the week he'd vanished, they reported when we came back, and they couldn't find him anywhere. We thought he'd probably traced Annabel to the farm and sure enough, the day after we fetched Annabel home, Robertson himself reappeared, stalking grandly along the path towards her stable.

Later that night I noticed, looking through the kitchen doorway, that Solomon and Sheba were in the yard, sitting in front of the woodshed and studying the base of it with expressions of rapt concentration. 'They've got Robertson down a mouse-hole', I jokingly said to Charles, 'and they're not going to let him come out'. I was nearer the truth than I knew. A while later I looked out of the hall window on the principle, well-known to Siamese owners, that if they're quiet they're up to something – and there, beyond them, where I hadn't been able to see him from the kitchen, was Robertson. Sniffing at one of the support posts while our two gazed superiorly on.

A little later Robertson had gone, but our own two were still sitting importantly by the woodshed. I went out at that to see what Robertson had been sniffing at – and there, down the woodwork, was a long damp streak. Solomon, it seemed, had sprayed. A good big spray that he'd been saving up for a week. He'd then sat down with Sheba with an air of Beat That One If You Can while Robertson inspected it – and, to their intense satisfaction, he'd had to admit that he couldn't.

EIGHT

Music Hath Charms

Had things continued like that, with Robertson content to sit outcast-fashion in the yard, to acknowledge Solomon as local spraying champion and to look suitably humble whenever our two met up with him, they might in time have become used to him and allowed him into the cottage.

Might is a nebulous word, of course. They might equally have done what they did years before when we tried to introduce the kitten Samson. Fight him, ourselves and each other till the place resembled the United Nations.

As it was, Robertson jumped the gun one day and appeared in person in our kitchen. Without being asked, commented Sheba, who was the first to spot him and drew our attention to it by craning her neck incredulously through the doorway from the sitting-room. Just going to eat Our Food! roared Solomon – which Robertson probably was, but only because it happened to be there, like the fruits of the Indies, en route on his voyage of discovery...

Robertson went through the door like a niblick shot with Solomon behind him. Any time Solomon saw Robertson after that he chased him indignantly from the garden. That, hard though it was on Robertson, was logical. It was Solomon's garden; Robertson was supposed to live with Annabel; and though I felt a pang at times when I saw his stocky ginger figure valiantly accompanying Charles around the orchard or sitting with him while he dug in the vegetable garden, which was the nearest Robertson could come now to his desire to belong to somebody, at least he got regular meals and we petted him surreptitiously in the garage.

He was sitting by the bean row one day, busily belonging to Charles, when some people came past with a dog. The dog, a big brown cross-bred, stopped in the gateway and growled at Robertson. Only in passing, because Robertson was a cat, but Robertson didn't see it like that. He saw it that Solomon stopped him from being with Charles in the cottage; now this dog was threatening to stop him from being with Charles among the beans... At that point something snapped. He stood up, bushed his tail, and growled back. The dog fled. Robertson, like a boy who has just discovered he can fight a bully, flew after him. The snag being that the next time he saw Solomon, he flew at him .

'Take that... and that... and THAT', he spat, and Solomon, caught unawares, was badly beaten. Thereafter it was Solomon versus Butch all over again. Solomon kept going out to look for Robertson. Robertson kept coming down to look for Solomon. He was worse than Butch, however, in that his idea was obviously to drive Solomon away from the cottage so that he could live with us himself. The blue one, too, he apparently decided, with the result that he leapt from the undergrowth one day when Sheba and I were in the garden – Sheba, who had never said boo to him in her life... and attacked her before my very eyes until, recovering from my surprise, I shouted and drove him off.

Thereafter I was officially his enemy. Behind the scenes I still prepared his food – there was nobody else to feed him and we couldn't let him starve. But Charles took it up to him. Charles talked to him and allowed Robertson to accompany him round the orchard. Any time I saw him, I chased him back to the paddock. I hated doing it, but it was the only way. He had Charles as his friend, lived with Annabel, had good meals, but knew that if he set one paw in the garden I'd be after him. It was no worse, in principle, than a cat living in one house but being afraid to venture next door because of the dog – and that way, we thought, we could look after him yet keep our own two safe from attack.