Tovey, Doreen - Raining Cats and Donkeys

It worked for a while. Robertson loved Charles, looked daggers at me when he saw me, but kept well to his side of the fence. When he went for a ramble he skirted our garden now, instead of coming through it. Our two, for their part, took to the tiles for safety – Sheba sitting on the coalhouse under the lilac, which was in any case a favourite perch of hers, and Solomon spending most of his time on the woodshed. It was higher, the woodshed roof, and Solomon, though officially up there looking for Robertson, obviously felt safer at an altitude.

He wasn't, though. Stumping with the resentfulness of the underprivileged past the cottage one day, Robertson spotted Solomon in his eyrie, presumably worked out that he could get at him up there without setting foot in the forbidden territory of our garden (the only reason I can think of for the fact that his approach from then on was always from an outside wall at roof level, and never by any chance through the yard) and climbed metaphorically in with his cosh.

Thereafter I dreaded ten o'clock in the morning. Around that time Robertson came by on the war-path. If Solomon was on the woodshed he got up and attacked him. If Sheba was on the coalhouse, he got up and attacked her. Keep vigilance as I might, the moment my back was turned he was up there fighting one of them.

Sheba, rolling comet-fashion as in her battle with Butch, was off the roof and indoors within seconds. Solomon, however, apart from his determination to fight like a man, couldn't roll off the woodshed. It was too high to get off in a hurry. He had to stay there till I went to his aid. Becoming, for some reason we couldn't understand, less and less able to drive Robertson off until the day came – or so we imagined must have happened – when Robertson pushed Solomon off the roof.

We rushed out to find him limping slowly through the yard while Robertson made off up the lane. He limped, he wouldn't eat... he was Tired, he said. All he wanted was to lie down and rest. We got the Vet at once; this time not without cause. He hadn't fallen off the roof, said Mr Harler – or if he had, it hadn't done him any harm. What Solomon had was a virus infection. A high temperature, a resultant lethargy which was why he hadn't felt like fighting. When I asked but why was he limping if he hadn't fallen off the roof, Mr Harler said 'You'd limp too, if your legs were aching', and called him his poor little man.

He gave him aureomycin. Afterwards, sick at heart to think of him being attacked while he was ill, by a cat whom we'd encouraged, perhaps from whom he'd actually caught the infection while they were fighting, we watched him limp listlessly up behind the cottage into the long grass.

'Let him rest for a while', the Vet. had said after the injection. And so, working in the garden to guard him, watching perpetually for Robertson, we did. Never giving a thought to the heat of the sun except that the warmth would do him good, until, going up to see how he was an hour later, I found him suffering from heat-stroke.

It was obvious enough. His legs were aching, the injection had made him sleepy, the strength of the sun had intensified the effect until he was too numb to move even if he'd wanted to. So obvious that we hadn't even thought of it.

Anguishedly I picked him up – limp, his head drooping over my arm, dribbling helplessly at the mouth – and rushed indoors with him to Charles. We laid him on our bed, which was the coolest place we could think of, and pulled the curtains. So many pictures went through my mind while we watched and waited. Solomon as a kitten, running races up and down this very bed. Solomon going walks with us, galloping exuberantly on his long black legs to catch us when we ran. Solomon, so nervous for all his airs of bravado, coming to me when he was frightened, looking into my eyes for reassurance when he was in the hands of the Vet, trusting me with every inch of his small seal-point soul – and I had let him down.

He wasn't our little black clown for nothing, however. Even as I gulped back my tears – Solomon was scared of crying; he always hid under the table when I wept – Sheba came into the room. On to the bed she got. Sniffed Solomon expertly. Informed us in her cracked soprano voice that there wasn't much wrong with him , and went to sit, unconcernedly washing herself, in the window behind the curtains.

She was right. Half an hour later he was sitting up drinking rabbit broth. That night he was eating rabbit itself. Within two days, so quickly did the aureomycin work, he was back to normal. Eating like a horse. Going, every time he thought of it, right up to the paddock to challenge Robertson (only I went right up after him and brought him back before he got the chance). Robertson, sensing his disgrace, stayed strictly up with Annabel. In order to divert Solomon's mind from Robertson we took him and Sheba for walks. Which was how we came to buy a piano.

We took them up across the hills one night – Charles carrying Sheba, who was otherwise apt to say her feet hurt and turn back halfway, while Solomon ambled behind. Rounding a corner, we suddenly came upon a young man sitting in a hedge with a tape-recorder. Recording birdsong, we presumed; we couldn't think what he was doing there otherwise. Not wanting to disturb him, we put Sheba down with Solomon and turned quietly back along the track.

Normally this was the signal for the pair of them to follow back behind us, bounding exuberantly through the grass and stopping at intervals to play their favourite game of boys and girls, which consisted of Solomon sitting on Sheba and biting her neck and which, for some reason best known to themselves, they only did on the return half of walks.

This time, however, there was silence. No sign of anybody. Until we went back along the track once more and there round the corner sat the pair of them, side by side in front of the bird-watcher. There was no need for speech. The angle of Sheba's ears enquired what he was doing. The angle of Solomon's expressed intense interest in the recorder itself. Silently we picked them up and slung them over our shoulders. Silently, if somewhat bewilderedly, the birdwatcher acknowledged our mimed apology...

It was useless, of course. Hanging over our shoulders as we tiptoed down the track, they started to shout back at him. Sheba first, as she always did to departing strangers, Solomon joining in from sheer enthusiasm. There went that recording, I said resignedly. While Charles, his mind on the recorder itself, said 'When are we going to get our piano?'

He'd been wanting one for ages. He was fond of music. If we had a piano, he commented at frequent intervals, I could accompany him while he played the violin, and he'd learn the piano himself so he could compose.

Neither of us had played at all for a considerable number of years. It was, as I pointed out, going to cause something of a sensation in the Valley when we started our duets. Charles practising beginners' pieces on a piano would hardly go unnoticed, either. Couldn't he compose on a violin? I enquired hopefully.

Apparently he couldn't. He needed a piano. Having settled that, the project stayed in the background for months and might never have materialised at all but for Charles seeing the tape-recorder turning seductively in the hedge.

That – and the visions it no doubt aroused of composing, recording, and the tapes being sent to London to be played by an ecstatic Barbirolli – revived his interest, and within a fortnight we had our piano. A modern miniature. And the piano men had gone, and I was in the study trying it out.

My one real doubt about having it had been how Solomon would react. He was a tremendously nervous cat. The staccato tap of a typewriter, for instance, affected him so that he leapt like a startled fawn at the slightest sound for hours after either of us had used it. We'd long ago had to buy a silent model before we started leaping too. So we'd decided to get him used to the piano gradually. Shut him downstairs to begin with, where he could only hear it at a distance, and then let him come up to the study in his own good time, exploring by himself.