Tovey, Doreen - Raining Cats and Donkeys

It did so far as Solomon was concerned. He ate some meat from my hand as soon as he got home. He was wolfing food the next morning as if we'd been starving him for a month. It was the rest of us who suffered.

I'm afraid I wasn't very sympathetic when Charles, driving home from the Vet's, came over queer when we reached the cottage. He'd been nattering so much about the stuff spraying into his mouth and the putrid taste of it and wondering whether it was poisonous or not, that I put it down to his imagination. When, as he went to get out, he suddenly sat heavily on the running-board and said that he felt giddy, I said 'Don't be silly, it didn't make Solomon giddy' and never gave it another thought.

Not till the following day, that was, when we were in the sitting-room just before tea – Solomon, with a solid meal of rabbit inside him, curled recuperatively in the armchair, Sheba spread like a little blue buffalo robe on top of him, and a log-fire blazing comfortingly in the grate. Outside, which made things seem even cosier, it was snowing heavily. A late snowfall we hadn't anticipated, which by now was a good ten inches deep.

'Thank goodness we took Solomon to Harler yesterday', I said with relief. 'We'd never have got through in this.' Charles agreed; we looked with a common thought towards the chair in which, just at that moment, Sheba was reaching out to give Solomon a loving lick on his flanks – and in that very instant it happened. Sheba leapt from the chair before our eyes, gnashed her teeth in frenzy and, foaming alarmingly at the mouth, started tearing round and round the room.

'She's having a fit!' I whispered, almost too scared to speak. 'How can we get her to Harler?' cried Charles, his thoughts on the impassable roads. And there we were once more like a scene from Tchekov. The snow slanting down outside, Sheba going round and round in circles, Charles and I wringing our hands and Solomon – visible only as a pair of big round eyes – hiding under the table.

It came to us eventually, of course. That some of the spilt injection must have gone over Solomon's coat, that Sheba had just licked it off and that – allowing for the fact that Charles hadn't actually foamed at the mouth or run in circles himself (a lot of notice I'd have taken if he had, he said, when I wouldn't even believe he'd been feeling giddy) her reaction had been much the same as his. We caught her, wiped the taste from her mouth with a towel, and in seconds she'd recovered. Except – trust Sheba – that when she tried to tell Charles about it, thanks to all the frothing she'd done and all the lick she'd lost, nothing came out but a squeak.

Meanwhile the snow came implacably down; Solomon spoke for the first time in weeks, wailing from under the table that he was Convalescent if we remembered, and he'd like some food if we'd finished playing; and our lives returned to normal.

More normal than they'd been for a long time, for in the interim Robertson had been adopted. By a family new to the district who wanted a cat and who, when they heard the story of our ginger outcast, offered to give him a home. It was the only possible solution. Sorry for him as we were, we couldn't have kept him any longer, with his terrible hatred for Solomon. So Robertson – fed, sheltered and with a family at last to call his own – went to live at the top of the hill, and we, with Solomon and Sheba, returned to peace once more in the Valley.

For a little while, at any rate. No sooner was Solomon on his feet and out again than we heard, one day, the old familiar war-cry from the hillside. 'Robertson!' we cried in unison, making as one for the door.

It wasn't Robertson. It was a strange black cat who, after one close-up howl from Solomon, fled for his life into the trees. We grabbed Solomon, brought him back, set him down, with warnings about fighting, in the yard... It was no use, of course. Solomon – King of the Valley again what with Mr Harler's vitamins, a successful wrestling bout or two with Sheba and now this strange cat running away from him, was back up on the hillside like a longshot.

I was up there like a longshot after him, too, and so it was that I was on hand when Annabel, grazing blissfully a dozen yards or so away, suddenly decided to charge him. Only in fun, no doubt, seeing that everybody else seemed to be running after him and there he was so temptingly standing on a tussock. But Solomon had his back to her – and Annabel, these days, was temperamentally unpredictable.

There was no time to get between them. At top speed I raced after her, gave her a push from behind that sent her

flying down the hill away from Solomon, unable to stop myself I went flying down behind her...

Now we were really back to normal said Charles as with Annabel snorting derisively from the pathway and Solomon, calm as a cucumber, still surveying the land for the other cat from his tussock, I retrieved myself from a clump of nettles.

Thank goodness, indeed we were.

THIRTEEN

Comes the Spring

The trouble between Father Adams and Fred Ferry resolved itself around this time, too. Quite simply through Father Adams's television set catching on fire. If they'd thought of it somebody could have arranged it afore, said a wit in the Rose and Crown that night when, after their vicissitudes of the past few months, the pair of them sat sheepishly quaffing their cider side by side at the table by the fire.

But nobody had thought of it, and it had taken spontan­eous combustion on the part of the ancient set while Father Adams was, as Fred kept joyfully informing his audience, 'Out in the little old outhouse', to bring about the desired reunion. Fred, passing by and seeing the flames, had rushed into the house and pulled out the plug. Mr Carey had rushed in after him and smothered the fire with a rug, which explained why the third member of the trio at the table, looking more sheepish even than the other two and assuring everybody who spoke to him that it was only ginger ale he was drinking, was the Rose and Crown's erstwhile bête noir.

Not any more, though. The brewery-men had long grown accustomed to taking the beer through the other door which, to tell the truth, was more convenient. The fact that the heather had taken root on his banks showed Mr Carey to be a man who knew his gardening. The County Council's decision not only that it was legal for him to alter his entrance if he wished but that people who used his entrance for passing in were in point of fact committing trespass, proved that he knew his rights (and of nobody does a country-dweller approve more heartily than the man who knows those). All it needed was something like the fire to break the ice and there he was. Discussing the best way of planting rhubarb crowns with Alby Smith. Where the new post-box ought to be (as against where the authorities had recently put it) with Harry Freeman. One of the village at last.

As fast as one door closes another opens, however, as Miss Wellington is fond of saying, and never is it truer than in a village. No sooner had that little problem settled itself than the Duggans were in the soup.

It was Spring, of course, when ventures start up like snowdrops, so it was hardly surprising when the Duggans woke up one morning in their bungalow on the hilltop to find that someone had started building on the steep, wooded slope below them.

They wouldn't have minded normal building, said Alan Duggan a few days later. Cement mixers and men dropping planks and lorries coming past with piles of bricks – it had happened with their own bungalow and they'd have stood it, in their turn, with other people's. But a bulldozer , he said (for the hillside had to be dug out to level the site). Working at weekends, he said (for the construction, we soon discovered, was being done by a part-time builder). Working at night , he howled, when an arc-light went up while the bulldozer chugged on without respite.