Cats In The Belfry

NINE

Call Me Hiawatha

It was just about then that we had a recurrence of the bath trouble. Sugieh's craze for water had vanished after she had her family. She was too busy now, as she was always telling us between frantic toppings and tailings of four protesting kittens, ever to think of herself. So Charles had gone back to leaving the door open while he soaked so that he could hear the wireless, and apart, as he said, from momentary heart failure whenever he heard the posse thunder past like a herd of elephants on its way to the kitchen, bath-time was once more quiet, peaceful and refreshing.

Then, galloping out with the rest of the posse one day, the she-kitten stopped to wash her paw. Solomon had stepped on it, she said, and she didn't want it to be Dirty when she saw Sidney. Taking off after the others like a small blue comet – nobody ever walked in our house; just sometimes they whooshed faster than others – she missed the kitchen turning, shot through the bathroom door instead, and before anybody could stop her there was an almighty splash and she was in the water. When I went in Charles was lying back, still clutching the loofah, with an expression of utter resignation on his face, while his girlfriend sat dripping happily on his chest telling him how much she loved him.

From then on, even if she was at the far end of the garden talking to Sidney, the moment she heard the bath tap running she would tear into the house like greased lightning, take up position outside the bathroom door and demand to be let in. A few seconds later Solomon, always ready to join in anything that required using his voice, would roll round the corner and demand to be let in too. Finally the blue boys would arrive to make up the party and the whole lot would sit down and bellow their heads off.

The only way to stop them was to let them in, and since we couldn't do that while the water was still in the bath it meant, in order to preserve the peace, bathing in about five seconds flat, pulling the plug as we leapt out, and opening the door to the public the instant the last drop had gurgled down the plug-hole.

They never did anything special in the bath; it was just that they didn't want to miss anything that was going on. Sometimes, said Charles, towelling himself savagely while four smudge-marked faces watched him with interest from the bottom of the bath and Solomon, consumed with curiosity as usual, wanted to know why he took his skin off when he washed, and didn't it hurt when he put it on again. Sometimes he thought he'd get more privacy if he took his bath in Trafalgar Square.

Actually Charles was feeling rather put out with the kittens just then because they had stopped him becoming an archer. Charles had a friend who was keen on archery. One day the pair of them had gone rabbit-shooting with a local farmer and Allister, just for fun, took along his bow and arrows. The farmer took a twenty-yard shot at a rabbit and missed; Allister, taking random aim immediately afterwards, transfixed the rabbit on the spot. 'Lumme! Ruddy Robin 'Ood!' said the farmer, gazing at him in awestruck amazement – and though Allister modestly said it was a complete accident and he couldn't do it again if he tried, Charles had come home with the ambition to be a Robin Hood too.

He started reading books on archery. He bought himself a hat. Though he never wore a hat in the normal way all Charles's sporting activities were highlighted with what he considered to be the appropriate headgear. A balaclava for climbing, for instance, though he was hardly likely to get frostbite in his ears in the Lake District, and all it did was render him stone-deaf when I said I thought we had gone high enough; a scarlet and white striped one made (by me) at top speed one winter when we had snow and Charles, who had been busily reading a book on the frozen North, said pioneers always wore striped caps for woodcutting. Now he had his archer's hat – Sherwood Green, turned up on one side and pinned with a natty sweep of pheasant's feathers that was all his own idea. All he needed now was to learn to shoot – and one evening Allister came over with his equipment and they went out on the hillside to make a start.

Half an hour later a procession entered the kitchen. Charles first, trembling like a leaf and carrying the blue boys; Sugieh marching alongside with crossed eyes and bushed tail yelling that he'd Nearly Killed Them All and they were going to Leave Home That Very Night; Allister behind, wearing the bewildered expression that marked everybody who ever came up against our Siamese in force; and, far in the rear, Solomon and his sister happily dragging home Charles's hunting hat by its feathers.

What had happened was quite simple. Allister, showing Charles the correct stance and draw, had let fly across the valley and scored a magnificent bull in an oak tree. Charles, using exactly the same stance and draw, had hit a stone two feet ahead of him. The arrow had ricocheted off smartly to the right – and before his horrified eyes had landed slap in the middle of the posse, headed by Solomon, just as it appeared in a body round an outcrop, nosily intent on seeing what Charles was doing. Nobody was hurt. Only, said Charles, he had lost another ten years off his life. Over a mile he and Allister had walked to find a safe place and those cats must have tracked him every inch of the way. If he put the Channel between them, he said bitterly; if he went to Japan or somewhere to practise archery, he bet that lot would turn up the moment he took aim and swear he had done it purposely.

Whether they would or not, that was the end of Charles's ambition to be an archer. Allister left the blunted arrow behind – in case, he said, Charles should change his mind, then he could practise with it. But it was the kittens who played with it, not Charles. We kept it under the Welsh dresser, from which it was apt to emerge precipitately at all hours of the day, two kittens dragging it by the feathers like a battering ram and the other two charging behind shrieking it was Their Turn Now and Hurry Up and get it Into the Garden.

We took their playing with it for granted, like all their other nefarious pursuits, and anyway we knew the arrow was blunt. But the old lady who used to worry about Sugieh eating scraps in the lane and now felt it incumbent to keep an eye on the way we were bringing up the kittens nearly had a fit the day she looked over the wall and saw them tearing round the garden with it like a pack of Comanche Indians. Did I think it was right, she enquired breathlessly – you could see the dust still settling on the path behind her, she had scuttled up it so fast – to allow those dear little kittens to play with a dangerous missile like that? The wee black one was screaming so hard in the middle of the lawn that indeed she feared he had hurt himself already.

They were a lot safer playing with it than Charles was, I assured her. And if the wee black one let out just one more peep because the others wouldn't let him be Hiawatha and carry the arrow all by himself he was going to get his bottom smacked so hard he wouldn't sit down for days.

If it was any comfort, Charles wouldn't have had much time for archery anyway. He had all he could do that summer trying to keep the garden straight. Now we had not one cat digging holes all over it but five, and as it only needed one to give a speculative scratch for all the others enthusiastically to follow suit, most of the time the garden looked like a map of the moon.

Somewhere or other the kittens, unlike their mother, had discovered that holes could be put to a more practical use than mere play. Visitors going round the garden were continually coming across the embarrassing spectacle of four small kittens squatting solemnly among the roses with four scrappy tails raised like matchsticks and four pairs of round blue eyes fixed on the heavens, earnestly thinking Higher Thoughts.

The trouble was, Solomon could never think Higher Thoughts for long enough. He would start off like the others – tail raised, staring with an air of determined concentration at the sky. Then his gaze would wander and he would spot one of the blue boys similarly engaged a few feet away and, completely forgetting why he was there, start stalking him round a peony. Or he would decide the hole wasn't big enough, start to dig it bigger, and then get sidetracked by a beetle. Beetles always turned up in Solomon's holes and nobody else's. So often, in fact, that we came to the conclusion it must be the same beetle trying to be funny. By the time he had trailed it across the garden – more often than not getting sidetracked again on the way by a bee which Sat on a Flower and Insulted Him or a bird which Flew Over His Head and Said Something Rude – he would completely forget where the first hole was and have to start all over again.

Long after the others had finished Solomon would still be hard at work alternately digging holes and chasing beetles. More times than we could count, the moment we brought the kittens in from the garden he would start raking at the door shouting that he hadn't finished yet and he'd got to go out. And without fail, each time we took pity on him and let him out, no sooner would he have dug another hole and seated himself tearfully on it than that blasted beetle would appear again and we'd be back where we started.

We hadn't done with earth-boxes by any means. Solomon usually finished up on one in the end, having been dragged screeching from the garden half an hour after everybody else. Sugieh always used one. It wasn't ladylike to use the garden, she said, and where the kittens had picked up such a dreadful habit she didn't know. Everybody used it before going to bed. Everybody that is, except Solomon, who could usually be heard trying to dig through the bottom of his box at two o'clock in the morning.

This consituted another problem in the complicated business of cat-keeping. Getting the earth for the earth-boxes. Perhaps hazard is a better word than problem. The problem was, after all, solved simply enough by me, twice a week, after a heated argument with Charles as to why he couldn't go, trundling off to the woods with wheelbarrow and spade and getting a load of leaf-mould. The hazard was that all the cats insisted on coming too.

Try as I might I could never get away unnoticed. Sometimes I left the wheelbarrow outside in the lane waiting for an opportune moment to sneak out and run for it. It was no use. Always somebody was watching. Hidden in the lilac that drooped so conveniently over a corner of the coalhouse roof; lurking ostentatiously round the corner of the woodshed; or, if it was Solomon, simply sitting in the wheelbarrow waiting to go.

It was bad enough on the outward journey. Kittens in the wheelbarrow; kittens tumbling out of the wheelbarrow; Sugieh marching alongside shouting to ­everybody she passed to Look At Us Going for the Leaf-Mould; and after the first few minutes somebody, usually Solomon, wailing frantically far in the rear to Wait For Him, He'd Got Left Behind!

On the outward journey, however, they did at least know they were going somewhere, and in case it should be somewhere interesting – none of that lot were going to miss anything if they could help it – we usually got there more or less as a unit. The real trouble started on the way back, when they realised with dismay that they were only going home.

Then they started shinning up every tree they came to, saying they were going to stay there and be little birds – all except Solomon, who sat at the bottom and said he was going to be a mushroom. They hid in the long grass and then, while I called them frantically in one part of the meadow, suddenly came leaping over the moon-daisies like a troop of kangaroos, from a different direction altogether. They prepared endless traps for one another. What with the stealthy stalking of the ambusher and the even stealthier approach of the victim that game could be guaranteed to take ages, particularly if the victim was the she-kitten who didn't like being jumped on and immediately started going back the other way. Even when we got back to civilisation they wouldn't behave. Then they dawdled at everybody's front gate, either bawling for me to go back for them, Sugieh included, because they were Afraid to Go Past – or, if there was something interesting inside, like a baby in a pram or an open front door, marching in in a body and having a look.

Often when I got back from one of those trips I was so exhausted I had to go and lie down to reassemble my shattered nerves. Not that I got much rest. If I left the cats in the garden I lay there wondering what they were up to. Once, indeed, I came down to investigate an unnatural silence just in time to spot them marching away into the distance, off to do the leaf-mould walk all over again. If I took them upstairs with me they either played tag all over the bed or sat heavily on me in a body and said they were going to sleep as well. If I left them downstairs, that was usually the signal for Sugieh to show them how to knock down Shorty.

I always got up and reeled wearily down the stairs when I heard the crash, just in case – and it was fortunate that I did. One day I went down to find that the armchair was not in its usual position and Shorty, tail-less as usual and completely grounded, was running madly round on the floor trying to face up to a circle of all four kittens at once while Sugieh, seated maternally on the chair-arm, encouraged them with soft cries to play with the pretty birdie, he couldn't run away.

I remember that so well because it was the last adventure they had as a family. The next day one of the blue boys, after a final game that brought a stupid lump to my throat as I saw his small paw poking excitedly at his brothers and sister through the air-holes of his basket, went to his new home. And the day after that Sugieh – suddenly, tragically, unbelievably – was dead.