A Comfort Оf Cats

Five

We first realised we had a strain of unusual mice in the Valley when we were returning from a walk one day with Annabel.

I was in front, going ahead to open the Forestry gate, Charles was coming behind with his four-legged girlfriend, when what I thought was an autumn leaf skittered across the track in front of me and came to rest at the bottom of the bank. It moved again as I got near it and I saw that it was a field-mouse. Chestnut brown, small – the size of a half-grown oak leaf – and making no attempt whatever to get away. Maybe it was injured, I thought, stooping to pick it up and put it where Annabel wouldn't tread on it. (I'll pick up anything with gloves on except an adder; another thing I've grown used to over the years.)

It wasn't injured, however. It was sitting up on its haunches eating grass seed, turning the tassel like a corn-cob in incredibly tiny paws, ignoring me completely as if I were some sort of local tree. By the time Charles came up it had finished that grass head and moved a foot or so up the bank, where it selected another which it sat up and nibbled while it looked interestedly down at Annabel.

'Perhaps it's got concussion,' I whispered to Charles. Never had I seen an outdoor mouse so confident. Charles studied it closely.

'Nothing wrong with that one,' he said. 'It's just not afraid of anything.'

Neither was the one I saw next day eating bird crumbs by the cotoneaster in the yard. It was sitting nonchalantly with its back to me and didn't even turn round as I passed. It wasn't the mouse we'd seen in the lane. This one was definitely larger. There was the same air of insouciance, however – the obvious lack of fear. I wondered if they came from the same litter.

That afternoon the cotoneaster mouse was taken into custody by Shebalu. I shouted when I saw her creeping up on him but he determinedly took no notice. She carried him indoors, moaning horribly between her teeth as is her wont when she's announcing that she's caught something. That in itself would frighten most mice to death – it shakes even me when I hear it. But the moment she put it down to give a louder bellow for Sass (never around, said her expression, when he was Wanted) the mouse got up and, while she still had her mouth open, nipped quietly into the kitchen.

I hoped he'd go straight through it and out into the yard but instead he went into a cupboard. Not, we realised when we knew him better, because he was scared and seeking refuge. He was busy summing up the prospects. That was in October. That mouse, soon to be known as Lancelot (because, phonetically, that was what he did to Charles's nuts), stayed with us till the following spring, resisting all our attempts to expel him. He moved his headquarters at times but we always knew where he was. We had only to look for the cats.

It was they, the first day, who told us he was in the cupboard. They were camped hopefully outside it. Sass with not the least idea why he was there – he'd never yet seen a mouse – but copying Shebalu, trying to look intent, though his ears did wander occasionally. I shut them in the living-room and turned out the tins and packets. Sure enough there was the mouse in the last corner. I put on a glove, reached out a hand – he jumped over it and disappeared behind me.

He was under the cooker, according to Shebalu, whom I fetched out to say where he'd gone. He could actually See Him, said Sass, peering under with one eye. Apparently the mouse saw Saska, too. He shot out and into another cupboard. Only to check that he had an escape route, though. Having done so he came back and went under the cooker.

There, shuttling between cooker and cupboard with the waste bin sheltering his passage (we put it there on purpose to give him protection from the cats) he lived contentedly for several days and might indeed have spent all winter... there were only cleaning things in that cupboard and I kept the doors of the others firmly closed... if it weren't for the fact that I began to have a conscience about him. It seemed hardly the life for a field-mouse.

I started to put down crumbs for him. They were definitely gone each morning. After a couple of days, though, I had another thought. What could he be getting to drink? I put down a saucer of water and he certainly made use of that. From the splashings on the floor next morning he'd either fallen in it or had a bath.

He was obviously happy now, the only snag being that we had to keep the cats out of the kitchen in case they caught him. Not only was it difficult – sometimes I wondered if they got through the door by thought transference, the way I'd be sure I'd shut them on one side only to find them next minute on the other – but also it didn't seem fair. Sass in particular adored the kitchen. He couldn't get up to the work-tops yet, owing to his inability to jump, but he liked to sit out there and savour the smells and think about what I might be going to give him next.

Ergo, one night I laid a trail of crumbs out to the porch and put Lancelot's water saucer out there as well. That he'd transferred headquarters was confirmed next morning when the cats went straight to the refrigerator. He was Under There, said Shebalu, putting her nose to the bottom. Eating, Sass solemnly informed us, putting his nose down there as well. He was indeed. Lancelot had found El Dorado. Charles's harvest of cob-nuts.

Charles had brought them in and put them in the porch in a big plastic bin with its lid off, so that any damp would evaporate and not rot them. I had wondered about mice at the time, but he said they couldn't climb the bin-sides. What he hadn't reckoned with, however, was that Lancelot was no ordinary mouse. Not for him trying futilely to climb the plastic. He'd gone up the leg of the table we had out there and launched himself downwards into the bin. To get out again, of course, he had only to drop off over the edge, the bin being filled to the top. Judging from the trail of nuts leading to the refrigerator he'd been working a transfer system all night.

Charles was so impressed he said he was welcome to share the nuts. He certainly was a clever little chap, getting away from Shebalu like that and proving himself so resourceful. Which wasn't what he said when he looked at his duffel coat one day (we'd noticed the cats had been sniffing suspiciously below it) and discovered that while Lancelot might eat nuts under the refrigerator by day, that certainly wasn't where he spent his nights. He'd chewed big holes in the duffel, carried the resultant wool into one of the pockets, and constructed a neat, soft bed suspended on the wall, safe from frost and patrolling cats.

It wasn't what I said either, a week or two after that, when Lancelot and Charles between them caused chaos at the cottage.

It began with our buying a caravan. Why we bought it I will explain later. As you may guess, it was connected with the cats. Suffice it for the moment to say that we'd bought a second-hand caravan – in November because it was then that we saw the one we wanted. We'd been looking for one since September and this was the first one that fitted the bill. And because it was in superb condition and had until then been kept undercover in the winter, Charles said we would keep it undercover too. A little beauty like that deserved it, he said, patting it affectionately on the side. When I puzzledly enquired where, he said the shed next to Annabel's stable. My heart sank with a thud when I heard it. You should just have seen that shed!

We'd owned it for nearly twenty years and from the moment we'd bought it, along with the orchard, Charles had used it as a store for things that might one day come in handy. Not things of any value, like the heavy roller, for instance, which we'd used once in twenty years and was kept in the garage. (Charles was always saying This Spring he'd roll the lawn, but somehow he never got round to it.)

No. The shed, which was open-fronted, contained a sort of magpie's nest of bits and pieces. The load of stone removed when we had the fireplace opened up, for instance. (Charles had said it would cost a fortune to buy that lot; we'd be glad of it for repairing the walls.) Earth excavated when we had the extension put on the cottage; according to Charles it was good topsoil. (Dump it in the shed, he'd told the builder at the time; later he'd spread it on the garden.) Soot, stored undercover to keep it from being de-natured by the rain. The remains of a load of mushroom compost, left there for the same purpose. Bags of sand. A mêlée of metal poles and wire, which we'd once used as an enclosure for Annabel and had never been able to untangle.

Somewhere in the depths was an old-fashioned folding bed-spring Charles had destined, years before, for a garden frame. In one corner were several reserve sacks of coal, hidden behind an old door. Eight heavy scaffolding planks were stacked at the rear – we'd used them to whitewash the cottage that summer. Surmounting everything else, the top of the magpie's nest, was our winter supply of kindling. Apple-tree prunings, sycamore branches, put there diligently by Charles. One reached it by standing on a convenient mound of earth there hadn't been room for inside. To stop the kindling cascading down, which it tended to do when one tried to pull out a piece, it was held in place by loops of rope fastened to the crossbeam at random intervals. 'Nonsense,' said Charles, when I complained that it looked like Steptoe's yard. That's part of country living.'

Now he was suggesting clearing it and I should have jumped for joy. Being me, I was worrying about what we were going to do with it. 'Absolutely nothing to it,' said Charles. 'We'll have it cleared in half a day.'

Maybe so if we'd hired a bulldozer and put that lot where it deserved, on the local rubbish tip. But Charles insisted on removing it bit by bit, as if we were delving for jewels. Ten bags of manure – you'd have thought they were jewels, the reverence with which he carted them away. Must have matured for years, he said. They'd be worth their weight in gold on the rhubarb.

Coal to the conservatory. Kindling to Annabel's stable. She snuffed and snorted at it with displeasure. Stacking That Stuff in Her Place, she said... she wasn't going to have Those Planks. She did have them, propped across the back of her stable wall, and snorted her annoyance all the louder, banging her feeding bowl about at night to show what little space she now had. There was enough room in there for six donkeys, Charles told her, and it would keep her much warmer in winter.

It needed to. It was the coldest winter we'd had in years and it took us a fortnight to clear that shed. Lugging out the stones, cold enough to have come from a glacier, pickaxing the solid heaps of earth, trundling it off in a barrow with ice-cold handles whose frozen wheel would hardly turn. Normally we would have had plenty of assistance, but for some reason all our neighbours seemed to have been suddenly struck with palsy. Tim Bannett had flu. Father Adams had arthritis – it had come on when we told him about clearing the shed. As for Fred Ferry, he'd come past the first morning, clumping stolidly along as is his wont. 'Whass doin' in there?' he'd stopped to enquire, and when we'd told him he looked astounded and said 'Never!'

'Thought theest was leaving that lot for they blokes what digs up the past,' he said. Fred prides himself on his subtle sense of humour. When I suggested maybe he could help us – we'd pay him at the usual rates – I fancied the humour faded slightly, but he said 'Ah. I'll see. I'll let thee know,' and trudged on up the hill. When he came down again he was limping too. He said his knee trouble had suddenly cropped up again. It always does when Fred needs an excuse. We knew when we were beaten.

So we toiled on. Up in the morning. Out on the job. Our labours seemed absolutely endless. At one stage Charles nearly joined the rest of them in our village of limping men. We'd got down to the layer where the bed-spring was and he incautiously walked across it. I warned him I could see a space underneath and that the spring appeared to be propped up on boxes. He wouldn't listen. Before my very eyes one of his legs went down through the spring and he was stuck like Long John Silver. If I hadn't been there to grab him when he sank, goodness knows what might have happened. As it was he emerged with only a scraped ankle – and if you are wondering what this had to do with Lancelot, it was the morning after this that, inadvertently, he and Charles produced their combined operation.

Charles, when we were working on clearing the shed, always locked the cottage doors. Quite right, too. As he said, we were out of sight and earshot. Any passing stranger could walk in. Charles being punctilious, it involved removing two keys – the Yale one belonging to the old back door, which was now the inner door of the extension, and the key to the new outer extension door, which was of the ordinary non-Yale type. That one was simple. The key had to be outside before you could lock it. It was the inner door you had to watch. You had to remember to bring the Yale key with you before you shut it or you could find yourself locked out.

Normally that key stayed in the inner door all day, but with one of us now removing it constantly, tensed up with all the work we were doing, feeling like a couple of hard-pressed navvies – that morning, thinking I was accompanying him and had the key in my pocket, Charles banged the inner door shut. I hadn't got the key. I was merely shaking out the breakfast cloth. We were now completely locked out. And in the moment of silence in which we stood there, taking in what we had done, I suddenly realised I could hear Lancelot chewing noisily away behind the freezer.

He was always chewing noisily. At Charles's cob-nuts, under the refrigerator. He worked away like a nutmeg grater all day. But behind the freezer... was he at the electricity wires? If so, at any moment it could catch on fire!

I shouted for Charles, who was in the tool-house hunting for a hammer to break a window. It was the only way to get into the kitchen again and Charles wasn't very pleased about it. Unfortunately when I called to him about Lancelot he put down the rake he'd been holding and it slipped and smashed a stack of flowerpots. Well anyway, he hadn't used those for ages, I consoled him – but Charles was by this time beyond consoling. He strode into the porch, seized the corner of the freezer... 'Mind we don't squash Lancelot,' I said. Charles told me what he'd like to do to Lancelot, but I noticed he moved it carefully all the same.

Halfway through, Lancelot emerged and went under a cupboard. He hadn't been chewing the wires. It must just have been that he fancied a change of residence. Under the freezer was a fresh pile of Charles's nuts. We gathered them up, replaced the freezer, pulled out the refrigerator and swept the heap of nutshells from underneath that. If we cleared that out for him perhaps he'd go back there and stay there, said Charles. When he was under there we at least knew what he was doing.

Charles smashed the window. I climbed through. We patched it temporarily with cardboard so the cats couldn't get out. Swept up the glass. Retrieved the key. Marched back to our private Siberia in the caravan shed. Did I ever stop to think, enquired Charles, what animals got us into? We wouldn't have thought of a caravan if it hadn't been for the cats. We wouldn't have been out here slaving. If we hadn't encouraged Lancelot he wouldn't have got into mischief under the freezer. And he, Charles, wouldn't have broken the flowerpots.

We wouldn't have had to hire a couple of ten-foot jacks, either, to hold up the shed roof when we found one of the support poles was rotten. We wouldn't have had to ring the Forestry Commission in a panic asking if they could supply us, quickly, with a pole. Alas, they had no spare poles, and no men available to cut one. The Forester asked if we could possibly fell one ourselves. It was the best he could do to help us, he said. He'd send us an invoice in due course.

It almost came to that. All it needed to complete the picture would have been Charles and me sawing down one of the Forestry pine trees while the village looked on wondering what on earth we were doing. Half an hour later, however, the Forester rang us back to say that a couple of his men had just come in. He was sending them over right away. It would be safer than our felling a tree ourselves. He hadn't felt too happy about that. Neither had we, and in fact in the meantime a neighbour had offered us a spare pole that he had and we'd accepted it – the only snag being that I'd left Charles holding it up like Atlas while I'd dashed down to answer the phone.

Eventually the shed was ready. The caravan went halfway in and immediately had to be pulled out again. Its rooflight was touching the crossbeam and we didn't want it broken. There were plenty of hands to help us now, however. It was like the launching of a ship. All the hard work done. Just a gentle heave from our audience after Charles had climbed the ladder and planed the crossbeam.

Fred Ferry hauled so enthusiastically on the brake-knob, it came off in his hand. He slipped, dropped the knob in our fast-flowing stream and nearly fell in himself. Another neighbour, pushing at the back, stuck his shoulder through a window. Fortunately he didn't hurt himself and as Charles said, what was a pane of glass? The caravan was under cover. That was what really mattered. After a fortnight, we could relax.

Did he ever stop to think, I said later that night as we lazed before the sitting-room fire... Saska on my lap, Shebalu on Charles's, Lancelot happily cracking nuts out in the porch... Did he ever stop to think what other people did? Stored their caravans in their gardens? Under a carport, under a tarpaulin, or even standing in the open? I bet nobody else would have worked so hard to remove all the rubbish we had.

Maybe not, said Charles, but it would be worth it in the long run. That caravan was a little beauty. Think of us going off to Cornwall and Scotland in it. Taking the cats. Maybe even taking Annabel. In the caravan? I said incredulously. Charles said he didn't see why not.

Changing the subject, he said (he could see I was about to raise objections to the idea of the caravan doubling as a horse-box)... talking of self-sufficiency... he'd been talking to Tim after we'd got the caravan in. Had I heard about him and the graveyard?