Able Seacat Simon: The Wartime Hero of the High Seas

Chapter 1

Stonecutters Island, Hong Kong, May 1948

I’d finally found a good route across the island. I used the same one every day now, and could have walked it in my sleep. Past the tamarinds, down the passage past the big house and the small house, across the road, mindful of traffic (which could strike you down and kill you), along the side of the big sheds where men clanged and banged a lot, then down past the cranes onto the docks.

The rain will come, kitten. That’s what my mother had always told me. It will come in spring, and it will teem, and it will fill the air and drench us. It will drip from your whiskers, and it will plop from your eyelashes, and it will get in your ears, you wait and see. It will come down so hard that it will dance before your eyes, kitten, and you’ll be wet through. And, trust me, you won’t like it one bit!

I had never seen rain then, not a single glistening drop of it. Only the dew that collected and sometimes fell in streams from the banyans, and the sea, which lapped gently on all sides of where we lived. So while I did trust my mother, and believed everything she told me, I couldn’t quite imagine what rain would feel like. As with so many things I’d experienced since I’d lost her, I was to discover there were still a lot of everyday things I didn’t know; not just the mysteries that lay beyond the harbour.

Today, though, I didn’t need to imagine. I was wet. I might even, I supposed, be wet through. I was heavy with wet; ‘wet’ clearly being a thing to be concerned about, just like strangers and traffic and snakes. A thing that streamed from my eyes, made my paws slip and slither, made my underbelly cold and damp and dirty. I could see it dancing in front of me, just as she had promised – kicking up from the lakes it had made of all the alleyways, jumping up and down on all the wall tops and roofs.

It was raining, so it must by now be spring. The time when my mother said the world would start changing. The time of warmth and something wonderful called ‘plenty’. Which was good, because there hadn’t been much plenty since I’d lost her. So far, I had only been able to catch just one or two mice. And that was then. Before hunger. Before spring. Before rain. And, weak from the pain that gnawed and clutched at my stomach, I didn’t know if I’d ever catch anything again.

I slipped through the spaces between two sets of fences, wondering when life might get better. If I didn’t manage to catch anything, then what would become of me? Which was why (I kept telling myself this, over and over) I’d had no choice but to go down to the docks and scavenge for scraps, despite all that my mother had told me – repeatedly – about how dangerous it was to be around humans.

The quayside was an assault on all my senses, as always. The big ships with funnels, the smaller ships with sails, the swarms of running people, the shouting and whistling, the sudden metallic shrieks and clangs, the gouts of steam and smoke, the cargo crates and nets swinging high above the ground. I felt my mother’s presence keenly as I approached my special spot: the place where she’d explained the rudiments of hunting and where I, always distracted by the wonders all around me, took too little notice of the skills she’d tried to impart.

My ears pricked and I tipped my nose a fraction higher, sniffing. Could I trust this one smell among the many, many odours? I slunk down into the space between my usual barrels with great care, and rounded the corner to where food sacks were often piled up – there to be loaded, my mother had said, onto the ships bound for the sea.

And then I stopped, transfixed. Because perhaps today was going to be a better day. For a few yards in front of me was a shrew. I knew it was a shrew from the shape of its snout. Look first, Mum would say to me. Don’t just leap in haste. Look. So I lowered myself down, not even caring about the wet now, just the tiniest fraction of the tip of my tail twitching, because that, my mum had told me, was what a tail was meant to do.

The shrew had so far been lucky. Something bigger – a rat or a fox or a cockatoo, even – had nibbled its way into the corner of a sack of grain. It was the bottom-most sack of a pile among many piles; piles that reached way higher than I was. The shrew was feeding, preoccupied, rooting around with its back to me, and, as far as I could tell, had no ready means of escape. The first surge of strength I’d felt since the rain had come coursed through me. I’d have that shrew, I just knew it, for my dinner.

Everything went wrong in an instant. So wrong that something else my mother had told me popped into my head. Was this going to be a day for misadventure? Her words came back to me, as they always did when things became scary: remember, she’d say, every day holds the capacity for adventure, kitten, but never forget that it holds the capacity for misadventure too.

And it looked like misadventure might have found me. I’d been settling into position, just a moment from pouncing, when a sound and a strong smell hit my ears and nose together, and a voice – a deep human voice – broke the spell.

‘Well, well, well, well!’ it said. ‘What do we have here, then?’

The still-lucky shrew streaked away out of sight, but I realised I had no such possibility. Not without turning round, and I knew I mustn’t do that. So, instead, I arched my back, and I hissed.

The human – a man – opened his mouth again and laughed at me. ‘Hey, little feller, don’t be scared. I won’t hurt you.’

I hissed again, drawing my lips back, partly in rage, partly in terror, all the while trying to work out my own best means of escape. Should I make a leap for the nearest barrel? Scale the sacks just ahead of me? Try to squeeze myself through the tiny space by the wall, as the shrew had? It was clear from the way the man was still looking down at me that he wasn’t going to leave me alone yet.

‘Hey, kitty, kitty,’ he said, looming even closer, squatting down on his haunches and extending his arm.

I knew about this. Sometimes humans liked to offer things to you and then, when you plucked up the courage to inch closer, would grab you and take you away and put you in a cage. My terror intensified as soon as that thought popped into my head, because I knew all about cats being put in cages. It was probably only because I was still a kitten that I hadn’t yet been in one – because putting kittens in cages was considered bad luck.

But perhaps the human in front of me didn’t know about bad luck, so I shrank further back against the wall and hissed at him a third time.

Again he laughed. ‘Don’t be scared, little feller. Don’t be frightened.’ And then he reached all the way to me and just as I tensed, stricken, he smoothed his huge human hand all the way down my back, like the kind lady in the big house used to do.

‘There,’ he said. ‘My, you’re just skin and bone, aren’t you, Blackie? Shall I see if I can find you something to eat?’

Eat. He meant food. And I was starving, so I wavered. But most humans weren’t like the lady in the big house. I knew that too. I saw my chance. Spied the sack. Made a leap and scrabbled up it. Then ran away just as fast as my legs could carry me.

Chapter 2

I never knew what happened to the brothers and sisters who’d been born along with me. My mother never said, and I was too scared to ask, for fear of hearing something that would frighten me. Cats were supposed to have nine lives – it was one of the first things I ever remember her telling me – but even so, one by one, all of them had disappeared. ‘Such a shame,’ the lady in the big house used to say, shaking her head as she stroked the tips of my mother’s ears.

And now they had gone too, both the kind lady and my mother. I couldn’t help wonder why I’d worried so much about hearing about my brothers and sisters, because now that I was completely alone in the world I’d have liked to know what had become of them. And, besides, being afraid of almost everything now felt normal.

Fear travelled with me everywhere because there was so much to be frightened of. It had almost become something of a friend. It accompanied me on all my hunting forays, curled up with me wherever I hid myself away to sleep, whispered in my ears as I prowled around the island, trying to keep to the secret places and shadows.

I knew fear was a good thing, that it would help keep me out of danger, but it was beginning to be such a constant and insistent companion that there hardly seemed room for anything else. But I was a kitten, soon to be a cat, and there was something else still burning bright in me – the curiosity that I’d been born with. And that night, as on most nights, as I padded along the jetty, it was still up to the stars that I looked, rather than down to the planks beneath my paws.

It was midnight. And, bar the gentle slip and slosh of the waves, silent. The noise of the harbour always lessened as the moon rose, almost as if it had been instructed to do so. Just now, the huge orb was low-lying and lemony, but I knew it would soon rise up to take its place among the stars, becoming smaller and brighter and whiter.

Bathed in its glow, the city of Hong Kong was transformed. By day full of the sights, sounds and scents of human industry, by night, from my vantage point at the far end of the jetty, it seemed a less scary, more pretty place altogether. One strung with distant lights, where diamonds danced on the water.

This is our time, my mother had often explained to me, as we’d sit and gaze out over the inky expanse together. The time when the humans are all going to sleep. The time when the moon is our friend.

I had liked the moon then. I liked it even more now. Moonlight always seemed to me the friendliest light of all – particularly now that she had left me. The starlight, too, from stars that every living thing had originally come from. Stars to which the soul of every cat always returned.

I took up my usual position and curled my tail around my paws, feeling the breeze tickle my whiskers and the salt prick my nose as I watched the water lapping lazily at the jetty’s wooden pillars. Then I gazed up, imagining my mother up there somewhere, looking down at me. Remembering how, a while before she’d been run down and taken from me, she’d told me that she would always be there, watching over me, whatever happened.

I’ll be enjoying my ninth life, she’d told me, which had initially confused me. So she’d explained that cats were lucky. Perhaps the luckiest of all the creatures. Because our nine lives meant more than perhaps I’d imagined; the eight on earth, which was why cats could afford be so curious and courageous, and then the ninth, up in the stars for all eternity.

I gazed at the moon, wishing eternity didn’t feel quite so far away, then padded back towards the beach, in search of prey.

Prey was always on my mind but, as hard as I tried, prey kept managing to elude me. By the time the dawn broke on another day I was so weak with fatigue and hunger that the dock, with its slim promise of scraps to pick over, seemed once again the only place left to go. At the very least, I knew I could find a sheltered spot in which to rest before trying again.

So I returned, trying to pad my way lightly along the soggy paths and alleyways, always on the lookout and alert to new scents but, bar a brown snake that reared up and hissed at me threateningly, still failing to find anything to pounce on. But it wasn’t just my empty stomach that was drawing me back. Despite my knowing what my mother had said about how dangerous it was to show myself, the memory of the kind man I’d met the day before had stayed with me. And as I slipped once again through the holes in the fences, I kept going back to what he’d said. Did he really mean me no harm? Could I trust him? Might he feed me? Despite the danger, I wanted to find out.

When my mum had still been with me, I’d been curious about everything. So much so that there had been many times when she’d been the fearful one. When my curiosity might well have got me into trouble, had she not been there to remind me of all the hazards in the world. I was curious again now.

And the more I thought about the man’s kindness, the more I wondered. Had I been right to run away from him after all?

Yes, of course you were right to run away, I could hear my mother’s voice telling me. Who knows what might have happened to you? Humans are dangerous.

But a part of me – a guilty part, even as it was a defiant part – kept thinking no. Because it seemed to me that not all humans were dangerous. Snakes were dangerous. Rats were dangerous. (My mother had had a scar on her nose to prove it.) Cars and trucks were extremely dangerous, as was everything else that travelled so fast and so threateningly along the big road. I knew I wouldn’t forget about that, ever.

The old woman in the big house hadn’t been dangerous at all, though. Yes, she’d been human, but she’d given us food and been kind to us; those were two of my earliest memories. Milk on a patterned saucer. Little morsels of meat. She’d also been the last human to stroke me. To bend right down to stroke me and say, ‘Look at you, with those little white socks on your feet! Now, don’t you be going getting them dirty!’

I threaded my way along the quay in the hope that, in this at least, my mother was wrong. And as I walked, I wondered how life might have been if the old lady hadn’t vanished from our lives the way she had. If the man with the dog – our most mortal enemy – hadn’t moved in there instead. If we’d not had to run away from him quite so fast.

‘Well now, you’re back again, are you?’ The voice was loud and close and clear. But not such a fright now, because today I had expected it.

The quayside was once again bustling and noisy, gangplanks slung down from ships like so many giant tree creepers, disgorging sailors and fishermen, deck hands and mess boys; and stern men in hats, who dodged different men in different hats, cursing and chattering, weaved their heavily laden wooden carts in and around and between.

From my vantage point, hidden in the gap between two oil drums, I had curled up and watched him for a bit. He’d come, I realised, from one of the tallest ships currently docked there, and was today, like the rest of the men that teemed around it, dressed differently from previously, in polished shoes and crisp navy kit. Their white hulk of a ship, which had been tied up for some days now, had a tall mast, and two pairs of guns that pointed forward, which I knew were used for something called war.

The man stood in the ship’s shadow and considered me. He then looked around, and strode off, his shoes clicking rhythmically, and, before I had even stretched my paws out and yawned, had returned, holding something in his hand.

He squatted down on his haunches again and held it out to me. ‘Sardine,’ he said. ‘Well, a piece of one, anyway. Freshly caught this morning.’

I drank in the aroma that began to engulf me. I could almost taste it. ‘Go on, little feller,’ he urged again. ‘Help yourself.’

I wanted to. Badly. The smell was almost hypnotic. But I hadn’t been so frightened since the last time I’d been chased – by the dog at the big house, who’d nearly caught me. And curiosity was one thing from a safe spot between two sturdy oil drums, quite another when you were standing out in the open, close to a human, and your heart was pounding almost out of your chest.

I lifted a paw. Took a step. Cautiously sniffed at what he was holding out to me. But my instincts were too powerful. His movement towards me was only very slight, but still enough to have me skittering anxiously away.

‘Here, then,’ he said, laying the piece of fish on the ground in front of me. ‘Only grab it quick or the gulls will have it before you can say knife.’

So I grabbed it between my teeth and bit down on it ravenously, all the while backing away towards the space between the oil drums. It would be terrible if a gull did steal it, because I’d never tasted anything quite so delicious in all my life – or so gloriously without fur or feet or whiskers! I was so engrossed then (almost in heaven; so much fish at one sitting!) that when he reached out to stroke me this time, I didn’t flinch.

Though he did. ‘Gawd, kitty, there really is nothing of you,’ he said. ‘Is there? Poor little mite. Where’s your mum, eh? You a stray? All on your lonesome? You poor little blighter. Look at you shaking! Shhh, now. Don’t be scared. I won’t hurt you, I promise. You know what? I’ve got one just like you back in Blighty. Well, like you, but there’s a good deal more of ’im than you, for certain.’

‘Hickinbottom!’ Another voice rang out, and this one did scare me – not least because, at the sound of it, the man whipped his hand away, snapped back to his feet and spun around.

‘Aye aye, sir!’ he called back, stiffening. ‘Over here, sir! Just coming!’

‘Good. Because there’s two dozen potato sacks here that won’t shift themselves, Hickinbottom!’

‘I’d better go,’ he whispered. ‘You enjoy your breakfast, little Blackie.’

And with that he was hurrying back across towards his ship.

Chapter 3

‘So there’s dry stores, and wet stores – and those big sacks over there, Blackie? They’re all the veg that’ll be going in the vegetable bins down below. Then there’s the tins. Loads of them to load. Corned beef and kippers. Chopped ham. Potted chicken. Feed the brute! That’s what they say. You enjoying that?’

It was the following morning, early, and it had dawned dry and warm. And I’d greeted the sun with a full belly. I had caught a mouse in the small hours, and my joy knew no bounds. Neither did the gratitude I now felt towards my new friend, the sailor who’d given me the fish that had given me the energy – not to mention the confidence – to make my first kill in days.

And now another sardine. This time a whole one, which he’d already told me he’d ‘half-inched’, whatever that meant, from the stack of crates near a fishing junk further down the quay.

‘Polish it off quick,’ he’d said, and I was obliging him by doing precisely that while he puffed on a cigarette and lifted his face to the sun, apparently as pleased to see it smiling down on us as I was.

I should have known that there was going to be something different about today. I was a kitten, after all, so I was supposed to be good at sensing things. But I didn’t. Perhaps because of the fish, which took up all my attention, or perhaps just because I was so happy about my earlier catch. Either way, I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.

I was cleaning my whiskers, looking around for a puddle of water I could perhaps lap from when the cigarette end was flicked away and the sailor’s hand reached down to stroke me. Or so I thought. Instead, his hand wrapped right around me and the next thing I knew was that I was being borne aloft – up, up, up, up! – and was held there, high in the air above his head.

Terrified, I pinged my claws out. Then I mewled at him and furiously scrabbled my back legs against the inside of his wrist. He just laughed, pushed his cap back, and lowered me down a little, now holding me, legs dangling, closer to his grinning face.

‘Steady on, Blackie,’ he said. ‘You already know I’m not going to hurt you.’ Then he brought up his other hand and cupped it around my head, flattening my ears. ‘Shhh,’ he soothed, ‘shhh,’ even though I wasn’t making any noise now. Not so much as a hiss. I didn’t dare to. ‘No need to panic, is there?’ he reassured me. ‘No need at all. Look, you even like it,’ he said, rubbing the fur under my chin.

‘Look, you’re purring. See? I’m not so bad, am I?’

I didn’t know about that. How on earth could I? This was a human who was holding me, and that should never, ever happen. Not even the lady in the big house had picked me up, ever. She wouldn’t have dared to. My mother would have gone for her. But he had just picked me up and held me like I wouldn’t mind at all.

And that was the funniest thing. Despite my mother’s lessons clanging loudly in my ears – Never trust. Never touch. Never let a human lure or grab you – I found I actually didn’t mind him holding me. Which was no sort of thing for a kitten to be thinking. Not a kitten who valued all nine of his lives. It was at exactly that point, just as I was enjoying being cuddled, that I realised I might have made a terrible mistake.

No, not ‘might’, I decided, as his grip on me tightened further. Had just made a terrible, possibly fatal, mistake.

‘You know what, Blackie?’ he said, lowering his voice a little, and confirming my worst fears. ‘I reckon you’d fare a lot better coming with me than staying here.’ And with that, I was suddenly gripped even tighter, and plunged into the fusty darkness inside his shirt.

If I’d been frightened before, I was petrified now. The assault on my nose was the first thing – it was shocking. I’d never felt such an intense, frightening animal smell before. If that wasn’t enough to make me wriggle and squeal in terror, the lack of air, the furious rub of my whiskers against what felt like his skin – and other whiskers, the total blackness, the huff and puff and thump of his own breathing… it was all I could do to not succumb to the powerful instinct to claw and scrape and bite my way free.

Yet some other instinct stopped me. It was inexplicable, but it prevailed. I don’t know if it was the constant firm but gentle pressure of his hand against my flank – now back outside the fabric that contained me – or just the voice in my head that had brought me back to him at the docks. Either way, it reassured me that he wouldn’t hurt me. And as we hurried (for we were definitely hurrying) to wherever it was that he was taking me, the scared part became, if not exactly less scared, more pragmatic. I’d made a choice. I’d been curious. And if my curiosity killed me? Well, then, so be it. After all, why had cats been gifted all those lives if not to use them?

‘Here we are!’ the man called Hickinbottom whispered, just as I was bracing myself for whatever was going to happen to me. ‘Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like ’ome!’

Then he chuckled, causing the whiskers on his chest to jiggle against me and gusts of that strange human odour to prickle in my nose. I was glad to be fished out from under his clothing and plonked down in front of him, not least because there was a great deal more air for me to breathe. Though I was now so stunned that it didn’t even occur to me to run away. He rubbed my chin again, with a little finger, looking pleased with himself. ‘Welcome to the Amethyst, little feller,’ he said, pushing his cap back from his forehead. ‘And my humble abode. It might not look much, but you’re honoured, you know. These here are very superior accommodations for an ordinary seaman, I can tell you. On account of me being Captain of the Fo’c’sle, you see. I get all this to myself –’ he waved an arm around the tiny space he’d brought me into – ‘because it’s my job to make sure everything’s shipshape and in good order. Which is why I get berthed up here –’ he jabbed a thumb behind him – ‘right up front, next to the captain’s cabin. And you, me little feller, get first-class accommodations as well. Well, at least for the moment,’ he added. ‘I dare say you won’t want to stay cooped up with me for long; be all over the place like a rash before we know it.’

Having no idea what sort of ‘accommodations’ might be classed as inferior, I looked around me to get a sense of where I was. On a ship, in the harbour – that much I’d already worked out, and everything I could see around me definitely bore that out. White. Everything white. Just like the ship was on the outside. Everything straight lines, hard angles, sharp edges. Cold to touch, most likely, both to the nose and to the paw. And a faint metallic tang in the uncannily still air.

But where he’d placed me felt particularly, well, peculiar. I took a tentative step, and was immediately frozen in fear again; for the grey ground beneath me, which seemed to be made of some kind of matted hair, felt almost alive under my paws. I tried to get my balance, which was no easy feat. And just as I’d done so, the man called Hickinbottom slung his cap down beside me, sending tremors once again beneath me. And I wondered, pulling a memory from somewhere in my brain, if we were already rolling on high, stormy seas, of the kind Mum used to tell me stories about. I pinged my claws out and hung on for dear life.

‘You daft ’a’p’orth!’ Hickinbottom said, placing the flat of his hand beside me, then pressing it into the softness a couple of times and watching me wobble once again. ‘This here’s me hammock,’ he explained. ‘Me bed. It’s where I sleep. And, if you behave yourself, little Blackie, you’ll be sleeping here too. Though right now I need to stow it, quick smart,’ he said, scooping me up and plopping me down on the floor, ‘or the old man up there will have my guts for garters.’

To my quiet satisfaction (because cats were supposed never to be wrong about anything) the floor I’d been put down on fulfilled all expectations, being slippery, unyielding and cold. Still, now I was here and fairly certain the man called Hickinbottom meant no harm to me, any lingering anxieties about what might become of me – I had, I supposed, been officially kitnapped – were buried beneath what I could only describe as a feeling of happy recklessness and glorious potential; I was on a ship, bound for the ocean and certain adventure. To a life beyond the island I had only ever dreamed about. Despite having so many reasons to be terrified, I couldn’t help but feel my spirits soar.

Well, to a degree. If I thought too long, it was also very easy to remember that I was a very small, not-quite-yet-fully-grown animal, that I was alone with a human in a very confined space, and that I seemed to have no visible means of escape. I couldn’t help but wonder how such little birds and animals as the ones I had successfully stalked must have felt when I had had them gripped between my teeth or claws.

So I did the sensible thing, and tried not to think too much about that, and to instead remind myself of all the good things that might come of this, and the kindnesses the man called Hickinbottom had already shown me – to try to focus on the excitement I couldn’t help feel about everything being so different and new.

‘Come on, move yer harris, Blackie,’ he said, interrupting my philosophising. He appeared to be engaged in some unfathomable and complex manoeuvre, requiring a number of very strange contortions. It was hard to be sure, but he seemed to be trying to turn the thing he called his bed into what looked like something else altogether, though whether he was achieving it was anyone’s guess.

So, to be obliging, and because I definitely didn’t want to be stepped on, I quickly scuttled out of harm’s way, squeezing myself into the space between two strange metal objects that protruded from the wall, from where I could both keep an eye on his progress and take a proper look at the place I would also call home till such time as he decided it would be safe for me to venture out again. Though how long that would be, I had no idea.

‘Right, that’s me done,’ he said, finally, tugging at his tunic. ‘They’ll be weighing anchor soon so I’d best be skedaddling. I’ll be back in a bit, with some food.’

Then he was gone. He was gone for some time, as well; time that I spent making circuits of the strange, tiny space, investigating every last inch of it. That done, I spent an even longer time washing my fur, and then monitoring the progress of a tiny, flitty fly, which, evidently much too high up to be concerned about my presence, went quietly about its business; something that seemed to involve bobbing back and forth just below the ceiling, and often knocking into it, for whatever reason flies did such kinds of things.

And it was fine. It was pleasant having no pressing need to go anywhere (though, as for needing to ‘go’, I had to be judicious about that, opting, after some indecision, for a clean, obvious corner). I was happy enough, because I had grown used to enjoying my own company. Even before my mother died, I’d already known that I would have to leave her eventually, because the life of a cat was generally a solitary one, out of both nature and necessity. Cats – or so she’d told me – needed something called territory. Because cats didn’t really like sharing.

I didn’t know about that because it was a concept I’d yet to experience. It did make me think of the home I’d now left, though, and to wonder if I’d ever likely see it again.

But not for too long. Within moments, I was asleep.

Since it felt like particularly bad manners to keep my new friend awake half the night while I explored, I spent my first night as a seafaring cat doing what my mum had always told me was the answer to many a feline problem: I curled up at the end of the thing George slept in and was soon far away inside my head again, chasing moths.

It had been a day of rest but, for all that, some exciting discoveries too. I discovered that sardines could come in tins – little metal containers, opened by little metal keys – and that they tasted even more sardine-y than normal sardines did, which was quite a revelation. And also good, because it seemed that sardines were another thing of which there were apparently ‘plenty’.

I also discovered a thin white liquid, which George told me was called milk. He’d brought some with the sardines, and the taste of it took me straight back to a memory I’d almost forgotten. Of my early kittenhood, and of being so close to my mother that remembering the feeling now was almost painful. And via the milk, I also found out that George was called George, because the feeding of me seemed to invoke a memory for him too. Of the cat back at home, which he’d mentioned at the quayside.

‘George! Is that cat up in bed with you again, you rascal!’ That’s what his mother would often say to him when he was younger and would sneak the cat – who was called Sooty, and who he told me he missed very much – into bed to keep his toes warm in the winter.

Knowing that made me sleep all the better in this strange new metal world, because it was so nice to know I was already being appreciated. But George’s ship seemed to pay scant regard to the dreams we were both enjoying, because we were suddenly jolted wide awake in the darkness by a din so close and deafening that for some seconds I wondered if I was trapped in an oil drum that was being beaten with a stick.

Though, happily, I was soon reassured. I knew these strange whistling noises, I realised. I’d heard them often down in the harbour, back when I would spend the later reaches of many a night hoping the dark and quiet would lead to an abundance of prey.

It rarely did, as I still had so much to learn about stalking, but the moonlit routines had become familiar. The night insects gathering in the pools of brightness around the floodlights, the bats that would wheel and swoop and try to pick them off – not to mention make me wish that I, too, could fly. The sooty smell of the charcoal from the night watchman’s brazier and then, often, when the bigger ships were moored, the meandering humans, who would sway and bump into each other and shout as they made their way back to the quay, and to their beds. ‘Don’t fall in the drink!’ they’d cry, ‘I’ll bloody swing for her, so I will!’, ‘Hey, just you mind your ruddy language!’, and other incomprehensible babble, which would now perhaps start to make sense to me.

And then the pre-dawn cacophony, also human in origin, that started up long before the birds. A din that would begin even before the sun peeked over the horizon, with the clanking of bells and the squealing of pipes and the great wall of sound that was unlike any other; that of humans, many humans, being roused from their slumbers, and not liking it one little bit.

All this happened now; all of it simultaneously and all of it deafening (the ship’s bell, I would learn, being particularly close). The combined clamour caused George, previously inert, to jerk and judder, and caused me, curled up tight in the warm space between his ankles, to shoot my claws out and cling on to the shifting grey mass beneath me, for fear of being launched into space.

‘Yeeooow!’ he yelled. ‘Streuth, Blackie! Jesus and Mary! Come ’ere. Gi’s me legs back, for Gawd’s sake, you tinker!’ Then he plucked me from the covers, with scant regard for my still being attached to them, and nuzzled my cheek into the hot skin of his face.

‘Aww, little feller,’ he said, his breath gusting warm and close, causing me to mewl at him. ‘This is nice, ain’t it? Almost feels like I’m back at home. Don’t be scared.’ (Which I wasn’t, just somewhat stunned, which felt reasonable under the circumstances.) ‘You’ll have to get used to this kind of racket, matey.’ He popped me onto his lap and ran his hands down my flanks, and as I luxuriated in the simple, rhythmic pleasure of being stroked by him, it hit me that perhaps I’d discovered something good. Something my poor mother might never have found.

That perhaps a cat’s life didn’t need to be solitary after all.

Chapter 4

I learned so much in that first couple of days. I learned that it wasn’t terribly nice to be in a confined space with one’s toilet, and that the long hours between George coming back to check on me and feed me could grow almost intolerable to the nose.

I learned that the sea was an even more shifting mass than George’s hammock; that sitting on the hard, polished floor of his tiny quarters was no protection from the feeling that if you stood up, your legs wouldn’t quite behave in the way that your brain had been expecting them to.

I learned that the resultant queasiness (which had taken me completely by surprise, given how much the sea had always seemed a soothing, lapping presence) was one that was decidedly unpleasant, and that the only escape from it was sleep.

So I did a lot of sleeping, which must have been good for me, because I’d never felt so strong and rested, and with the anxieties of how I’d fill my belly removed at a stroke, it was the kind of sleep that came very easily.

Though I did feel scared at times. I couldn’t help it. When you’ve lived with constant fear, as I had since my mother had been taken from me, you couldn’t easily stop being fearful. And I knew I was right to be fearful about what lay beyond the fo’c’sle. Because, despite my instinct – that George was kind, that to be here with him was a good thing – I couldn’t help think about my mother’s many warnings about the lives cats like us should probably try to live. On that she had been clear, and with what had always seemed good reason: that, apart from the old lady, (who, even so, we should only approach with caution) we should keep away from, and be always wary of, humans. I couldn’t help wondering every time I found myself itching to explore further, did my mum die because she was too curious a cat?

On the surface of things, no – she died because of the man who moved into the big house, and his dog. Because she was chased away from the one place where we felt no harm would come to us; because she ran, petrified, unseeing, out into the road. But her words dogged me, even so. I must keep my wits about me. Gentle George was one thing, the enormity of this huge metal vessel – and all the humans contained in it – quite another. I’d be a foolish kitten indeed not to be scared.

Even so, the itch to roam soon took precedence over the fear, not least because it seemed George was keen for me to explore, too. Since that first morning when we’d sailed, he had not locked me in, and it occurred to me that as he’d told me what a fine ship’s cat I’d make I should better acquaint myself with the ship. So on the third day, George having been ‘mustered’ ‘on-deck’ (which I had by now worked out always involved him ‘skedaddling’ away at high speed) I decided it was time to venture out.

The Amethyst was a place like no other I had ever encountered. Admittedly, in my short life, I had not encountered much, but here was somewhere – and something – that was completely unlike anywhere I’d ever been. Though its exterior held no surprises – I’d watched so many ships coming and going that the sight of a ship was very familiar – the inside of my new home was a mystery.

Like so many human structures, the ship was a box, but unlike the cavernous warehouses into which I’d sometimes sneak in search of sleeping lizards, it was divided into lots of smaller boxes. The junction between each box was also very clear. Where I was used to squeezing myself into slim gaps between things, here it was all about ups and downs. To get from one space to another, as I found out almost immediately, it was necessary to first leap over a small metal wall. It was complicated to understand, being so full of things that made no sense to me; within each new place that my tentative travels took me I saw the same lacework of piping over all the walls and ceilings, the same inexplicable lumps of wood and metal, all rising up from the same, highly polished red floor. It couldn’t have been more different from the green softness I was used to seeing, or even the giant scale of all the human-made structures of the docks. It was so much to take in, in such a small, confusing space. I could only trust that I would begin to make sense of it eventually, and in the meantime not get hopelessly lost.

I saw no one. It was true that I hadn’t travelled far yet, but this surprised me almost as much as it relieved me. Then I realised that the humans here must all have been ‘mustered’ – the whole lot of them; a thing I would doubtless also learn about in due course. For now I was content just to explore my immediate surroundings, and to try to make sense of my strange new abode. Though finding my way outside, back to where I would be able to see the sea again, took some time and some doing, and some retracing of my steps, because there seemed little logic in the way the ship was laid out.

Back on the island, with its many meandering pathways and alleyways, it was simply a case of following my nose and eyes, and padding along, taking heed of the information from my whiskers. Up a slope, down a hill, through a space between railings; there wasn’t much in the way of obstacles that could effectively bar my way. In this strange place, however, quite apart from the multitude of strange little barriers I must hop over, there were also step-ladders everywhere, which looked fine to scale, but far less appealing to descend. It was clear that, though to look at they were quite different, these had all the same qualities as trees.

Trees, as any cat would tell you, were never to be trusted. Trees were bewitching, confounding and ultimately deceptive, as I’d found out as a kitten of maybe not quite five months, when in bold pursuit of a large gecko. So easy to climb (a determined kitten could shimmy up one in no time) but, once there, it was almost impossible to get down. And my mother – this being a while before everything went wrong for us – seemed to find my plight very funny.

There is a reason you’ll never see a cat up a tree, kitten, she’d observed, as I’d trembled and mewled and miaowed high above her. It’s because every cat recalls the day they did just as you have. Now, don’t panic. Be brave. Trust you’ll land the right way up. Land hard, yes, but the right way. You’ll see. Come on, try it. She’d been right. It had taken half a morning, but she’d been right about both things. That I would land the right way up – even if only after a terrifying, uncontrollable, claw-shredding downward scramble. And that I wouldn’t forget it. I vowed I would never scale a tree trunk again.

I elected to avoid the ladders too, at least till I’d worked out how I might negotiate them. So it was via a rather circuitous route that I finally found the outside, and when I stepped out there at last, treading lightly and cautiously, I realised I must have arrived at what George called ‘on-deck’. Though there was no sign of anyone – which ‘on-deck’ had he been mustered to? – I knew because for the first time in many, many hours now, I could smell salt and feel a familiar breeze caress my fur.

Being apparently alone – the shiny ground stretched into the far distance in both directions – I drank it all in, noticing how much the air differed from that in George’s space in the fo’c’sle, which was air like no air I’d experienced before, being so thick with dense, alien, often startling odours.

It was also fully light – a glorious morning, in fact – and I felt in no rush to explore further yet. It was enough just to look around me, take it in, letting my nose and whiskers reassure me, then cast my gaze upwards towards a sky so bright and butterfly-blue that I had to narrow my eyes in order to properly see it.

But it seemed I wasn’t the only one ‘on-deck’ after all. ‘What the very devil do we have here?’ boomed a voice from behind me. ‘A cat? How’s a ruddy cat found his way aboard my ship?’

Every cat’s life is precious, so instinct prevailed. I dug my claws in – though into nothing, so that wasn’t much use to me – and made myself as big and threatening as I could. Which I fully realised wasn’t very big, much less very threatening, but I was too frightened to think rationally.

Except perhaps the dark part of my brain was being perfectly rational, because the other option, of running away, felt foolish in the extreme. Where exactly would I hope to run to? For what struck me most forcibly as I trembled beneath the human – tail fluffed, back a half-moon, teeth bared, teetering on tippytoes – was the sight, in the gaps between the deck edge and rail, of sea, and more sea, and not a great deal else but sea. The time for escape was clearly long gone.

And, just as George had, this human – this huge, thunder-voiced male human – seemed to find my predicament very funny. He also wasted no time in reaching down and scooping me up, though he grabbed me not by my belly, but by the scruff of my neck, just as my mother used to do. He brought me close to his face then and dangled me in front of it, breathing his man-scent (another assault on my nostrils as well as my dignity) and eyeing me just as I might have done a shrew.

For a moment, it was all I could do not to panic. One thing cats don’t do for pleasure is swim, particularly in waves bigger than they are. Given the way he’d just spoken, overboard was where I must surely be headed. I’d have wriggled, even knowing the futility of it, but the scruff of a neck is a singular location – by some clever trickery, which I’d thought was known only to mother cats, I was entirely unable to move.

‘Hmm,’ said the captain. (I knew he must be the captain, because only the captain would call it ‘my ship’.) ‘A stowaway, eh? Or did someone smuggle you on board, eh?’ He studied me intently for a number of seconds, as if seriously expecting me to answer.

I sniffed him. He smelled markedly different from George, which seemed appropriate, because George, I now knew, was still only a man-boy. I knew because of his ‘bum-fluff’, as he called it, and his sharp observation that we were both of us teenage ‘waifs and strays’, give or take, causing me to wonder if we weren’t both in the same situation – both without our mothers, and neither of us feeling quite ready.

This captain was clearly no man-boy. He was a man and I could smell it, in the same way as I was always alert to the scent of the big cats on Stonecutters Island, in whose territories I never dared tread. His scent was earthy, and salty, and strong in my nostrils, though also strangely reminiscent of the shady spaces on the island where the jacarandas dripped their purple petals. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘since you are here, you may as well come meet my number one.’ Upon which, I was relocated to the crook of his other hand, and carried up and down the step-ladders I’d slunk beneath before, my heart beating out a tattoo against his palm.

‘Weston!’ he boomed (as I would soon learn was the way of things with captains). ‘Look what I’ve found promenading down the foredeck, bold as you please!’

He put me down on what seemed to be a sort of ledge, and, just as had been the case down on the deck, I took the view that to make a bid for escape would probably be pointless. Besides, I had not yet been thrown into the sea, so I suspected (at least, I hoped) that I might not. Though I could certainly see the endless glassy expanse of it, having now found myself in the place that must be from where the captain ran the ship.

Every cat likes a high place (as long as it’s not a high place in a tree, of course) and this was a very fine high place indeed. It was right at the front of the ship, with a kind of windscreen to protect me from the stiff ocean breeze. In time I would realise that dozing behind it on a sunny day was a particular pleasure, but right now I was more excited by the awe-inspiring view; from up here, you could see right to the distant horizon; a place my mother always told me was special indeed, because that was where the earth met the stars.

Reassured now (the captain would surely have launched me overboard by now if he’d wanted to) I began to wash my nose and whiskers, both because they’d taken something of a battering on the scent front and because I was keen to make the best impression I could.

‘Well, isn’t that the darndest?’ the man called Weston said, lowering a pair of what I would learn were called binoculars from his face, and shaking his head. ‘I saw this little feller on the quay the other day, and I was only saying to Frank that we should get ourselves a ship’s cat. Well, I say cat. This one’s only a kitten – not even a year old, I reckon.’

My ears twitched hopefully. George had said exactly the same thing! The captain nodded. ‘Perhaps less. But he’s a handsome little fellow, isn’t he? Plucky, too. A bit small and scrawny, but if he’s a stray, which I suspect he must be, that’s only to be expected. And you know what they say about the strays round these parts, don’t you? He’ll probably make an excellent ratter.’

I stopped cleaning my whiskers so the captain could stroke me, pushing my face tentatively up into his palm. It was a curious thing, this stroking humans seemed to like to do. Curious and nice, and I could feel myself purring. I’d hardly purred since my mother had died; it was like a muscle I had no use for. Yet here I was, astonished to find myself purring all the time, even when I hadn’t exactly meant to.

I wasn’t sure what a ‘ratter’ was, but I had a hunch what it might be. This was confirmed when he explained that it was a very important post, for which he suspected a cat like me would be particularly well qualified, dispatching the vermin that were what he called one of the ‘most damnable evils of life in His Majesty’s Navy’, as they pilfered from the stores and munched their way through anything that took their fancy. ‘Or, rather, did,’ he corrected. ‘Perhaps no more, eh? Not when they get wind of this little chap in their midst!’

I decided I liked the captain very much, and would endeavour to do my very best for him.

‘He’ll need some meat on his bones then, sir,’ observed the third man, who had a face full of creases and very blue eyes. ‘Shall I call down and have one of the mess boys bring him up something from the stores, sir? Some herrings, perhaps. I imagine he’d be very keen on herrings.’

‘Absolutely,’ said the captain, plucking me up again for another inspection. ‘He’ll certainly need feeding up a bit, if he’s to be given a commission. And you’ll need a name, I suppose, little chap,’ he added, to me. ‘An official ship’s cat needs to have a suitable name.’

‘Socks?’ suggested Weston. ‘Or Felix, perhaps? Tiddles?’

The captain rolled his eyes. ‘Tiddles? You hear that, Frank? Really? He’d really have me striding about the place, yelling “Tiddles!”? I’d never live it down!’

‘Alright, Korky, then,’ Weston suggested. ‘As in Korky the Cat. Now that would be apt, given the markings on him, wouldn’t it?’

But the captain, though looking straight at me, seemed to be looking somewhere else, too. Somewhere I had a hunch might be a good bit further away. ‘Simon,’ he said eventually. ‘I think we’ll call you Simon.’

‘Simon?’ Weston and the other man said simultaneously. ‘Why on earth Simon?’

‘Very long story,’ replied the captain, very shortly. ‘And once you’re fed, perhaps you can accompany me on my rounds, eh, little Simon? Weston, did that maintenance detail make a start on the boilers yet?’

Weston nodded.

‘Excellent,’ said the captain. ‘So once you’re fed, we’ll start in the engine room, then, shall we, Simon?’

‘Though you’d better take care not to let Peggy see him on your way down, sir,’ the man called Frank said.

‘There’s a point,’ said Weston. ‘He’s right, sir. Better not. You know, I’m not sure if she’s so much as even seen a cat before. I suspect she probably hasn’t, don’t you?’ He, too, came across and stroked me. ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘And I wonder what you’ll do…’

‘What they’ll do,’ the captain corrected, ‘is to learn to rub along together as best they can. Just as we all do, eh?’

He put me down again and, having nowhere else in particular I’d rather be, I stayed where I was, wondering what sort of foodstuff a herring might be. And, more pressingly, wondering who or what Peggy was. They called her ‘she’, so perhaps she was a lady, like in the big house. I hoped so.

More intriguingly, it seemed I was going to be called Simon now, as well as Blackie. And I thought I could probably live with that. I was learning lots about humans, and the curious words they used for things. And given it could have been ‘Tiddles’, which, for some reason, had a bit of an unsavoury tang to it, I thought I’d probably got off quite lightly.

Chapter 5

I soon forgot all about Peggy. And with hindsight that was probably understandable. There was so much for me to see and do – much of it in the dark hours of the night time – and the Amethyst was a very big place.

We’d been at sea a few days, and while the view of the horizon was largely unchanging, every day (and night) was still full of wonder because there was just such a lot to try to understand. The ship’s routines, for starters, which I was beginning to get quite a feel for. And quickly, too, because, though I still spent plenty of time napping in gentle George’s hammock, now the captain had discovered me I had become something of a novelty; so much so that on that very day he assembled the crew on the quarterdeck, and made my position on his ship official.

George had told me I’d be made welcome, and I was. He’d told me sailors had always had a friendship with cats, because cats kept sailors safe, having miraculous powers that could protect them from dangerous weather. He also let me know that sailors generally were a very superstitious bunch, and that if I walked up to one of them, they’d feel lucky. Of course, the flip side of this was that if I walked away from them, they’d be unlucky, so I might want to think before deciding to do that. He also told me (though while assuring me he didn’t believe such nonsense) that back in the ‘olden days’, whatever they were, some sailors also believed cats had storm-repelling magic in their tails.

Best of all, however, was the news that if anyone considered throwing me overboard they would think twice, because throwing a cat overboard would cause a great storm to sink the ship and kill everyone and should any lucky ones survive they would have nine years of further bad luck to look forward to.

In any event, it was all rather good news, I decided, as was the captain’s announcement that he was giving me a ‘roving commission’ as an ordinary seacat, with my number-one duty – as well as the bringing of luck and magic – being to take control of all the vermin.

Quite apart from all that, the captain seemed to have taken a shine to me personally. He would tour the decks, whistling, and it soon became obvious that sometimes he was whistling specifically for me, as I’d often hear him calling out his name for me as well. This put me in mind of the old lady in the big house on Stonecutters Island, and the way she’d often whistle to call my mother. It also reminded me of the affection she’d always shown us, and how my mother had once told me it was a cat’s way to reciprocate, and to return such a compliment wherever possible. (Even if I knew full well that, in her book, such feline displays of affection definitely didn’t include allowing yourself to be picked up and hugged, much less slung over a naval captain’s shoulder.)

I would therefore always hurry to wherever he was and show myself, and he would express such delight at my having come ‘at his command’ that I made it my business to hurry to him any time I heard him calling ‘Simonnnn!’, or whistling for me to come to him. And it wasn’t just because of the ease with which he could find me sardines, either. I was equally delighted to have made a new human friend. I thought perhaps my mother would have been, too.

Making friends very soon became the order of the day because it seemed everyone on the Amethyst wanted to say hello to me. Wherever I went I was greeted with the same affection George had shown me back on Stonecutters Island, and I quickly got used to being picked up and cuddled.

It was a very different life from the one I’d been living in Hong Kong. But I was still my mother’s kitten and, for the most part, her words of advice still made sense to me. I would do as she’d always advised when it came to relations with other creatures; return the friendship my new human friends were extending to me by becoming the best ratter in the Navy. And so what that I lacked experience? I would make up for that easily – with enthusiasm, dedication and courage.

It felt good to have an ambition. To be given a role in life. To strive for something more fulfilling than just survival. And I couldn’t wait to get underway. There was just the one detail that was holding me up. In order to kill the ship’s vermin, first I had to track them down. And in this I still felt woefully lacking in skills or experience, bar half-remembered snatches of half-remembered information from my mother – that fresh rat’s urine was so revolting that it made your whiskers shiver, and that they scuttled around the most at dawn and dusk.

So it was that on the fourth or fifth night after getting my orders I was still prowling optimistically below the waterline at dawn, having had what was shaping up to be a very productive night – my first true lead in what had become a rather lengthy campaign.

Ever since I’d joined the crew, I’d been trying to work out where I might find the promised enclave of marauding rodents, but up to now I hadn’t had a great deal of success. I could often smell them (fusty and musty, like mice, only more so) but that had been as far as I’d got. Which didn’t surprise me. If they were one of the evils – indeed, the very curse – of His Majesty’s Navy, it seemed sensible to assume they were as crafty as any rodent, and knew their way around a ship a lot better than I did.

I also wondered if they’d got wind of my own presence. I’d only encountered rats very fleetingly, as one of the rules my mother had been at pains to have me heed was that I was forbidden from having anything to do with them. She had been clear in the utmost on how much danger a rat posed to a kitten; I was too small still, too weak, too inexperienced and too curious, and she assured me that when the day came when she deemed me no longer all those things, she would be the first to tell me.

Not that I’d even fully understood what she’d meant. That last bit, for instance. Shouldn’t cats be curious? Wasn’t that what cats were supposed to be? As a kitten, it had all been such a puzzle to me. In what way could being too curious about something as lowly as a rat pose a danger to a rat-hunting kitten? What could a rat – just a big mouse, really – actually do to me? They were grain-nibblers. Scurriers. Made for footling, not fighting. Whereas I had the tools for an altogether different kind of life. Speed and stealth. Grace and agility. A predator’s teeth and claws.

And then I’d met one for myself, back on the island, and though I was only little then, I was still not convinced. Because my memory was not so much of a terrifying adversary, as of being a bold, courageous kitten, cruelly thwarted. That what I’d spotted had been a rat had been without question. Fat, dung-coloured rump. Scaly tail, like an earthworm. Unquestionably a rat – just like a mouse, only bigger – and I couldn’t have been more excited. And having spied it scuttling away (another thing rats are good at), I simply did what a kitten is naturally compelled to do. I sank down almost to my belly, took aim, rehearsed my pounce in my head and then –

‘KITTEN, STOP!’ My mother’s hiss pierced the air with such force that the entire rat, already aquiver, completely left the ground. And once back in touch with it, streaked away as if propelled by a hurricane, to go on and live – and to steal – another day. And I’d been cross – just as any thwarted kitten had a right to be, in my book. Humphing and harrumphing and generally mewling my displeasure at what she’d done. Oh, how I sulked! Till I was finally chastened by my mother – by her explaining at great length that a rat was, in reality, not at all like a mouse. That the fat-bottomed rodent I had set my sights on killing could just as easily turn around and kill me.

I trusted my mother, so was still slightly nervous as I padded along the passageways in the bowels of the Amethyst, nose up, whiskers twitching, reading the air. For all that the captain had assured me that I’d make a very fine ratter (though how could he know that?), my mother’s stern warnings couldn’t help but nag at me and neither could the memory of that scar on her nose. So the business of whether I was yet big enough, strong enough, experienced enough to deal with one – all of those were the questions I had yet to resolve. Without her to tell me – because she’d died before that day she’d mentioned happened – I would just have to judge for myself.

I was in no doubt about one thing – that I must be curious. I knew I’d be ratting no rats otherwise. Without curiosity, I would fail to even find one. The Amethyst was a place of secrets, a place of nooks, crannies and corners. Many of them places, presumably, where my human friends couldn’t go – which was why rats, evil scavengers and skulkers in shadows, could set up home there and take things that weren’t theirs. And as the captain’s ratter – which responsibility I took extremely seriously – it was down to me to seek and find them, to get into all those places and (with luck as well as courage, both of which I knew I would need a lot of) take control, thin their numbers, make kills.

It was with that very much in mind that I stalked my first ship’s rodent, which I came upon, finally, in the space between the flour sacks and pipes, at the very back of the dark, silent stores. It was its route I noticed first. I knew all about routes. This route was a rat run if ever I saw one. And though I could hear my mother tutting as I thought it, I thought it anyway; that it was exactly like a mouse run only bigger.

The evidence was clear. The husks of grains, the crumbs of bread and swede and carrot. The foul-smelling pellets that rats, being entirely without hygiene, drop thoughtlessly, randomly, disgustingly, in their wake. Then that odour – that once smelled was never forgotten odour – which was now making such an assault on my nostrils that it was almost like a magnet, reeling me in…

And then the prize, as I slipped round the edge of a metal bin. The rat itself, with its back to me, front paws up to whiskers; those whiskers twitching in a way that a cat’s whiskers never would, rhythmically, quiverishly, furiously – marking the movement of jaws that were munching on food it had no business munching, that it had absolutely no right to steal. The captain had been right, I decided, as I watched it – it was the very curse of His Majesty’s Navy.

I sank down slowly, feeling my belly fur almost melt into the floor beneath me, adjusted my position, and counted out heartbeats in my head. There was time, there was space, there was no way of escape for it. Two more heartbeats. Luck and courage.

I pounced.

The rat spun around, a blur of pale pink, black eyes and frantic whiskers, the spoils forgotten as it tried to scrabble claws at my face. But it was too shocked to do any more than slightly unbalance me, which – being a cat and not a rat – I quickly corrected, making firm, decisive contact with the side of its neck till its thrashing began to ebb and finally ended.

I waited, crouched and motionless, a full half-minute more till my heart slowed, my fur settled and the moment seemed right finally to relax my jaws and drop my prey between my paws. And it was only then that I began to appreciate just how heavy it had been. How one fat-bottomed rat had so much more bulk about it than a vole or a mouse or a shrew. How my mother had had a point when she’d cautioned against kittens taking them on. But I’d done it. I couldn’t believe it, yet I’d really done it. I’d killed it. I’d dispatched it for my captain and could not have felt more proud. I’d become big enough and strong enough and would soon be experienced enough. I couldn’t wait to take it to his cabin.

And I would have done so, except that fate intervened, and it seemed that someone else was destined to see it first. It was while I was on my way up top, moments later, that I bumped into him.

I was hurrying, keen that I should present it to the captain warm, and (I don’t doubt, since I was feeling particularly full of myself) trotting along with something of a swagger. It was perhaps that which caused the sailor (who appeared round a corner out of nowhere, a massive man-shaped silhouette) to place his hands on his hips and make such a noise about it.

‘Well, looky here!’ he boomed, his voice echoing off the walls and the ceiling (I mentally corrected myself; the bulkhead and the overhead, of course). ‘Look. At. You!’ he went on, seeming almost as proud of my kill as I was. ‘What’s that you’ve got there, Blackie? Is it what I think it is?’

He stepped nimbly over the small metal wall beneath the door between us, moving into the pool of what little light was left burning at that time of day. He had a piece of paper in his hand and a pencil behind his ear. The light gleamed on his teeth as he grinned down at me.

He squatted in front of me to make a closer inspection. ‘Good Lord, it is!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a clever little Blackie. Earning your keep already, I see!’ Before I could take any action to evade it, I was then ‘treated’ to a scratch of the space between my ears, which, with some effort, I just about tolerated.

It wasn’t that I had anything against him – as with everyone I’d so far befriended on the Amethyst, he looked nothing but overjoyed to have had the chance to meet and stroke me. But it’s no treat for a cat bearing prey to be touched. (Not even, might I add, by their mother.) It’s quite the opposite. And try as I might to believe that he didn’t mean to take the rat from me, certain feline instincts are way stronger than logic. Though I managed not to growl at him. Just.

But he seemed to understand anyway, because he stepped aside and made a dramatic sweeping motion with his arm. ‘On your way, sailor,’ he said. ‘Don’t let me hold you up. And if it’s the boss you’re after, you’ll find him on the bridge if you hurry. Blow me,’ he finished, now scratching his own head, using the pencil. ‘And you such a titch, and all, Blackie! Fancy!’ Then he laughed. ‘Peggy’ll be looking to her laurels!’

Even then, I didn’t pay it a great deal of attention – either to the business of who Peggy was, or what ‘her laurels’ might be. I was much too focused on the business in hand. Well, more accurately, the business at that moment in mouth – a dead weight between my jaws that was getting heavier by the moment, and that I had still to present to the captain.

As it was, I failed to find him, because he wasn’t on the bridge and, fearing the man up there – Lieutenant Berger, who was apparently not a ‘cat fan’ – I slipped away again, carefully, holding my head up as I went, so the rat’s scaly tail didn’t drag on the floor.

To the captain’s cabin, then, I decided, but he wasn’t there either, and it occurred to me that he might by now be back out on deck, doing the dawn ‘mustering’ that seemed to bring him such joy. Since it seemed a bit presumptuous to waltz up with it while he was busy giving orders, I decided that the cabin was the best place for my trophy. I sprang up to his bunk and left the body where I knew he’d appreciate it – on the pillow.

It was only when I jumped down and headed back to the rat runs that it occurred to me. I still had no answer to my question. Who or what was this Peggy, anyway?

Chapter 6

When you live on board a ship, as I very quickly came to understand once I’d joined the Amethyst, life is all about order and routine. This obviously holds true for every drama a ship might encounter, but it’s equally important on those days when there is none; those long days of ploughing steadily through the water, the sky above, the ocean below, the view calm and unchanging. That’s where routine apparently makes for ‘good order’, which was something the captain seemed to mention a lot, along with ‘shipshape’, which seemed relevant, even if not entirely obvious, and ‘Bristol fashion’, which meant not a jot to me.

But whatever the reason Mr Bristol had decreed it, his way of fashioning things created routine and structure, which made it quite unlike any day in my previous life. Back then, every dawn could bring entirely new challenges, many of them challenges I felt ill-equipped to face. Here, every new day was a copy of the one that came before it, and also a blueprint for the one coming after – each one so like the other that they soon began to blur; it would be only the ship’s log that would enable any distinction to be made, and some specific memory be pinned to it.

With one exception. The day I met Peggy.

News of my first kill seemed to blow through the Amethyst like a hurricane, and I made even more friends as a result. It seemed the captain hadn’t been joking when he’d told me what a scourge the ship’s rats were, because the first thing he did was congratulate me fulsomely. ‘Well, thanks VERY much for my gift!’ he said, chuckling as he did so. ‘What a TREAT it was to find it just before I had my breakfast! Absolutely DELIGHTFUL,’ and lots of other jolly things like that.

Everywhere I went, I was treated like a hero; applauded, roundly cheered, and given all sorts of food treats. In fact, the only dampening detail in the joy of my new status was that now I’d done it once I must of course do it all again.

And again. And then again. Which didn’t worry me that much – after my kill I was as full of confidence as I was of sardines (sardines being preferable to rat parts on any intelligent kitten’s menu) but enough to ensure that I wasted no time on pride and preening. Instead, I planned my next kill, just as I’d done when my mother had first died (even though I was no longer desperate for food); tried to hunt as much with forethought and intelligence as with instinct, rejigging my watches, just as the captain liked the rest of the crew to do sometimes, so that I was always extra-vigilant at those times of day when the rats were most likely to be out and about. So it was that at dusk the following evening, most of the crew having just eaten their evening meal, I was patrolling the various passageways amidships.

It was the sound that came first, and it stopped me in my tracks, streaking through my body like a bolt of electricity.

‘You alright, Blackie?’ said my new friend, Jack, he of the first rat encounter. Jack was the youngest of the ship’s telegraphists, which meant he was in charge of communications, of which, on the Amethyst, there seemed to be many different kinds. He spent a lot of his time in a particularly pleasing place I’d recently discovered – the wireless office, which was situated forward, near the wheelhouse, and had a rather nice high place in it – a cosy kitten-sized nook. It was a warm wooden shelf and I had already taken quite a shine to it, both on account of its location and its proximity to various electrical items that beeped and tapped and often grew pleasingly warm as well.

Jack was at the stores today, seeing the quartermaster for a tin of herrings-in-tomato-sauce, and had obviously noticed my sudden immobility and stricken pose.

Was I alright? I realised I couldn’t provide him with an answer, because I wasn’t sure. Though my brain told me I was fine, other bits of me were disagreeing with it – which, as I learned early on, is often the way it works with felines; our ears and whiskers are laws unto themselves. I strained to listen, trying to believe I hadn’t heard what I’d just thought I had. But since no sensible cat refuses to believe the evidence of their own ears, I was already inclining to the view that I had indeed heard what I thought I had, when it came again, and then again, several times in quick succession, leaving me in no doubt that my terror was well founded. It couldn’t be, surely? But it was, even so. It was the sound of barking. There was a dog aboard the Amethyst!

Since the barking kept happening and I was still fluffed and frozen, Jack obviously worked out what had frightened me. And he laughed. (This sort of response to such troubling developments never ceased to amaze me.) ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you’ve heard her, then? That’s just our Peg. Nothing to worry about. You’ve got nothing to fear from her. Bark’s worse than her bite, isn’t it, Dusty?’

‘She hasn’t even got a bite,’ the man in charge of the herrings corrected him. ‘Not that anyone’s ever noticed, anyway. Daft as a brush, that one. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Well, I say that. She might easily lick a man to death. Had a screw loose from birth, I reckon, she has.’

I felt my fur settling flatter, and my pulse slow a little. Though, for all their smiles, I was by no means reassured. They seemed to talk about Peggy (a dog! I still couldn’t believe it!) as if she posed absolutely no danger at all, and that surely couldn’t be right, could it? What kind of dog was she? I mentally flipped through the dog-dossier in my head, which was, for obvious reasons, pretty flimsy. Not to mention largely half forgotten these days.

I tried to picture this Peggy, this ‘daft-as-a-brush’ dog, this ‘wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly’ dog. This dog with ‘a screw loose from birth’. None of these statements made sense to me, so they didn’t help reassure me. Neither did any recollection I could come up with from Hong Kong. I certainly remembered seeing tiny dogs from time to time, which were usually bought, sold and kept in bamboo cages, but those dogs had a yip more like a bird’s call. And they were the exception; the ones to which my mother said I need pay no mind. Every other dog I had ever encountered had been scary in the utmost; invariably a muscular brown whirl of aggression, growls and panting, their eyes white-tinged, their teeth dripping drool.

Having frightened myself all over again, I decided to leave them to it. From the depth of her bark, Peggy seemed extremely unlikely to be a tiny fluff-ball, which meant – and the thought was of scant relief, but some, at least – she was also unlikely to be able to go where I could. And since I was well-versed in the skill of evading dogs by diving into places they couldn’t – high places, small places, places that could only be accessed by superior feline climbing skills – I turned tail in the passageway, left Jack to his chortlings with Dusty and headed off in the direction of a rat run I’d newly discovered, which took them beneath one of the boats stowed on the starboard side of the ship.

But it seemed Jack wasn’t done with me yet. I was scooped up before I’d even managed to get out of earshot, then unceremoniously wedged under his arm. ‘Time you two met,’ he said. ‘Properly. Or else you’ll be scrapping.’

I miaowed my disapproval. I miaowed it again, louder. I miaowed it a third time, somewhat desperately and shrilly, as with every step Jack took, the barking seemed to be getting louder. I was by now beside myself, wriggling furiously. What was he thinking? He was even whistling, which only compounded my confusion. What had possessed him? You didn’t ‘meet’ a dog. Not if you were a cat, much less a kitten. You turned tail and ran, for your very life!

‘Oh, I know,’ Jack said soothingly. Though exactly what he knew he failed to share with me. ‘I know, feller,’ he said again. ‘But you just be gentle with our Peggy, okay?’ Which confused me even more. Me, be gentle with Peggy? But trapped as I was, I remembered I was a ship’s cat, and must therefore try to accept my fate – and perhaps my death – with dignity. ‘Try’ being the operative word in this case, as I’d quite left all vestiges of dignity behind, and it was only the firmness of Jack’s grip and my possibly misplaced trust in him that stopped me from disgracing myself.

We finished up in the after-mess no more than a couple of minutes later. I had previously enjoyed being with the sailors in the mess, particularly at this time of day. Though the hammocks were not yet slung, (so not yet available for snoozing purposes) it was still a cosy, companionable space, full of entertaining odours – the place where, once the meals were cleared away and everything was safely stowed, they spent most of the time when they weren’t working. There were lots of men in there now – the long wooden mess tables playing host to various groups of ratings, some writing letters home, others playing cards, some lying full-length on the benches – a few asleep, others just staring into space – while others, clustered in larger groups, were doing what they often did between times: something George had explained when he’d first taken me into the mess was generally called ‘putting the world to rights’.

The world was not right, however. Not presently. How could it be? I knew because of the new scent that was now invading my nostrils; which wasn’t rat, wasn’t human, and definitely wasn’t anything edible – but was, in fact (and the realisation made me wince; how had I not made the connection?) a scent I had already picked up on board here and there. A scent that I’d dismissed, as it couldn’t possibly be the one I’d thought it might be, or, if it had been, could be easily explained away (ships do get visitors on board from time to time, after all) as not meaning – as not possibly meaning what it now appeared it did mean – that there was a dog on board the Amethyst. A dog that lived on board the Amethyst. A dog called Peggy that – this last the most unbelievable of all – my human friends thought I should properly get to know!

I was so full of fear by now that I knew I couldn’t be held responsible for my actions. Yet still Jack held on to me. Tightly. Then came a ‘woof’! Then a laugh. Then another and another. And there before me, as big and brown and horrible as I’d imagined, stood a dog – an actual dog! It barked again.

The details were a blur. Ears and teeth and whites-of-eyes and general brutal fearsomeness. So there was nothing for it. With no thought for skin or cloth or, indeed, tins of herring, I struggled my hardest, and finally scrabbled my way out of Jack’s grip, up his shoulder, over his head and to the highest place available. Which wasn’t nearly high enough (it being the top end of a stowed hammock) as the she-dog called Peggy, who was still barking – ‘Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof!’ – launched herself up on hind legs that were altogether too long for comfort, and kept on going ‘woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof!’, while the men, to a man, just stood and let her!

Well, bar Jack, who was cussing and dabbing at his face. ‘Ruddy hell, Blackie!’ he complained. ‘Thanks a bunch!’

‘Well, what d’you expect?’ laughed a young sailor called Martin, who was standing next to him. ‘That he’d pop a paw out and say how d’you do? Nice to meet you? C’mon, Peg, pipe down, will you? Come away now. It’s just the cat.’

‘He’ll have her eye out, an’ all,’ observed the one called Paddy, looking at Jack. ‘He’s certainly got some claws on him for a little ’un,’ he added, inspecting the blood that was now running down Jack’s face. ‘Quite a scram, that. Here, get him down,’ he said, grabbing Peggy by the thick leather collar that I belatedly realised was fastened around her neck. Which was a relief, but only briefly, because, far from reassuring me of my safety, it only seemed to endorse the fact that she was every bit as dangerous as I’d feared. Still, I was grateful. At least for the half-second before I realised that George (who’d now arrived in the after-mess as well) was intent on getting me down from my place of safety, despite the desperation with which I now hissed at him.

‘You’re alright,’ he soothed, though he wrenched me bodily off the canvas even so. And with scant regard for my claws, which were very keen to stay attached to it. ‘Here you go,’ he said, ‘come on, boy – you might as well get used to her. Gotta rub along, you two have, after all, haven’t you? You’re shipmates! And she wouldn’t hurt you, honest –’

‘It’s not Blackie I’d be worried about,’ Jack pointed out, with apparent feeling. Had I not been so terrified that I thought I might pass out, I’d have had more space in my head to feel terrible about his face. As it was, though, I didn’t, because I was trapped in George’s hands now, and was being manoeuvred to within inches of the slobbering animal’s face. Did they not realise? Could they not see? It could eat me in a couple of mouthfuls! Yes, I could see that it – she, whatever – was being tethered to one of my human friends by that collar of hers, but the fact that he not only held her but also straddled her with his knees didn’t inspire confidence. Was she really that difficult to restrain? And if so, what were they thinking? Had the whole ship gone completely insane?

‘Come on, Blackie,’ George was saying. ‘See, she’s just a big old softie.’ For which statement there seemed to only be evidence to the contrary, because even as he said it the dog kept going ‘woof woof woof woof!’ and her tail kept going ‘thwack thwack thwack thwack!’ against Paddy’s legs.

I drew my lips back – I had teeth too, and I wasn’t afraid to use them – and though I couldn’t escape George’s clutches I also had claws. There was nothing for it. I pinged them forth again, shot a paw out and made a sideways swipe at the horrible animal’s nose.

And, inexplicably, I was suddenly free! How had that happened? George must have decided to let go of me, I decided. So I hit the ground running, and I ran for my very life. As I bounded away I heard the bark change to a yowling, and Jack saying, ‘Well, that went well, didn’t it?’

But it seemed Peggy hadn’t followed me – or she hadn’t been allowed to. That was the main thing. So perhaps they weren’t going to let her get to me, after all. Just to be sure, though, I decided I’d abandon that evening’s rat hunt, and hide in the safety and sanctuary of the officers’ wardroom instead. At least till I had recovered from my shock and fright.

Which, bafflingly, nobody seemed to be paying any heed to. I could still hear them all laughing, even out on the upper deck.

So I was living, and I was definitely learning. I soon learned that there were two reasons why it had taken so long for me to meet Peggy – the first being that, being a dog, she tended to sleep when it was dark, like most of the humans, and – as yet, anyway – was never ordered to do any night watches. And the second was that she’d spent several days confined to ‘barracks’, having managed to get a rusty nail wedged in her foot (I remembered my mum telling me that dogs could be prone to such mishaps) and had been made to stay safe inside while it healed.

It healed. And once that happened it became clear that there would be no means of avoiding her, despite the great pains I took over the next couple of days to ensure that I wouldn’t bump into her – or that I wasn’t in a position where I could be forced into a confined space and risk being made to ‘meet’ her again.

But there would be no way around it in the longer term. That was the thing that really galled me and worried me. I would have to find some way to live with this creature, for if I couldn’t, what on earth would I do? I was official ‘ship’s cat’ (a post I was proud to hold now, and which I loved) and Peggy, to my mortification, was apparently the ship’s dog, and since we were aboard the same ship there really wasn’t any way around it. We would both have to do what Captain Griffiths had already ordered. We would just have to learn to ‘rub along’.

But how could that work? I spent many an hour pondering that problem. It didn’t just fill me with anxiety and dread, it went against everything my mother had told me. And not only because of what she’d told me – cats and dogs, kitten. No. And that’s all you need to know – just stay well away from them – but also because it had been a dog that had killed her. How could I ever forget that?

Except, had it? No, in truth, it had not. It had been the car that had killed her. Yes, it was true that it had been a dog who’d been chasing her, causing her to run blindly into the road – something she would never have done otherwise. But it had been the car that had actually killed her, so though it upset me to question my mother, I now did. I no longer had a choice in the matter, did I?

And little by little, despite the clamouring of my instincts, I began to get a sense that the fearsome Peggy she-dog might not be quite as fearsome as she’d first seemed. There were little things, for example, that didn’t make sense to me, such as a couple of days later, when I was taking advantage of a sunny spot up on one of the whalers, and Petty Officer Griffiths – yes, same name as the captain – passed below me. Peggy was trotting at his side – and just getting used to that was hard enough in itself. But then she’d barked at me – as frantically as ever – and I’d naturally hissed down at her, and then Petty Officer Griffiths had said, with something of a note of exasperation, ‘Look, Simon – she just wants to be friends with you. See? Look at her tail going! She likes you. She does.’

Which made me think. Her tail ‘going’. What did that mean? Yet another thing to puzzle over. Shouldn’t I be concerned about her tail ‘going’? If a cat’s tail was moving – particularly at the frequency Peggy’s seemed to – that was definitely something for a kitten to be concerned about, particularly if the cat in question was considerably bigger. Was that not so for dogs? I wished I knew.

There were also the things people said, and were still saying to me, like, ‘Go easy on her, Blackie’ and, ‘She’s just a big old softie’, as if (and I really couldn’t fathom this at all) the fearsome one was actually me!

So I continued to observe her, and continued to ponder, and continued to make it my business to avoid her where possible, at least until I could make a bit more sense of things. I might have carried on doing so long into the future if it hadn’t been for the moment which probably had to come eventually, when I rounded a corner and she rounded another and there we were, face to face, on the quarterdeck, all alone.

For once, Peggy didn’t bark. Didn’t blink. Didn’t move. She just stood there for a second or two and stared at me. And, perhaps because she hadn’t barked – as yet – I stared right back at her. And then I noticed her tail, which was wagging behind her, like a jacaranda sapling that’s been caught in a stiff breeze.

Which means she likes you, I reminded myself, because that’s what they’d said, hadn’t they? And I kept trying to remember that, over and over, though with a marked lack of conviction. And then, quite without warning, she began walking towards me, trotting right up across the deck to me, all tongue and ears and eyeballs, and then, to my astonishment, she carried straight on past me!

I spun around. She did likewise. I spun again. She did too. And it was only after we’d danced around each other five or six times that I realised she wasn’t trying to catch me, or maul me, or have me for dinner, but in fact was doing exactly what a cat would (if only to a relative) – just having a sniff, to say hello.

Tentatively, anxiously, I moved around to return the compliment, trying hard to resist the instinct to run away.

I made the appropriate hello back, feeling it was a rather strange thing to be doing. After all, aside from rats and humans (though I’d obviously changed my mind about the humans), dogs had always been my mortal enemy. More importantly, I had no idea how to communicate with a dog either, and wasn’t quite sure where to start.

Happily, as I stood there dithering, wondering if I should continue with the sniffing, two young ratings clattered up the deck towards us, both carrying mops and buckets.

‘Would you look at these two?’ one said, putting his bucket down with a clang. ‘See? Told you they’d be fine when it came to it, didn’t I?’

‘Woof!’ said Peggy, seeing them both. ‘Woof woof woof woof!’

Then she scampered back off down the deck and disappeared into a passageway.

I felt no such compulsion. In fact, quite the opposite. I sat down on the deck and began furiously washing my hindquarters. A dog. I had just been licked by a dog. I really didn’t know what to think.

Chapter 7

The stars, when at sea, looked magnificent. They’d be magnificent anywhere, because stars can’t help but sparkle, but when viewed from the ocean, many miles away from the land, they have a brightness and depth and complexity and beauty that is beyond anything that exists on the earth.

They were also a constant – a reminder that no matter how far I travelled, I could look up and see the same sky above me as I had as a kitten in Hong Kong. And it was comforting to think that, no matter where my new life as a ship’s cat might now take me, my mother could – and, I hoped, did – still watch over me.

On board ship, though, every aspect of my life was now different – so much so that I sometimes had to stop and take stock of quite how much it had changed since the day George had smuggled me aboard.

For starters, I was living on the sea rather than the land, which was a very strange business for a cat, not least because my mother had been quite right about water, and how much I disliked being ‘wet through’. Curiously, though, it was a much drier world than the one I’d left on dry land. Yes, there were times when it was necessary to keep away from mops and buckets, but there was never any issue of having to hunt in teeming rain, to leap puddles, or to pad through muddy gloop.

Neither did I now have to defend my ‘territory’ – something I’d only just begun to understand as a concept when George had taken me from the harbour, and one that, as a young kitten, had always loomed rather threateningly. Having a territory might be necessary, but there was nothing nice about it, as it seemed mostly to comprise a non-stop round of boundary-patrolling, invariably involving lots of angry confrontations, facing up to cats with bigger expansion plans than I had.

But all that – to my great joy – was a thing of the past now. Here there would be no such confrontations to have to deal with. Well, bar perhaps the odd one with Peggy. But as it had quickly become obvious that Peggy’s idea of ‘confrontation’ was to greet you as if she loved you more than anything in the world, the only worry there was the foulness of her well-meaning tongue, dogs not being so particular as cats in matters of personal hygiene.

Though I did, I supposed, still have a kind of territory to patrol. No longer one of trees, sand and blossoms, and things that roosted, cawed and crawled, but one of steel and salty spray, enamel, oil and engines, of machines and the materials of men. A territory of ladders, too, which I had finally found the means to negotiate, and which had turned out to be not quite so terrifying as I’d supposed. No, it wasn’t easy to go down a ladder, and at first I’d made laborious diversions to avoid doing so. But when there was no option but to descend one, I had no choice but to be courageous and, bit by bit – to my great delight – I managed to conquer my fear.

Moreover, it was a territory I found myself sharing very willingly – an occurrence that never ceased to amaze me, not least because of how natural it had quickly come to feel. Should it have? On this point I was still very baffled, because adult cats (as far as I knew) shunned company and lived alone, and that was supposedly the way they preferred it.

Yet here I was sharing my territory, very happily, with some one hundred and seventy humans and a dog, name of Peggy. A dog. A real, living, breathing, actual dog. Sometimes I’d wake up from a nap in the captain’s cap, then see or hear Peggy, and think I must surely still be dreaming.

Most pleasing and surprising was how much I loved my human family, and no less was the revelation of how much they seemed to love me too.

Yes, I’d come on board with George, but he’d laid no particular claim to me, clear from the outset that I (together with the good luck I would apparently confer on their endeavours) was to be there for them all. Though I reported to Captain Griffiths, I was very much there for everyone, and though they couldn’t possibly know just how much I understood of them (that human thing again) it quickly seemed I had another role to play aboard the Amethyst – to be the official recipient of sailors’ secrets.

Whether I was in one of the officers’ cabins, or somewhere in the packed after-mess, every sailor seemed to have things in his head that he kept to himself. So it was that my role began not just as a rat catcher, but as a confidant as well, hearing all about the things they seemed to find it difficult to share with one another – the same sorts of things, in the main, that I would share with the moon when sitting on the end of my jetty. I heard about crushes and sweethearts, fiancées and wives. About their families, about the children and animals whose images danced across various bulkheads; about the babies a few of my friends had apparently fathered, but, heart-breakingly, had yet to even meet. I heard of memories and musings, regrets and resolutions, recriminations, and sometimes, when days at sea became rain-sodden and endless, it was my job to curl up close while one of my friends had a cry, which was sometimes upsetting for them, but at other times, also a blessing. ‘You’re a good listener, Blackie,’ they’d whisper, furiously drying their eyes. ‘And I know you’ll keep mum.’

Keeping ‘mum’, I soon learned, was a very important thing. And having responsibility for keeping it (and the men’s faith that I could be trusted to, of course) always made me feel close to my own mother.

None of this was a part of my mother’s plan for me, however. Far from it. I’d catch myself (as likely when cuddled up in a sleeping sailor’s hammock as when presenting a lifeless rat to the captain) in a state of bemused wonder. Specially at those times when the stars were at their brightest – at three or four or five in the morning, perhaps while I was sitting on some sheltered part of the upper deck, watching flying fish skim the water, perhaps sitting in the humming warmth of the wireless room, perhaps curled up on my favourite spot up on the bridge. I’d be sitting companionably with the captain, or Lieutenant Weston (or even Lieutenant Berger, however much he kept declaring himself not to be ‘a cat person’) and wishing so hard that my mother could see for herself that humans – at least the ones on His Majesty’s Ship Amethyst – were not the monsters she’d supposed.

It was the strangest thing – I had gone from being an outsider, a loner, a scared, scavenging kitten, to being a valued member of a team. No longer hiding in the shadows, for fear of being seen and mistreated, here I was treated daily to titbits and cuddles and strokes. It made no sense, because these were not things a cat should desire, yet at the same time I had never felt so happy. And as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, I realised that solitude was not only overrated, it was the least likely thing I’d be now inclined to choose, with a human lap the most likely, any day.

There was a great deal to learn about life in the Navy, and I was eager to learn it. Not least (as it was key to almost everything on board) the many ways my human friends communicated with one another, which was something they seemed to like to do almost all the time, even more so – and this was a revelation too – than the ever barking, ever sniffing, ever tail-wagging Peggy.

Yes, they spoke to each other, of course, and for the most part, that was easy to grasp. Had Captain Griffiths been a cat, the Amethyst would very much be his territory, though, unlike a cat, he didn’t need to defend it alone; he had all his men, who deferred to him at all times and in all things, to assist him in doing it.

Then there were things called flags, of which there seemed to be many; not just the ensign that flew from the top of that masthead to let everyone know who we were. There was a big store of flags below, each in its own designated cubby hole, all of them made of a mix of different coloured cloths, all of them enticing to a cat in want of a nap. Though I learned very quickly that a cat in want of a nap might – no, would – do much better to take it elsewhere, because (as the signals officer was at great pains to relay when he ejected me) no one interfered with his bunting. I wasn’t sure what he meant by ‘bunting’ but, as ever, his tone was very clear; that everything to do with flags – hoisting them, flying them and then bringing them down again and refolding them – was taken very seriously indeed.

Closer to home, there were myriad different ways by which everyone communicated on board. As well as everyone being called different things by different people (which was why I’d been gifted two names, I supposed) there was a big noisy bell, which was rung periodically, as well as a bewildering number of different whistles, which were blown in so many ways, and for so many apparent reasons, that I never knew if there was going to be a sudden invasion of mops and buckets or a very important person coming aboard.

Most curious of all, though, were the serpentine devices that wound their way around the Amethyst and, by some magic that I had yet to understand (and perhaps never would), enabled everyone to speak to whoever they wished to speak to, in whichever compartment of the ship they happened to be.

They were strange things – a little too unnervingly snakelike, to my mind – but without doubt, very clever indeed: lidded metal tubes that began in one place – say, the bridge – and ended up somewhere else – say the wireless room or wheelhouse – carrying words wherever words needed to be.

‘That’s called a voice pipe,’ the captain told me, when I was up on the bridge with him one morning, sitting on the ship’s compass (which being glass-topped, was always nice to sit on when the sun happened to be shining, though best avoided if there was a nip in the air). The pipe was adjacent, and I was busy making a closer inspection of it. ‘And, let me tell you, young fellow, if you let your curiosity get the better of you and decide to see where it might take you, you’ll be in for an extremely rude awakening.’ He’d laughed then. ‘And probably get stuck fast then, as well, even being the little tiddler you are.’

I had no idea what a rude awakening might feel like, but I was definitely more than familiar with being ‘stuck’, having never forgotten being stuck up a tree. It was sufficient to deter me from investigating them any further.

Most fascinating of all, though, were the machines that went tap-tap-tap-tap and lived in the wireless room. It was a place that had quickly become a favourite haunt for me anyway – what with all the paper lying around (‘very important bits of paper!’ Jack would huff, every time he shifted me off from them) – it had lots of very cat-friendly features. But the machines were particularly interesting. They didn’t look much, but could apparently send important messages all around the world, just by the operator (of which Jack was one) tapping bits of wood against one another.

There was something mesmeric about the tap-tap machines, so much so that I’d spend long periods dozing beside the telegraphists – Jack in particular. This had initially been because his preferred snack was a herring sandwich, but latterly just because, well, because Jack was Jack, and there was so much with Jack that was tacitly understood. I sometimes wondered if Jack could tell what I was thinking.

I could see him doing it, despite the fact that the main thing about the tap-taps was their ability to put me, if not quite to sleep, in that delicious drowsy half-sleep that cats like the best; my ‘meditations on the mouse’, as George once had put it.

‘Shall I tell you what this is?’ Jack explained to me. ‘This here is what’s known as a code machine. Named after a chap called Samuel Morse – since you obviously want to know that – who was something of a clever man, and who helped devise a way of communicating using pulses of electricity, and that’s really all you need to know.’

He was wrong about that – ideally I’d have liked to know everything about everything – but I was happy enough, for now anyway, just to understand the principle. And once again to discover that humans, working together, were so much more the sum of all their parts, all of them contributing in different ways to achieving the amazing variety of things humans seemed to want to do.

But I had another thing to learn in those early months on board the Amethyst. That just when you are growing content, thinking everything is exactly as you like it, life has a way of seeing to it that you get something else.

Change was a normal part of life in the Navy; I had quickly learned that. You followed your orders and went wherever you were told. As did the Amethyst. We sailed and we docked and we oiled and replaced supplies, and by the end of the year we had travelled all over the ocean – and also up a river; the mighty Yangtse, to Nanking.

But, as well as that, people came and people went. First George, gentle George, who I would be forever grateful to, and who was posted off to another ship that autumn.

And there were others, some I’d known, some I’d barely got to know yet – off to different postings, new adventures, exciting places. And in their stead would come new sailors, often pink-cheeked and so innocent-looking they barely seemed men yet, their kit sharp and clean and their caps fresh from their boxes – they were called ‘boy-sailors’, and very aptly so.

But by far the biggest change – and the most upsetting personally, was the news that Lieutenant Commander Griffiths was leaving us. I found out quite by chance, too, when I wandered into his cabin just before we were about dock in Hong Kong one day, and came upon him packing up his things.

Being now so much a sea cat (or salty sea dog, which the captain had once called me, rather confusingly) I tended to make myself scarce whenever the Amethyst docked. Once we were alongside a wharf, I had quickly learned, there would be a period of noisy mayhem – people flooding aboard, stores being loaded and unloaded, sailors to-ing and fro-ing and generally being busy, in that way that was peculiar to being in a port. It was the part of the ship’s routine that, though still routine, never felt so to me. Quite the opposite.

Unlike Peggy, who seemed to revel in the fuss strangers made of her, I preferred to nap my way through the chaos, only emerging back on deck when I could hear the reassuring throb of the boilers making steam again. Who knew what might happen when in port, after all? Just as George had taken me from the dock to start my new life, who was to say that someone might not just snatch me off the Amethyst and take me right back again? Or, less dramatically, but also more feasibly, that I’d accidentally curl up in something that was destined to be returned to land? A basket of laundry, perhaps. Or a trunk. Or some box or crate or bundle. It could happen. No, not likely, but I never ruled it out. I didn’t dare to, because I’d dreamed about it once. About the stomach-churning business of waking up, confused, and seeing my home moving away from me; my dear Amethyst, steaming into the distance, getting smaller and smaller…

It was silly – so silly – but the feeling never really left me. And I didn’t think it ever would. At sea I was happy. On land I had not been. Not since I’d found myself alone and so afraid. I couldn’t imagine living on land ever again.

Glad as I was to reach the captain’s cabin and escape the mayhem, once inside, there it struck me anew. My beloved captain, who I couldn’t quite believe was leaving us – leaving me – was looking just as he always did when the Amethyst came into port. He was as smart and shiny as the pins the men furiously polished, and as straight and tall as the Amethyst’s mast. As was the custom when entering port, he had dressed for the occasion and was an even more shipshape and Bristol fashion version of his normal self.

He smiled when he saw me, and I wished, as I did sometimes, that I could find a way to have him tell me what Bristol fashion did mean. I wondered if I’d ever find out now. ‘Well, well, come on in, my little friend,’ he said, patting the bed covers on his bunk. ‘Come to say goodbye, have you? Bless you. I’m going to miss you.’

He reached down to stroke me, in his usual firm, no-nonsense fashion. I knew he dared not pick me up, though. My white fur had a habit of shedding when he was dressed in his dark clothes; even more so than the black did when he was decked out in his whites. So I sprang up onto the bed so I could at least be close beside him while he gathered together the last of his things. Sadness came over me. I knew I would miss him terribly.

‘You know what, Simon?’ he said, reaching out to slide a hand down my back again. ‘For two pins, I’d pop you into my trunk and take you home with me, you know that?’

I purred as loudly as I could so he would know I understood. I’d have also liked to let him know that a part of me would like that too, even as I was in no doubt that my home now was here. How would they cope with the rats without me? Who would the men confide their secrets to? How would Jack manage without me when he was all alone at night doing his watch, with only his Morse code machine to keep him company?

But I think the captain knew that too. He continued to stroke me, staring out into space for some time, before starting to pick carefully at the sticky tape at the corners of the small collection of photographs that were clustered above his bed. From the captain to the Chinese mess boys – it seemed to make no difference. Everyone on board seemed to have a collection such as this: pictures of people and places they missed. And, in the captain’s case, of several cats, too. I wondered where they were now – what might have become of them. ‘That’s the thing with cats,’ he said eventually, perhaps reading my mind. ‘You’re so supremely adaptable, you felines. Fit yourselves in just about anywhere. Plop you down wherever and you just get on with it, don’t you?’

I thought about how little my mother would have expected that I’d be living anywhere other than Stonecutters Island, and decided he was probably right. I had always imagined I would too. Yet here I was.

He rubbed the little cleft beneath my mouth, and then smiled at one of the photographs, which was of two little girls, sitting in an armchair. He put it down on the bed beside me, and started on another. This one was a boy, who I thought must be his son. How did he feel to know they were so far away? ‘And this here,’ he then said, ‘is Peter Puss.’ He placed another picture on the pile, of him standing in uniform with a cat draped over his shoulder. ‘He’s a she,’ he went on. Then he grinned. ‘I know. Confusing, isn’t it? Ship’s cat on the Brissenden, while I was serving as lieutenant. Just after the war ended, that was. Feels like a long time ago now… Anyway, I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that.’ He tapped the picture. ‘Now there’s a cat and a half for you, Simon – she even had a litter of kittens while on active duty. How about that?’

He added a couple more pictures to the pile. ‘You know, us sailors aren’t that different to you cats, really, are we?’ he mused. ‘We go where we’re posted, we fit in and get on with it. Just like Peter Puss here. We do our best. That’s the naval way, you see.’

Captain Griffiths had been in the Navy for a long time. He’d fought in the war. He’d captained a famous ship called the Riou. He’d been courageous, and for his bravery the Navy had given him several medals. He had done his best. He was clearly a fine captain indeed.

But, to me, he was a man who’d been kind, and I would miss him, and I worried about the new captain who was coming to take his place. Would he like me? Would I like him? Would he give me a ‘roving commission’ too? Would he want me to accompany him on his rounds?

There was no way of knowing, and not much I could do about it, either, so I’d just have to do what Captain Griffiths said – get on with it. And it wouldn’t be long now, anyway; I could feel that the engines were slowing. We’d soon be docking in Hong Kong. And soon after that, I’d find out.

He was nearly ready. The small pile of photographs was almost complete, but for one picture that he was removing from the bulkhead particularly carefully. It was clearly old, and I had a hunch it had been stuck up on many a ship before this one. He finally freed it, and placed it down on the pile with the others, before seeming to reconsider. He picked it up again.

‘I never did tell you, did I?’ he mused, tapping a finger to my nose. Then he smiled a strange smile and lifted the picture closer to his face. He touched it lightly with the same finger, and then nodded towards me. ‘You know who that is, Simon?’ he said, holding it out again, for me to look at. It was of a young, beautiful lady (the ‘darling wife’ he sometimes spoke of? Or some other person? Perhaps his mother?) and cradled in her arms was a bundle wrapped in a shawl. It was a baby. I knew because I’d seen lots of pictures of babies now – even a couple their young fathers had yet to meet. ‘That’s your namesake, that is,’ said Captain Griffiths. ‘That’s Simon.’

He didn’t say any more, but he didn’t need to. I’d been with humans now for long enough to understand them so much better. So I knew; I knew immediately, from the way he said the words to me, and from the way he quickly cast his eyes heavenwards as he spoke. That the Simon in the photograph was gone.

And I realised that the distance between cats and humans wasn’t so great. Whoever that Simon was – and perhaps that didn’t even matter – he was up with my mother, among the stars.

Chapter 8

The period immediately after Captain Griffiths left us had been a strange one.

The new captain joined the ship – he was called Lieutenant Commander Bernard Skinner, and he had such a round, smooth and gentle-looking face that I wondered if he’d been one of the boy-sailors in the war – this war that meant nothing to me, but that everyone still seemed to talk about. But though he scarcely looked old enough to command a whole ship, there was something in his manner that seemed to suggest otherwise, something in the way he held himself that put me in mind of some of the cats back on Stonecutters whose territory abutted mine. His was a presence that commanded respect.

I knew it would be some time before we properly got to know each other, but there was good news right away. The first lieutenant assured me that he was a cat lover like Captain Griffiths, which meant my position was probably safe up on the bridge. I hated the idea of giving up my spot on the magnetic compass – not to mention the other spot I enjoyed, in hazy weather: the little box-on-the-wall at the back of the bridge which housed lots of important wires. But I was still keen to make a good impression on the new commander, and immediately set about hunting down a rat to present to him, so he would know I was a cat who pulled my weight.

And there was another change afoot, it seemed. A big one. Within days of Captain Skinner joining us, we celebrated something called Christmas, which was entirely new to me; an odd business that seemed to involve all sorts of peculiar rituals, few of which made a great deal of sense to me (setting fire to your pudding?) and some of which, particularly the things they had appropriately called ‘crackers’, weren’t nice at all. They were terrifying.

Happily, it didn’t last long and, as far as I could tell, the men were rather glad of it all being over, too. After all, though it inspired lots of singing, and a bumper load of extra post when we’d docked at Shanghai, it also inspired a surprising degree of sadness among some of the crew, and, on one unfortunate occasion, following extra rum rations, a leading seaman getting punched on the nose.

But such was the ‘mystery of the human condition’ – a phrase I’d picked up from Captain Griffiths – that, once the ‘festivities’ were done with (along with another bout of bizarre behaviour, to do with ‘seeing in’ the new year, apparently) a collective glumness seemed to settle over the Amethyst, like the sooty spewings of a badly maintained engine.

The rats, in contrast, seemed to be full of the joys of the coming spring; they certainly sprung away with gusto almost every time I got near one, driving me almost to distraction. So it was that I met Captain Skinner before being able to dispatch one to present to him. Instead, I met him quite by accident, a good couple of weeks after he’d assumed command, while keeping Jack company in the wireless room, as usual.

I was taking my rest on some of his Very Important Bits of Paper when the captain appeared, snapping me out of my reverie (about some very important rat-related matters) and making Jack, who had his back to him, jump.

‘Ah, the ship’s cat!’ he boomed, coming in on a cloud of some exotic spicy odour – one that I was fairly sure had not been present on the Amethyst up to now.

He picked me up without further ado (this was clearly the way with captains) setting both my whiskers and nostrils into overdrive all at once.

‘He’s called Simon, sir,’ Jack told him. ‘Well, Blackie, more often that not, sir. One of the ratings found him back last May, sir, on Stonecutters Island. Ordinary Seaman Hickinbottom. Left the ship before Christmas. Mangy little stray, he was. Probably orphaned. Just a kitten then. Nothing of him. Didn’t think he were more than a few months old when he found him. Erm, sir.’

Just as Captain Griffiths had, Captain Skinner now held me at arm’s length for inspection. He had one hand round my tummy, so my front legs dangled over the back of his hand, and the other thoughtfully cupped under my hindquarters. It wasn’t the most dignified position a cat could find itself in, but I’d grown used to the idea that a naval cat needed to be understanding in such situations. I couldn’t expect the captain of one of His Majesty’s frigates to get down on his hands and knees, after all.

The new captain chortled, revealing a row of cheerful teeth. ‘There’s not a great deal of him now!’ he told Jack, as if giving him an order to rethink. ‘Still quite the tiddler, aren’t you, boy?’

‘But he’s an excellent ratter, sir,’ Jack was quick to reassure him.

‘Often the way,’ the captain mused. ‘He’ll be lighter on his feet.’ He brought me back closer to his face then, and I could see he had eyes almost the same colour as my mother had. Warm eyes, like berries. He then put me back down on Jack’s pull-down Morse code machine desk. ‘As you were, old chap,’ he said to me. ‘So now, Signals, what have you got for me?’ and began looking through some of the piles of Very Important Bits of Paper, and various scribbled notes Jack routinely had at his side. And as I settled down to a decent grooming – mangy stray, indeed! – I remembered what Jack had said about ‘when’ I was still a kitten. So I’d been right, then. I’d officially left my kittenhood behind. I was a grown cat not just in my own eyes, but in their eyes as well. I stretched a little taller. Actually felt a little taller. Because it was a quite a milestone, that. I was a cat now. It was official.

I couldn’t help thinking about what my mother had told me about bad luck, and kittens, and cages. I supposed I was now grown enough for that protection to be behind me, which made me even more glad (as if I could have been any gladder) to have been chosen to live the seafaring life.

For there were no men who put cats in cages living here. On board the Amethyst I was free, and I was safe.

And I was safe, and also free, for a long time. We all were. And Captain Skinner turned out to be much like Captain Griffiths – stern when he needed to be, soft when he didn’t, and as appreciative of a dead rat as the next man. Well, assuming the next man was a naval man, anyway.

Captain Skinner was also happy to have a ship’s cat among the company. Though he didn’t whistle for me (and it would be impolite to follow him around without permission), he seemed very happy to have me in the wardroom during meal times, particularly when we had visiting naval dignitaries on board, where he liked most for me to entertain them.

But a ship at sea, previously a warship, as the Amethyst had been, was not always about entertaining visiting dignitaries. Her new role – and her white post-war livery reflected it well – was always to try to help keep the peace.

So when we were given our orders, midway through April 1949, it was odd to begin hearing whispers around the ship that the peace might not be as robust as everyone thought.

Though our orders were, to be fair, perfectly ordinary. Having recently spent a while in Shanghai, and had some fifteen young ratings join us, we were now being sent to relieve our sister ship, HMS Consort, which was stationed in Nanking to provide protection for local British residents, and in particular, the staff of the British Embassy. We were also there to bring supplies to the British and Commonwealth residents and, should they require it (which they apparently might, given China was currently such an unstable country) evacuate any nationals.

We knew Nanking, because the Amethyst had already done a spell of this back in December, the guardships being in place there on rotation. It had been a deployment that had gone without incident. Rather too much without incident, the way I remembered it; the crew that had been there complaining bitterly (we had been moored there for a month) that as protocol dictated they were unable to enter the city itself, they’d spent most of the time fed up, too hot, and bored witless.

Not so, Peggy and I. Peggy because she was largely witless already, and, if strapped for entertainment, would simply chase her own tail. As for me, the word ‘bored’ took a great deal of fathoming, since it was completely beyond my comprehension. You were either busy (killing rats, tormenting cockroaches, eating, playing and so on) or you were dozing (always a pleasure), or you were asleep. So the business of being ‘bored’ (and its sister complaint of ‘getting down in the dumps’) was a concept I found hard to understand.

‘Aww, Blackie,’ Jack would often say to me, wistfully, ‘oh, to be a cat, eh? Oh, to have a cat’s life!’ Then he’d sigh theatrically, as if somehow jealous.

But this time around, it seemed my friends might not be bored. Because though the Amethyst had nothing to do with the Chinese Civil War, she was still about to be pitched into the middle of it. Yes, this had been the case last time and, yes, it was true no harm had come to us, but since that time the Chinese war had begun to intensify, and all the talk in the wardroom that night was of worries that now we might be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The concern lay in the fact that we weren’t even supposed to be there: we were standing in for another ship, the Australian HMAS Shoalhaven. The Shoalhaven had already been in Shanghai, all set to go to Nanking, when the ‘powers that be’, as Captain Skinner put it (and he’d seemed none too pleased about it, either), had changed their minds about the ship being deployed at that point, deciding that, with Anzac Day imminent (a day when Australia remembered her war dead) they were not prepared to send an Australian vessel up the Yangtse, and run the risk of their sailors being put in danger. ‘So that’s where we come in,’ Captain Skinner had explained to the crew the night before we sailed, confirming what was already being rumoured by the officers. That, with the war reaching crisis point, this trip to Nanking could, in theory, put the Amethyst in the line of fire instead.

Though the nationalists and communists had been at war with each other since the 1920s, a point had been reached where the communists controlled the north shore of the Yangtse river, and, though a temporary truce was apparently in place, they had made it known that if the nationalists didn’t allow them to pass freely, they would make an assault on the south bank.

In just three days from now.

If I knew nothing of boredom, I knew even less of war. My only experience of human conflict was the occasional rumpus over something or other down at Stonecutters dockyard – which was usually resolved with no more than angry words being exchanged or, at the worst, someone’s cart being upturned.

All I really understood about ‘war’ – that human preoccupation that continued to confound me – was that, as far as we were concerned, it was history. War was over now – everyone always seemed to say that. We’d just had the ‘war to end all wars’, and the older sailors on the Amethyst would tell the younger ones about it constantly.

‘Back during the war…’ they’d say, before regaling them with some spine-tingling anecdote or other. ‘Back when bloody Jerry had the upper hand, or so they thought…’ they’d begin, before painting pictures that had the boy seamen’s eyes bulging out as if on stalks. ‘You’re lucky, lads, not to have been through it…’ they’d remind them, their expressions stony, before slapping them on the backs and laughing long and loud. But for all that, it was still laughter that held enough of a note of relief to make it clear that being in a war was not a good thing.

Now war was done with, and everyone was happier as a result of it. All the talk, always, was of ‘keeping the peace’. That was what the Amethyst was there for. To keep the peace. Our job was to patrol the waters around the countries of the Far East, so that no one could be in doubt that – where His Majesty’s Navy was concerned, anyway – that was the way it was going to stay.

The jacarandas were in bloom in Shanghai as we left it. Blossom was everywhere – the whole hillside was dotted with colour – but it was the jacaranda blossom that most grabbed my attention, because it took me back to my kittenhood, to the same luminous purple that I remembered from when I’d left. So had it been a year? A full year since I’d gone to sea?

I decided it must have been, because I was in no doubt that the sea felt like home now; by my reckoning it had been home for longer than it had not. So as we slipped that day, smoothly and without ceremony, for Nanking, it was only the usual excitement that I felt. It was another day, another journey, another sea-going adventure. If my friends were bored, I would do my best to entertain them. To jolly them out of their dissatisfaction.

Little did I know that the truce that the ‘powers that be’ had banked on was not going to hold for as long as they’d thought. And as a consequence, though we couldn’t know it, for those of us aboard the Amethyst, the peace would soon be over as well.