Cats In The Belfry

EIGHT

Downfall of a Church Organ

Cats, said Father Adams, leaning dejectedly on our front gate with his hat tilted over his eyes, was the very devil. From which remark we gathered that, despite all his efforts, Mimi was once more in season.

Three times now she and Ajax had honeymooned uproariously in the attic, and three times Father Adams, praying piously for the patter of tiny paws, had been disappointed. Not only had Mimi failed to outdo the strawberry patch, now the strawberry patch wasn't any good either. A couple of Mimi's earlier suitors had staged a prize fight in it one night to console themselves and trampled all the flowers.

Father Adams said it had him licked. He wouldn't listen to Mrs Adams's theory that it all arose from Ajax already having a wife and steadfastly refusing – as all good husbands should – to look at another cat. He said she was a silly old fool. Not about Ajax having a wife. All Dr Tucker's patients knew Ajax's wife. She was a slender doe-eyed creature called Andromache who had two claims to fame. Firstly that she had bitten the grocer's boy, which was something a good many housewives who had suffered from his cheek would like to have done themselves. And secondly that she was so fond of Ajax that even when she had kittens, which is a time when most queens will attack a tom on sight, she would let him get into the basket with them.

Father Adams knew that was right. He had seen it for himself. Hefty, battle-scarred Ajax tenderly washing the ears of his latest batch of offspring while Andromache sunbathed on the porch. Father Adams's comment on that was that he was an adjectival fool. Catch him putting a flannel to any of his kids' faces while his missus sat round sunning her fat rump.

What Father Adams refused to believe was that Ajax wasn't interested in other females. Cats had more sense, he said. Nobody else believed it either – until a certain strange sequence of events that set everybody wondering. Andromache, coming into season at a time when Ajax was away at the vet's for ear treatment, got out of the pantry window one night and went for a walk with a cat called Nelson who lived at the Carpenter's Arms. It was a fine May evening, with the air heady with the scent of hawthorn and a nightingale singing romantically in the copse. Ajax was miles away with penicillin powder in his ear, Nelson was near at hand and ardently amorous – and nine weeks later there were seven black and white kittens with unmistakably Nelsonian squeaks in the basket on the doctor's porch.

Ajax didn't help with that lot. Andromache might rub whiskers with him as much as she liked and say of course they were his, silly, it must have been the penicillin – but he knew black and white when he saw it. He knew Nelson, too. He nearly murdered him one night on the roof of the Carpenter's Arms and the next time he went to stay with Mimi there was no nonsense about being faithful to his wife. Six strapping little Ajaxes Mimi had, and Father Adams rubbing his hands with delight; though Mrs Adams rather took the gilt off the gingerbread by continually saying it didn't seem right to her until he asked her what the devil she wanted him to do about it. Take the ruddy cats to a Marriage Guidance Council?

It was, of course, complete coincidence. Mimi just happened to be a cat who didn't mate easily. All the same, as people said, it made you think. At the time when Father Adams was leaning on our gate moaning, however, this extraordinary turn of events was still in the future. We, too, were quite oblivious of the tragedy ahead of us. Our problem just then was to fit Sugieh and her tyrannical family into a normal pattern of living.

It took an awful lot of doing. When we had visitors to stay, for instance, we could no longer put them in the spare room. Way back when Sugieh was using it as a nursery we had moved the earth-box up there for convenience – and there, like the Rock of Gibraltar, the kittens expected it to stay. After the embarrassing night when Solomon – who was always much too lazy to use the box before going to bed as Sugieh had taught him, and in consequence invariably had to get up in the early hours – practically tore the door down shouting that he had to get in quick while we in turn tried fruitlessly to persuade him that a box on the landing would do just as well, we gave up putting visitors in there. We slept in it ourselves, kittens, earth-box and all, while the visitors had our room.

We had, too, to be very careful in our choice of guests. It had been one thing to leave Sugieh sitting on the table at mealtimes. We could always nip her off quickly and pretend we didn't know what had come over her – she never did that in the normal way. When, however, a cat and four kittens marched on to the table like a detachment of the Salvation Army as soon as it was laid and grouped themselves solidly round the cruet, it was no good trying to pass that off as an accident. Neither was it any good locking them out in the hall and pretending that was where they usually spent mealtimes. They kicked up such a racket, yelling and banging on the door, that it invariably led to the visitors saying not to shut the little dears out for their sakes and opening the door themselves. Whereupon the little dears would hurl themselves across the room and onto the table with such purpose there could be no doubt even in the dimmest mind as to where they normally sat at mealtimes.

By the time we had weeded out people who objected to kittens peering interestedly into their plates while they ate, people who were squeamish about Solomon sicking up spiders into their laps – that was the worst of spiders, they had such indigestible legs – and people who objected to playing canasta with kittens chewing the cards or poking experimental paws into their ears, there weren't really many we could invite at all.

In some ways it was just as well. The place wasn't looking its best just then anyway. The lamp on the side table, for instance, made from a Georgian candlestick and so lopsided it reminded one of a bad Channel crossing. Romantically-minded visitors might like to imagine its having been dropped down some sweeping Regency staircase in a moment of emotional crisis by a lady who looked like Margaret Lockwood, or used as a weapon in a drunken Regency brawl. The truth was that it got bent one day when four kittens tried to jump it at once in a glorious Grand National round the sitting room, and we were never able to straighten it out.

On the bureau there used to stand a Bristol glass jug, an old toby jug and a china image of a Breton woman spinning. The Bristol jug went west the day after Sugieh brought her family down from the spare room for the first time. When I rushed in after the crash Solomon, sitting on the spot where it had ­once stood and looking down at the remains with eyes as round as saucers – Sugieh and the others were busily looking out of the window at an ant they swore had just gone round the corner – said it fell off all by itself just as he got there, and why had it gone that funny shape?

We never knew who was responsible for knocking off the head of the Breton spinner. Everybody was at the far end of the vegetable garden busily learning to catch mice when we found her decapitated body lying on the carpet, and when they all trooped back again at lunchtime they assured us they were just as mystified as we were.

After that we took the precaution of putting our one remaining treasure – the toby jug – on the floor when the kittens were around, but we might just as well have left it where it was. Seeing that the top of the bureau was now a nice clear space the gang took to sitting on it en masse while they decided what to do next and one day, what with the blue boys having a practice fight while they waited, Solomon saying he ought to sit in front because he was most important and his sister furiously refusing to budge otherwise she couldn't see Charles, the whole lot fell off, landed on the jug like a bomb, and that was the end of that.

Wherever we looked we were surrounded by evidence of our decline and fall. The hide chair in the corner, draped with a tattered car rug. Not to protect it from the kittens – we had long given up hope of that; when they wanted to sharpen their claws they just turned back the rug and got down to it – but to conceal the fact that the stuffing now stuck out in tufts, like some strange African hairdressing style. The patch on the carpet where Solomon sicked up the day he ate two cream cakes at a sitting – and another where Charles dropped the coffee pot the day the she-kitten, who was still hardly bigger than a mouse, lovingly climbed his leg inside his trousers instead of out.

Aunt Ethel was cross about that. Charles ought to have more self-control, she said, and I ought to know better than to give a kitten that age cream cakes.

That was a joke if you like. From the day Solomon found his way onto the table for the first time by the simple expedient of clambering up the curtains and falling off when he got to food level there had never been any need to give him anything. What he fancied he took. The trouble was, what he fancied wasn't always good for him.

Prawns, for instance. Offer Sugieh a prawn and she would close her eyes and say we knew she never ate anything. Offer it to the blue boys and they took one sniff and fought harder than ever. Offer it to the she-kitten, who was so fastidious we wondered she didn't want all her meals sent down from the Dorchester, and she said it was dirty and buried it under a rug. Offer it to Solomon – offer him even a sniff of a prawn's whisker – and, his black face shining with eagerness and his small pink tongue licking nearly up to his eyebrows, he would follow you to the ends of the earth.

Solomon liked garlic sausage, liver sausage, All Bran and string. The first time we saw a piece of string vanish into his mouth, followed by an almighty hiccup which nearly lifted him off the floor, we rang the vet in a panic, but he sighed wearily and said not to worry, particularly if it was Solomon whom he always referred to as the Gannet. Just let nature take its course. It did – then and all the other times we found him eating string, surrounded by an admiring audience of kittens who watched his big act as if he were the star turn at the circus – which, of course, was just what he imagined himself to be. But it never failed to scare us stiff. I was afraid he'd choke and Charles colourfully imagined it winding round his inside like the string on an outboard motor. It took years off us when he made the exciting discovery that he could now get a ping-pong ball right inside his mouth and gave up string-eating to be an Alsatian dog instead.

What with spiders, string, and the occasional butterfly caught napping on a cabbage which he ate wings and all, Solomon was, of course, frequently sick. But never, ever, was he so gloriously sick as the day he ate the cream cakes. It was, in spite of what Aunt Edith said, quite an accident. Hearing the 'phone ring just as I was unpacking the shopping, I had gathered up the fish, chops, sausages and bacon, all of which Solomon had been gloating over saying he liked that, and were we going to have it for tea, and taken them with me for safety. Only the week before I had been idly chatting on the 'phone when a procession, led by the head of the family, passed by on its way to the lawn carrying two pounds of bacon.

I didn't take the bag of cream cakes because Solomon had never shown any interest in them before. Now, as there was nothing else about, he did. Before I had even finished 'phoning he came out to tell me he felt full. As the afternoon wore on he got quieter and quieter and his eyes grew rounder and rounder until eventually he took up his position in the middle of the carpet and we knew there was no doubt about it. Solomon was going to be sick.

Our cats were always sick in the middle of the room. It was a habit started by Sugieh, to make sure she didn't die while we weren't looking, and we were so used to it by this time that we were quite adept at nipping down a newspaper the moment we heard the first burp. All would have been well that time, too, if it hadn't been for the village pest, who chose just that moment to come collecting for the church organ. She came right in, of course. According to Charles that was why she did the collecting. She saw Solomon sitting like a small, sooty-faced elf in the middle of the carpet, and before we could stop her – 'The little Daaaaarling,' she screeched, and swept him tightly to her massive, Scotch-tweeded bosom.

It was too much for Sol. He gave one despairing 'Whoops' and threw up all down her best silk blouse and over the carpet. She was absolutely furious. Even when Solomon said he was sorry but it was two whole buns and she had squeezed him rather hard round the middle but Never Mind, he felt Much Better now, she wouldn't listen. She marched out without waiting for our contribution and gave the Rector her notice on the spot. People were always insulting her, she said. But when people trained their cats to be sick over her, that was the absolute limit.

That, as Charles used to explain to people for a long time afterwards, was the reason not only for the patch on the sitting-room carpet, but for the fact that the village organ had hardly a black key to its name.