The Coming Of Saska

We had oranges in our pockets. ‘Let’s sit down here and eat them,’ I said, anxious for the last bit of atmosphere.

‘Not till we get to the road,’ said Charles. ‘The smell of oranges carries.’ I followed him, thinking how silly that was... a well-used footbridge here, the road only yards ahead.

We crossed the bridge. There was a notice-board beyond it, carrying the usual warning to hikers about bears. At least – it had carried it. The notice had been ripped. Half of it lay on the ground, together with the pulled-off top of the board.

There was a curved slash-mark down the paper– more slash-marks on the pole – and, on the ground, what could have been the droppings of a very large dog.

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The Coming of Saska They weren’t, of course. They were a bear’s. A man in the Loop parking-ground told us. We recognised him as having been up at Granite Park and went across to talk to him. Furthermore, he said, he’d come off the trail about twenty minutes ahead of us and the notice-board had been intact then: he remembered looking at it.

So we’d narrowly missed another bear. Was it a black or a grizzly? An expert could have told from the size of the droppings, but we knew nothing about that. Only that it was one that went around clawing at notices. Maybe it was a good thing we had missed it... or was it just feeling bored?

Charles said he bet nobody would believe us at home

– about the experiences we’d had in one day.

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Twelve

WE WENT HOME WITHIN a week and they believed us all right.

Father Adams’ verdict was that ’twould have served us right if we had been et. Fred Ferry said ’twas a pity I’d rattled them stones, wunnit? What he meant by that we weren’t quite sure. Miss Wellington said it made her come all over giddy just to think of me up on that cliff ledge... After which they embarked on an account of what had happened in the village in our absence and we wondered if we hadn’t been safer in Canada.

For a start, Tim Bannett had gone in for keeping bees and was talking of getting a goat, in both of which activities he was being encouraged by Miss Wellington, no doubt with thoughts of honey for tea and goats’ milk cheese and herself in a flowery smock helping to sell them. They’d been looking at possible goats, the bees were already installed, and Tim was getting stung almost daily.

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‘Hasn’t he got a veil?’ asked Charles, who’d been an ardent bee-keeper himself until a number of stings built up on him and he proved to be allergic. Oh yes, replied Miss Wellington – but he wasn’t getting stung actually handling the bees. He’d been reading about communicating with them and he was putting it into practice – taking siestas on a chaise longue in front of the hive where he could study them and transmit thoughts of trust and friendship as they flew in and out over his head.

One couldn’t communicate trust to them wearing a bee-veil, could one? she asked. I said it didn’t sound as if he was communicating much without one. These were early days yet, said Miss Wellington. Just give the dear little creatures a chance to settle in.

Father Adams contributed the next item of interest. Had we heard about Mr Duggald, he asked. He were goin’

round bandaged up like a mummy, having been bitten by Fred Ferry’s cousin Bill’s dog.

Actually it wasn’t as bad as that. It was only his hand that had been bitten. It seemed that Bill Ferry’s daughter was getting married and Bill, talking about it in the pub, had said his wife was drivin’ him fair nuts about who had to pay for what, which side of the church people sat on, and the flowers and all that muck. Mr Duggald had told his wife, who happened to have a book on etiquette, and she’d sent him round to Bill Ferry’s with it specially... he’d said it could wait till opening-time but Mrs Duggald, trying to be neighbourly, insisted he took it round at once.

There was nobody at home when he got there, so he’d opened the door to leave the book on the kitchen table.

Bill’s dog was in the kitchen: Mr Duggald bent down to stroke it and the dog promptly bit him in the hand. ‘Thic 118

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dog hadn’t read thic book on etiquette,’ said Father Adams, who thought the whole thing uproariously funny. Unlike Mr Duggald, with a tetanus injection and stitches in his hand, and Mrs Duggald feeling it was all her fault for sending him, and Bill Ferry now assiduously avoiding Mr Duggald and not speaking to him when they did meet by accident. ‘In case he sues ’n’ explained Father Adams, who obviously hoped that he would.

This being ground where the Ferry family no doubt thought it best to tread softly, Fred, pretended he hadn’t heard that one. Had we, he asked, changing the subject, seen Ern Biggs limpin’ around? When we said no, who’d bitten him, Fred said he’d got water on the knee. Tripped over the guard stone outside the pub wall – the one put there to stop the milk lorry knocking it down. ‘Bin there for years,’ Fred said expansively, ‘but theest know old Ern when he’s had a drop too much. Out of the door, legs weavin’ like withy plaits, flat on his face over th’ stone.

Hobblin’ around with a stick he is, and threatening he’s goin’ to...’ He stopped, realising what he’d almost said.

‘Sue ’em,’ completed Father Adams.

So now we knew, when we saw Tim Bannett with an angry bump on his nose, Mr Duggald with his hand in a sling, and Ern Biggs limping along with a sag to his knees that increased when he was passing the pub. For ourselves, we fetched the cats from Halstock, and Annabel back from the farm, and settled down to the autumn, dreaming of all we had seen – with Charles worrying intermittently about our swallows, which had gone when we got back.

He thought they’d have stayed till October, he said – the brood had been still quite young when we left. Maybe that was why they’d gone early, I said – to get them to Africa 119

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The Coming of Saska before the colder weather set in. Whether they’d survived, or whether something had happened to them, we wouldn’t know till the following Spring – when, if we were lucky, one day they’d come back.

To this end we decided not to replace the glass in the garage window – a state of affairs that considerably worried Ern Biggs on the occasions when he came limping manfully past. ‘Want I put the glass back for thee?’ he enquired. ‘I could manage if theest hold the ladder.’ ‘’N then fall off and blame that for thee knee,’ said Father Adams, helpfully on hand as usual.

We explained we were leaving the gap in the window for the swallows but obviously nobody believed it. Fred Ferry, it eventually got back to us through the village grapevine, was putting it down to me getting stuck on that cliff-edge. That was why we didn’t put the glass back, he was busily telling people: I was afraid of heights. Not a mere fifteen feet from the ground, I wasn’t: I’d have done it without a thought.

Charles, who had nerves of steel and could overhang drops of hundreds of feet, would have done it on his head. But it was no good explaining it to the villagers. They all knew better than that.

It was no good, either, trying to explain to Aunt Ethel that we hadn’t been in Canada big-game hunting. That was what people had done when she was young. Bear skins, antelope skins, moose heads to hang on the wall... Where were our trophies? she enquired when, on our first Sunday back, Charles fetched her over to lunch. (She’d survived our absence successfully, of course: now she wanted to boast about our exploits.) We hadn’t gone for that, we told her. Thinking people didn’t kill animals like that nowadays.

We’d gone to see and enjoy the living animals. Those were all we’d brought back...

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We indicated a pair of cattle horns that hung over the living-room archway, beneath the dark oak beams. They were Texas Long-horns, from a steer that had been bred for beef, and we’d bought them already mounted. They had a span of almost a yard and were really very impressive. Charles had chosen them himself and carried them on to the plane, a sock bound protectively round each tip. He couldn’t wrap the rest of them – they were far too big – and they had created quite a sensation. His tooth on the way out, a pair of horns on the way home... Charles always added variety to our travels.

‘They’re Texas Longhorns,’ we shouted at Aunt Ethel now: her hearing aid wasn’t working properly as usual.

‘From a steer. You know – cattle, bred for beef. We bought them in Montana.’ Aunt Ethel regarded them with approval.

She obviously hadn’t heard a word we’d said. ‘Whichever of you got those,’ she said with pride, ‘must have been a very good shot.’

So, back in our old routine, we moved on towards Christmas. Charles busy with his orchard, I riding, writing, doing the house-work, taking the cats for walks in the woods in the afternoons.

We didn’t give them the freedom Solomon and Sheba had had. There were more people around now with dogs. More strangers, too, who drove out from town to go for walks and might have fancied a Siamese out on the loose. So we let them out for a run before breakfast, started calling them if they weren’t back in half an hour... Shebalu was usually back well within that time, but Seeley sometimes went further afield.

Up the Forestry lane, perhaps, looking for mice in the ruins, or going up through our woods to Mrs Pursey’s where he would sit hopefully by the birdtable in her bungalow garden, visible to every bird for miles.

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The Coming of Saska Mrs Pursey would ring us if she saw him. She knew we didn’t like him being even that far away. She was always afraid, she said, that he might go further, and someone who didn’t know he was ours might pick him up… And I would trudge off up the hill to fetch him, carrying him back down to the cottage on my shoulder, hoping nobody would see me and feeling a fool for making such a fuss.

The neighbours’ cats stayed out day and night without harm – but they, I told myself, weren’t Siamese. Valuable, attractive, and – discounting all that – with a genius for getting themselves into trouble.

On odd occasions he would be away for an hour or more, and, having checked that he wasn’t at Mrs Pursey’s, I would go charging round the lanes shrieking ‘Seeley-weeley-weeley’ and banging a spoon on his feeding plate.

As I flashed past, neighbours would ask if it was the big dark one again, and say they’d let me know if they saw him. I’ve no doubt they tapped their heads at each other when I’d gone. I would have done the same. But I knew Siamese. I never had any peace until – by which time I was usually on my knees – I’d report back to the cottage for the umpteenth time and Charles, keeping watch at base, would call ‘He’s back’ – and sure enough, as large as life, there he’d be sitting in the path. Where on earth had I Been?

his air of puzzlement would enquire. He’d been waiting here for me for Ages. What on earth possessed me to run about shouting like that? Didn’t I realise he wanted his breakfast?

He didn’t play truant very often, but it was always the same when he did. I’d be frantic in case he was in trouble

– even while, tearing from one to another of his haunts, I was telling myself not to be so stupid. ‘You know he 122

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always comes back,’ I’d think. As had Solomon, our other wanderer, before him. The number of times I’d rushed around the lanes thinking that Solomon had gone for good...

Once they came in for breakfast, they stayed in for the rest of the day. There were adders on the hills in summer

– Seeley, as a kitten, had been bitten up in Annabel’s field.

Strangers around, people with dogs, adders – for their own safety we kept them in. Until in the late afternoon, working at my typewriter, I’d realised that a deputation had arrived.

From their window-seat in the sun, or their armchair, if it was winter, and they were sitting watching me, side by side. Time to go out now, they would inform me. Before Charles started asking about tea.

Invariably I went with them, carrying a golf club for their protection. I didn’t take them as far as Solomon and Sheba used to go. Dogs seemed to appear these days from nowhere and the cats were vulnerable on the open track. I either sat with them on the hillside behind the cottage or took them into the woods.

At first just into the pine wood, where they followed me like dogs; Shebalu close behind me, in my footsteps like Wenceslas’s page; Seeley loitering at a distance to show his independence, but never letting me out of his sight. If I sat down, Shebalu was on my knees in an instant; she didn’t like the feel of the pine needles under her feet. When I looked round, sure enough Seeley would be sitting too...

upright, a few feet distant... conveying the impression that he was a Big Cat and nothing to do with us, but following us as soon as we moved on.

Some two hundred yards up the Forestry track there is a beech wood and after a while I began to take them into that. It was lighter – in winter, such sun as there was struck 123

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The Coming of Saska warm in the shelter of the trees and the cats loved chasing each other through the leaves. Up trees, down trees, charging around like pint-sized elephants; pretending they couldn’t hear me calling them, then catching me up at a tremendous lick; then back to the cottage in procession, for an evening in front of the fire. I would think how much the woods were like those in Canada. All it needed was a bear or two, or a moose. But then it wouldn’t be safe for the cats to be around in. Here, I told myself so many times... here they were so safe.

That Christmas, having resisted it for years, we installed television at the cottage. When we were going to find time to watch it was a problem, of course. We had so many other things to do. We liked having friends in for a natter round the fire for instance, and we liked reading: Charles did his painting in the evenings and it was the only time I had to play the piano. But we ought to have it for the news and the nature programmes, we decided – and, after our trip, I fancied seeing an occasional cowboy film, with cattle milling over the rangeland, riders racing in a cloud of dust out from a ranch... and, in nostalgic imagination, Charles and I riding with them on Sheba and Biz.

So we had it installed, switched it on – I remember the first time was when we were having tea by the fire with the long, low coffee table between us, and both cats were sitting on Charles’s lap. I was moving about with crumpets and teacups between Charles and the television set – but it was Seeley who objected to the interruption to his viewing, not Charles. Claws clamped to Charles’s knees, eyes concentrated as blue binoculars, he dodged his head impatiently round me when I got between him and the screen. Nearly missed that bit, said his expression. What 124

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was the man on that horse doing now? Why on earth couldn’t I sit Down!

It reminded me of someone I knew who once bred a litter of television-addicted kittens. She said it was the only thing that kept those seal-point beatniks quiet. They used to come rushing in when the set was switched on and sit in a gang in front of it. They liked cow-boy films the best, she said, and when I asked her how she knew, she told me they never fought or budged an inch while those were on. They were always a bloodthirsty lot, she admitted. She thought they liked hearing the guns go bang.

Aunt Ethel liked cowboy films, too. It was a great help when she came to stay with us and we could park her and Seeley in front of the set. (Shebalu, completely uninterested, always curled in a ball behind Seeley and slept.) We left them like that one night when we had to make a call in the village. They were watching a film about Mexican bandits and there were even more horses than usual charging round, and people escaping across the Rio Grande, and gunfights and a band of hostile Apaches.

Tim Bannett called while we were out and wondered what on earth was going on. Aunt Ethel had the set turned up, of course, being rather deaf. Tim said it sounded from the front gate as if we were having a private revolution –

and when he came up the path and knocked at the door he got no answer. Only a burst of gunfire and, when he tapped on the window, a voice yelling ‘Take that, you lousy cur!’

He went back home and telephoned us twice, but couldn’t get any reply. Somewhat alarmed – wondering whether something had happened to us – he came down to the cottage again. He hammered on the door and window.

Still there was no reply. He was very relieved when he rang 125

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The Coming of Saska us later that night and we answered. Fancy, he said, people like us becoming television addicts... He was glad he and Liz didn’t have a set. I’m still not sure whether he believed us when we said it was Aunt Ethel and Seeley.

Round about then we heard of a piece of real-life adventure. A Canadian Government official in London, writing to acknowledge our thanks for making possible our trip, said he thought we’d like to know he’d been out in Alberta recently and had actually seen two of the Jasper wolves while driving through the Park. It was winter, the Park was under snow and practically deserted; a very different place from the way it looked in summer. The wolves had come down to look for food and he’d spotted them by the roadside. He’d driven past very slowly and they’d come out and trotted after him. He’d slowed the car even more, driving for several miles at a crawl with the wolves following only yards behind. Then, having an appointment in Banff, he’d had to speed up and they’d turned off into the forest. He’d never seen wolves as close as that before, he concluded. Didn’t we think it was interesting?

We did. Knowing something now about them we also had an idea as to why they’d done it. The car going slowly... not at the usual speed of motor traffic. Dropping to a crawl...

becoming, to all intents and purposes, even more feeble...

no doubt the wolves were following it waiting for it to come to a stop and die. When, though all the evidence says they wouldn’t have touched the driver, presumably they were anticipating to be able to eat the car!

Before we knew it, it was March and the primroses were out along the banks of the stream. Then it was May, and to Charles’s joy the swallows came back again. One morning, 126

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as if by magic, there were three tired swallows sitting on the telephone wire. Presumably the original pair and one of their offspring, whom we hoped would also take up quarters in the garage. The third one disappeared later that day, however – probably up to the farm, where there’d be a selection of mates to choose from – and our pair settled down to live with us again. There was no cautiousness now as to whether we were a safe proposition. They remembered us and set to repairing their nest at once. We watched the male bird for ages, bringing hay from Annabel’s stable...

flying over with a long strand in its beak, circling several times to get it horizontal, then, with the hay out behind it like a kite-tail, straight in through the window gap at full speed.

Now it was June. Tim still hadn’t got his goat but he was very busy with his bees. Putting on supers, removing queen cells to prevent the hive from swarming – he’d become very competent indeed and it wasn’t his bees that were seen one morning clustered on one of the chimneys at he farm, looking as if they d been glued to it with treacle and showing every sign of settling in. Nobly, however, he and a neighbour tried to get them down – and were well and truly stung for their pains. Up on a roof, on a ladder, is not the best place to argue with bees. Gorged with honey, as they are when they swarm, they wouldn’t in the normal way have been angry, but this lot appeared to have mislaid their queen and were very agitated indeed. Just as Tim’s neighbour, Henry, got near them with a box, they swept up and off again.

Circling, they came down on the next-door-but-one chimney, presumably thinking the queen might be there

– seeing which, the owner of the cottage, who’d been 127

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The Coming of Saska watching from the garden, rushed in and lit a fire with the intention of smoking them off. What he’d forgotten was that he’d blocked the chimney for the summer, to stop stray birds and soot from falling down, and in next to no time the scene was one of animation such as is rarely seen in our village. A ladder on the farm roof, another against the cottage wall, Tim and Henry comparing bee-stings in the lane, smoke pouring spectacularly out of the cottage windows and Miss Wellington wanting to phone the fire brigade. The postman stopped to watch, a string of riders joined the throng, everybody gawking at the swarm on the chimney top – where they remained for quite a while until, still unsettled, they took off again. Definitely they weren’t Tim Bannett’s bees. Equally definitely, he got the blame.

Then it was July. A whole year had gone by since our trip to Alberta and we recalled it nostalgically day by day.

This time last year it had been Klondike Days. This time last year, we were at Wapiti. Then came the anniversary of the day we went on the wolf-howl the day that had been so wonderful. This year it was one of the most tragic we had ever known. It was the day we lost Seeley.

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Thirteen

THE PREVIOUS DAY HAD been such a pleasant one. We had gone down to the moors in the afternoon, to buy peat for the garden. We took tea with us and had it in the car, looking out at the rhines and the flat water meadows and the hedges of pollarded willows that make this corner of Somerset so reminiscent of the Camargue. We watched the herons flying home, and a water-rat sitting up in a clump of reeds eating a seed-head, turning it in his paws as if it were corn-on-the-cob. We came home and I took the cats for a run...

then in for their supper and ours. We ate in armchairs so that we could see The Pallisers... Shebalu turning her back on such mundane behaviour as usual, Seeley watching eagerly with us. He sat on Charles’s knee, that being his favourite viewing point, which gave him an unobscured view of the screen. I looked across at him once. He was looking at me.

He squeezed his eyes affectionately, which was always his way of communicating. Later, I remember, he was rolling 129

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The Coming of Saska happily on the carpet and I got down and hugged him, always a pushover for that little black pansy face. Really, I said, when we went to bed... I’d really enjoyed that day.

We let them out next morning, which was Sunday, and they ambled as usual up to the vegetable garden to eat grass and see what the day was like. Charles went with them, to check there were no cars about, and to open the greenhouse door and water the tomatoes. While I was setting breakfast I looked out through the kitchen and Seeley had come back and was sitting in the outer doorway. He was looking out into the yard, obviously wondering where to go next.

I almost fetched him in – but he hadn’t been out long, I thought. It was such a nice morning. Another ten minutes or so wouldn’t hurt. So I left him. Shebalu came back while we were having breakfast. But we never saw Seeley again.

It was Charles who became anxious first. Out in the garden watching for him after breakfast, he’d noticed a girl with a limping wolfhound come up the lane. Always suspicious since Seeley had been chased up a tree down there – why was the dog limping? he wondered. After that a gang of boys came past, pulling at branches and kicking stones. We’d better start to look for him, said Charles.

There were too many people about.

I went up to Mrs Pursey’s. She hadn’t seen him at all.

I came back and went, calling him persistently, up the Forestry Lane. Not right to the top. His range didn’t normally extend that far and I was wasting time, I thought.

If he was up there, he was safer than on the road. Better to concentrate on the hill.

Back to the cottage, up the hill once more – this time right to the Rose and Crown, and on up the next hill and along the lane that runs along the top of our woods and then dips 130

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to the valley again. I was passing the little paddock where, years before, I’d rescued Solomon by the scruff of his neck from an angry goose, when across in the Forest there was a fusillade of shots and my heart sank like a stone.

Rubbish, I told myself. People wouldn’t fire that many shots at a cat. Besides, the shots were well over in the Forest.

Or were they? Could they perhaps have been at the top of the Forestry lane, or in the beech wood? Sounds echo so much around here. It was too much of a coincidence, though, for Seeley to be missing for two hours and then run into a gang with guns. He’d be back by the time I got home.

He wasn’t. Charles, returning from searching the other tracks he might have taken, said there was no sign of him on any of them. All the same, we searched them again.

We called and hunted all day and the door stayed open all night. We went to bed at midnight from sheer exhaustion but at three in the morning, unable to sleep, I came down, went out into the garden and called again. I came down every night for a week, always hoping that this time he’d be there. One of my most desolate memories is of the yard door open, the darkness outside and the night wind blowing, and my going outside and calling and calling...

always without reply. The coldness permeated the living room where he and Shebalu had slept for so long. Their armchair was empty now. Shebalu slept with us upstairs.

We searched, and theorised – the whole village searched with us for weeks. But we never found any trace.

Could a fox have taken him? Hardly at nine o’clock on a summer’s morning, with Seeley having in the past stood up to big dogs and so many climbable trees around. In any case he would have put up a fight if he’d been attacked and, 131

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The Coming of Saska watching out for him as we’d done, we would have heard it. Could he have been bitten by an adder? There are lots of them round here. Seeley had been bitten as a kitten. He’d screamed so loudly then, though, that the whole valley had heard him, and we would have heard him this time. In any case, said a Vet whom I asked, he wouldn’t have collapsed on the spot. He’d have managed to get home.

All the same we checked the countryside all round the valley. We found no body. No trace of blood. No sign of cartridge cases in the Forestry lane. Neither were there any traps around; we searched every hedgerow for those. We combed the undergrowth on either side all the way up the hill in case he’d been hit by a car and had crawled away, though, so far as we know, no car had been around. The road ends in front of the cottage; after that it is a bridle track. Few strange cars come down here, and even then not fast – the hill is too steep and winding for that. We searched all the same, just in case. But there wasn’t a single sign.

Had there been a car parked at the top of the hill where we couldn’t see it, the occupants perhaps having gone for a walk, and Seeley, always a great one for poking around cars, had got into it and been carried off? Maybe, if that had happened, the people had turned him out when they found him, which could have been miles away. Maybe on the other hand, they were looking after him, not knowing where he’d got in. In case that had happened, and because he was so well known, after he’d been missing for almost a week, an appeal was put out in the newspapers and on radio and television, asking if anyone had seen him.

We got the first phone call, from a farmer forty miles away, within minutes of the television broadcast. There had been a large stray Siamese in one of his fields for the 132

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past five days, he said – catching the rabbits and sleeping in his haybarn. It was right by the side of the Castle Cary road where a passing car might have dumped him. Beside ourselves with joy – it must be Seeley, we thought; absolutely the right number of days that he’d been missing: and how many other big, dark-backed Siamese could there be astray in this pan of Somerset? – we drove down with his basket to fetch him. The farmer took us to the field and I called, but it was dark by this time and no cat came. After an hour we drove home – still sure it must be him – and were back again at first light next morning. It was lost, right enough.

And it was a seal-point Siamese. But it wasn’t Seeley.

We concealed our heartbreak. How strange, we said, that there should be another stray Siamese as well. The farmer said we needn’t worry, it wouldn’t be stray for long.

If its owner didn’t turn up he’d take it on himself. ‘Very intelligent, that cat is,’ he said. He was telling us! In its adversity it had found a haybarn to sleep in, rabbits for the eating, a stream to drink from nearby... and, if it so wanted, another home where it would be welcome, with a prosperous farmer under its thumb. We hoped that Seeley, if he was alive, had been equally fortunate. We hoped, even more, that we would find him. Then we drove back to the cottage where a friend, keeping vigil by the phone, reported that another call had come in.

Siamese cats get lost all right. In the next few weeks we followed up more calls than we would ever have believed possible from people who had seen cats in their gardens whom they were positive must be Seeley. We went to see every one. Nine times out of ten it transpired that the cat lived across the road, round the corner, or in some cases wasn’t a Siamese at all. We did, however, see six seal-point 133

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The Coming of Saska neuters in three weeks, all in the West of England, that were completely and hopelessly lost, obviously miles from their homes, with no clue as to how they had got there.

The thing that upset us every time, apart from the fact that it was never Seeley, was the fear and bewildered hopelessness that looked at us out of those lost blue eyes. Cats that had been so cherished, forced to fend for themselves. If we could, we’d have given a home to all of them, but we couldn’t take on six... and obviously somebody somewhere, like us, was grieving and searching for them. Their best chance of being found was to leave them where they were. In each case the person who had contacted us was quietly keeping an eye on them. The only thing we ourselves could do was to go on hoping and asking and searching.

Our worst experience was when a farmer’s wife rang us one night from five miles away, to say she’d seen a Siamese cat hunting round their barn at dusk for several evenings and she wondered whether we’d found ours yet. No we hadn’t we said. We’d come over at once... Oh, it wasn’t there now, she said. She was just checking to see if we’d found Seeley. She’d watch out, and if the cat appeared again, she’d ring us as soon as she saw it.

For two nights we heard nothing, so I rang her to enquire.

No, she hadn’t seen it again, she said. Then on the third night, she rang us to say her husband had found it. It had been hit by a car and was dead. It was ten o’clock, and dark, but we drove over at once. I couldn’t rest without knowing but when we got there, I couldn’t look at the body. Charles had to do it. And, by dim torchlight in a shed, he thought at first it was Seeley.

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‘If only we’d come over the night she rang us, and I’d called him,’ I said. There are so many ‘if only’s’. If only I had brought Seeley in from the doorstep that morning...

And we had called so much, so futilely, in so many different places. Then I looked at the dead cat, forcing myself to do it. If it was Seeley, I had to wish him goodbye. And hope surged through my heart again, because I knew it wasn’t Seeley. ‘It’s not his face,’ I said. We lifted the cat out of the box and shone the torch more closely on it, and sure enough, its back, too, was too light. I wept for the dead cat, and for the owner who had lost him – and gave thanks that it wasn’t Seeley.

It might as well have been. At least we would have known his end. As it is, we never shall. So many people told us of missing Siamese that had been found as much as a whole year later. The one that walked home from Wales to Sussex, for instance, taking a year to do it. And the one that vanished from its home one day and the owners hunted and advertised futilely... until six months later there was a phone call from a farmer who lived a few miles away. He’d just heard they’d lost a Siamese, he said.

There’d been one living wild in his wood all the winter.

They went over and called and their cat emerged from the trees, glad to see them and fit as a trivet. The only difference in him was the tremendous depth of his coat, which had automatically thickened for his protection.

So many tales we heard to give us hope, but it is over a year now since we lost him. Sometimes we wonder whether he is still alive – and at other times know that he can’t be. If he was killed, we hope it was quick and he knew nothing about it. If someone has him, we hope that they love him as much as we did. It is the worst way 135

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The Coming of Saska to lose a friend... not to know the end, and always to be wondering.

It would never happen again, said Charles. Any cats we had would never again be out of our sight. To which end we bought a collar for Shebalu and fitted a twenty-foot nylon lead to it. Charles took her into the orchard on it in the mornings, and it was surprising how quickly she got used to it. She seemed to think it was some special bond – a sort of token of her and Charles’s togetherness. She purred when it was put on, learned not to pull on it, undoubtedly felt it akin to a Lady Mayoress’s collar... which didn’t alter the fact that at the first opportunity she took off in it, lead and all.

She had been up in the vegetable garden eating grass and Charles had left her for just a moment to open the greenhouse. No more than a second, he panted, racing down to the kitchen to fetch me, and when he turned round she had gone. It was only a fortnight since we’d lost Seeley.

Supposing there was a rogue fox around... or a killer dog, or someone who didn’t like Siamese cats, and now Shebalu in her turn met up with them? Worst of all, she was trailing a 20-foot nylon cord which could get tangled up in anything.

Our minds rocketing from one possibility to another, we tore around like agitated ants.

Fortunately I found her within minutes, having picked the right direction by sheer chance. She must have gone straight up the ten-foot wall at the back of the garden, which was how she’d vanished so quickly, and she was up in Annabel’s field, hiding in a clump of bracken, thoroughly enjoying the search. Her lead rustled in the bracken as she turned her head to watch me and I heard it as I went past. When I stooped to look, there she was, eyes crossed with self-satisfaction.

Nearly missed her, hadn’t I? she said.

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After that there was no letting go of her lead in the mornings. Whoever was with her stayed firmly on the end of it. Only in the afternoons did she ever run free, when she came up with me on the hillside. Now, though, I didn’t sit on a rug as I used to do, waiting for her and Seeley to come back from their undergrowth-inspecting sorties.

When Shebalu went round a corner I was right behind her.

She was never out of my sight. We walked in the woods together. We sat under the oak tree in Annabel’s field –

Shebalu perched on my knee, surveying the valley below.

She would watch the track through the bracken... waiting, it was obvious, for Seeley to come along it; wondering where on earth he could be.

One afternoon in September, walking with her through Annabel’s field, for once I was in the lead. She’d stopped to sniff the moss under a wayfaring bush and I’d gone around it and on along the path. Suddenly realising she wasn’t with me, I went back in a panic. Something I wouldn’t have done in the old days, knowing she’d be bounding after me at any moment, but now I couldn’t take a chance.

It was just as well I did go back because when I rounded the bush Shebalu was experimentally patting at an adder.

A young one, rather sleepy – she must have scented it and scooped it out of the undergrowth – but an adder, potentially lethal, all the same. I remember looking at it disbelievingly, thinking ‘Not this, as well as Seeley’ – and in an instant I had grabbed Shebalu, thrown her away to safety down the hillside, and hit the adder with the golf-club I always carried when out with the cats. I killed it, hating the necessity, but there was nothing else to be done.

It obviously had a hole under the under-growth and, had I left it, Shebalu would have searched it out again. Followed 137

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The Coming of Saska by her, I carried it back to the cottage draped over the golf-club and called Charles to look at it. He confirmed that it was an adder. We might have lost Shebalu. Honestly, we wondered, what on earth was going on?

We guarded her even more carefully after that. Being Shebalu, she enjoyed it. She slept with us at night. She followed me like a shadow during the day – upstairs, downstairs, perched importantly on the kitchen table or the bathroom stool, her small blue face jutting urgently as she nattered at me non-stop. Did she like being the only one? More probably, we decided, she was lonely, and in the absence of Seeley was attaching herself more closely to us. Certainly, even after weeks had passed, there were still times when she sat watching expectantly out of the window

– or, when she was eating, looked round as if another cat should be there.

For ourselves, we missed Seeley as much as ever –

stretched out luxuriously on the hearthrug; yelling for the hall door to be opened... he never learned to open it for himself. Bounding down the stairs ahead of us, his back legs spread wide in exuberance. A dark head, as well as a blue one, thrust enquiringly into the refrigerator. We still hoped we would find him – but now it was November. Four months since he’d vanished, and the hurt hadn’t grown any less. For our sake, as well as Shebalu’s, we decided to get another kitten... and hope that, Siamese being so contrary, that might bring Seeley back.

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Fourteen

WHEN SOLOMON DIED WE were determined to find a successor who’d grow up to look as like him as possible. Armed with his pedigree, and photographs of him as a kitten, it had taken us a month to find Seeley. Now, in turn, we wanted a kitten who’d look like him – and we wanted one as soon as possible.

We’d been without a seal-point boy for four months now, and it was already far too long.

We rang Seeley’s breeder. She had met tragedy, too.

Seeley’s father was dead. Not, as we’d always privately feared would be his end, from his habit of wandering off on romantic expeditions – he having been an exception, a pedigree stud-cat who was always allowed his freedom. It happened because the people next door had bought some guinea pigs for their children, and thoughtlessly put down poison for the rats who came after the guinea pigs’ food and Orlando, spending a few quiet days at home for once, had brought in one of the poisoned rats and eaten it. Nine 139

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The Coming of Saska years without a mishap and he’d had to die like that, said his owner. If only she’d called the Vet as soon as he was sick.

But she’d thought at first it was just a stomach upset, and by the time she found the half-eaten rat it was too late.

Orlando was gone. Seeley’s mother had died, too.

There was no possibility of getting a closely related kitten.

Wondering where to try next, we remembered a cat we had gone to see when we were looking for Seeley. Someone had phoned us to say he was sitting, looking lost, in a field about two miles away from the cottage. We’d rushed over at once

– and indeed it did appear to be Seeley, sitting on a plank in a field behind some houses, apparently watching for mice.

If Seeley had gone down through the Valley this was where he would have come out and it was just the owlish way he adopted when he was watching things. Perhaps he’d been hunting in the woods on the way, we thought, and it had taken him several days to get there.

We were sure it was him this time. Charles waited with his basket at the edge of the field while I approached slowly through the long grass so as not to frighten him. I held out my hand and called his name. He turned his face towards me and sat waiting. The size, the big dark back, the expression on his face... my heart rose at every step.

Only when I reached him did I know that, again, it wasn’t Seeley. When Charles and I came back out of the field a man who’d been passing and had stopped to watch us said he thought the cat belonged to people who’d just come to live up on the hill. If we could find out who they were and where they’d got him, it now occurred to us, we might still be able to get a kitten who looked like Seeley.

We managed to trace him. He’d come from a breeder near Bridgwater and of all the extraordinary coincidences, not 140

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only was he distantly related to Seeley, but he and Shebalu had the same father. Shebalu’s mother, a blue-point like her, had been mated to a lilac-point called Valentine. A famous Champion of Champions, he was, owned by a Mrs Furber. We’d never actually seen Valentine, though, and it seemed almost as if it was meant that he should be the father of the cat in the field... and, when we enquired, that Mrs Furber also owned the seal-point mother.

We rang her. She said she had two litters of kittens almost ready but neither of them, unfortunately, was directly Valentine’s. One litter was his daughter’s, though, and his descendants invariably came out like him: we’d be practically certain of getting one from that lot who would look like the cat in the field. On the other hand there was a kitten in the elder litter, sired by Saturn, who was really quite exceptional.

She’d never had a kitten quite like him. Lively, intelligent

– you could see him sizing you up when he looked at you, she said. He stood out from the others like a sore thumb.

He stood out for another reason, too. Inquisitive and enterprising, at three weeks old he’d got his tail caught in a door. It now had a bend in it – at the base end, not a Siamese kink – which spoilt him from being the show cat he otherwise would have been. Apart from this he was absolutely gorgeous and as she knew we liked cats of character... honestly, she said, she couldn’t have picked a better match. He was absolutely made for us.

Sorry, I told her. Our cats had all been perfect. It would seem all wrong to have one with a bend in its tail. Besides, we’d set our heart on a kitten of Valentine’s... if there wasn’t one of his available we’d rather have one of his daughter’s.

All right, she said. If we liked to come and choose one, it would be ready in a fortnight.

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The Coming of Saska We went the following Saturday. We didn’t take a basket.

After all, we were only going down to see them. We walked into the Furbers’ sitting-room without so much as a thought about the kitten who’d bent his tail... and guess who we brought home with us?

When we went in. Valentine’s daughter’s kittens were tumbling around the room like particularly exuberant clowns in a circus. Kittens in the coal-scuttle, kittens whizzing over the chairs and up the curtains... we’d seen it so often before. There is nothing in this world more captivating than a litter of Siamese kittens and I was among them, on my knees, in an instant... only to see, in front of me on the hearthrug, a perspex travelling box with two larger kittens in it. One had a bent tail and was looking indignant; the other had a firmly closed eye. He, said Mrs Furber, indicating the one who resembled Nelson, was one she’d thought we might possibly like to see... in case we wanted to take one away with us, instead of waiting for the younger litter. ‘Believe me,’ she said, ‘he was perfect when I fetched him in. I brought the one with the bent tail just to keep him company. I ought to have known better, of course. He’d poked him in the eye.’

It seemed that the one with the bent tail excelled at getting the others into trouble. He was always the one, said Mrs Furber, who led the way up on to ledges in their run that were just about the cat equivalent of climbing Everest – and then, when the others had got themselves all hopelessly stuck, he’d jump down and leave them stranded. She’d seen him do it so often and whenever she went to the rescue there, invariably, he’d be: the little, round-eyed innocent, regarding them puzzledly from the ground. One day, she said, he’d managed to move the prop that held the cat-house 142

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window open: something no other cat or kitten had ever done. He’d got through before the window came down. The others, following after him, had nearly been port-cullised.

She’d better let him out now, she said, looking at the travelling box. She’d put the two of them in there to keep them apart from the younger litter. But he was getting rather restless. He’d be hitting his brother in the other eye at any moment.

She opened the travelling box door and he came out like a small, charging bull. Up on to the settee, where he rolled, waving his paws and arching his back in celebration. Then, hearing me laugh, he got up and galloped to the edge to stare at me. His eyes were almost hypnotic. They bore deeply into mine, as though he was either reading my thoughts or trying to imprint me with some of his. He stood there for several seconds before he lowered his head and charged away, launching himself off the settee to land like a bomb in the middle of the younger kittens who, with frantic squeals for Mum, shot for shelter in all directions. They had been playing with a marble, which Bent Tail now took over. ‘He likes marbles. They’re noisier than ping-pong balls,’ Mrs Furber explained as he dribbled it like lightning round the room. ‘Whatever he’s doing he shows off, wanting to get people’s attention.’

He had ours, all right. He aimed the marble expertly under the settee and flushed out three of Valentine’s grandchildren. The entire entourage disappeared under a nearby chair and we could see odd paws waving wildly about. The marble rolled out... was hooked back again...

there was what sounded like a rugby scrum. Whoever came out behind the marble, I announced eventually, was the kitten we would have. I was cheating, of course. I knew 143

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The Coming of Saska who’d come out. He emerged behind the marble, bent tail triumphant. I picked him up. Again I got that solemn, hypnotic stare. ‘Welcome to the family,’ I said.

Accompanying the solemn stare was a solemn little seal-point nose that reminded us of the saskatoon berries we’d seen in Canada. That was why we named him Saskatoon Seal, which has since become Saska, or Sass. Then Mrs Furber took us out to see his father, whom she said he was very like. On the way we saw Valentine, Shebalu’s father, who was sitting regally in his run. A beautiful, elegant lilac-point – we could see where his daughter got her looks from. He rubbed his head on the run-wire when Mrs Furber spoke to him. He had a wonderful nature, she said. She could go into his run and handle him even when he had a queen with him for mating.

Saturn now, she said – leading us over to another run from which a big seal-point male was regarding us with undisguised suspicion – when he had a queen in there with him he treated the place like an Eastern seraglio. Flew at the wire when anyone as much as passed, in case they were trying to steal her. He was as lovable as anything at other times – but a real Tarzan character, not a bit like Valentine.

‘Look at their runs,’ she said. ‘Valentine’s is always so neat and tidy – I never mind anyone seeing it. But Saturn absolutely refuses to use an earthbox and he will spray over his house.’

Valentine’s run indeed looked as if it ought to be in Ideal Homes and the paint-work on his house was immaculate.

Saturn’s run appeared to have been dug to plant potatoes; and the paint, where he persistently sprayed on it, was yellowed and peeling in strips. It was as if he’d put up a notice ‘This is My House- Keep Off ’, and we laughed. He certainly was a character we said. We hoped Saska would 144

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take after him. A remark I remembered next morning when we found that Sass, too, had a quirk about earthboxes.

To be fair, it might have been traumatic. We’d arranged to take him home with us in the evening – we had to go on to Watchet and we called for him on our way back. It was dark by then and, as we hadn’t a basket, I tucked him inside my coat. He was warm, but we were strangers and he was frightened. He spat at us all the way back. None of the others had ever done that: I hoped he was going to be good-tempered, I said. It was the darkness, Charles assured me. He was scared because he couldn’t see us, and of the noise of the engine, and of the lights of the other cars going past. It showed what a plucky little chap he was – so frightened, but he wouldn’t give in.

He was scared all right. When we got home I put him in our big, wire-fronted cat-basket. He’d feel more secure in there, I said. then we let Shebalu in to meet him. We thought she’d be a little wary at first. When we first brought her home as a kitten, Seeley had been terrified of her for days.

What we weren’t prepared for was Shebalu marching up to the basket, glaring in at him with her face to the cage-front and giving a tremendous, explosive spit. I jumped yards at the vehemence of it and I wasn’t even on the receiving end. Sass jumped as high as he could in the confines of the basket and had diarrhoea on the spot.

Shebalu slept with us as usual that night, while Sass stayed down by the fire. I’d cleaned out the basket, put a blanket and hotwater bottle in it, and another blanket on the hearthrug in front of the fire. I left the basket door open: he could sleep inside it if he felt safer, or out on the second blanket, nearer the fire, if he preferred. It would be his own small retreat till Shebalu and he got together.

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The Coming of Saska I thought that, like his father, he would feel more secure with a lair of his own.

We gave him his supper, put down water and an earthbox for him and, collecting Shebalu from the kitchen where she was shouting her head off from the top of the cooker with a spit from him as we passed the basket, we went hopefully to bed. It was always the same, we told ourselves. There were always these ructions at first. But Shebalu was young, and a female – she’d soon get round to mothering him. It wasn’t the same as having Seeley back, but it was good to have two cats again.

Even when we came down next morning and discovered that his earthbox was dry as the Sahara but the blanket in front of his basket was wet, I wasn’t particularly perturbed.

When our first Siamese, Sugieh, had had kittens, they had done that at first – wetted the old dressing gown I’d wrapped round their basket as a draught-excluder until Sugieh trained them to a box. Sass, Charles and I decided, had just been following his primeval instinct. What with being parted from his Mum, and Shebalu frightening him, and finding himself suddenly alone in a strange place, he’d nipped out from the basket, used the blanket as the nearest thing... probably in his mind he was staking out his terrain... He’d be perfectly all right now it was daylight and he could see it was safe to use his box.

To which end, as Shebalu was slinking sinisterly round the room crossing her eyes at him from behind chairs, I gave him his breakfast in our bedroom, showed him his earthbox filled with peat in the corner, and put him and a freshly-filled hotwater bottle in a nest of sweaters on the bed. A time-honoured refuge, this: it had been a favourite with all our cats. I left him curled in it blissfully; such 146

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a self-contained little white ball. Later, I brought him down so that he could be with Charles and let Shebalu go upstairs. If she could sniff at her leisure round the place where he’d been sleeping, I thought, she’d soon get used to the smell of him. But why was she regarding the sweaters with such horror and trying to rake them over with her paw? Because, I discovered when I touched them, he’d wetted on those as well.

We spent the rest of the day putting him in and out of earthboxes. At one point we had six in a row containing, in that order, peat moss, ordinary peat, earth, sawdust and torn-up paper – and then, just for luck, earth again.

They stretched in a line through the kitchen, past the refrigerator. I put him in each one in turn. He hesitated in the sawdust as if it rang some faint small bell in his memory, then marched nonchalantly on down the line. Eventually I rang Mrs Furber, who was absolutely mortified. He was a little horror, she said. He did know about earthboxes. Like the others, he’d been trained to use one. She’d watched him sit on it again and again. It was just like him to let her down. He was obviously doing it deliberately. Did we want to bring him back?

Never, I said – but what did she use in her earthboxes?

Sawdust, she told me: or failing that, torn-up newspapers.

I remembered his hesitation at the sawdust... it had meant something, but maybe that had been damp. Charles, ever valiant, went out and sawed some logs to get some more.

Hearing the noise of sawing outside in the yard on a dark Sunday night... Boy, we were back to normal! I thought.

I presented the sawdust to Sass. What was that for? he demanded. We played musical chairs with him down the line of boxes again. This time, to our joy, he did do a small 147

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The Coming of Saska puddle in the peat-box and we went to bed congratulating ourselves that we’d won. He had a fresh blanket to sleep on – in the armchair this time – and, which he obviously liked very much, a hotwater bottle tucked inside it, and a cushion to keep out the draughts. In front of the chair, where he couldn’t possibly miss it, we put an earthbox filled with peat. When we came down next morning, he’d wetted the blanket again.

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Fifteen

LOOKING BACK, WE CAN only conclude that he did it because he was so intelligent. According to his lights – you could tell it by the earnestness on his face – he was being the cleanest of kittens. He’d come to a strange house where the first thing that had happened was that a big cat had frightened him into using a blanket as an earthbox. Ergo, if it was woollen things... blankets and sweaters and such... that people used as earthboxes in this house... who was he to argue? Blankets and sweaters he’d use.

That, at any rate, is the only explanation we could find for the fact that during the weeks that followed we’d get him for maybe as much as a day or two to use a box of peat or sawdust... looking terribly worried while he did so but if we insisted, said his expression... then, presumably scared at what his guardian angel would think of such a relapse, back he’d go to the smell of wool again. We had to harden our hearts and make him sleep without a blanket. He looked 149

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The Coming of Saska so small and forlorn, curled in the armchair on a cotton cushion. We even had to wrap his bottle in a towel. Wrap it in wool and he’d wet it – and then, to show how clean he really was, drag the whole thing out of the chair and dump it in the middle of the hearthrug. Couldn’t sleep with that smell, he said. Lavatories belonged on the Floor.

By making him sleep on cotton for a while we cured him of wetting wool. When it wasn’t available he used his earthbox quite happily. Nowadays he sleeps on a blanket without a second thought. We even trust him with expensive sweaters. For a while, though, obviously to placate that guardian angel, he surreptitiously used the corner of one particular rug in the living-room. We discovered it by seeing him hovering around the spot and looking furtive when he knew we were watching him. After that we put him out in the hall the moment we recognised his rug-using expression – following which, protocol having been decided for him, we would hear him tear up to the spare room to use the Big Cat’s box. At night, besides providing him, with about half a hundredweight of peat, we covered that particular rug with a big rubber groundsheet. Putting it down, putting two peat-boxes at one end, weighting the other three sides with a table, the kitchen stool and a horse bronze (otherwise, following the dictates of his conscience, he would pull back the groundsheet to use the rug)... I wouldn’t change Sass for anything, I said. But why did it have to happen to us?

Because he was a Siamese, of course, with his own ideas on things, and because, in his first few impressionable moments in his new home, Shebalu had scared him into it. Just as the introduction of a new cat next door to them had led two other Siamese we knew into spraying. Their 150

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names were Sugar and Spice and they belonged to Dora and Nita, who were friends of ours, and who also had a Scottie called Dougal. The cats were in residence before Dougal arrived but they graciously condescended to accept him. He in turn adored his girls and considered it his mission in life to defend them – to which end, when this ginger cat started coming into the garden, strolling around as if it owned it, Dougal would dash out, all bark and big feet, and vociferously see it off. This in turn would rouse Sugar and Spice, who’d go out to see what was doing – and, as their contribution to the defence of the realm, obligingly started to spray.

She didn’t know girls could, Dora said. They could if they were Siamese, I informed her. We’d had a stray cat around the cottage once and our first Sheba had gone round performing like a flit-gun. One day, presumably to mark me among her possessions, she sprayed my gum-boots while I was in them.

They wouldn’t have minded so much if Sugar and Spice had confined it to outdoors, said Nita, but they started spraying indoors as well. Over the long velvet curtains –

they had plastic bags tacked over those, which they took off when anybody came. Over the sink. On the sitting-room wall – Sugar used spraying for blackmail now; if she wanted to go out and they wouldn’t let her, she’d stand on the side-table so they could see her and raise her tail intimidatingly at the wall. She didn’t perform immediately. In the first place she’d just stand there and threaten.

We fell about laughing when we heard about the cooker.

On a couple of occasions, it seemed, one of the cats (probably Sugar, said Dora: she was the one with the most Machiavellian mind) had stood on the cooker and sprayed 151

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The Coming of Saska the panel which held the control knobs. We could imagine what a time they’d had cleaning those. But the culminating incident had been the time they put the joint in the oven, set the timer and went to church- and when they came back, expecting to be met by the smell of roast beef, they found the oven was still cold. Somebody had sprayed straight into the timer clock and stopped it, and the automatic switch hadn’t come on. ‘Nobody’d believe it, would they?’ asked Nita. Knowing Siamese cats, we would. At least, however, we were able to cure Sass of his fixation in the end. Sugar and Spice still have their moments.

A good deal of Sass’s training was carried out by Shebalu.

After four days of slinking round like Lucrezia Borgia, looking sinisterly at him round corners, she decided to take him in hand. By this time he’d begun to take on the scent of the place and obviously didn’t smell quite so repulsive.

He’d also fallen in the fishpond, which had probably helped quite a lot.

Both Solomon and Seeley had fallen in the pond in their time – it seemed to be a tradition with our boys – so I wasn’t really surprised when, watching over him while he zoomed round the yard, he chased after a stray late gnat and went into the water with a splash. What did surprise me, rushing to the rescue, was to find there was really no need. Sass, head up, all nine inches of him completely confident, was swimming like a retriever across the pool. I stood there dumbfounded as he climbed out on the other side, his bent tail raised in triumph. He wasn’t afraid of water, he informed me. They had a big river where he was born.

I took him indoors and towelled him down, thus removing even more of his original scent, and that evening, while he was curled on Charles’s knee, Shebalu climbed cautiously 152

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up beside him. She stretched out her neck, did a tentative lick... from the tiny white bundle came an enthusiastic purr... until Shebalu, progressing, tried to clean the inside of his ears, where the smell of his mother still lurked.

‘SCH... AAAH’ spat Shebalu. Up went Sass. And Charles started telling me about his nerves.

It wasn’t only his nerves that suffered during those early days. Sass, dividing his affection scrupulously between us, decided that I was the one to Love Him – to which end he would follow me round looking for any convenient height (the edge of the bed, for instance, or the bathroom stool) from which he could launch himself at my chest. It was a good thing it was winter and I was wearing hefty sweaters

– and there, clinging to me like a koala bear, he would talk to me confidingly while I carried him about.

Charles he delegated as the one to play with him – to which end, besides trailing ties and pieces of string wherever he went around the cottage, Charles was also expected to throw things for him. Sass, as keen a retriever as Shebalu had been as a kitten, would bring back his catnip mouse or his bean-bag with a bell on it over and over again. Charles, trying to read at the same time, would feel for it with one hand and throw it. Sass, watching with impatience the delay which this involved, eventually took to placing the toy on Charles’s foot – and, when the groping hand didn’t immediately locate it, jumping on it to show where it was and in the process puncturing Charles’s ankle. The resultant yells were absolutely blood-curdling.

Charles took to sitting with his trousers rolled up when he was reading, even when Sass didn’t appear to be around.

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The Coming of Saska to call in. He never knew when the attack would come, he said, and when I said but that wouldn’t help his ankles...

Maybe not, he said, but at least scratches would heal. That little devil was ruining all his trousers.

So Sass pursued his intrepid way, unmoved by Charles’s yelling. He brought his toys for me to throw, too, as a variation from Charles. Then... obviously I didn’t come up to scratch on the toy-throwing, either... he started offering them to Shebalu. I looked in from the kitchen one morning when things seemed unnaturally quiet, to see Sass trot across the floor with his bean-bag in his mouth and put it down in front of Shebalu. He sat back hopefully and looked at her.

She regarded it for a moment, picked it up in her mouth, shook it gently to rattle the bell, and quite deliberately tossed it. It went only about a foot and she didn’t do it again – but it was obvious our blue girl was trying.

How much she loved him was made clear one day when I was giving the living-room a belated clean. She was asleep upstairs on the bed – being so aristocratic she wasn’t the least bit interested in housework. Sass, on the other hand, was pottering about with me... turning somersaults on the cushions, continually rushing up my legs. A moment earlier he’d disappeared in pursuit of a pingpong ball and was diving about under the dresser. I finished dusting the mantelshelf, stepped back hard on poor Sass who must have right that moment come zooming back to climb me, and there was a screech as if he’d been flattened.

Immediately there was a thump from upstairs and Shebalu came tearing down to see what had happened.

Apologetically I held him out for her to inspect. He was all right, I said. ‘Just you be more Careful with him, all the same,’ said her look as she licked him proprietorially.

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Everybody loved him. Tim Bannett, calling in the morning after his arrival, was so struck by the size of his ears – and by the fact that Sass decided Tim could Love Him too and spent the visit attached like a limpet to his chest – that within minutes of Tim’s departure Liz arrived to ask if she could see him. ‘Gosh, he’s gorgeous,’ she said, looking at him admiringly. Sass pointed a pair of ears like big black yacht sails at her. Like him to sit on her sweater too? he asked.

Miss Wellington burst into tears as soon as she saw him, saying he was so like Seeley as a kitten. Father Adams reached out a wistful finger to stroke him. He had once owned a Siamese. It had been our admiration for her, all those years ago, that had led us to getting Sugieh. ‘Minds I of Mimi,’ he said now. He still pronounced it My-my. ‘If I were ten years younger, darned if I ’ouldn’t ’ave another.’

He needn’t worry about that, I told him. Sass was willing to share. I put Sass on Father Adams’s waistcoat, where he obligingly did his limpet act. ‘How about I then?’ Fred Ferry enquired. Sass was transferred to him. Never did I think I’d see sour old Fred stroking a Siamese kitten.

‘’Ouldn’t mind takin’ he up to the pub,’ he said – and patently there’d have been no objection from Saska.

Charles and I had brought him home, however, fully determined on one thing. Neither he nor Shebalu were ever going to be out of our sight – except when we went on holiday and they went to board with the Francises.

Out of doors that was, of course. Indoors it was a different matter. For the sake of our nerves and digestion they had to be shut out in the hall at mealtimes. Which was why, every Siamese worth his salt having his own idea of how to tackle important problems, Sass started trying to chew his way back in via our new mustard carpet.

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The Coming of Saska I could have banged my head on the wall with despair.

One has to accept, of course, that Siamese are destructive.

Solomon had ripped a hole in the stair-carpet by way of sharpening his claws: he and Sheba, over the years, had demolished two sets of loose covers between them: Seeley’s penchant, when he was shut out, had been removing the draught excluders from doors: Shebalu had recently started on a chair. But carpets. At the price they are now. And not just clawing them but chewing them till they were bare, fringed canvas at the corners... ‘What have we let ourselves in for this time?’ I wailed, clutching my brow in desperation.

‘Another cat who reasons for himself,’ said Charles. ‘You know you wouldn’t want it any other way. In the end you’ll think it funny.’

Not as yet I haven’t – where, when people come through our front door, the first thing they see is a whacking great vinyl corner piece over the carpet in front of the living-room door. ‘It’s not to save wear,’ I explain when I see them looking at it. ‘It’s to stop our Siamese chewing the corners.’

You can see their eyebrows lift... a cat chewing the carpet? I bet they go away and say I’m batty.

There is another vinyl protective piece where the living-room carpet adjoins the kitchen door. Until it was put there, when Sass got tired of waiting for his meals he lay down and chewed on that. There are more frayed edges outside the bathroom and bedroom doors, too, whereby hang a couple of tales. Normally Sass wouldn’t bother with the bathroom, there not being anything interesting inside, but one day Shebalu got shut in there by accident, being a great one for hiding behind doors. Sass discovered where she was – we didn’t even know she was missing – but did he howl the place down, as our other boys would have done?

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No. Sass the Resourceful lay down and tried to chew her out. When I went upstairs, wondering where they were, the corners of that carpet had gone.

On the second occasion we’d gone for a walk with friends, shutting the cats out in the hall as usual. They had a hotwater bottle in a nest of sweaters on the bed, an earthbox in the box-room, they could also go into the spare room if they liked and talk to passers-by out of the window... At least, that was the normal arrangement but in the rush of getting ready to go, somebody shut the bedroom door and also the one to the box-room. The only door left open was the one to the spare room, which we use also as a study.

Any of our previous cats would have been perfectly content to be in there – after all, we were only away for an hour – but Sass gets so intense about things, when we got back we found devastation. The carpet in front of the bedroom door was chewed with his trying to get in there.

So it was in front of the box-room door because he hadn’t been able to get in to his earthbox. Ditto in front of the bathroom door, his second attack on that one: it looked as if a dog had been worrying a slipper.

He’d then gone into the spare room, where there was a car-rug on the settee. You can guess what he did to that.

Two puddles, one at either end, to show that This Territory belonged to Sass. Why did he have to do that, I asked him?

Why couldn’t he have held on like other cats? In any case, we’d only been gone an hour – it couldn’t have been necessary to go twice. Sass looked at me reprovingly. I knew how he worried, he said.

He has been with us for over a year now and we can’t imagine the place without him, though we wish – how we wish – there hadn’t been such a sad reason for his coming.

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The Coming of Saska He never wets on wool now... that, he assures us, was when he was a Baby. He hasn’t given up chewing carpets, though: ours still have vinyl corners. As far as possible we co-operate with him by remembering not to shut doors.

Seeley never did learn to push open the hall door from the outside – at five years old he still sat outside and bawled for admission, or waited for Shebalu to open it when he would jump in over her head. Sass had been with us for less than a week – and he’d come as a ten-week-old kitten

– when there was a squeak of the heavy hinges and he came squirming triumphantly through.

His breeder was right about his being exceptional. This capacity of his for retrieving things, for instance... Up on the hill one afternoon, to my amazement, he picked up a fir-cone, brought it to me and put it down – and, when I threw it for him and it fell among a scattering of other cones, he chased it, searched it out by its scent, and brought the same one back. I encouraged him every afternoon after that by throwing pine-cones for him... further and further, till he’d come racing back with them right from the bottom of the hill, then lay them at my feet and sit down, bat ears at expectant angles, waiting for me to throw them for him again.

Fred Ferry spotted us at this in next to no time, of course, and went off to tell the tale round the village. Father Adams was watching from the lane the next time we came down off the hill. Sass, I should have mentioned, always brings his pine-cone back with him, trotting through the gate with it sticking out of his mouth and putting it down on the lawn.

‘Well, if th’old liar weren’t right for once,’ said Father Adams. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for meself...’ And off he went with an addendum to Fred’s story. No wonder people think we are queer.

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As they no doubt do when they see us with the cats on 20-foot leads... in the morning before breakfast, or when it is getting dusk. Never again will we take a chance with them...

which has led to another complication. Sass the Exceptional has proved to be a tremendous jumper. He simply delights in leaping over things, which looks remarkable enough when he does it off his lead... over the wheelbarrow or a pile of bricks, for instance; or me, if I’m bending on the lawn.

But when they are on their leads going into the orchard, and Shebalu demurely mounts the bar across the entrance and steps down the other side – and then Sass, lead and all, clears the whole thing high in the air like a grasshopper... no wonder people who see it look at us rather askance.

Not that we worry. At least we know they are safe, and gradually things have returned to normal. Charles is busy with his fruit trees and his painting. I go riding on Mio...

I have learned to jump on him almost as well as Sass. The Bannetts have got their goat who, when they are away, quite often comes to stay with us.

‘Thass all theest needed,’ says Father Adams every time he sees her on our lawn. She and Sass heads down at one another, Shebalu looking primly on. Annabel bellowing down from the hillside about making a Fuss about Other People’s rotten Goats. That is what we needed indeed, though there are some things we shall never forget. Nowadays, when we holiday in England, Sass and Shebalu come with us. They have seen the sea, and walked on a beach. Sass has even been in a boat. It is a long way from Canada to Cornwall... But that is another story.

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