The day Tuffy was put down, we shared a bottle of champagne and swore we’d never, ever have a cat again. (I’d rather leave a child behind in California!)
And the joke is that these Killer Cat books – there are six of them now – are popular in over twenty languages, and more each year. That horrid pet is now repaying us for all our pains by pretty well single-handedly earning my pension.
I feel quite fondly about Tuffy now.
Anne Fine
OUR DOGS
We have had three dogs and many more cats. The dogs had more vivid personalities, and I think I loved them more because of it. Our first dog was a lurcher whom we called Daisy. She had the most beautiful and kindly nature of any animal I’ve known. Once, when a friend of ours was terribly unhappy, she (the friend) was sitting on our sofa and she began to cry. Daisy came and laid her head on the friend’s knee in a gesture that could only mean deep sympathy.
We also had two pugs, a brother and sister. He, Hoagy, was black, and Nellie was fawn, the colour that most pugs are. Their hair felt different: hers was coarser than his, which was very soft, like cashmere.
I have never known such stupid creatures. They were absolutely untrainable. Whatever we tried to teach them to do, whether to sit, to come to us, to stand still, all they would do when we called was turn and look at us blankly, and then carry on with whatever they were doing.
But they bore out what I’ve noticed about human siblings: just because they were born to the same mother and father, that didn’t mean that they were similar in character. Hoagy was languid (idle, frankly) and perfectly genial. He would roll over on his back and allow himself to be tickled with no fear or hesitation. Nellie was the exact opposite. I don’t think she ever rolled over on her back in her entire life. What she thought was going to happen if she did, I don’t like to speculate, but she would squirm and wriggle and do anything to get away. You could feel a sort of nervous tension in all her muscles when you picked her up, whereas Hoagy would lie in your arms with no more animation than a beanbag.
We loved them all, of course, and did our best to keep them healthy. However, Hoagy got fatter and fatter, and we couldn’t work out why. Finally we saw him crawling back under the fence from the next door garden, and realized that he’d been visiting the students who lived there. When we asked them about it, they said, ‘Yes, he’s a great eater. He’ll eat anything except Marmite.’ They must have been feeding him for months.
The only thing that makes living with a dog less than an ideal relationship is that their lives are so much shorter than ours, and we have to arrange for their deaths when they get old and ill. That’s almost too painful to be borne, but we have to do it.
We haven’t got a dog at the moment, and I have to say that life is a lot easier: we can go away at a moment’s notice without having to find somewhere for the dog to stay. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we had another dog one day.
Philip Pullman
PEKINGESE
Years ago, on my sixteenth birthday, I was given five pounds to buy a Persian kitten. Most girls pine for an animal of their own but, even as a little child, for me the longing was not just for an animal but for an extraordinary animal; I would have loved a unicorn rather than a pony, if there had really been unicorns, or a salamander, or a kylin – that mythical monster with the head of a lion and the body of a dragon – if I had known about them, but a Persian kitten was the nearest my dear family could come to fulfilling this unusual wish.
In the pet shop there was a rusty old bird-cage and in it sat a puppy, small, square, black with cream paws and vest; he was of a kind I had not seen before, but his eyes, that took up most of his face, looked at me compellingly. I bought him, my five pounds was accepted as a down-payment with a pledge of half a crown a week from my allowance for a year.
I am sure now that the shopkeeper did not expect me to come back as, in pekingese parlance, this puppy was flawed; for one thing his lower jaw protruded, a fault the Chinese call ‘earth covers heaven’, so that he was worth precisely nothing – to anybody else; but I am glad now that I met every one of those Saturday morning extortions so that my lifetime of pekingese – I have had more than twenty – was founded on fidelity, however slight. I called the puppy Piers because it was the most aristocratic name I could think of.
In those days, though I had an ignoramus’s love of things Chinese, poetry, ceramics and paintings, I knew nothing of the dynasties and their emperors and empresses; of palace cities and paeony-terraced ten-mile-wide gardens; of eunuchs and concubines; of the silk caravan route or of opium clippers. I knew practically nothing either of Queen Victoria and Court life at Windsor, Balmoral and Buckingham Palace; of treaties and wars and, if I had, would not have dreamed of connecting them with pekingese. I only knew Piers but my instinct was right – no matter how flawed, Piers by origin was aristocratic – more, he was Imperial.
It may seem absurd to link a race of small dogs with two vast empires, one Western, the other Far Eastern and, in particular, with the two powerful women who, in the nineteenth century, ruled over them, but no one can follow the story of the pekingese without some knowledge of these two utterly different and distant worlds.
The Chinese regarded Westerners as vandals and there is certainly something unthinking and prejudiced in the image of this blithe and historic breed we have conjured up and, sadly, often made fact: that of rich ladies’ lapdogs, pampered and delicate, dressed in coats, bad-tempered, even snappy, wheezing, snoring and so adipose they can only waddle. If they have been distorted into this, the fault lies with the owner, not with the dog. True, elderly people buy them believing they need little exercise – which is wrong; most pekingese detest laps, are even wary of fondling, are only bad-tempered through being made liverish from too many tidbits. It is true, too, that they snore, but that is because of what man, through the ages, has done to their noses, and the snores are usually only a soporific snuffle. As for waddling! Pekingese can race, even hurdle; they retrieve, swim and are more hardy than many a big dog, walking in any weather; sometimes in snow or deluging rain my pekingese have been the only dogs out in the woods or on the hills.
Most of us dog-owners are ordinary people and so most pekingese nowadays have to settle not for palaces, but for an ordinary humdrum life, but they still treat it in a lordly way. Piers, for instance, soon became a well-known character in our Sussex town. ‘In quod again’, a policeman would come to our door and say, and I would have to go to the police station and redeem Piers with a fine of five shillings. The trouble was that while I was away at school he was bored and so would slip out; and kind people, seeing a small pekingese wandering alone, thought he was lost. By no means: a bus ran from a stop near our then house up to the Downs; one morning I caught it with Piers, meaning to take him for a walk on the rolling green hills – it should have been a chariot or imperial cart or, at least, a car, but for us it had to be a bus. ‘That your dog, Miss?’ asked the conductor. ‘Well, I guess you owe the Corporation at least five pounds.’ It seems that Piers caught the bus in the morning, took himself off to the front seat on the top – buses were open-topped then – alighted at the terminus at the foot of the Downs and went rabbitting and, at the right time, caught the bus home. I had long been puzzled by the earth on his paws and ruff.
He became my shadow, mourning if I went anywhere without him, making a carnival of joy of my return; alert to every word I said, sensitive to every mood, but after twenty halcyon months we went back to India and I had to leave him. I never saw him again.
Rumer Godden
MIMI’S DAY
Our cat, Mimi, who was always known as Meems, lived with us from 1990 to 2004. She was a tabby cat with one white shoulder, and my husband described her perfectly as the kind of creature you can imagine with a handbag in the crook of her arm. She was elegant and beautiful, like very many cats, but had about her an air of femininity and sweetness that was quite unusual. The fierceness sometimes associated with tabby cats was
completely missing from her looks and her character. She was the very opposite of a hunter. She’d crouch on the step and look in a meaningful way at squirrels racing past her nose without ever chasing any of them. She never once in fourteen years brought in a mouse or a bird, for which we were very grateful. Some people said the reason she never hunted was because we spoiled her rotten, but I don’t believe that . . . I think the hunting instinct is something a cat either has or doesn’t. Still, it’s true she was pampered. She had dry food and wet food and water out for her pleasure every day. She was never left in a cattery, and indeed for the time we had her, my husband and I took separate holidays so that Meems wouldn’t have to be on her own, even for one night. We thought of her as one of the family and loved her very much. When she died, of an illness that we could no longer get treatment for, we were bereft. I kept seeing her out of the corner of my eye in every part of the house for a very long time. We think of her often and remember her with delight and pleasure. She was a loving and lap-sitting cat, and not one of the standoffish kind. I’m really pleased to think that people will be able to read about her now. Here’s a poem I wrote about her.
From her position on the windowsill
she gives the garden her consideration.
Later, both the camellias and the ferns
will undergo a full investigation.
First, she will be a small domestic sphinx
unmoving on the carpet, enigmatic,
thinking: there was a fire here last night
and now it’s gone. All life is problematic.
The second serious question of the day
is: where to sleep? Which bed or chair to grace?
The velvet spaces of the chesterfield?
Or should she seek a woolly resting place?
They sometimes leave (she thinks) jerseys on beds,
or there’s a shawl spread softly on a chair.
Also a cupboard full of fluffy towels
and gurgling darkness . . . maybe she’ll go there.
She steps into the garden after lunch:
a meal she’d hoped might magically be prawns
but wasn’t. She is philosophical.
It is the hour for stalking things on lawns.
Squirrels are jet-propelled and every bird
annoyingly decides to fly away.
She races up a tree trunk, just to show
she might catch something, on some other day.
And meanwhile, she’ll adopt a watchful pose
on a convenient step, warm in the sun,
until her head grows heavy, droops and falls.
The work of sleepy cats is never done.
The moths come out at night. Then she’s awake.
Their grey and blurring wings catch on her claws.
When they are still, she stretches bends and yawns
and with a sharp pink tongue, tidies her paws.
Adèle Geras
PETS I HAVE HAD
All children like pets, especially, of course, dogs and cats, and even better than those they like puppies and kittens. I only had one pet as a child, and that was a kitten who was sent away after I had had it for a fortnight. I was heart-broken. I called it Chippy, I don’t know why, and I used to rush home from school to play with it.
My mother was not very fond of animals. My father loved all wild animals and birds, but he was not interested in dogs or cats because he loved his garden so much. He couldn’t bear to think of animals rushing over his beautiful patches of violets, or breaking his delphiniums.
So my brothers and I never had any pets at all, and I used to spend much of my time playing with the kittens and puppies belonging to friends of mine. If you love animals you have got to be with them somehow, even if you haven’t any of your own.
I kept caterpillars though, but they were not allowed in the house. I had to keep them at the bottom of the garden in a shed. I couldn’t love my caterpillars, though I liked them, and never forgot to feed them, and I liked feeling their funny clingy feet walking over my hand. The only caterpillars I really liked immensely were the furry ‘woolly-bear’ ones – you know the kind I mean. You can stroke them. They are the hairy caterpillars of the tiger-moth and are lovely things.
I couldn’t love caterpillars because it seemed rather a waste of love when they were going to stop being caterpillars and turn into something else. That really did seem like magic to me. I used to try very hard to be there when the chrysalis split open and out came a moth or a butterfly with limp and draggled wings.
‘I will have all the cats and dogs and birds and fish I want when I am grown-up,’ I said to myself. ‘If I have to save for a year I’ll buy a dog of my own. And if I have children when I am grown-up and married, they shall have all the pets they want.’
That’s one of the nice things about being a child – if you haven’t got something you badly want you can always plan to have it when you are grown-up. And if you are determined enough you do get it, though it usually means working very hard. But things are much more precious to you if you have to work for them, and seem much more worth-while then than if you just have them given to you.
Well, of course, when I was grown-up, I did get pets of my own; all kinds, from dogs and cats to goldfish and hedgehogs!
First I had a dog called Bobs. He was a handsome smooth-haired fox-terrier with a fine head. He was very clever indeed. If I said ‘Die for the King, Bobs!’ he would at once roll over and pretend to be dead. And there he would lie, perfectly still, till I said ‘Come alive!’ Then he would jump up and look for the biscuit he always got when he was a clever dog!
He could shut the door for me too. Not only that but he would listen for the ‘click’ of the door, to make sure it was properly shut. He could sit up and trust, of course, even when a biscuit was balanced on his nose. I had him for years, a faithful companion, merry and intelligent.
Then I had a wife for him, an amusing little smooth-haired terrier called Sandy. Sandy was white with a sandy-coloured head, and she was a dear, affectionate little dog. The two of them lived in a little dog-house together. It had two doors, a partition between the two rooms, and a bench in each room, raised from the floor. Here Sandy had many beautiful puppies, so Gillian and Imogen, my two children, grew up always surrounded by dogs.
I had more fox-terriers after that, and the last was Topsy, a funny little dog with a black head, and just about the smallest brain I should think any dog ever had. You will see how queer she was when you hear the following story!
One day my children thought they would like to keep mice. So they bought some, and took them up to the nursery. They put the mice on a high book-case, out of Topsy’s way.
Topsy saw them running about in their cage, of course, and she sat down in front of the book-case and watched them for hours.
We thought it was silly of Topsy to sit and stare like that for hours and as the mice smelt rather strongly, I took the cage down to the verandah and put it there, where the mice were very happy. I put a clock on the book-case in the place where the mice had been.
Topsy sat for hours and stared at the clock! We never could make out what she thought – whether she thought the mice had turned into the clock, or lived inside it, or what!
Anyway we really couldn’t bear to see Topsy staring steadfastly at the clock all day long, so we put it on the mantel-piece and then there was nothing on the book-case at all. But dear old Topsy still sat there, staring at nothing for hours and hours! She really was an absurd little dog.
Then one day she got into the garden next door and, for some extraordinary reason, killed nineteen hens and chicks – so we had to send poor Topsy away to someone who lived in a town, where there were no hens near. We were all very sad.
Then I had a dear little dog called Lassie, a black cocker spaniel. And now I have Laddie, also a spaniel, who appears in many of my books as Loony. We often think that Loony would be a better name for him than Laddie, because he really is such a lunatic somet
imes!
He fetches all the mats and the cushions and some of the towels, and drapes them about the house – in the hall is one of his favourite places! He sometimes goes completely mad and tears up and down the stairs and round and round the rooms at top speed. Yes, Loony would certainly be a better name for him!
I couldn’t tell you how many cats and kittens I have had since I was grown up. I love Siamese cats, with their creamy coats, dark brown points and strange, brilliant blue eyes. I bred them for years, and many a time I have had as many as ten or twelve small Siamese kittens racing about, plaguing the life out of Bobs or Sandy. They are most amusing, and are really more like dogs than cats.
They look a bit like monkeys, they act rather like squirrels in the way they sit up and hold things, they have some of the nature of a dog – and yet they are cats! What a peculiar mixture! The one I have now, Bimbo, licks me like a dog, and follows me about like a dog too.
He will go after a little ball and bring it back in his mouth. I say ‘Drop it!’ and he drops it for me to throw. He will hunt for anything I have hidden till he finds it. He is really beautiful.
I have had other cats, of course – tabby ones – a magnificent ginger one called Rufus – a black one with white socks. But Bimbo is the cleverest of them all.
Enid Blyton
MY PETS
Sometimes I think the ages of our lives have been defined by the pets who came to live with us. So childhood was a goldfish I won at a country fair, called Swimsy. She/he swam around the bowl mesmerizingly and went barracuda-line at feeding time. So we fed him/her a lot.
When Swimsy died we got a dog. Prynne was a retriever-cross-Labrador with long floppy ears, who slobbered wonderfully.
Paws and Whiskers Page 12
