by Doreen Tovey
Six
Sidney Has Problems
Four years now we’d had Solomon and Sheba and, as Sidney put it, we hadn’t half had some times with them.
We’d had a few with Sidney too. Life sometimes seemed as full of his little problems as it was with Siamese cats and, right from the time he came to work for us, we were always getting involved.
Take, for instance, the time he was caught riding a motorbike without a licence. There was nothing we could do about the offence itself. Even Sidney admitted it was a fair cop. His friend Ron had offered him a run on his new model; Sidney, with a quick look round for P.C. McNab, had jumped on and tried it up the hill; McNab, to quote Sidney’s own description, had immediately leapt from behind the phone box like a blooming leprechaun—and there he was. Two pounds fine and no licence for a year.
What worried Sidney, and where we came into the story, was that he’d just started courting a girl who lived ten miles away. Bit of all right she was, he advised us after his initial date, and the prospects were looking so favourable that he had in fact decided to go in for a motorbike himself, which was why he had been trying out Ron’s. And now, he demanded the day after his appearance in court, where was he? Leaning on our lawn-mower as a matter of fact, where he’d been moored for the last half-hour, informing us soulfully that he didn’t suppose we’d feel much like courting either if we had to do ten miles on a push-bike first.
We saw him through that little crisis, as he no doubt hoped we would, by running him over to Baxton ourselves on courting nights. There being a limit to what we’d do for Sidney, he had to make his own way back. There was one night, alas, when he didn’t even get there. A dear old lady who’d known him since childhood said she was going to Baxton—she, for once, would take Sidney to his tryst—and when the silly old fool turned up, said Sidney next morning, she had a blooming great dog sitting in the passenger seat, he couldn’t get the rear door open, and to his astonishment, while he was still wrestling with it, she had suddenly said ‘Quite comfy, dear?’ and driven off.
She was deaf, so the fact that Sidney hadn’t answered didn’t register. She also drove with her nose glued to the windscreen—like ruddy Lot, said Sidney, getting quite incoherent when he thought about it—and it wasn’t until she rattled into the square at Baxton that she realised he was missing. Given her a terrible fright, she said it had, imagining poor Sidney having fallen out en route, which was nothing to what it gave Sidney when he imagined Mag waiting by the Baxton turnpike, him not turning up, and—at this point in his ruminations the mower went straight into the paeonies—her perhaps going off with some other chap.
As a matter of fact she didn’t. Sidney had far more fatal charm than anybody realised. Eventually he married her, honeymooned triumphantly—the penal year being up—on a brand new motorbike, and became the father of twins.
Even that failed to cheer him up, however. He still worried about things. When the Rector caught him sawing logs for us one Sunday morning, for instance—Sidney hid in the woodshed when he saw him coming, and when in spite of this precaution the Rector looked round the door and asked him how the twins were he was terribly worried about that. Bet th’old sky pilot had him down in his little black book now, he said, wrestling gloomily with his conscience after the event. It was no good our trying to comfort him, either, with an assurance that the Rector was broadminded—that he judged people by their principles and wouldn’t really mind. Sidney knew a parson’s duties, and he worried even more. Then he ought to mind, he said.
He worried when the twins kept him awake at night. How long, he enquired—and some mornings, indeed, his eyes looked exactly like a panda’s—could a bloke go without sleep? He worried when he thought he was losing his hair. Actually Sidney’s straw-like thatch never had been very thick, but once he persuaded himself it was going there was no end to the worrying he did about that. The day he arrived having flattened it down with water that morning—to see, he said, how he’d look when ’twas gone—we had to give him a glass of sherry to pull his nerves together
What raised this particular incident to epic proportions was that unfortunately everybody, when they heard about Sidney’s hair, started giving him remedies. ‘Bay rum,’ said one—whereupon Sidney arrived smelling more pungently than the Rose and Crown. ‘Paraffin,’ said somebody who knew a travelling hardware man who always rubbed his head with his hands after serving oil and he had hair like a child—after which we had to be jolly careful not to strike matches when Sidney was around. ‘Goose-grease,’ advised somebody else—at which stage Sheba announced that she didn’t love Sidney any more and Solomon, going round the kitchen like a mine detector, said he reckoned we had dead mice in here.
It passed eventually, like all Sidney’s worries, but it was pretty trying while it lasted. His next one took a different turn altogether. Mag, he said, wanted a fur coat. Seen one in some magazine, she had—picture of some girl wearing one when she went shopping and she thought ’twould be nice when she went to town. Sidney, sweating at the thought, had already tried diplomatic tactics. Told her she’d look daft in one of they in the sidecar, for instance, which didn’t impress her a bit. Left his newspaper with us on the days it carried those spectacular full-page fur advertisements—whereupon she went next door and borrowed the neighbour’s. What, he asked—absentmindedly eyeing the cats, whereupon Sheba took her fur coat up the garden in a hurry while it was still safe—did we think he ought to do now?
He found the answer himself that time. We could hardly believe it when he zipped down the hill on his push-bike on the following Monday—whistling, his cap perched jauntily on the back of his head and his feet on the handlebars for good measure.
‘Got Mag her fur coat on Saturday,’ he announced, rubbing his hands triumphantly as he stamped into the kitchen for his cocoa. ‘Where?’ we asked in chorus, scarcely daring to think what the answer might be. ‘Jumble sale,’ he said, with a last man-of-the-world drag on his Woodbine before he flicked it through the kitchen door. ‘Got her a smasher for ten bob.’
Sidney wasn’t the only one who had problems. Father Adams, for instance, was in trouble with his wife over a faux pas about our cats. Very proper was Mrs Adams. Always out to do things right by village standards. Doileys under the cakes, doileys under the flower vases, smart chromium fruit spoons—to the annoyance of Father Adams who was apt to ask what the hell was this for and what was wrong with his teaspoon—when visitors came to tea. Always out to improve Father Adams too, which was why she was so pleased when the hunting gentleman came by.
We were leaning on the gate at the time, lazily discussing with the Adamses the prospects for the harvest supper, and when the vision in hunting pink and fine white breeches came clopping down the lane and not only stopped but raised his top hat to us she was nearly beside herself with pride. He enquired after Solomon and Sheba. He had read about them, he said. He had seen them on television … There was no need for further conversation. At the mention of their names Solomon and Sheba appeared as if by magic. Not obtrusively, seeing that we were all so busy talking. Just side by side across the lane and—so that nobody could possibly think they were showing off—with their backs to us, their tails raised in concentration, intently studying something in the hedge.
‘Solomon and Sheba,’ indicated Charles, thinking the visitor might like to see them—as indeed he did. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said, gazing at their rear views in admiration. ‘Solomon and Sheba! The dear little chaps themselves!’
It was calling them little chaps that did it. Father Adams, seventy years a countryman, was astounded that a hunting man could show such ignorance. ‘Cassn’t thee tell even from this end?’ he said.
How, asked Father Adams miserably after the horseman had gone and Mrs Adams had stalked in prim dudgeon up the lane, were he going to put that right? I didn’t know. I had troubles of my own at the time. Charles was being a handyman again.
Inspired by an article in a do-it-yourself magazine he had
started redecorating the kitchen. And halfway through redecorating the kitchen—leaving me with three pink walls, one dirty cream one and five cupboard doors which he’d taken off for painting and left propped against the wall for the cats to play tunnels through—he’d got inspired by another article and started paving the yard.
Even that wouldn’t have been so bad—it certainly needed doing, Sidney said he’d help him, and between them they might, with luck, have finished it in a month. But unfortunately Charles decided that while he was at it he would do the thing properly, with drainage. A simple Y-shaped system, he said, with rainwater pipes running underground from either corner of the cottage and ending in a soakaway inside the back gate. And that was where Sidney resigned from the scheme. Yards was all right, he said firmly, but he was hoping one day to get his pension, and he had the twins to think of. He weren’t digging no more soakaways for us.
So Charles, undaunted, set out to do the job himself. Very well he did it, too, as far as it went. Two professional-looking trenches converging towards the centre, filled in as he went along and with the paving, flat and smooth as a spirit level could make it, growing before our very eyes. He was just past the water-butt when the thought struck him that pretty soon it would be tree-planting time, and that the site for the fruit trees he’d ordered back in the gay, carefree days of summer wasn’t ready yet.
‘Another hour at this and I’d better start digging the holes,’ he announced one morning, swinging his pickaxe practisedly through the air. He was as good as his word. An hour later, with four more feet of trench opened, drainpiped—but not, seeing that the allotted time was up, filled in again—Charles departed to dig holes up on the hillside. Unfortunately it is rather stony ground up there. Very difficult indeed to find a depth of soil sufficient to take fruit trees. A week later, when a card arrived to say the trees were now ready and when would we like them delivered, Charles was still delving feverishly away on the skyline.
The kitchen remained unfinished. One night, when we had some special visitors coming, he did get around to putting the doors back on the cupboards. Unfortunately he didn’t put the screws back in the hinges—what was the point, he said, when he’d only have to take them off again as soon as he started painting? He had, in fact, merely tucked them in for show. A fact which, full of bonhomie, I forgot when the visitors were actually there, and when I opened one to get out the coffee cups the damned thing fell down and nearly brained me.
Despite my apprehension the trench, too, remained unfilled. Charles said the main thing was to get the trees in, and the yard was a job he could do in the winter. Only an idiot could fall down that little hole, he said, when I suggested perhaps we should put a plank over it in case of accidents.
He fell down it himself the next night, coming through the gate in a hurry. The neighbours were always having narrow escapes, particularly as the weeks went by and the nasturtiums spread across the gap. And Solomon went down it practically every day, chasing Sheba round the garden for exercise.
That, of course, was funny. It was obviously deliberate, too, from the way his big black head peered through the nasturtiums a second later, waiting for the laughs.
It wasn’t funny, though, the night we heard a crash and a howl and rushed out to find the baker in the trench. Not our regular baker, who knew the route through the nasturtiums and was a nice little man with corns and three children, but a rather unfriendly substitute who had, he informed us as we helped him out, already done a full day’s round and was doing our end of the village because his mate was sick. What did we think we were up to, he demanded as we dusted him down and handed him back his basket. Catching ruddy elephants or trying to break his neck?
Charles filled in the trench before breakfast next morning without a mention of the fruit trees. He did say now he’d have to leave the soakaway till Spring—to which Father Adams, leaning reflectively on the gate to watch him, said ’twas just as well. Somebody might fall down there afore then, he said.
Seven
And So to Spain
Something, said Charles, would have to be done about those cats. He said that quite regularly. It came in jolly handy for changing the subject at times, particularly when there was a slight suggestion in the air that something ought also to be done about Charles.
Like that very morning, for instance, when, moving a large bottle of pickling vinegar out of the way with his foot so that he could get on with sandpapering the kitchen wall, Charles had knocked it over and smashed it. With speed born of experience—Charles had knocked quite a lot of things over in his time—he had immediately locked the kitchen door. With speed also born of experience I nipped quietly round the front, in through the back door which he hadn’t thought of locking—and there, sure enough, was Charles gingerly pushing a cloth round in a sea of vinegar with his toe.
Not that he was at all perturbed when he was caught out. All he said, lifting the sopping cloth expertly towards me on the end of his shoe, was that this one was wet now and could he have another. Even when, breathing fire and slaughter, I wrung it out and got down to the job myself he was quite undaunted. Wonderful how vinegar brought the tiles up, wasn’t it? he said admiringly as I mopped away. If I asked him we’d made a discovery there.
We’d just made one about Solomon, too, which was the cause of his latest remark about the cats. At that moment there was a car parked outside our garden wall with its occupants gazing absolutely entranced at Solomon, who was apparently giving a solo ballet performance on the lawn. He leapt, he pranced, he postured—every now and then adding a variation where, for no apparent reason, he lay on the ground and stuck his paw down the clock-golf hole.
‘Dancing nicely, isn’t he Mummy?’ asked a small treble voice through the car window after one particularly effective pas seul. To which Mummy replied—sadly, for obviously she liked cats—that she was afraid the poor little chap wasn’t feeling well. Solomon was all right. He was just showing off with a mouse. The reason his audience couldn’t see it was because it was about the size of a mothball and the reason for that was that he had caught it himself. It was one of the few he had ever caught—the only size, alas, he was ever likely to catch. Even that had taken him a whole morning of sitting on a mole-hill in an adjoining field gazing hypnotically at a clump of grass—at the end of which, if we knew anything about it, the poor little mouse had had to come out or die of starvation and Svengali had probably fallen on it and squashed it flat.
Not that that worried Solomon. Even if it was only a moth he captured he went round like Trader Horn. Even when he couldn’t catch anything he still showed off. Lately he’d taken to hunting under the blackberry hedge in the lane. Being Solomon it was naturally the most inaccessible hole he wanted to look down—and being a mug where he was concerned, I naturally helped him. Time and again I was caught by passers-by holding up the brambles for him while he explored underneath, either poking down the hole with his paw or else, which looked even more impressive, sitting intently by it waiting for his quarry to come out. Time and again people stopped to watch, obviously expecting—what with him and me and the raised brambles—that something big was about to be caught at any moment. And time and again after collecting his audience and keeping them on tenterhooks for ages, Solomon got up, stretched, and strolled nonchalantly away.
Who was it who looked sheepish then—who dropped the brambles as if they were red-hot, muttered something about it being a nice day and slunk embarrassedly through the gate? Certainly not Solomon. Nothing large enough today, he assured them airily from the garden wall. Not even a snake bigger than three feet long. Come again tomorrow, and see what we caught then.
Sheba’s attitude was just as bad. She had perfected a method of putting us in our place, which was effective in the extreme. Any time we refused to let her out, or her supper wasn’t ready, or she was just plain fed up, she sat in front of us, eyed us witheringly, and sighed. It was the sort of sigh my maths mistress used to give when she saw my geometry homew
ork, and I knew quite well what it meant. It was even more demoralising coming from a Siamese cat.
Added to that Sheba, when she was out these days, didn’t come home when she was called. One word from me, or even from Charles, whom she normally obeyed as promptly as if she was his Eastern slave, and she was off up the lane like a shot. Her goal was a neighbour’s strawberry bed up on the hillside. He was—as she was doubtless aware, seeing that she passed several other equally good strawberry beds to get there—the one man in the village who objected to my trespassing on his land to fetch the cats; everybody else’s attitude was that I could get the so-and-sos any way I liked, so long as I removed them fast.
So there, if she made it first, she sat in her sanctuary of strawberries while we yelled threats at her from the lane and she bawled companionably back. Sooner or later somebody would come by and ask why didn’t we go in and fetch the little dear, not shout at her like that. And the moment we tried to, as sure as eggs were eggs, out would pop the old man shouting one foot in his strawberries and he’d sue us while Sheba, having achieved her object of reducing the neighbourhood to bedlam, melted quietly from the scene and went home.
Something certainly would have to be done about those cats. The question was … what?
Somebody suggested we get another kitten. That, they said, would take them down a peg or two and keep them in their place. Our answer to that—little knowing what fate had in store for us in that connection—was that we weren’t quite as crazy as that yet. Not only were the trials of bringing up our own two still shatteringly fresh in our minds, but we had examples enough of what happened to people who had kittens.
There were the friends who owned Chuki, for instance. We’d warned them ourselves what to expect if they bought a Siamese. So, to be quite fair, had the owner of Chuki’s mother. When they went to see her she said sometimes the only way she kept from going mad was to go for a long, long walk and, when she came back, give that cat a darned good hiding. It made no difference. They still bought one. All it needed, they insisted, was patience and a firm hand, and with an intelligent little thing like that there’d be no trouble at all.
