by Doreen Tovey
But now, quite suddenly, it was spring. With Sheba sitting on the cottage roof and refusing to come down—she could, she said, see every mouse hole for miles around and the air was fine up here—Solomon chasing a ginger tom, and Timothy arriving for the Easter holidays.
We weren’t quite out of the woods yet, mind you. That night, looking for two little cats who had elected to stay out Both Ends of the Day now that spring was here, we met the ginger tom chasing Solomon. While Timothy—presumably to keep his lug’holes warm too—was now wearing a crash helmet.
It added, as Charles remarked, little to the decor of the cottage or to Timothy, but he refused to take it off. He also, having once renewed his acquaintance with Solomon and with us, hardly ever seemed to go home. We had Sheba on the wall busily informing people he Wasn’t Ours, Solomon stalking admiringly after him being a space cat, Timothy himself performing landings on the lawn from Mars … Wunnerful how the little chap’d took to us, wasn’t it? said Father Adams, beaming benignly over the gate at the mêlée on his way to the Rose and Crown—which was all very well for him.
People didn’t tell him his little boy’s trousers were coming down. People didn’t tell him his little boy was calling them rude names in the lane, or encouraging a cat with a long black face to walk deliberately over their cars. People didn’t tell him they thought that helmet was bad for his little boy’s ears—to be met by the little boy retching realistically and sticking out his tongue. Everybody thought he was ours.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if he appreciated the relationship, but he didn’t. He followed Charles around informing him scathingly that he couldn’t grow cabbages like his granfer. Me he advised professionally that my rake was no good. Break he I would if Charlie-boy didn’t put a nail in h’n, he said. And when a little later the rake did indeed come off the handle and I tried to slink nonchalantly past with it hidden in a bucket—did Timothy avert his gaze and ignore it like a gentleman? Like heck he did. Told I, didn’t he? he said.
His one saving grace was his interest in nature, and even that had complications. Because when I pointed out the birds to him, and Charles told him about them making their nests—and then Charles, in an unguarded moment, told him of the collection of birds’ eggs he had had as a boy—we had fresh problems with Timothy. He wanted a collection too.
In vain I tried to persuade him against it. All he said, while Charles looked suitably guilty, was that Charlie-boy did. The best I could do, as the die was cast, was to stipulate sternly that he must never damage a nest, never frighten the bird, never take more than one egg—and then only if there were at least three there already. And only, in any case, I said firmly, if he was going to be a Naturalist.
He was, he assured us. On a business basis, apparently, because next time I asked after his collection he said he had six hedgesparrow’s eggs already. Only one from each nest, he assured me as I clutched my head and groaned. But there were lots of them about, ’n’ if he swapped one with somebody who had, say, a spare moorhen’s egg, that would save him disturbing a moorhen, wouldn’t it?
It would also, I hoped, giving the scheme my dubious blessing, stop Timothy from falling in the pond—which was something Charles, nostalgically remembering his own childhood, hadn’t thought of.
As it was, spurred on by a book on birds which he’d persuaded Father Adams to buy for him, the next development was that Timothy started borrowing our stepladder to look at nests he’d spotted up the lane or in the woods, which meant that Charles or I—accompanied, of course, by Solomon and, in the far, reproachful distance, Sheba—had to go with him to hold the ladder and prevent him breaking his neck.
That in itself wasn’t too bad. It was all quite local—concentrated round a corner of the village where everybody thought we were nuts anyway. But one day Timothy turned up in a state of great excitement announcing that he’d found a hawfinch’s nest. Over by the church, he said it was, in a rather tall hawthorn, which meant taking the ladder—and, as the branches were prickly, please could he borrow the shears?
We all went on that expedition. I got roped in—hawthorns being rather tricky—to help hold the ladder. I didn’t mind that so much, but I did experience a qualm when we reached the church to find that Timothy had told us a little lie. That it wasn’t, he explained, quite right here after all, but some way down the lane.
I guessed what lay ahead of me, and I was right. A procession down the road with me trying to look as if I always went for walks carrying the rear ends of ladders. Timothy wearing his crash helmet. The cats marching happily behind. People, as I pointed out, were looking at us even then—but it was no good telling Charles. He, re-living the halcyon days of youth, was a Naturalist too by this time. ‘Take no notice,’ he said.
So there—when we reached the tree and my final fears were realised; it was not in some corner of a hidden copse but hanging right over the road—I stood. Holding the ladder while Charles pruned out the branches, Timothy directed operations from the sideline, and the cats sat conspicuously on top.
Just about everybody passed us while we were there. The doctor laughing his head off, old ladies raising their eyebrows, Sidney tapping his head. What they’d be saying about us in the village I could just imagine, but it didn’t worry Charles. Not, that was, until he came down out of the tree—there was nothing in the nest and it was, once more, a hedgesparrow’s—and heard what Timothy had to say. He’d just remembered, he announced. Rector’d given he a talking-to yesterday about birds’-nesting. Did we think we should go back across the fields with the ladder—so nobody’d know we’d been? he said.
Spring, in spite of that little setback, still surged steadfastly on. Starlings started nesting in the eaves and Solomon, trying to climb a wall to see them, fell down and hurt his foot. I made some dandelion wine, which attracted all the ants in the neighbourhood who immediately started getting drunk in the greenhouse. The Rector’s cats got spring eczema and were going round self-consciously painted with Gentian Violet which scared our two practically out of their points when they saw them. They thought it was Woad, they said.
We started going for walks after supper—round the village in the soft spring evenings, with the cats greeting people they hadn’t seen all winter Most Friendlily and people gazing apprehensively back. We went off for a few days by the sea to get our strength up for the summer—and when Solomon’s basket fell off its handle as we carried him into Halstock, there again was another sign. Woodworm on spring manoeuvres in the cover; the only part Solomon had left intact.
And finally—the one thing we needed to convince us that spring was really with us—Tarzan the tortoise came back.
He appeared one day as magically as he had vanished, ambling down the garden helped by two excited paws. He didn’t half look thin to him, said Solomon, lying down when we appeared and squinting anxiously under his shell. What about giving him some rabbit? Found him in the garage, said Sheba, beaming proudly at Charles. Under that straw heap she’d been watching for days, and wasn’t she clever?
She was indeed. So was Charles, whose idea it subsequently was to paint a bull’s-eye on Tarzan’s back to match the cottage. White for the walls, he chanted, describing a neat lime-wash circle on his drab brown shell. Blue for the doors, he said, putting a small circle inside the first one while Timothy and the cats stood admiringly by. Now, he announced, we could never lose Tarzan. We could spot him anywhere he went. Even if he got out and wandered round the village, people would know he was ours.
Which was how, quite simply, we arrived at the next stage of our springtime saga. Visitors to the valley were apt to be surprised these days anyway, when at the top they met Hardy and Willis sporting purple whiskers. When, rounding the corner one morning, one of them then encountered Timothy in his crash helmet, a tortoise painted blue and white, Solomon because at that moment Tarzan had stopped for a rest—looking worriedly underneath and Sheba, following them at a distance shouting that they were all very silly and had Better Come
Right Back Home … he jumped and turned quite pale.
That, said the villager with him, was the lot from Cats in the Belfry. The visitor mopped his brow. If he asked him, he said shakenly, we were ruddy well up the pole.
Fifteen
Cats in May
It is Maytime now in the valley. The birds are singing; the lilac is in bloom; Solomon and Sheba are moulting; and—judging by the ants in the greenhouse—our dandelion wine is a riot.
Timothy is still with us. Father Adams never got Fred Ferry’s summons after all. At the eleventh hour they united instead over a right of way running through some building land. Fred Ferry says he remembers distinctly using it when he were courting … Father Adams says so does he, and the elm tree is up there still … From the sentimental expressions they assume when they are talking about it I have a strong suspicion they are making it up, particularly since if they are successful it will result, according to Father Adams, in something unique even in this district—a footpath going through a house. Meanwhile, there being nothing like a good fight for his rights to put him in a good humour, he has arranged to keep Timothy for the summer. Do ’un a power of good, he explained when he broke the news to us, and he weren’t much trouble, were he?
We are resting now from the turmoil on the lawn. Charles has just come back from a hayfield, where he has spent two hours looking for Timothy’s scout knife which he—Timothy, that is—and Solomon lost while they were being naturalists. Tossing it up they were, wept Timothy, when a jackdaw distracted their attention, and when they looked round it was gone.
I, as a further mark of Timothy’s zest to be a naturalist, am now a swallow’s Mum. One just a few days old which he found lying in the lane one night in the shelter of the barn and brought to me for succour. Much good did it do me, too, to say I didn’t know what to feed it on. ‘Flies caught on the wing,’ advised Timothy pontifically, without a thought of the sight which would have ensued had we taken his advice. Charles and I and the cats, catching swallow’s flies on the lawn.
It is, as a matter of fact, doing very nicely on boiled egg and biscuit crumbs. Fed every hour, of course, which means my taking it to town during the day, but what is that to Timothy? Or to my colleagues, to whose delight—with happy memories of Blondin—it feeds clinging to the front of my dress, looking open-beaked up at my mouth and taking egg from a matchstick with aplomb.
It lives, when we are home, in the bathroom which is why Sheba is now sitting on the bathroom windowsill, imploring us piteously to open up. Thirsty she says she is, bawling so hard that already the Rector’s wife has stopped to ask if she is Well. So thirsty she can hardly speak … and we know she likes to drink from the washbasin …
But as Timothy says, we want the little swallow to grow up, don’t we? And fly, according to his bird book, away to Africa in the autumn? And come back again next year and nest in our roof instead of the starlings? And be a perishing nuisance for evermore, I think despondently. Throwing its fledglings down for me to look after—and I bet they all like egg.
I dare not say this openly, of course. We are all such naturalists now. Solomon, when I left a chicken in the kitchen this morning ready for the oven—and he, with a quick glance over his shoulder, nipped it into the yard—was quite hurt when I said he’d stolen it. Fainted it had, he assured me sorrowfully. He’d taken it out for Air.
Solomon right now is lying in a deckchair, waiting for his tea and swatting—though not, I fear, with the swallow in mind—the gnat flies as they pass. Time we finished writing, he says—and probably he is right. Who, if we told them, would believe any more of our stories? About our getting a mate for Tarzan, for instance, at Timothy’s suggestion … and what happened after that. Solomon in any case is tired—and you know who really wrote this book? Not me, if you go by his expression. But a big, Seal-Pointed cat.
