Some days later, Toby Jug surprised me yet again with his accelerating health and his burgeoning instinct for survival. I was still feeding him from the small spoon which was now known as ‘Toby Jug’s spoon’. While I was spooning the milky concoction into him I noticed that he was beginning to lick the spoon. Two or three feeds later I observed him not only licking at the spoon but actually licking the top of my hand where some of the milk had spilled. This was progress indeed and the next step was to see whether he could lap directly from a saucer.
The first experiments were total failures. At this stage, Toby Jug was still extremely small, if not to say minute. In comparison to his size, saucers proved quite large and far too high for him to reach over to lap the milk. Back to square one. I continued feeding him with the spoon until a few days later when I happened to be shopping in a Woolworths store.
On one of the displays I spotted a children’s play-pack of miniature place-settings for a doll’s house. I thought the saucers looked just the right size for Toby Jug and bought one on the spot. Hastening home, I couldn’t wait to try it out.
Toby was confused at first and couldn’t work out what was expected of him. So I raised the saucer with the milk to his mouth and, holding him steady with the other hand, I gently nudged his face into the liquid. He gasped and spluttered as he usually did when I fed him, but as I persevered Toby gradually got the message. Finally, there was no stopping him as he attacked the milk in the saucer with gusto. Yet another major step along the road to recovery, I thought.
‘Bright little cat,’ I said, watching him, but by then Toby was experiencing the first principle of cat lore: ‘Be Independent’. The determination he showed in the way he shoved his face into that saucer of milk revealed his true mettle. It meant the past was behind him and Toby Jug was here to stay. I know that some people disapprove of giving milk to cats in the belief that it can give them constipation and make them ill, but the cats I have known have all been supremely healthy and happy animals who thrive on drinking milk, the creamier the better. In Toby Jug’s case, I needed to duplicate the health-sustaining properties of a mother cat’s milk and the concoction of unsweetened evaporated milk with an added booster of halibut oil proved to be a life-saver. However, he also needed to drink water so from then on he had both, although the milk mixture continued to be a firm favourite at this point in time.
From that Saturday onwards there was no holding him back. Toby rapidly advanced to semi-solid foods, which I bought for him at the supermarket as I didn’t have any type of food processor. I purchased baby foods for him at first. Any meat with vegetables was favoured but he especially appreciated the milky puddings. However, Toby Jug was a messy eater and he required regular cleaning, as did the floor area around his dish. In the time before he could eat and drink from a saucer, I had had to resort to wearing an apron to protect my clothes from his spillages, but lately I had detected a subtle change in his behaviour. He was becoming increasingly fastidious about his appearance. On one occasion, having washed him down with a wet sponge and dried him off as best I could with his towel, I happened to turn as I was leaving the room in time to witness another example of the little creature’s instinctive efforts to become independent.
Silhouetted against a background of blazing logs, this miniature cat was slowly inching his way forward from the hand towel on which I’d left him. He moved purposefully across the stone hearth towards the inviting heat. On reaching the point he no doubt thought to be the warmest place on this earth, he stopped and, in complete repudiation of my recent efforts on his behalf, began to wash himself. This continued for a while until he slumped to a comfortable sleeping position and flopped on to his side in blissful abandon. Yet another hurdle in his development had been accomplished with aplomb. Thereafter, a considerable amount of his waking time was spent licking himself clean and tidy.
In the days that followed Toby Jug visibly improved in vitality and began to show a much more active interest in life. I was much reassured by this, especially with regard to the latter, because a part of me wondered whether the problems he had suffered during those first weeks after birth might have damaged him. Now I could tell that these worries were unfounded and I became more aware of the bright and interesting character that was emerging. Toby Jug had proved himself very much the survivor par excellence.
Further aspects of his lively personality rapidly developed. For one thing, Toby soon began to show frustration at being kept in the jug – on several occasions he tried to climb out but his feline climbing skills just weren’t up to scaling the smooth glass. He also became surprisingly mobile. Gone were the comatose slumbers of the early days. Whenever I let him out of his jug he would dart here and there in a sheer frenzy of leaps and bounds. Much to my astonishment, he played. I suppose it couldn’t really be called playing by normal kitten standards but considering his size and what he’d been through, every mock pounce and roll were feats of Olympic proportions. A small ball of discarded paper became prey to be hunted down with exaggerated fervour. However, his energy very quickly ran out and he would quite suddenly drop in the middle of a half-completed whirl and fall immediately asleep where he lay.
At times, these antics left him lying asleep in the most undignified postures. Once I watched him playing outside his jug and jumping repeatedly at his reflection in the glass, probably through curiosity at what he thought was an apparition of another cat. Suddenly, he stopped, exhausted, lay flat on his back with all four paws in the air and, most comical of all, with just the tip of a pink tongue sticking out of his mouth. On such occasions I would pick him up and return him to the warmth and safety of his jug only for him to awaken some minutes later and begin shuffling around on the cotton wool, anxiously trying to catch my attention with piteous squeaks. On letting him out the same routine would start all over again and again until both of us were tired out.
In the evenings, having eaten, I liked to sit by the arched stone fireplace with only the flames from the fire and candlelight casting shadows that eased my mind in restful solitude. Now I had Toby Jug lying beside me as an extra comfort. Outside everything was still frozen in the harsh grip of the winter snows which made being inside the cottage feel extra cosy. At times like this I often left the curtains open to look at the moon through the bare branches of the oak and mountain ash trees that graced the far end of the garden. Whenever I sat like this, with the lights switched off and without any intrusions from the radio or television, I could sense a timeless affinity with the way of life many years ago which was much simpler than that demanded by our noisy, hectic and ultra-modern world. Despite my awareness that such a life was filled with hardships that I would never have to endure, I enjoyed indulging romantic thoughts about times past in Owl Cottage and of the people who lived here long ago.
Some people believe that houses have a spirit which epitomizes the feelings, good or bad, of the people who have lived there previously. Perhaps this is especially true of older houses because they have had a longer time to develop their spirits. Allegedly, houses built of stone are more likely to have acquired this characteristic because of peculiar qualities which enable stone to imbibe and store strong feelings. Whatever the truth of this, I noticed from the very first time I entered Owl Cottage that I experienced a sense of calm and friendly ambience. I had never felt anything like this in the modern flats and houses I had lived in.
The cottage always had a feel-good atmosphere about it. This feeling even extended to the garden. I could easily imagine a scenario in which hard-working ordinary family folk lived happily in this place and I felt certain the cottage retained something of their spirits. The sound of the wind in the trees, the calls of animals and birds and the crackling of the log fire seemed to link me to the people who had lived here previously. I found that these emotional vibrations, within both the cottage and the garden, had a calming effect on me, possibly because they derived from simple pleasures that had their source in nature rather than modern technology.
All of this may well have been my very own fantasy world and yet the singing of blackbirds as dusk settled over the garden or the night sky when the moon was at its fullest evoked emotions in me similar to hearing the Northern Sinfonia play Ravel at Brinkburn Abbey, or the sight of Bamburgh Castle clothed in a wintry landscape or sail boats in the harbour at Seahouses on a warm summer evening, as viewed from the balcony of the Olde Ship Inn. All of these things are part of the charm of Northumberland.
Toby Jug was the bonus I needed to cement my attachment to this Northumbrian world. Through observing his lust for life I was able to rediscover my lost youth and the hope of finding a place where I could experience a quality of living that fulfilled my wildest dreams.
In such a tranquil and philosophical state of mind, it was a bonus to have a cat on my lap to stroke even if that cat was intent upon tearing my best sweater to shreds. I enjoyed watching the emergence of such instinctive patterns of behaviour in Toby Jug as he became fitter, even though my sweater became increasingly tattered as he worked through the feline ritual of preparing a nest for sleeping. He presented a comical sight. Eyes half-closed in the sheer ecstasy of the war dance, with claws sharply extended, he treaded rhythmically to the tune of his own purring until eventually, turning a half circle, he collapsed. Then, with a few additional throaty purrs to convey his contentment, he fell asleep in an instant.
As he lay in my lap softly sleeping I could see that the bare patches of skin had responded to treatment and had just about healed. His fur now had a sheen to it, which was yet another sign of improved health, testimony to the good food he was getting and the days of intensive care, attention and love. To look at, he was nothing special compared to the chocolate-box pictures of kittens but to me he was the most remarkable kitten in the whole world. Beauty, as the saying goes, is in the eye of the beholder and to my eye Toby Jug was wonderful.
I remember at that time jotting down a few words that would aptly describe Toby Jug’s appearance. He had a round knob of a head with tiny ears and almost the whole of his face was covered with untidy tufts of fur which gave him a wild, absurdly belligerent appearance. His face was covered with a predominantly black mask extending to below his nose where he had a white moustache slightly skewed to the right, along with a white mouth, throat and chest. He also had a black smudge on the right side of his nose which gave him a somewhat quizzical expression. The rest of his body was black except for neat white spats on all four paws that lent him an endearing touch of the dandy. His eyes, which turned green as he matured, were faintly ringed with white, giving him a perpetually startled look.
His appearance reminded me of some other creature that I couldn’t at first put a name to until I recalled memories of racoons seen by torchlight as they raided refuse bins during the nights when I had stayed with friends in Rhode Island, USA. There was definitely a slight racoon-look to Toby Jug’s eyes. When I stopped to think about it, there was a further resemblance to racoons in the way he would occasionally sit up and balance on his hind legs and look searchingly around. He also tended to scoop his food up into his mouth with a paw and sometimes he would dip a piece of cooked chicken I had given him into the water bowl before eating it. All of these behaviours were curiously racoon-like but at the time I didn’t make a great deal of it. Later, however, it was to prove significant in consideration of Toby Jug’s ancestry. He was certainly no ordinary cat either in looks or behaviour and in my opinion he was unique!
Taking a really careful look at him I wondered just how this little cat perceived the world and me. Maybe I was his entire world. I thought that any memory of his mother would be severely limited, especially since he hadn’t been able to open his eyes until he’d been with me awhile. Because I had been the first living and moving thing he’d ever seen, he probably regarded me as family and had imprinted in his brain the sight of me as mother. A famous zoologist called Konrad Lorenz once described how he became the ‘mother’ to some geese and had to teach them to swim and also how to fly by running along flapping his arms until the geese, imitating him, became airborne. Quite possibly, Toby Jug had no idea he was a cat at all but believed himself to be human. After all, he had never even seen another cat and had very little experience of associating with his own species. What else could he think in the circumstances, if he could think at all? It was all very confusing and I fell asleep in the chair ruminating on it.
Some hours later I awoke with a stiff neck to find that the fire was almost out and Toby Jug had worked his way up inside my sweater. Popping him into his jug, I blew out the candles and carried both kitten and jug up to my bedroom, which had an electric heater. I climbed into bed and fell nicely asleep, until Toby Jug’s true cat nature began to assert itself once more and I awoke in alarm to find him squeaking and squealing. There he was, in the dim illumination of my bedside lamp, leaping urgently about in his jug, determined to attract my attention. Obviously, he wished to be let out of his jug to join me on the bed; 3 a.m. in the morning is no time to start an argument and so Toby won. Thereafter at bedtime he spurned his jug in favour of sleeping on the bed between the quilt and the top blanket as if it was his God-given right to do so. I expect his excuse would be that he had to keep track of me.
This was often the pattern of our evenings during the winter months as Toby grew from strength to strength and we became irrevocably attached to each other.
SPRING
With the coming of spring a whole new world opened up for Toby Jug and me in the northeast of England. In this part of the world, springtime brings more than just relief from winter, awakening the earth around us again in ways that more southern European climes enjoy for most of the year. The first greening of the trees and the bursts of vitality from crocuses, snowdrops and then daffodils in the gardens and woods are always welcome. I wanted Toby to enjoy to the full this first spring of his life. This particular springtime was especially anticipated because it would signify not only the passing of a severe winter but hopefully also mark the end of Toby Jug’s life or death traumas. It was a time heralding hope that both he and I could take advantage of sunny days outdoors.
At first I didn’t let him outside alone in the garden because I was afraid something might attack him. There were hawks and crows about, as well as weasels and foxes, and I was very much aware that Toby Jug wasn’t big or strong enough to protect himself, nor was he at this stage sufficiently aware of danger or mobile enough to run away.
I had become accustomed to taking him almost everywhere I went in the cottage. Sometimes I just carried him in my hand or stuck him in the pocket of my wool cardigan with his head peeping out, so he could see what was happening. At other times I would place his jug near to where I was working, whether it was in the kitchen preparing food or at my desk in the study, so that he could keep me in sight. It was most important to him that he was able to see me wherever I was in the cottage – if he couldn’t he would set up a rumpus which was out of all proportion to his size. His wails were no longer so feeble that they could not penetrate walls, even walls as thick as those in my cottage. Therefore, when I was at home I tried not to aggravate him by leaving him alone. It also made me feel guilty whenever he became distressed. I felt totally responsible for him and I liked to have him with me anyway.
He was not as yet physically robust enough to be given the freedom to run around the cottage on his own. There were lots of places that I was sure would attract the attention of the kitten when he was in his actively curious mode. There were cracks in the old skirting board and holes near the water pipes where spiders dwelt and where an unwary miniature kitten might disappear. It would take no end of ingenuity to retrieve him without demolishing part of the cottage. I consequently decided that until he achieved a decent size and weight I would restrict his access to certain parts of the cottage.
With the improvement in the weather now that spring was here I felt that it was warm enough to allow Toby to venture into the garden, but at first I judged it bet
ter for safety’s sake to only take him out in his jug. The garden of the cottage was extensive and varied and for Toby Jug it promised to be a cat-wonderland of scents and sights. When he was capable of exploring the garden he would discover a multitude of natural delights which were the products of my time and effort.
When I first bought the cottage in 1964 it was much in need of renovation and the garden was grossly overgrown. Two years later, when Toby Jug came into my life, I had succeeded in clearing the lawn of weeds and the shrubbery had been cut back to manageable proportions. As I reworked each section I concentrated on planting roses and plum trees near to the house. The latter had a special significance for me. On a working visit to Hong Kong some years earlier I had been introduced to the ancient Chinese art of plum-tree painting, which dates back over a thousand years. In keeping with my interest in gardening I bought a famous book on the subject and discovered that plum trees flower with fragrant and fragile blossoms and the trees grow into extraordinary and aesthetically pleasing shapes which are quite unlike other fruit trees. According to Chinese folklore they are said to endow a garden with spiritual blessings for joy and health. I became so enthralled by what I had read about the beauty of these trees that I made up my mind to buy and plant some of them when I acquired a garden of my own. Now my plum trees, although still young, were beginning to assume what promised to be fascinating shapes and their blossoms, true to my expectations, were fragile flowers of sublime beauty.
In addition to plum trees I also planted a small orchard of apple, pear and cherry trees. I had also discovered a greengage tree in a local garden centre which I planted beside the plums. This veritable plethora of fruit trees meant that in early spring there was a display of blossom marvellous to behold. I also made a patio garden near to the back door of the cottage. Here I planted mulberry, blackthorn and some small crab-apple trees. In the centre of this small garden area I planted two dozen roses of various kinds selected for their perfume. This ensured that in both springtime and summer the garden adjacent to the cottage had plenty of colour and on a still evening the air was filled with sweet perfume.
Paw Prints in the Moonlight Page 4
