by Derek Tangye
And so no time was lost. Her mother had an appointment at the hairdressers and she promised that immediately afterwards she would go to the pet shop to see what kittens were available. The visit never took place. At the hairdressers she confided her mission to the girl who attended her. ‘But I’ve got a kitten that nobody wants,’ the girl said, ‘it’s a ginger, the last of a litter, and if we don’t find a home by tomorrow he’ll have to be put away.’
I would not have agreed if my advice had been sought. One less kitten in the world would not have seemed very important to me. But my advice wasn’t sought and Monty was saved.
For the price of my mother-in-law’s weekly chocolate ration, he entered our lives.
3
As soon as I picked him out of the wicker basket in which we had brought him home, I explained to our housekeeper that Monty was to be a kitchen cat. ‘I don’t want to see him at all,’ I said, ‘he’s here to catch mice and although he may be small for that yet, I’ve been told the very smell of a cat will keep them away.’
I looked at Jeannie. She was busily unwrapping a small paper parcel. ‘Isn’t that true? Didn’t you say that?’
‘Oh yes . . . yes.’
An object had now appeared from the paper. A small sole bonne femme. It was freshly cooked and succulent.
‘Good heavens, Jeannie,’ I said, ‘Where did you get that?’
‘Latry gave it to me,’ she said. Latry was the famous maître chef of the Savoy. ‘He’s cooked it specially as a celebration present for Monty.’ I looked at the fish and then at Monty. Only a few hours before, the girl in the hairdressers was frightened he would be put away on the morrow.
‘Really, Jeannie,’ I said crossly, ‘you can’t go cadging food for the cat.’
‘I wasn’t cadging. Latry gave it to me, I tell you. He loves cats and felt honoured to cook Monty’s first meal.’
‘Honoured,’ I murmured to myself, and shuddered.
Jeannie mashed the fish up in a saucer, put it on the floor and began cooing at Monty who, never having seen a fish before, tottered off in the opposite direction.
‘There you are,’ I said, as if I had achieved a minor triumph, ‘he doesn’t like fish.’
Of course he was soon to do so; and during the course of his life he was to eat vast quantities of it, although sole was not his favourite. It was whiting. The cottage, and also in due course our cottage in Cornwall, was often to reek with the stink of it when the water in which it was cooked boiled over from the pan on to the stove.
But on the first morning of his life with us, the morning on which I awoke to a disquieting awareness that the pattern of my life was about to be re-adjusted, the sole from the Savoy kitchens awaited him. ‘I wonder whether he has eaten it,’ pondered Jeannie aloud as she dressed.
Oddly enough I found myself wondering too. It was as if time being momentarily dull I was awaiting the BBC News to hear if the announcer had anything to say to stir the pulse. ‘I’ll go down and see,’ I said, and was off through the door in my dressing gown.
The stairs were narrow and steep, of polished wood and slippery; and on the third step from the bottom, too frightened to go up or down, was Monty. ‘How have you got there?’ I said; and my voice was as firm as could be allowed when a child gets caught in a predicament. ‘Your place is in the kitchen. It’s no use you trying to learn to climb stairs.’ The tiny miaows did not protest against my firmness, they appealed for my help; and so I picked him up in one hand and took him to the saucer of the night before where it had been placed under the kitchen table. It was empty.
Jeannie was encouraged by my apparent gentleness on this occasion; and I observed, during the days that followed, how she cunningly began to use Monty to help pierce my utilitarian attitude towards him. The process continued from days into weeks until one afternoon an incident took place which, she considered, set the seal on her triumphant tactics.
The first of these tactics was her good sense in realising it was unwise to make too much fuss of Monty in my presence. She made up for this apparent coolness in my absence, but this I was not to know; and I was not to know, for instance, that Latry, the chef, continued to supply her with delicacies which she fed to Monty surreptitiously while I was in the pub next door.
Nor when, as he grew older, he began successfully to climb the stairs, did she encourage him to do so; and on the evening he was found for the first time in a tight ball on the bed, she impressed me with her scolding. Indeed I felt a twinge of sympathy for Monty as I carried him, on Jeannie’s instructions, back to the kitchen. I found myself wondering against my will whether it was fair he should be banished when it was so obvious he was prepared to give both of us his affection.
Monty played his own part very well because from the beginning he made it plain he liked me. It was a dangerous moment of flattery when I realised this and I believe, had it not been for my entrenched posture of dislike for the species, I would have fallen for it without more ado. There was, however, a thick enough layer of prejudice inside me for me to hold out.
He would seek to play with me. I would be sitting at dinner and feel a soft cushion gently knocking my foot, and when I put down a hand to stop it my fingers were enclosed by small teeth. In the garden he would perform his most bewitching tricks in front of me, the clumsy chase of a butterfly, the pounce on an imaginary demon leaving a spreadeagled posterior to face me. And when at the end of the day we returned to the cottage, unlatched the door and went inside, it was strange how often he came to me instead of paying court to Jeannie. Did I perhaps impose an intuition upon him that my prejudice, once defeated, would leave a vacuum that he alone could fill? My prejudice has long ago disappeared, but I am still a one-cat man. I have never developed a taste for a household of cats, each with a colourful name, each having to share the affection accorded to them all, each leading a life so independent that one of them can disappear for a few days without causing undue worry. It is a taste in cat worship I will never share. I am incapable of spreading my affection so widely. Monty needed only to vanish for a few hours and we both would fill ourselves with imaginary fears.
But the talk of these cat lovers among Jeannie’s friends was part of my education. She enlisted their aid. I listened to the language they used, both spoken and unspoken, and became aware there was a streak of connoisseurship in this world of cats. It was the snobbery of an exclusive club; and if the flavour of conversation was an acquired taste, it was no more so than learning to like jazz or Bach. They perused Monty and unanimously pronounced he would grow into a beautiful member of the fraternity; and fraternity henceforth replaced for me the words of species or breed. They admired his head and foretold, quite correctly, it would become like that of a miniature tiger, not snouty and elongated like some ginger cats. They assessed his mother as a tortoiseshell and his father as a tabby. They liked his whiskers which at that age were wisps of white. They forecast, as he had been doctored, that he would become a huge cat. They discussed him, men and women of distinction in various walks of life, in the tone one associates with relations probing the future of an infant of noble heritage. Would his appearance measure up to his responsibilities? Young as he was, did he show signs of a strong character? Would his movements prove elegant? How thick would become his coat? Monty was fussed over and cooed at as if to win his favour were an ambition far outweighing in importance any achievement in the daily task. I watched amused, comforting myself with the knowledge that Jeannie’s friends were not as serious as they appeared. Monty was only a diversion. He was a toy for temporary enjoyment. A cat could never possess a personality which could be remembered except by those with whom he lived.
In any case, during the initial period of this homage bestowed on him, Monty did not appear very attractive. He would not wash. His body was dull and dusty, the white on his left paw a dirty cuff, the crescent of white on his little chest a grey, soiled shirt. ‘He looks like an alley cat,’ I taunted Jeannie.
My coolness toward
s him, my inclination to niggle at any of his failings, naturally increased the sense of protection she had for him; and during this phase of unwash she was afraid I might have the excuse to get rid of him. Yet, to my surprise, I did not feel that way at all. I, too, felt a sense of protection; and the evening – Jeannie having gone home before me – I returned to find Monty on a chair in the kitchen, his fur shining bright, I was as delighted as Jeannie. I did not know she had damped him all over with plain water; and he had licked himself dry.
It was another homecoming a few weeks later, an unexpected one, which finally witnessed my capitulation. I had spent the day in the cottage and was not thinking of Jeannie’s return till the evening. I was in the top room alone when there was a noise at the door as if it were being kicked by a soft boot. I opened it and Monty came scampering in. He rushed to the sofa, jumped up, climbed on the back walking along it tail up, then down again to the floor and across to where I was standing, arching his back, rubbing his head against my leg and purring. All this in less than a minute, and performed with such élan that it made me wonder whether he was telling me in his particular fashion that I had been making an ass of myself. I bent down and stroked him, and he thereupon carried out a manoeuvre that he was often to do when he aimed to be especially endearing. He twisted his head as if he were going to fold up in a ball, collapsed on the floor and turned over, and lay with his back on the green carpet, paws in the air, displaying his silky maize underparts while a pair of bright yellow eyes hopefully awaited the pleasure the sight would give me. The reward he expected was a gentle stroke until he decided he had had one too many when there would be a mock savage attempt to bite my fingers.
But on this first occasion I was holding a pipe cleaner in my hand and I tickled him with that, which led to a game, which led half an hour later to his sitting on my desk, a large kidney-shaped Regency desk with a top like a table, performing ridiculous antics with a pencil.
I was sitting there roaring with laughter when the door opened. In walked Jeannie.
4
My capitulation was complete, and within a few weeks there was no pretence that Monty was a kitchen cat. Every room in the cottage was his kingdom; and at night, if his fancy was to sleep on the bed, I would lie with legs stiff so as not to disturb him while he curled in a ball at the bottom. I endlessly wanted to play with him, and felt put in my place when he was not in the mood, stalking away from me tail in the air showing he had something more important to do, like a vigorous if temporary wash of the underparts.
Sometimes my games were gently malicious, as if taking a friendly revenge on the way he had captured me. I used to lift him on to the beam in the sitting room where he glared down at me, then ran along the beam to find a place from which to leap on to the floor, only to find I had moved along too and was there to stop him. I would put up a hand and receive a slap from a paw.
There was another game with an ulterior purpose or game perhaps is the wrong word for it. Three months had gone by and there was still no evidence that he had caught a mouse; no remains had been found, no victory bellow heard, no sign that there were fewer mice than before. It was disturbing. His presence had brought no fear to the mice and so he seemed as useless as a dog for the purpose required of him. ‘Perhaps he left his mother too soon,’ said Jeannie, apologising, ‘and she didn’t have time to teach him.’
I no longer wished to prise Jeannie’s defences and whereas in the beginning I would have ridiculed such a remark, I now said nothing. Monty was growing fast and his appetite enormous, so the best thing to do, I decided, was to keep him hungry for a while and let his natural cat’s instinct develop out of necessity. After twenty-four hours he was prowling around like a tiger, and Jeannie was yearning to yield to his fury. ‘You’re cruel,’ she said, ‘to do this to him.’ It was often to be like that, Jeannie always ready to surrender to his whims while I, my anti-cat upbringing still somewhere within me, endeavoured to insist on discipline.
But my plan on this occasion was to put him up in the attic, a dark, forbidding world of rafters, cobwebs and, without doubt, mice. Standing on a chair, my arms outstretched above me, I shoved Monty through the trap door, and returned to the sitting room to await results. After half an hour Jeannie argued it was time to let him out. After an hour I was restraining her from standing on the chair. She was furious. I was anxious less my plan had misfired. Another ten minutes and I admitted I was wrong. I stood on the chair to push up the trap door. At that instant there was a wild scramble on the ceiling, followed by squeak, squeak, squeak . . . and a few seconds later peering down from the opening above me was Monty with a mouse, like a fat moustache, in his mouth.
As Monty grew larger Jeannie’s lap became too small for his comfort, and he transferred to mine. He would approach where I was sitting, arch his back, claw for a brief second at the chair’s fabric, leap up and settle down, then turn his head upwards to me as if he were saying: ‘Thank you very much.’ That was not, however, the moment when I required any thanks because I always felt flattered he had chosen me, above all other comfortable spots in the house, to rest on a while. It was later when I deserved the thanks, when my feet had gone to sleep, my legs had got cramp, and I had refrained from doing any job I had intended to do. I never dared move him. I would watch him comfortably dozing, occasionally adjusting his posture while I sat stiff as a ramrod: such a gesture as selecting my lap was an accolade I could not refuse. I was to spend hours, days, weeks of my life like that, while Jeannie sat opposite watching the two of us.
There were times, however, when first he paid me this attention, that circumstances forced me to move him. It was the period of the little blitz, the bitter late winter when Hitler again attacked London. The sirens would wail while we sat upstairs in the sitting room and we would wait, pretending we were not tense, until the guns began firing. ‘They’re not very busy tonight,’ I would sometimes say, which only meant I had not heard any bombs fall in the neighbourhood. But there were other times when a stick would fall uncomfortably close, and then I would tuck Monty under my arm and we would all hasten to the shelter at the top of the garden. We would crouch there, the dark being flashed into brilliance while Jeannie, a hand clutching Monty, would declare she was more afraid of the spiders than she was of the bombs.
On the night a near miss blew the roof off, leaving our sitting room facing the stars, we were not in the shelter. It was the evening of our first wedding anniversary and a number of friends were celebrating with us when we heard the stick coming . . . one, two, three, four and wham! The Brewery had a direct hit and the fire that followed lit the night into daylight, and we knew that this tempting sight might lead to another attack. None of us was hurt, only covered with plaster, but the room we loved so much was a terrible sight; and Jeannie and I were standing at the door looking at it, thinking how only an hour or two before we had spent such care getting it ready, when suddenly she said:‘Where’s Monty?’
We ran down the stairs asking as we went whether anyone had seen him. We ran into the kitchen shouting his name, then in the dining room, then into the spare bedroom that led from the kitchen. No one had seen him. I ran into the garden calling his name, the guns still firing, the flames in the Brewery leaping into the sky; and I remember how even in that moment of distress I found myself marvelling at the silhouette of a fireman’s ladder that was already poised high against the fire, a pinpoint of a man at the top of it. ‘Monty,’ I yelled, ‘Monty!’ No sign of him there so I went back to the house asking everyone to look, then out on to the river bank where I knew Jeannie had gone. I found her, but no Monty; and after searching for a while we felt our task hopeless, nothing to do except go home and wait. ‘He’ll turn up,’ I said, trying to encourage her.
And half an hour later into the kitchen came one of our guests, a burly Australian war correspondent, with Monty held in his arms like a child. His fur was powdered with plaster, as white as if he had spent the night in a bakery house.
‘He’
d got in his foxhole,’ the Australian said with a grin on his face, using the phrase of a soldier. ‘I found him upstairs in the airing cupboard!’
He was unharmed except for the temporary mess of his fur; and later, when dawn was breaking and the raiders had gone, he decided to sit on the kitchen table and receive the homage of the firemen for whom Jeannie was pouring cups of tea. The powdery plaster had been licked away; and he sat, tail gently flicking, eyes blinking, dozing like a miniature tiger in the midday sun, utterly sure of himself amidst the hubbub of chatter. He was calmer than any of the humans around him.
And when, to commemorate this end of our first year of marriage, we asked the firemen to sign their names in the visitors’ book, one of them scrawled alongside his signature:
‘Monty, the handsomest cat I ever saw.’
Derek getting to know Monty in the garden
5
We left Mortlake two days later to become evacuees with Jeannie’s father and mother in St Albans; and within an hour of arrival at his temporary home there was an incident which had an effect on Monty for the rest of his life. He had always been suspicious of dogs, but until St Albans, he had never come face to face with one in the same room.
Bryher Lodge stood on the hill facing east towards London; and on nights when duties did not perforce make us stay in the city we would stand on the terrace above the garden which sloped down to the wood at the bottom, and watch the inferno in the distance. First the little blitz, then, a few weeks later and shortly before we returned to the cottage, the beginning of the flying bombs. We would watch for a few minutes this insanity of the human race, then return indoors to the private war between Judy the Scottie in the house, and Monty.
