‘We’ll see,’ said Nannie, magnanimous in victory.
Round about my birthday, having taken advice locally, Duff visited to the nearest animal shelter and returned in triumph with rather a rarity –a striped ginger female whom the charity had not yet spayed. We installed her in a cosy corner of the toolshed, buttered her paws, and kept her confined there until she was settled. It was no surprise when, a couple of months later, she gave birth to four attractively-marked kittens. We decided to keep two.
Rainbow kittens for sale, I advertised, thinking other people would find them as beautiful as I did, but the first customers rudely dashed this hope.
‘Nothing rainbow about them,’ said the fussy, fidgety old husband with contempt, giving the kittens a cursory glance before hurrying his wife back into his car. ‘Those are just ordinary tortoiseshells. No one’s going to pay £5 for them. From the advert, I thought you’d got something special for sale.’
Luckily the next couple who rang were less demanding, and paid up happily enough for their common tortoiseshell kittens, but the first customer’s words left a nasty taste in my mouth. One of the most disagreeable aspects of selling livestock is the way so many potential buyers feel obliged to denigrate and find fault with whatever they are offered, I suppose in the hope that the price will be reduced, though in my case the tactic has precisely the opposite effect and makes me decide instantly that whatever my animal’s imperfections, I shall not allow it to fall into the hands of someone who despises it. Or even pretends to despise it.
I also feel that one should never give an animal away: people tend to value and look after what they have paid for much more than something they acquire for free.
So there we were with three outdoor cats on the strength, their feeding-station on the windowsill outside the kitchen, and their favourite lairs among the hay-bales in the barn. Though they would allow the occasional caress – when it suited them – they were fairly wild, but I enjoyed catching glimpses of them slinking about their daily affairs, concentrated, wary, and busy whether they were watching at a mousehole or grooming one another in the sun. Nor was there any doubt that their presence had an impact on the rabbits.
Yet all too soon, as Duff had warned, the Shoot’s aversion to cats became overt. Walking back across the field one summer evening, I was horrified to see my ginger cat being chased homeward by the gamekeeper’s son on his motorbike, zigzagging wildly from one side of the lane to the other until she fled into a barn with fur on end and tail curved into a terrified half-hoop.
I blocked the boy’s path as he turned to ride away and gave him a piece of my mind, which did nothing to improve matters, and when about a week later the ginger cat disappeared entirely I had a fair idea we would never see her again. Nor did we, though as usual in the country by roundabout ways word of what had become of her finally reached us. In the summer gloaming she had been seen in the hedgerow near the pheasants’ release pen, mistaken for a fox and shot dead. The gamekeeper was sorry, but he had to look after his birds. Etc etc.
Useless to rage that if he couldn’t distinguish between a cat and a fox he shouldn’t have fired at all. Apart from shutting them indoors, there is really no way of stopping cats hunting, but the untimely death of poor Ginge made me realise that if we didn’t want the kittens to suffer the same fate we would have to alter their lifestyle asap.
They were now seven months old, lean and rangy, both female, and difficult to tell apart from a distance, though close up you could see that one’s fluffy coat made her look fatter than her smooth sister.
‘You ought to get those spayed unless you want to be overrun with cats,’ remarked my sister-in-law one day, watching them as they sat on a wall in provocative attitudes, challenging her Jack Russells to have a go.
‘Oh, surely not yet! They’re only kittens.’
‘Tomcats don’t hang about, you know.’
So I made an appointment with the vet and, at the cost of some spectacular scratches, managed to catch and cram them into a travel-box. Throughout the five-mile journey they yowled at earsplitting volume and scrabbled against the weld-mesh until their paws and faces were pouring blood. Heads jerked round as I entered the surgery, and disapproving eyes followed as I clumped across the shiny lino from reception desk to consulting room clutching the dripping cage at arm’s length, with a mop-wielding nurse close behind.
‘Been in the wars, have we?’ said the vet, surveying his patients warily and filling a syringe. ‘All right, set them down; we’ll take over now.’
I left, feeling a heel to abandon them in this strange, chemical-smelling place, and worse when I picked them up some hours later, still groggy from the anaesthetic, eyes glazed, paws bandaged and taped, and each with one shaven flank and a neatly stitched wound. Sure enough, they had both been pregnant.
‘Keep them quiet for a couple of days and they’ll be right as rain,’ said the cheerful receptionist. ‘You can take the stitches out yourself in about a week or, if you can’t manage, bring them back and we’ll do it.’
Knowing that wild horses weren’t going to get them back into that travelling-box, I co-opted a steely-nerved friend to help with do-it-yourself stitch-removal and resolved on an all-out effort to tame the little cats before the week was over. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The operation had had a miraculously calming effect on them, and when they regained full consciousness and explored the house, the cats seemed charmed with their new surroundings. Fat and Thin, as we continued to call them since changing an animal’s name is said to be unlucky and no one wanted to tempt Fate, made no effort to resume their wild life in the barns. They took possession of the chairs on either side of the fire, and entered into their role as domestic pets with enthusiasm.
‘I knew you’d come round in the end,’ said Nannie complacently.
Though I wasn’t going to admit it, I had more than come round: after a few days of their company I was a complete convert, bowled over by feline charm. They were simply no trouble at all. Not only did they quietly arrange their lives around ours and need no instruction or formal exercise, but from the first they were perfectly house-trained, scrupulously scraping a small hole in which to deposit faeces, then raking the soil back with great care, shaking their paws clear of earth with a few disdainful flicks.
Nor was there any problem with the dogs, who appeared to realise they were now a permanent part of the household and must not be harassed. The mouse problem vanished as quickly as it had arisen; I wondered why I had tried to bar them from the house in the first place.
Far from needing doors opened and shut for them, the cats came and went as they pleased through a self-closing flap, whose function they mastered overnight, its distinctive click-clack announcing to anyone in the kitchen that the hunters had returned and were in need of grub. That was really the only demand they made on me, although like all cats they had the irritating habit of leaving a few bites in the bottom of the bowl as insurance against night starvation. Since this was a magnet for flies, I would throw it away, and grew to admire the ingenuity with which they would convey to me that their dishes needed a refill. Whatever time of day they felt hungry (depending, I suppose, on whether or not a hunt had been successful) they would seek me out in garden, study, or stable, and become very charming, parading along fences or sprawling among my papers until I was forced to acknowledge their presence.
Next they would approach and solicit stroking, curling round my legs and, if I still didn’t get the message, sit staring unblinkingly and utter single mews precisely pitched at the timbre most annoying to the human ear, spacing the sounds until they were as impossible to ignore as a dripping tap.
The moment I put down whatever I was doing and turned to attend to the distraction, they would trot rapidly towards the kitchen, look round to see I was following and, if I happened to deviate from the direct line, return to the mewing and leg-winding until they again got me moving in the right direction. Considering our relative sizes, it was a
highly skilled piece of manipulation – mind over matter, one might say – and I very soon discovered it was less trouble to give up at once and submit to their wishes.
For fourteen years they kept us company, becoming tamer as time passed, but always accepting petting with a slight air of condescension and moving away if any human showed signs of wanting to pick them up. They preferred to keep their paws on the ground. When they died, which they did within a few months of one another, it was with minimal fuss. Riveted to Dr Who, I saw from the tail of my eye the survivor, Thin, get up from her favourite place on the nursery hearth-rug and slip quietly behind an armchair; minutes later, as the credits rolled, I looked to see where she had gone and found her stretched out, dead.
From then on, cats have always been part of our household, two at a time for choice, generally brother and sister (neutered for everyone’s peace of mind) and though no one could claim they haven’t a few uncultured habits, by and large I would rate them the most civilised of all household pets.
Some have been mighty hunters: Jasper – who began life named Jasmine until a vet pointed out the obvious – used to tug whole pheasants and pigeons through the cat-flap and pluck them on the dining-room carpet. We never ascertained whether he caught them roosting or picked them up after a shoot, but since they were perfectly fresh and he only ate the heads, Duff would remove them when he had had his fill and lay sprawled and satisfied, skin the untouched legs and breasts and I would cook them for our own supper. It seemed a fair division of spoils.
Jasper also enjoyed an evening walk with or without the dogs, sauntering along waving his tail a few paces behind when I went round checking the livestock, and should he encounter a young lamb that had strayed too far from its mother, he would go into an extravagantly playful routine: rolling on his back, tossing a pebble in his paws, lying supine until the fascinated lamb approached, stretching out an exploratory nose, then moving away a few feet to entice it still farther away from maternal surveillance. Clearly it was an act as carefully choreographed as that of the stoat which stands on its hind legs and weaves from side to side to hypnotise a rabbit, though just what Jasper thought he would do when he had the lamb at his mercy is impossible to say. Did he mean to spring on its back like a mountain lion, wrench its head back and with one bite sever the spinal cord?
I’ll never know, because the scenario always ended the same way. A shout from me, a bleat from the lamb, and up would bustle the ewe to teach the marauder a lesson.
‘Spoilsport,’ Jasper’s look would say as we resumed our evening walk.
Of all our cats he was the most self-sufficient, and if push came to shove could very well have fed himself without human assistance. By nature he was autocratic and possessive. When he wanted something, he wanted it now – at once, no messing – and we were fortunate that it was only in extreme old age that he hit on the surefire way to secure immediate attention.
I was chatting on the telephone one evening, leaning against the fridge and fending off Jasper’s demand that I should open it and take out the raw liver he so loved with my usual mantra: ‘Hang on a tick, can’t you see I’m busy?’ when he stopped winding round my legs, backed up and deliberately squirted urine almost as high as my waist.
When this occurs, on no account should you jump and scream because this will reinforce his behaviour, advised the Daily Telegraph’s animal problem guru. Nor should you scold him since that means he has succeeded in securing your attention. The best strategy is to leave the room quietly…
Easier said than done. Mercifully he perpetrated the outrage only three or four times, but this was because I was extremely wary of his food-soliciting overtures from then on, and on the occasions when he did take me by surprise, I not only jumped and screamed but also cursed and kicked out at him. I defy anyone to behave otherwise.
He was a cat of great character, yet in some ways it was a relief when the Grim Reaper intervened, and Jasper joined his sister and several of their predecessors under the Cryptomeria within sight of the kitchen door.
One summer day, nine-year-old Alice came home fizzing with excitement about the new project her class was doing on Bees and Honey, and bombarded us with amazing facts and statistics. Did we know that bees had to fly the equivalent of three times round the world to produce a single pound of honey? Or that the hexagonal cells in a honeycomb were geometrically perfect, incapable of improvement? Or that when a worker bee found a source of nectar, she told her mates exactly where it was by dancing to the points of the compass?
No, we said, and No again, and presently, infected by her enthusiasm and the tempting prospect of a hundredweight of honey from a single colony – ‘in a good year,’ Alice added cautiously – we agreed that it was high time we added a hive, a queen, and a nucleus of gentle, good-tempered bees to the strength.
For complete beginners, the obvious first step was to seek advice from local experts, and no one could have been more ready to dispense it than the longstanding secretary of the nearest association of apiarists. Bee-keepers are enthusiasts, and the faintest show of interest from an outsider fires them with messianic zeal to spread the word about the powers and wonders of their charges. I found that the real difficulty was to get a word in edgeways.
Amid the flood of verbiage, two contradictory messages came through loud and clear. The first was that everyone should keep bees. It was good for the natural world, beneficial for humans, and it couldn’t be easier. Put bees in a hive, substitute sugar syrup for the honey you removed, and bob’s your uncle, nature would do the rest.
The second message I picked up was starkly different. To maintain the health of a colony demanded constant vigilance, skill, and experience, and unless you timed everything right, you would be lucky to harvest any honey at all.
So which was I to believe?
Though I found this difficult to grasp at the time, both messages were perfectly true. For long periods of the bee-keeping year, the complex life of the hive carries on happily without human interference, and nothing could be easier than looking after the inhabitants. But should the weather be unseasonable – warm in February, for example, so the bees emerge from hibernation and find no nectar, or cold in July, which obliges the colony to consume winter stores when they should be built up – the bees may starve unless immediately supplied with sugar syrup to make up the nectar deficiency.
Since the hive should only be opened when the temperature is 70 degrees or over, a chilly, wet summer is very bad news, and instead of harvesting the fabled hundredweight of honey, the tyro bee-keeper is likely to find himself out of pocket after bulk-buying sugar for his poor hungry workers.
From the initial wave of our friendly apiarist’s advice, however, we disentangled two basic recommendations: the box-like ‘National’ hive would be the easiest for us to start on; and the most suitable nucleus of bees for beginners to handle would be the laid-back, yellow Italian variety bred by Brother Ambrose at Buckfast Abbey, in Devon.
The queen, however, we ordered from America.
Following instructions, we assembled the hive in a sunny corner of the garden, sheltered from the east wind by a high hedge, well away from the house and stables. The basic kit contained a deep lower compartment, known as a double brood chamber, with a shallower upper storey in which the honey would be stored. The flat, waxy, foundation frames with projecting wooden lugs, which the workers would draw out into proper honeycombs, smelled delicious, and slotted neatly into racks, though as living, eating, and breeding quarters they looked to me extremely claustrophobic. The spacing of the racks is critical, we were told, and must be no more or less than a quarter of an inch, since any wider passage would be used by the bees to build up extra comb, while a narrower gap would be sealed with the waxy yellow secretion known as propolis.
This two-tiered dwelling was topped with a plywood ‘crown board,’ with a zinc-covered lid, tight-fitting to prevent it being blown off, and doubly protected against this danger by placing a heavy stone on to
p. The brood chamber had a narrow slot of entrance, too low to admit a mouse, and a projecting lip of ‘flight board’ on which the bees could take off and land. This was sloped downward to prevent water running into the hive, and the whole edifice placed on a plinth of concrete blocks, to minimise the need for grass-mowing.
We were warned that bees disliked any kind of disturbance. The smell of horses was anathema to them, and so were expensive scent, brightly-coloured clothes, loud voices, and the noise of mowing machines, while thundery weather was guaranteed to make them stroppy. All in all, they were pretty sensitive souls, and their sole form of protest was to attack and sting the source of annoyance, even though they died as a result.
Thoughtfully, we scanned the bee-keeping catalogues and ordered protective all-in-one suits, broad-brimmed hats with integral veils, and long-gauntleted kid-gloves to protect us from our new charges. That first taste of home-produced honey looked like being an expensive one.
There were other, equally essential tools to buy. An extractor, like a spindryer with a tap at the base, in which to whirl the loaded combs and release the golden flow of honey by centrifugal force. A ripener, in which to store the thin honey until it reached the right stage of viscosity for bottling. Then we needed a smoker, a sort of hand-bellows attached to a canister with a bent nozzle, in which to burn corrugated paper in order to trick the bees into thinking there was a forest fire. Their instinct would then be to tank up with as much nectar as they could ingest, and this in turn made them feel sleepy and calm. The theory was that you could then handle them safely, remove frames of honey or scrape encrusted propolis from the crown board, without fear of attack. Another essential was the ‘hive tool’ – a long metal scraper which doubled up as a screwdriver – and the slotted zinc sheet known as a ‘queen excluder,’ because it stopped the queen laying brood among the honey cells in the hive’s top layer.
A Job for All Seasons Page 6
