SEVEN
And Spring is Far Behind
That was the winter we became so friendly with the blackbird. He'd been with us for years; chivvying us for food from the corner of the woodshed roof in the mornings; baiting Solomon, when he felt in a merry mood, by fluttering low across the lawn with Fatso leaping like a trout in pursuit; turning ragged as a scarecrow every summer because he was by no means young and raising families at the rate he raised them certainly took it out of a bird.
This particular winter, however, he took to actually coming into the kitchen when he wanted food, walking flat-footedly through the door at ground level like a clockwork penguin on a pavement in Oxford Street. Sheba, who never missed anything, promptly took to sitting behind the door waiting for him. Solomon – without the faintest idea of what they were in ambush for but he always joined Sheba if he saw her doing anything interesting – took to sitting hopefully alongside her. A situation that gave us a dozen fits a day until we discovered that the blackbird was a lot wiser than he looked. Peer through the partly open door, which had to be kept ajar even in the coldest weather otherwise Solomon used it as a Wailing Wall, battering frantically at it howling to be let out, he couldn't breathe, claustrophobia was setting in – and there, while two Siamese waited expectantly on one side, the blackbird, with his head cocked, stood listening intently on the other. Waiting till they went away before he pattered familiarly in, and he never made a mistake.
He made a mistake in another direction, however. He took to staying up late to see us. If we got home at dusk on a winter's evening, there, long after the other birds had gone to roost, a solitary little black figure sat waiting on the coalhouse roof, chattering, presumably to tell us all the day's doings, as we came down the path.
One night we came home well after dark, trudging down the hill from the farm through the snow, and while Charles opened up the garage to get Annabel's hay, I went on into the cottage, switching on the porch and hall lights as I did so. There was no sign of the blackbird. At that time of night we wouldn't have expected him. I was halfway through the hall when I heard a noise as of a bird crashing against the window and rushed outside again. There was no sign of anything. No bird lying stunned in the snow. No bird anywhere in the garden. Charles said he wouldn't be so stupid, anyway, as to be trying to contact us at that time of night. But – roused presumably by my switching on the porch light – he must have been. The next morning, when we opened the kitchen door, he was squatting on the coalhouse roof with his legs folded under him. Damaged by the bang on the window, and now what were we to do?
He wouldn't let us near enough to catch him, and we were obviously only frightening him by our attempts, so we did the best we could by throwing a large sheet of cardboard on to the lawn where it would catch the sun. Throwing it, because that way it landed like a raft on a three-foot depth of untrammelled snow which even the most determined pair of Siamese were unlikely to cross unless they could borrow a sledge.
We tossed bread and bacon rind on to the cardboard and the blackbird got the idea at once. There he fed, and sat safe from ambush on the dry cardboard, while the faint March sun did its work. He stayed there, apart from exercise flights, for days. We propped the coalhouse door open and hoped he used that for shelter by night. Just in case he slept in the porch instead we bolted the front door at dusk, took the lamp bulbs out of the porch and hall lights so we wouldn't switch on by accident and disturb him, and in consequence had to grope for the hall table every time the telephone rang and Charles tripped upstairs twice.
It was worth it in the end. The blackbird's legs had been bruised, probably numbed by the cold, but not broken. First one and then the other returned to normal. The moment the first one was functioning he flew down and stood on it in the kitchen doorway to show us, chittering mockingly at the cats whom this manoeuvre had left sitting on the hall window-sill planning, from the expressions on their faces, how they could best throw a breeches buoy across the lawn and get out to the cardboard that way.
They'd have been a lot more useful if they'd taken a course in mining. Apart from the drifts the snow was going rapidly now, and as it melted from the big top lawn we discovered that another inhabitant of the great outdoors, hearing no doubt that we were fond of animals, had decided to live with us. We now had a resident mole.
Dozens of them, it seemed, watching the hillocks rear up like mountain ranges where once there was flat green lawn, but Father Adams said 'twere only one and offered to set a trap. Charles said we couldn't do a thing like that and it was a marvellous chance to study it. I didn't want it trapped either, but I drew the line at studying it on our front lawn. The day Charles came in and said if I went out quietly I could actually see it – it had looked at him out of a hole, he said, and how many people could say they'd seen that in their garden?... I enquired which hillock he'd seen it in, went outside, and jumped. Not on the hillock itself I had no wish to harm the mole. I just thought a few local tremors might move it off.
It worked. Some people going along the lane looked at me a bit peculiarly when they saw me doing what appeared to be a war-dance round a molehill, but it worked. We had no more mole heaps on that lawn. One or two appeared rather tentatively on the lower lawn, but when I jumped on that, those stopped too.
Unfortunately the mole then went berserk and submerged under the paving-stones that Charles was laying in the yard, its progress marked by long thin lines of earth rising, like the smoke from an excursion train, between the cracks. Rather on my conscience that was, imagining him coming up for air to be repeatedly met by paving-stones, and it was a great relief when his trail turned once more towards the lower lawn... no jumping on it this time; we didn't want him under those paving-stones again... across it, and finally OUT. Under the wall and across into the woods, where presumably he lives to this day telling of his adventures in the earthquake country.
The winter – the worst winter we'd had for years – was passing now, but two relics of it remained with us as inexorably as the Laws of the Medes and Persians. Annabel's addiction to a hot drink at bedtime and the cats' decision to sleep downstairs. Annabel's discovery of hot drinks had come about not as a result of our pampering her, but of our trying to ensure that she got a drink at all. On principle she wouldn't drink when we first took her bucket out. Didn't want it. Didn't like water anyway, she would snort when we offered it to her. By the time she did feel like it the bucket was invariably frozen, so we started pouring a kettleful of hot water in before we carried it up in the hope of it staying liquid longer. Annabel, intrigued by the steam, immediately investigated it. The warmth to her nose must have been wonderful... even more so to her stomach, when it got down on all that hay...
She drank it as if it were nectar, with long sucking noises and a smack of her lips at the end. We, knowing how we liked our own hot drinks, took to giving it to her regularly, and as a result, long after the frost had gone and the lighter nights were coming we were still chugging up in the evenings with a steaming bucket which, if we saw anybody coming, we hid surreptitiously in the greenhouse. We had no wish to reveal to people that if we now tried to make her go to bed without a hot drink, our donkey bawled the place down.
We were in a similar position with the cats. Ever since they were born they had, unless we had visitors, slept next door to us in the spare room. There, if they fought in the night or fell out of bed or decided that they didn't feel well, we could hear them at once and go to the rescue. There was also the advantage of their being unable to damage the furniture in there, the only upholstered item being the armchair in which they slept, whose covering and Hessian under-part they had demolished long ago, as kittens.
It was so cold that winter, however, that even with two hot-water bottles they had us up at two in the morning protesting that their ears were falling off, please to let them into bed with us. We got no sleep if we did. Solomon, being my cat, insisted on cuddling cheek to cheek with me. If Sheba showed signs of wanting to get in on my side
he got closer still and lay possessively on my face. If she did come in he bit her on the leg, whereupon Sheba spat like a squib and went and sat forlornly at the bottom. She wouldn't sleep on Charles's side. Charles, she said, fidgeted. She either sat despondently on my feet and got cold, or came back and we had a repeat performance with Solomon. Solomon, if he finally did relent and let her in, in any case snored and twitched his paws like a tic-tac man the moment he fell asleep. So in the end we fixed them up in the sitting-room.
Bottles and blankets in the big armchair in front of the fire. The fire made up so the room wouldn't get cold during the night. Food, water-bowl and earth-boxes conveniently lined up so that they had the equivalent of a luxury self-contained flat. Thereafter we went to bed leaving two little cats sitting happily on the hearthrug in the firelight in a manner that reminded us of a Christmas card. A picture, alas, that resolved itself, the moment we ourselves were in bed, into the sound of claws being stropped down below us in celebration on the chair covers; the sound of a Siamese Grand National by firelight over the furniture (in friendship this time, as we could tell from the change of direction as Solomon chasing Sheba gave way, to his intense delight, to Sheba chasing Solomon); and the reply as we shouted and banged on the floor in protest, from a basso profundo Seal-point voice assuring us that everything was all right down there. He and Sheba were enjoying themselves.
They enjoyed themselves to the extent that, within days, they were trying to send us to bed. Come eleven o'clock and Solomon would start rubbing against Charles's foot. Sheba would practise long-jumps from chair to chair. Solomon, when all else failed, would sit on the back of the armchair in which they slept and wail, with his eyes fixed on the door through which we must go to fill their hot-water bottles and clean our teeth, that it was Late... he was getting Circles under his eyes from staying up... Sheba had circles too, he would shout, Sheba being Charles's cat and Solomon thought that might speed him up a bit...
There was no question of moving them back upstairs when the winter ended. They were down there for good.
Things were progressing everywhere now. Mrs Adams had taken down the maroon plush curtains and replaced them with spring-like white muslin. Father Adams was pursuing the traditional country pastime of having a row with his neighbour over their boundary. Miss Wellington was painting her garden gnomes – a task which, as there were eight of them plus an assortment of spotted toadstools, ensured that she was on the other side of the wall, brushing away with an air of intense absorption, every time the row over the boundary disturbed the desert air. And there was tension at the Rose and Crown.
There usually was. From who pulled the bells wrong on Sunday to the way some hapless newcomer was growing his potatoes, they were always in a state over something. This time, however, it appeared that disaster had really struck.
A Mr Carey had bought a cottage in the lane adjoining the side entrance to the pub. He'd decided to build a garage at the side of the cottage and to alter his existing gate and run-in, which was right outside his front door, to an entrance further along that would also serve the garage. While he was walling up the old entrance he'd further decided to front it with what he considered to be an improvement – a steep bank of earth, in line with the other grass verges along the lane, planted with heather roots that he'd brought back from his walks.
Unfortunately other people didn't see it like that. The old way in, being right opposite the pub's side entrance, had been the one place in the whole lane where cars could squeeze past while the brewery lorry was unloading. Every time there was a beer delivery now there was a queue of car owners honking agitatedly to pass. The brewery driver got bad-tempered having to keep breaking off to move the lorry. Father Adams said it didn't do the beer no good, being rolled in in all that hurry. Mr Carey – a non-drinker himself and entirely unmoved by such sentiments – said why didn't they unload the lorry at the front door of the pub... a suggestion, entirely feasible, which was rejected out of hand on the grounds that the lorry had always been unloaded at the side door and who was he to alter things?
The matter had been referred urgently to the Parish Council. Unfortunately they met only every two months. Meanwhile there was a weekly traffic block at Carey's cottage, a nightly indignation meeting at the Rose and Crown, and considerable speculation as to whether the heather, planted so doggedly by Mr Carey, would grow.
General opinion was that it wouldn't. It grew in the peat on top of the moors, but hereabouts the soil was limestone. Actually it did. In bringing the heather down from the moors Mr Carey had thoughtfully brought the soil to go with it. And there, for the moment, the matter rested.
Things were much more peaceful with us. For one thing Solomon appeared to have made friends with Robertson. I nearly dropped the first time I saw them, Robertson ensconced inscrutably on a hay-bale in the garage and Solomon, on his first post-thaw inspection trip, sitting on the ground in front of him. There was a silence that I expected to be broken at any moment by Solomon hurtling flat-eared into the attack. Then I realised it was a silence not so much of an eve of battle as of a chess-match. Robertson regarded the driveway. Solomon studied the sand-heap. There they sat, if a trifle embarrassedly, like a couple of members of Boodles.
It was some time before Sheba joined them, but eventually she did and now the three of them sat in silence in the garage apparently practising mental telepathy. They weren't practising that, though, the evening we saw them by the woodshed. We'd been off for a week by the sea – Annabel going up to the farm, Solomon and Sheba to the Siamese hotel at Halstock, and the Hazells, in our absence, feeding Robertson. Halfway through the week he'd vanished, they reported when we came back, and they couldn't find him anywhere. We thought he'd probably traced Annabel to the farm and sure enough, the day after we fetched Annabel home, Robertson himself reappeared, stalking grandly along the path towards her stable.
Later that night I noticed, looking through the kitchen doorway, that Solomon and Sheba were in the yard, sitting in front of the woodshed and studying the base of it with expressions of rapt concentration. 'They've got Robertson down a mouse-hole', I jokingly said to Charles, 'and they're not going to let him come out'. I was nearer the truth than I knew. A while later I looked out of the hall window on the principle, well-known to Siamese owners, that if they're quiet they're up to something – and there, beyond them, where I hadn't been able to see him from the kitchen, was Robertson. Sniffing at one of the support posts while our two gazed superiorly on.
A little later Robertson had gone, but our own two were still sitting importantly by the woodshed. I went out at that to see what Robertson had been sniffing at – and there, down the woodwork, was a long damp streak. Solomon, it seemed, had sprayed. A good big spray that he'd been saving up for a week. He'd then sat down with Sheba with an air of Beat That One If You Can while Robertson inspected it – and, to their intense satisfaction, he'd had to admit that he couldn't.
EIGHT
Music Hath Charms
Had things continued like that, with Robertson content to sit outcast-fashion in the yard, to acknowledge Solomon as local spraying champion and to look suitably humble whenever our two met up with him, they might in time have become used to him and allowed him into the cottage.
Might is a nebulous word, of course. They might equally have done what they did years before when we tried to introduce the kitten Samson. Fight him, ourselves and each other till the place resembled the United Nations.
As it was, Robertson jumped the gun one day and appeared in person in our kitchen. Without being asked, commented Sheba, who was the first to spot him and drew our attention to it by craning her neck incredulously through the doorway from the sitting-room. Just going to eat Our Food! roared Solomon – which Robertson probably was, but only because it happened to be there, like the fruits of the Indies, en route on his voyage of discovery...
Robertson went through the door like a niblick shot with Solomon behind him. Any time Solomon saw Robertson
after that he chased him indignantly from the garden. That, hard though it was on Robertson, was logical. It was Solomon's garden; Robertson was supposed to live with Annabel; and though I felt a pang at times when I saw his stocky ginger figure valiantly accompanying Charles around the orchard or sitting with him while he dug in the vegetable garden, which was the nearest Robertson could come now to his desire to belong to somebody, at least he got regular meals and we petted him surreptitiously in the garage.
He was sitting by the bean row one day, busily belonging to Charles, when some people came past with a dog. The dog, a big brown cross-bred, stopped in the gateway and growled at Robertson. Only in passing, because Robertson was a cat, but Robertson didn't see it like that. He saw it that Solomon stopped him from being with Charles in the cottage; now this dog was threatening to stop him from being with Charles among the beans... At that point something snapped. He stood up, bushed his tail, and growled back. The dog fled. Robertson, like a boy who has just discovered he can fight a bully, flew after him. The snag being that the next time he saw Solomon, he flew at him.
'Take that... and that... and THAT', he spat, and Solomon, caught unawares, was badly beaten. Thereafter it was Solomon versus Butch all over again. Solomon kept going out to look for Robertson. Robertson kept coming down to look for Solomon. He was worse than Butch, however, in that his idea was obviously to drive Solomon away from the cottage so that he could live with us himself. The blue one, too, he apparently decided, with the result that he leapt from the undergrowth one day when Sheba and I were in the garden – Sheba, who had never said boo to him in her life... and attacked her before my very eyes until, recovering from my surprise, I shouted and drove him off.
Raining Cats and Donkeys Page 6
