Able Seacat Simon

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘Good idea, sir,’ said Frank. ‘Righty ho.’ Then he turned to me. ‘So, young Simon, me lad. Wonder what other delights are going to be here for you?’

  I could only stare at him, the ‘cuddly toy’ (which wasn’t cuddly in the least bit) forgotten. Peggy gone? Peggy gone? Gone where?

  Chapter 21

  Bay of Biscay, 1 November 1949

  It took three months for us to sail to England, time which I spent as I’d always done; maintaining my watches, keeping the (now thankfully much smaller) rat population in check and wherever possible finding a billet in a warm, welcoming bunk or hammock, particularly as the temperature began dropping, and the thing they called ‘taters’ and ‘parky’ and something about ‘brass monkeys’ began to take on substance and shape.

  Peggy had indeed gone, and the ship felt all the quieter and sadder for it. I kept listening for her bark, or bracing myself for her imminent arrival, or expecting her to appear around the corners of passageways, bounding along and prancing about and extremely keen to lick me, her tail thwacking back and forth like a mast in a gale. Then I’d remember that she wouldn’t, because something called the ‘purse strings’ meant she had been found another home, and in Hong Kong, which was strange and unsettling.

  As for the why, what about Petty Officer Griffiths, who was the one who’d brought her on board? She’d been his dog originally. So how did he feel about it? With no answer forthcoming, I could only wonder about it. And wonder I did. How did Peggy feel about it? I missed her.

  For the most part, the time passed easily, with the ship shipshape, the men occupied and the atmosphere largely happy. The traumas we’d all been through were fading thankfully away, though at the same time, albeit curiously, they worked an unlikely magic in making everyone appreciate how lucky we were.

  But the closer we got to the place almost everyone called home, the more I became aware that something significant might be happening – something that I might not quite like. I could sense it, in the same way that cats can sense most things, and though I didn’t know what it was, I was about to find out.

  ‘I know how you’re going to feel, Blackie,’ Jack was explaining, on the morning of our arrival. It was past eight o’clock but, in this curious part of the world, still quite dark. ‘You’re going to feel like we’ve abandoned you. But we haven’t,’ he said. ‘Not a bit of it, okay? It’s just that there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s no getting round quarantine, I’m afraid. The law’s the law, and there’s no way around the law once we’re home, even if you are the most famous cat in the world.’

  It was a curious business, sitting in the mess with so many of my friends, knowing this was the last day, perhaps for a long time, that we’d all be at sea together. We were within ‘spitting’ distance, as Frank would say. I wished we weren’t.

  We’d left Gibraltar the previous day and were now making good speed to Devonport, where everyone kept saying we were going to have ourselves a welcome to rival all the welcomes we’d already had put together. We were returning as heroes, and the ‘world and his wife’ would be waiting there to greet us, which, though it clearly made my friends happy in the utmost – which of course made me happy – was increasingly making me feel sad for myself, because it reminded me that my home was here.

  Back in Hong Kong, we had already been greeted by more people than I had ever seen together in one place. It had been much the same ever since. We’d stopped at so many ports along the way, it was hard to keep track of them – Singapore, Penang, Colombo, Aden and Port Said – where Frank was reunited with his son, and had to try so hard not to cry.

  Then it was Malta, and most recently Gibraltar. I’d not gone ashore – after Hong Kong, I didn’t think I’d better wander off again, just in case – but each dock would still have a place in my memory because each had smelled different, looked different, felt different. In one aspect, each had been much like the one before it; we’d leave the open sea only to have it replaced by another; a sea of cheering humans, the warmth in their smiles, waves and welcomes unwavering, whatever the vagaries of the weather.

  But since leaving Gibraltar, something very worrying had started happening; something that was beginning to make me question my previous assumption that, once the Amethyst had been repaired, and the crew had seen their families, we’d be off to our next posting on the South China Seas.

  The worry was that strange new word ‘quarantine’. That curious word that Captain Kerans had first mentioned just as we’d left Hong Kong, and which I wished I had paid a great deal more attention to. This strange, worrying place where there’d be no rats to hunt – that much I had at least recalled.

  I’d been hearing the word ‘quarantine’ here and there ever since. Not to me, particularly, but always in tones that made me sure it was something not so much to be excited about, but be borne.

  I stood up on Jack’s lap now, arched my back and had a stretch, then settled down again and, because I knew he was in his best togs today, took care not to knead my front claws on his knees.

  ‘Daft, ain’t it?’ said Martin, who was similarly scrubbed up. The whole crew were, because once we docked, the ship’s company were going on parade again – their last in a run of them (I’d never seen so much spit-and-polishing) this one, the main one, through the streets of Plymouth. ‘You’d think they’d make an exception for him, wouldn’t you?’ he argued. ‘I mean it’s not like he’s going to be off being someone’s pet an’ that, is it? Not like he couldn’t just stick around with one of us till we’re off on our travels again.’

  ‘Yeah, but where?’ Jack said. ‘Someone would have to take him home, wouldn’t they? You know, back out into civvy street. And you’d hate that, you would, Blackie, trust me,’ he told me, running a big hand down my back. ‘Now you’ve got your sea legs, I reckon you’d find it pretty miserable. All those other cats, for one thing . . .’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Martin, grinning. ‘Who’s to say he wouldn’t meet a nice lady cat? Being such a good-looking tom now, and all.’

  ‘Not to mention a war hero,’ Paddy pointed out, while I was still trying to work out if I was to be given yet another name. Tom? Where had Tom come from?

  ‘Hey, Blackie, mate, that’s a point,’ said Jack. ‘You can show all the girls your medal!’

  I had no idea why, but they seemed to find this extremely funny, because they laughed so much that they all fell about the mess and doubled up, and Jack’s lap suddenly became a wild, stormy sea. In fact, I only clung on till he choked on his ciggy, upon which I had to leap off and retire to a safe distance till he finished the resultant coughing fit.

  He soon scooped me up again, and I wished so much that I could go home with him. With any of them. I’d be proud to. And yet it seemed I couldn’t. It was becoming chillingly clear that I wouldn’t be allowed to.

  ‘Tell you what, though,’ Jack said, cuddling me, ‘we’re going to miss you something awful. ‘’T ain’t right, is it? You being packed off like this. Perhaps Peggy got the best of it. But then, you’re a hero now, aren’t you? No question of not bringing you home. But don’t you worry, Blackie – they’ll make such a fuss of you once you’re there, you’ll see. Give you a proper hero’s welcome. You’ll be spoiled rotten by all those kennel maids. Just you wait. And we won’t leave you high and dry, mate,’ he added, tugging on one of my front paws. ‘A few of the lads don’t live so far away from where they’ll be taking you, me included. We’ll come visit you, okay? Promise. So you’ll have plenty of visitors to look forward to. You’ll see – those six months will fly by in a flash. Even if it’s that long, and I reckon it probably won’t be. You wait, you’ll pass muster with the powers that be and then we’ll be all of us – well, most of us, I reckon – back to sea.’

  I tried to take this all in. In what sense might Peggy have had the best of it? What was the worst of it, then? What were they sending me to? If I was going there, I was going there, so I tried to think like Jack did. Tried
to remember I must make the best of it. Tried to remember what Captain Griffiths had once said to me about both sailors and cats being so adaptable. To be reassured that my friends would come and visit me, just as they promised. That the time would pass quickly. That the kennel maids – whoever they were – would indeed make a fuss of me. But six months. Six whole months. That was how long he’d said it might be, hadn’t he? We’d been 101 days aground at Rose Island – which was barely half that. And if that had felt like forever and a day – which was how I remembered Jack himself had put it – then how long would my spell in the quarantine place feel?

  I could hardly bear to think about it.

  We were due to dock in Plymouth late morning. As we continued north, through a choppy, unfamiliar sea, I could sense a lifting of spirits around me the like of which I didn’t think I’d seen before, the men laughing and joshing with each other as we carved through the water, wearing our battle scars, as the captain put it, like bunting. There was much talk of things that were entirely new and strange to me. Talk of ‘Blighty’ and ‘sweethearts’ and ‘proper ale on draught, finally’, none of which – however hard I tried – I could understand, let alone share. I could only get the sense that, for most of the men, this place called Plymouth was a ‘coming to’ rather than a ‘leaving from’ kind of city; that there were loved ones here, precious humans, some of whose pictures I’d seen often, and who would apparently be waiting excitedly to greet them when we finally drew alongside wharf six.

  I thought back to Stonecutters Island, the place where I’d been born, and tried to put myself in their shoes. How wonderful it must be for my shipmates, after everything that they’d been through, to know that soon they might catch a glimpse of the people they’d missed so much, whose few letters they had read and reread so many times. I tried to imagine – though I chased the thought away as if vermin itself – what it would feel like to see my mum waiting there on the dockside for me too.

  But that wasn’t to be, and I had no choice but to accept it, however much I wished things were otherwise. I wished that we could sail right past this Plymouth (which from what I’d heard, and could now begin to see, looked cold and grey and regularly beset by sheets of heavy rain) and just head away again, fast, back out to the only home I now knew; the sea.

  Instead I was bound for ‘quarantine’. I kept hearing the word in my head over and over again. Quarantine. Qu-ar-ant-ine. It was such a strange word; a word I’d never heard before the captain had mentioned it. And I was no nearer to understanding it when Jack had said it either. Where was quarantine? What was quarantine? In what way did you go ‘into’ it? And what was an animal supposed to do when it got there? For, from what Jack had half-explained, that much did seem to be clear. That only the animals from the Amethyst had to go in there – and since Peggy was longer there, she didn’t have to – and that, given what I’d been through, I’d be treated like a king. But I didn’t feel any the wiser about why we had to go there, or what naval duties might be required of me when I got there. If they didn’t have a rat problem, perhaps they had another. Plagues of lizards, perhaps? Voles? I didn’t think so, or else, why would they have needed Peggy? Peggy could no more catch a vole than her own tail. Was that why she’d left the Amethyst? Because they hadn’t needed her in quarantine? That was still a mystery to me, too. And I was completely at a loss to know what I’d have to do in order to ‘pass muster’. Only that it was ‘the law’, and as Jack had made clear, no one – man or animal – was above that.

  I tried to think it through logically; make some sense of why it had to happen, when, strictly speaking, I had been deemed ‘above’ the law when on board the Amethyst. I knew that because I’d heard it said more than once by my beloved Captain Griffiths. But what did it mean? I tried to rack my brains, to see if I could fathom it. If I remembered rightly, he’d said something about it when I walked over his new charts with wet paws one day – which now felt like such a very long time ago. ‘Look at this one,’ he’d said to Lieutenant Weston, who was working on them with him. ‘Bold as you like! Cock of the walk!’ Then he’d shaken his head. ‘Mark my words, Number One, he thinks he’s above the law, that one. Look at him! If he was a rating – are you listening, Simon? I said if you were one of my ratings I’d have you on a charge, you hear that? Put on deck-mopping duty –’ He’d paused then and chuckled. ‘Or strung up against the mast and soundly thrashed with a cat-o’-nine tails! Yes, you heard right – a cat-o’-nine tails!’ Then he’d thrown his head back and laughed. ‘And I’d have yours for good measure, you mucky pup!’

  That had always been the thing about Captain Griffiths: he’d say one thing and do another, so sometimes you weren’t sure where you were with him. Well, the men weren’t – which was as it should have been – but I knew him rather better. So I wasn’t in the least surprised when he’d picked me up, kissed my forehead and dropped me gently to the floor. It was what he’d often done, for all his blustering and huffing.

  I tried to think how the two things might possibly be connected, but none of it, looking back now, made a great deal of sense. Not least because, actually, it was Peggy who was the mucky pup.

  So I wasn’t any the wiser.

  We docked at Devonport on schedule, and I had my first proper look at the place all my friends seemed to yearn for so much; the place about which they’d always talked so long and lovingly; the place which a lot of them had fought to protect.

  I watched it fill the horizon from my newest favourite viewpoint (the stowage box on the upper foredeck, which was sheltered from the worst of the wind by the starboard whaler) and tried to feel the same sense of excited anticipation.

  But it was difficult. It was nothing like the place where I’d been born. Unlike in Hong Kong, where the mountains rose behind us so magnificently, the land beyond the dock here was indistinct, flat and grey. It seemed to hug the earth rather than rise from it, as if anxious not to show itself. Such features as were visible all seemed to merge into one another, melting into, rather than meeting, the dingy smear of sky. There was little light, little colour; just the rain sliding down on us. This rain fell not so different from the way it had when we were trapped halfway up the Yangtse – out of a sky that was heavy with as yet unshed water. But, just as I had imagined from what I’d learned, it was not nearly as warm. All of which made it equally difficult for me to warm to the place. Rain will come, kitten, I remembered, and you won’t like it one bit. Here, would it ever go away?

  But as we approached, the warmth came to us in other ways. As we neared the harbour, it was as if the whole world had come to greet us; we were joined by a flotilla of all sorts of craft, their decks alive with sailors of all kinds. Boats and ships, big and small, were soon everywhere around us, while above us half a dozen planes swooped and dipped and soared, signalling their approval through the roaring of their engines.

  The welcome on the dock was as warm as the Plymouth air was cold, with people stretching almost as far as the eye could see. And not just at the wharfside – every structure that had space on which to stand held yet more people, anxious to better see.

  As we pulled alongside the wharf, to such a cacophony of cheering, to such a bright ocean of smiles, my friends’ happiness began to rub off on me.

  Not that I didn’t have my wits about me, too. I had never seen so many humans crammed into such a small space, and experience had by now shown me that this could mean only one thing: that if I didn’t make myself scarce they would soon all come swarming aboard and overwhelm me.

  And come aboard they did, in their droves. For a while, it was impossible to avoid the crush and chaos, because Captain Kerans seemed determined to make me part of the celebrations, particularly when it became clear that everyone wanted to take my picture.

  But there was the taking of pictures and the taking of pictures, and this was nothing like the picture-taking I had known. There were cameras everywhere, which didn’t in itself worry me unduly; I’d long since got used to havi
ng my picture taken at sea, and had coped with all the people wanting them in Hong Kong. But here it seemed tenfold – like no other port before it. Many of the cameras were held by shouting, jostling men; men who seemed not to care about pushing in front of one another in order to shove their enormous lenses in my face, and, with a terrifying ‘pop!’, blind me with hot white light.

  There was nothing to be done but grit my teeth and get on with it, just as Captain Griffiths had always told me. And as I was held fast in the captain’s arms, there was little I could practically do in any case, at least for the moment; to try to wriggle free from him would have been insubordinate in the extreme, particularly when he was recounting to everyone around us what heroes both Peggy and I had been.

  But I think he sensed my discomfort. I could tell by the way he held me, and no sooner had the flashes begun popping in earnest than a lady stepped aboard – one whose face I thought I recognised – who, at a nod from Captain Kerans, held out her arms to me, scooping me up against her shoulder. She immediately bore me away along the nearest gangway, off the deck, away from all the crush and noise.

  ‘Poor Simon,’ she whispered, speaking almost as if she knew me. ‘This is getting all too much for you, isn’t it? And I’m not surprised at all,’ she added, holding me out in front of her to make the usual thorough inspection. ‘My word, you’re doing well!’ she said. ‘Almost as good as new, eh? Look at those whiskers. I did so feel for you losing those whiskers. But here they are, all grown again. You’re a sight for sore eyes, and I’ve half a mind to take you hostage. I expected you to be looking so much more sorry for yourself.’