by Tom Cox
My slight aversion to items featuring cats meant that, by my mid-thirties, I had seen what many cat aficionados might have viewed as a pitiful number of films from the feline canon. I’d watched the original 1942 film noir version of the horror movie Cat People, but that’s probably clutching at straws. 1988’s Heathcliff: The Movie, 2001’s Cats and Dogs and 2004’s Garfield: The Movie had always been way off my radar.
One day in late summer 2012, I came upstairs from my office to find Gemma singing to The Bear, ‘Ev’rybody wants to be a cat.’
‘That’s a nice song,’ I said. ‘Did you make that up?’
‘You’re kidding me, right?’
‘No. It’s nice. I mean it.’
‘Surely you know that song. It’s from The Aristocats. The Disney film.’
‘Nope. Never seen it.’
‘But everyone’s seen that film.’
‘Not me. Is it good?’
I could have said this was perhaps another small measure of the gap between me, as someone born in the seventies, who’d grown up with only three channels of kids’ TV, and Gemma, a member of the more culturally saturated generation below me. In truth, the main reason I hadn’t seen The Aristocats was that I’d spent most of my childhood outside, riding my bike or playing football or golf. I sensed, though, from Gemma’s review and a few I read on the Internet, that if I was going to watch one film about cats, I could do a lot worse.
As luck would have it, that weekend The Aristocats happened to be on TV, and five of us – Gemma, me, Shipley, Ralph and The Bear (but not Roscoe, who’d seemed a bit anti-films ever since her attack on Mark Wahlberg during Contraband) – sat down to watch it. Shipley only lasted about five minutes before wandering off swearing, and The Bear bowed out at around the airing of the theme song, apparently in disagreement at its generalisations (not everyone wanted to be a cat – The Bear obviously didn’t want to be a cat; he wanted to be a poet, or a diplomat), but the rest of us lasted the course, and I surprised myself by quite enjoying it.
The story revolves around a mother cat called Duchess and her three kittens, who belong to the wealthy former opera singer Madame Adelaide Bonfamille. Had she existed in the Internet age, Madame Adelaide might have been branded a Crazy Cat Lady, and perhaps gone on to write self-abasing confessional pieces about her life in the Daily Mail, but this is 1910, so she’s just a somewhat eccentric old lady. Learning that Adelaide’s cats will inherit her fortune when she dies – but that in the event of their death, the money will pass into his hands – her evil butler Edgar drives Duchess and her kittens into the remote French countryside and releases them. Here they meet Thomas O’Malley, a con-man Lothario moggy from the wrong side of the tracks with a good heart, who shows amazing restraint around Duchess, given that he is attracted to her and clearly hasn’t been taken to the vet’s to have his balls cut off by interfering strangers. We learn that O’Malley is an alley cat, which seems a little strange, as the area of rural Burgundy where he happens upon Duchess and her kittens has a notable dearth of alleys. Soon, though, they are all making their way back to Paris to avenge the wrong that has been done to them, aided by some British geese who are by some distance the most annoying part of the film, and made me look with new fondness upon a particularly stroppy Muscovy duck who’d been spending time in my garden recently.
Ralph sat on my lap the whole way through The Aristocats, padding my chest and dribbling lightly in some of the more frantic earlier stages, then falling into a deep, snoring sleep during the climax. Witnessing the high life of Thomas O’Malley, its dalliances with well-bred female cats and its all-night feline jazz parties, I couldn’t help looking at Ralph, in his magnificent sideburned glory, and feeling a little wistful about his lot in life. If any of my cats had been a born ladies’ man, it was him, yet all I’d done throughout his life was emasculate him. Having been called Prudence for the first few months of his life, by the time he had been given a name becoming of his rugged manliness, he was missing a couple of vital components. This was a necessity, in a world where there are too many unwanted kittens: a straightforwardly responsible act that didn’t require any debate, but, with Ralph’s looks and irrepressible good nature, it was also a little like slapping God in the face. I couldn’t help feeling I’d been slightly cruel: as if I’d gone up to Kurt Russell during his role as MacReady in the 1982 film The Thing, stroked his magnificent beard and hair, then gently broken it to him that for the rest of his life he was not allowed to touch a member of the opposite sex.
Oh, there had been love affairs, of sorts, in Ralph’s life. During his kittenhood, he’d seemed to idolise Brewer and had fallen into a year-long slump after his death. After that, his attentions had moved in the direction of a sheepskin rug, which he could often be found padding and thrusting on, whilst staring with determination at a distant and invisible, yet apparently very attractive, object. In another heartless gesture, though, I’d recently got rid of the rug. It dated from my previous relationship, and I’d become almost oblivious to it in the last three and a half years, but one day recently I’d caught sight of it and realised: ‘I have part of a dead animal in my house. I do not want part of a dead animal in my house.’ Additionally, it still had just a trace of Ralph’s dried sick on it from 2010 that I could never quite remove.
So what did that leave? There was Shipley, but, although something of a brotherly bond still remained between the two of them, the way Ralph viewed Shipley tended to drift between irritation and indifference. Roscoe had recently got into the habit of attempting to jump on Ralph’s back from a variety of lofty surfaces, and he’d weathered this in a fairly mellow manner, but you wouldn’t exactly say she was interesting to him. Then there were the slugs, but that was a bit of a one-sided romance, too.
‘Ralph only really loves you,’ Gemma told me, perhaps accurately. I’d hurt Ralph so often in the time I’d known him. There had been the neutering, and the removal of the sheepskin, and the time in his youth I’d thrown an empty cardboard box quite near him in frustration after he’d maimed a heavily pregnant rat and left it on the staircase. To add insult to injury, there were my dietary decisions of the last few years. Now, when he ran to my cereal bowl and food plate to check for leftovers, as his brain had trained him to do, following years of excitement, he found only soya disappointment or leftover falafel woe. Yet Ralph continued to love me. Even though Gemma was around Roscoe, Shipley and The Bear for not much more than half the time that I was, it could be argued that they were as much her cats as mine. But not Ralph. His enthusiasm for being around me was such that it could virtually be considered that most unfeline of traits: obedience. I now bore the brunt of the sheepskin’s absence, many of the softer parts of my body having to withstand the pummelling that it had once endured.
It seemed a shame that Ralph’s love could not be more liberally spread around, since he had so much to give. He’d always been a mellow cat, and – if you overlooked the moments when he meowed his own name at the top of his voice – had only grown more mellow with age. Of course, he’d had his ginger-tabby race war with Pablo a while back, and knew how to put Shipley in his place with a nonchalant body slam, but the idea of him growling these days seemed as unlikely as the Dalai Lama suffering from road rage. When Ralph was in a good mood, which was most of the time, he turned the mythical grin of the Cheshire Cat into reality. There was always a sense that there was a thought bubble above his head saying ‘I know: majestic aren’t I?’ When he lay in a patch of sunlight, you got the feeling that it was a case of the sunlight finding him, not him finding the sunlight.
But, like any rock star, he had his ego problems and his secret hang-ups. He remained nervous around new people, in a way that Shipley, Roscoe and even The Bear weren’t. ‘What does this person want from me?’ he always seemed to be thinking, when a stranger or semi-stranger came to the house. ‘Are they just interested in me for my effortless shaggy good looks and giant sideburns?’
Ralph had also always experienced s
omething of a problem with summer. His relationship with the sun seemed to dance around the line separating love from hate. He loved to recline in a sunspot, but during prolonged periods of heat he could often be found yowling in heavy foliage, as if in pain, or looking dishevelled and glum. I’d come to view it as his own special form of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Since 2012 didn’t actually feature a summer, it had turned out to be a good year for him. He could often be found sleeping under the pampas grass, with one eye open, as I gardened, or taking a dust bath in one of the flower beds. One day in early September I was building a fence out of brushwood where a tree had fallen down and came back up the garden with the wheelbarrow to see him sitting happily next to a hedgehog. It was hard to tell from the expression on the hedgehog’s face, but I sense that there was nothing accidental about their coupling.
Over the next quarter of an hour, not wishing to butt in on whatever the two of them had going on, I observed them from twenty or so feet away. Whenever Ralph moved a yard or two, so, very quickly afterwards, did the hedgehog. As it did so, Ralph beamed, in his best ‘I didn’t ask to be beautiful’ way. I’m not sure if the hedgehog beamed too, or even if it’s possible for hedgehogs to beam, but it didn’t seem unhappy with the situation. I had a closer look at the hedgehog and it had a few ticks stuck to it, which I assumed might have been a bonding point, given Ralph’s history with parasites. As if to confirm this, Ralph reached up a paw and gave his neck a violent scratch, but the hedgehog didn’t flinch. It was nice to see the way the two of them seemed able to be totally themselves around one another, without any need to put on any airs or graces or pretend to be better than they were.
I went inside to fetch the hedgehog a saucer of milk, vaguely remembering the time – probably in 1986, or 1987 – when my mum and dad had fed the same thing to a hedgehog that their friend Jean had accidentally stepped on outside our back door. By the time I came back, though, the hedgehog was gone. As it transpired, this was a good job, since I soon found out that hedgehogs are dangerously lactose intolerant. It turned out that ‘it’s good to feed hedgehogs milk’ was one of those misguided bits of folk wisdom I had been told as a child in the eighties, along with ‘Cats on the continent prefer to be stroked backwards’ and ‘Girls like you more if you use hair gel’. Milk could in fact be considered one of hedgehogs’ main enemies, alongside slug pellets, badgers and cars.
As someone who lives in the British countryside, it’s easy to take hedgehogs for granted. If you’d never heard of hedgehogs and you saw one in your garden, you’d probably run up to the next human you saw, grab them furiously by the lapels and tell them that some kind of apocalypse was coming, but because we see them so often, we tend to think ‘Oh look – a creature entirely covered in needles who lives in the undergrowth: how normal’ instead. They’d always seemed like gentle souls to me, victims of the animal world – arguably more likely to strike up a friendship with a cat like The Bear than with one of life’s ostensible winners, such as Ralph – and, feeling sad that I’d scared this one off, and to learn that their numbers had fallen by twenty-five per cent in Britain in the last decade, I decided it was time I found out more about them.
One surprising detail I learned about hedgehogs is the common belief that the first thing you should do if you see one is weigh it. A hedgehog that weighs under 600 grams – which will usually be one that has been born late, in June or July – might not survive the winter, and needs to be rehabilitated by someone with proper hedgehog knowledge before being released back into the wild. Unfortunately, I’d not known this when I’d seen the hedgehog with Ralph – nor that the fact that it had been out in the open in daylight was a bad sign – and could scarcely have presumed it. Weighing just isn’t the first thing on my mind when I see a wild animal. I don’t spot, say, a skinny muntjac deer and think, ‘RIGHT! Time to get the scales out.’ What I tend to think is, ‘Maybe this one won’t be like all the others, and will come and live permanently in my garden, and let me call it Bruce, or Clive.’ But, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, there are a large number of underweight hedgehogs wandering through the undergrowth of Britain, as industrial agriculture reduces the amount of macro-invertebrate prey available to them. This reduction in prey has meant that their competition with badgers for it has got nasty. Hedgehogs don’t tend to run in packs, and would probably find it hard to take down a grown badger even if they did. So – and I realise there aren’t many opportunities to make this statement at the present time – the badgers are winning.
Here are a couple of other surprising things I found out about hedgehogs: it’s illegal to drive them through the state of Pennsylvania, and the well-known 1980s nature TV presenter David Bellamy sometimes eats them, often accompanied by herbs. I learned the latter in the section about hedgehogs as a roadkill delicacy in Hugh Warwick’s definitive hedgehog memoir-cum-bible, A Prickly Affair. Warwick also taught me that hedgehogs have been known to scale walls and turn up in people’s first-floor bedrooms. Julie, a friend of a friend in Norfolk, who could be found fostering around a dozen hedgehogs at any one time, told me that they can travel up to twelve miles in one night. Warwick puts it at more like four kilometres. Whatever the case, they move more swiftly than many of us give them credit for.
A month or so after Ralph’s dalliance with the hedgehog in the garden, I visited Shepreth Wildlife Park in Hertfordshire, which hosts one of the country’s biggest hedgehog hospitals, and met its curator, Rebecca Willers. With her hardworking team, Rebecca was researching better ways to care for and understand hedgehogs, including the possibility of fitting them with GPS tracking systems. Underweight or injured hogs – one, tragically, had been the victim of a garden strimmer – were usually brought to Shepreth by thoughtful members of the public. ‘One hedgehog arrived here alone in a taxi,’ Rebecca told me. ‘The driver said the fare was already covered. It had come forty miles, all the way from Watford.’
Rebecca and Julie both emphasised the point that people shouldn’t try to turn wild hedgehogs into pets: that their true home is in the wild. When I visited Julie and her hedgehogs at her barn conversion, ten miles or so from my house, she showed me a hedgehog whose spines were half-white, rather than the usual browny-beige. ‘It’s probably mated with one of the domesticated albino ones people have as pets,’ she explained.
Julie’s teenage daughter, Jessica – who got the idea of looking after hedgehogs after overhearing a conversation in her local pet shop involving a lady who said she had ‘a load of poorly birds and hedgehogs running around her front room’ – loves caring for the hogs but, after they’ve recovered and reached a healthy weight, they go back into the wild. The one exception was George, the hedgehog who lived in Julie and Jessica’s garden. George was perfectly at liberty to go elsewhere if he wanted to, but seemed to prefer to stick around.
‘We named George after a vet we took him to when he was poorly,’ Julie said.
‘He’s not Californian, by any chance?’
‘Who, the hedgehog?’
‘No, the vet.’
‘Yes. He is, as a matter of fact. He really loves hedgehogs, too, and knows lots about them. Do you know him?’
I thought back to George the vet’s kind, valiant efforts to cure Shipley, and recalled how Gemma and I had cooed his name experimentally at Graham a few months previously. I wondered just how many different animals my neighbourhood supervet now had named after him.
I headed out into Julie’s garden with her brother-in-law, Phil, who lived next door, to meet George (the spiny version, not the undervalued zoological genius), but at first he was nowhere to be seen. There was a creature in one of the small, doorless wooden hutches where George liked to sleep, but it plainly wasn’t him. For a start, this creature was significantly bigger than any hedgehog I’d ever set eyes on. Second, it was covered in dusty dark grey fur. Third, it was, to all intents and purposes, dead.
Phil’s reaction to seeing this creature surprised me, largely because it didn’t
involve him screaming ‘Sodding hell! What the buggery is that? I’m calling a top nature expert this instant.’ I mean, I assumed it was a rat, but I couldn’t quite be sure: it seemed much bulkier than the rats I’d seen Shipley and Ralph bring in. ‘Oh, we get ones that are loads bigger than this,’ said Phil, poking it with a stick to confirm its crusty deadness.
Thankfully, we found George in his other hutch, curled up safely for the winter. I looked at him and said, ‘Ah,’ but in the end there wasn’t a lot else to do. He was a hedgehog and, for all the quirks of his species, in this somnolent state he was a lot like other hedgehogs. With that, we headed back inside, leaving him to what appeared to be a blissful sleep, safely away from Pennsylvania, David Bellamy, badgers, main roads, and the kind of fool who might feed him milk or try to cajole him into a romance with a large, unkempt, narcissistic tabby cat.
* * *
A week after visiting Julie, I received a text message from her. I was playing the last few holes of a golf course in Bedfordshire at the time and, as my partners, Robin and Pat, lined up their putts, I snuck over to a small stand of trees to give the message proper attention. ‘There’s a hedgehog that needs picking up and taking to the vet not far from you,’ said Julie. ‘I can’t get over there just now and I was wondering if you are available. She said it’s running around her bathroom, making a mess.’
