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Victoria writes: "A dear friend of mine who knew that, as a cat lover I would enjoy it, picked up “The Cats of Moon Cottage” at a car boot sale. I was enchanted by that book and in particular, Otto reminded me so much of a beautiful Persian cross kitten that we had way back in the mid-eighties called Chloe. This is a story I sent to Marilyn Edwards shortly after reading the book."
The story takes place in the days when kittens and puppies could readily be discovered in pet shops and that was how Chloe came to be ours. She was a delightful, affectionate and pretty cat with a white face and bib, tabby markings and long hair. She must have been about six months old and hadn’t been going out and about for long when she followed my husband, Nick and our two small children who were going off to get the bus into town. Nick ‘shooed’ her back towards home and thought she had gone but it later transpired that, sadly, she had not.
Poor Chloe was lost and missing for a number of days and we had frantically been doing all the things that owners of lost cats and dogs do, such as searching on foot, calling, placing notices on lamp posts and in the newsagents and popping notes through doors.
Then we received a phone call from our veterinary surgery to inform us that Chloe had died after being hit by a vehicle on the Romsey Road, which is one of the main arterial roads into Winchester, where we live and about a quarter of a mile from our home, as the crow flies. A lady had found her by the side of the road, near to HMP Winchester where my husband works as a Prison Officer and had taken her into the surgery but Chloe was fatally injured and there was nothing they could do to save her. We were heartbroken and Nick blamed himself for not taking her home and shutting her in our house on the day she followed him and the children.
I could so relate to the dreadful phone call that Marilyn had received from the woman outside her door when Otto was hit by a car and killed. I cried a lot reading that chapter which touched me enormously.
A few months later I heard from a friend and fellow playgroup mum, Jeanette that she had a cat that had recently produced a litter of six kittens and she was looking for homes for most of them. Myself and our children, Alexandra (Alex) aged four years and Gavin three years old, visited Jeanette’s home to see the kittens. Immediately as we entered, a bold black and white, female kitty came straight up to us, which caused the children to exclaim, “Mummy, it’s Postman Pat’s cat, Jess”! Well, needless to say ‘that was that’ and Jess became our cat.
I’m sure that Jess regarded the children as fellow kittens and very much treated them as siblings as they all grew up together. I was her ‘mummy’ of course! She was quite an aloof cat and would come and go through the kitchen window at the front of the house.
Devastatingly and tragically, Alex died on the 1 July 1997 aged sixteen years. She had fallen from the Romsey Road Bridge onto the railway line below and had been instantly killed. The same Romsey Road that had taken Chloe, back in 1985. As this website is for stories about cats please visit www.relativesremembered.com to read about Alex’s untimely and rather strange death.
Poor Jess missed Alex and would wander around the house, in and out of Alex’s bedroom and would sleep on her bed. She would also seek out Gavin as if to just make sure that he was still around.
During the autumn of 2001 Jess, who was now over fifteen years old, became very ‘clingy’ towards me and extremely restless, wanting in and out of the house constantly. She was still eating alright and so I wasn’t unduly worried but after a couple of weeks I decided I had better get her checked out. The vet diagnosed advanced cancer of the bladder and told Nick and me there was nothing that could be done and the kindest thing would be to put her to sleep.
We stared at each other in disbelief but knew that he was right. I can remember clearly Jess’s big, frightened eyes staring at me as I dissolved into tears when the fatal needle was inserted into her front leg. It was a very wet day at the end of November, we took her home and Nick cried while digging her grave in the garden. Of course, Jess was also another link we were losing with our daughter and so it was especially difficult for us. We later placed a large, stone cat on the spot where Jess was buried.
I had been ill since losing Alex, with depression, and previously we had always had lovely family Christmases with the children growing up but now it was always a time of sadness, regret and Alex was always conspicuous by her absence. That Christmas, just after my father had returned to his home, my son Gavin, now a tall, strapping 19 year old asked whether we were going to get another cat? This was completely ‘out of the blue’ and at first I said, “No” mainly because it had been so upsetting when Jess had died.
However, the seed had been sewn and I realised just how much I missed having a cat around so the following day I spoke to Nick about it. We decided to ring our veterinary surgery to see if they knew of any kittens that needed a home. The veterinary nurse told me that a lady called Mrs Dreyer had found an abandoned kitten in early November and gave me her telephone number. I rang Mrs Dreyer and she confirmed that she still had the kitten and did need to find a home for it. “What is it”? I asked and held my breath. “A tiny, black and white, female”, she replied. My heart leapt at the thought of another black and white female kitty like Jess.
From the moment Nick, Gavin and I saw this little, longhaired, black and white kitten come trotting into Sheila Dreyer’s lounge, we were totally smitten. She was beautifully marked and had a very bushy, greyish tail almost like a fox’s brush, held very high up in the air.
She was rather delicate and had suffered various upper respiratory problems requiring veterinary treatment. Sheila told us that the little one had almost been dead when she found her on 2 November (incredibly, this was Nick’s birthday) inside a large, empty flowerpot by her back door, at just a few days old. The kitten had been very cold and barely breathing and she had struggled to revive her. Sheila said she knew the feline parents, both feral and that she would regularly put food out for them. She told us that when she had realised the queen was pregnant she had even provided a safe, covered place on a pallet, off the ground in her garden for the kittens’ arrival, including little ‘Snuffles’ as she called our little one.
On arriving home with ‘Snuffles’ she immediately ran behind the tumble drier and no amount of coaxing with food would get her out so we eventually had to move the drier. She tore away like a bullet and after a frantic run around, ended up behind the armchair where I normally sit – there she remained all evening and that night. We decided to call her ‘Kylie’ because she was so tiny and very pretty just like ‘The Kylie’. However, we were soon to learn that despite her fragility and small frame, she was to prove herself a little bombshell!
Kylie had and has a strange miaow, which I could liken to Marilyn’s description of Septi’s in the book as an “oddly strangulated voice” and an especially loud purr, again like his.
Needless to say, when my father returned on New Year’s Eve it was kitten-chaos! I recall vividly him sitting watching TV with a pint, when suddenly and in what seemed like slow motion, the Christmas tree crashed to the floor and a very scared Kylie shot out from underneath it covered in bits of smashed bauble. My dad’s face was a picture but I was more concerned that Kylie was OK, which I am happy to say she was. How on earth she had managed to tip over a large, decorated tree when she was so tiny was a mystery.
We did have some worrying times with her because she was very prone to upper respiratory infections and had two courses of antibiotics in her first few months with us. Kylie worried us because as she grew she had a tendency to be a little reckless and daring, almost to the point of being downright stupid. We came to the conclusion that she may have suffered some lack of oxygen to her brain at the time Sheila found her and may be a little ‘simple’ but that didn’t detract from her loveliness. We were ultra-careful with her, especially remembering what had happened to Chloe. Therefore, we decided to get her used to being outside by using a little dog harness (the smallest we could find) and a lead. Nick would look so funny out in the front garden; this big man with a little cat on a lead.
I firmly believe that Kylie helped in my recovery and in my grieving process for Alex. She was a breath of fresh air, needed me and gave me something wonderful to come home to. I’d like to think that maybe Alex had something to do with her coming to us at that particular time.
In September 2002 we received a phone call from Sheila asking if we wanted another kitten. She said the mother cat was Kylie’s mum and she had witnessed her trying to carry this rather large, black, squirming kitten but would keep dropping him and thought that she had just become fed-up and had abandoned him too (not much of a mum, this one!) Sheila said the mother cat was with the same tom a lot of the time and believed it was likely that Kylie and this kitten shared the same father also.
Kylie, now ten months old, had been spending longer periods out and about and we think she had been seeking other feline company because Sheila had three other cats of her own and so as a young kitten, Kylie had been used to other cats being around. We therefore decided to take on this new kitten, in the hope that it would provide companionship for Kylie. However, of course we knew that it could be risky bringing a new kitten into a home where there is an established cat.
He was the most gorgeous, totally black little-boy cat, shorthaired and with perfect, shiny, new black paw-pads like plump, juicy blackberries. His nose, whiskers, in fact everything was very black and he was around 9 weeks old. We called him Dennis after my dad.
Kylie seemed to be quite amazed by this newcomer and after just a short, cautious period of observation began to ‘mother’ him. They became firm companions and indeed, still are.
For mother’s day in 1997, the year Alex died, Gavin and Alex had bought a very attractive, young, white and grey, lacewing budgie for me. I called him Wing Commander Barrington-Smythe, DFC, bar – ‘Barry’ for short. Jess had always been somewhat indifferent to him but whenever she wandered into the kitchen, where he lived in his cage, he would give out a loud, distinctive chirpy greeting – or maybe it was a warning! With Kylie’s arrival he would make the same sort of chirping but would seem to be scrutinising this rather smaller, fluffier model rather closely. I think he just thought that Jess had shrunk and grown longer hair.
During the evenings we would bring Barry into the living room and Dennis and Kylie would sit on top of the cage and watch him, with Dennis sometimes just falling asleep. Far from being alarmed by this, Barry would chirp away happily at them, blissfully unaware of the danger. They were, understandably, fascinated by him but never showed any aggression or really threatening behaviour towards him. They seemed to understand that he was somehow different to the outside birds. He was, “Mummy’s bird”, as I would tell them. This continued until April 2006 when, sadly, Barry ‘hung up his wings’ and died.
Kylie and Dennis bring joy into my life every day and it’s funny but Alex was born in 1981 and Gavin in 1982. Kylie was born in 2001 and Dennis in 2002, which is exactly 20 years since my own children were babies. There is no doubt they are my substitute babies to me. Another strange little thing is that when the children were small and we had Chloe and then Jess, I owned a shopping bag that had a lovely picture of a black cat and a black and white cat peering out from bushes. I’ve still got the bag but can’t use it because the handle is very weak but it is strange that we should end up with those two particular coloured cats.
Maybe someone was trying to tell me something, way back when.
© Victoria Pemberton 2007
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