A Brief Friendship

About nine hours ago, I was sitting with a dear friend, soaking up the late afternoon sun and sipping G&T's while watching a neighbours cat that had made a second home of her many roomed house.

We talked of plants and birds, and how everything seemed to know that spring was coming.

We watched 'Tigger'  the cat as he played hide and seek with us, disappearing through one window, then coming out of another to sit by us in the sun, and enjoy our conversation.

He's not the only cat in the village that treats people as friends, to be dropped into for a bit of company from time to time, sometimes staying for a day, other times going off to visit somebody else.

I have written before about the cat I called Mr. Pushkin who shared my life on and off for a year or so. However, the mind has a strange way of drawing together threads from times past, and weaving them into a little dreamlike tapestry that, if it is not captured, will vanish like the morning dew.

Of all the cats that have enriched my life, and those of my children and grandchild, there is one that, during the short time we were best friends, had the most profound and lasting effect on my life.

I was barely a teenager, and would often go for solitary walks, sometimes across the downs, other times by the river. It was on a walk back from the riverside, where the shortest way home lay past local council rubbish tip, that I stopped for a moment and noticed a feral cat, quite young, an adolescent like me I guess, which trotted up to me and stood at my feet for me to stroke it.

Along the lane, across the main road, and down another to where I lived, this little cat followed me. When I got home my mother asked me who the cat belonged to, and I answered honestly that I didn't know.

Waifs and strays and friends were never turned away from our house without refreshment, and this cat was no exception.

But after it had drunk a saucer of milk, it would not be shooed out. My mother pushed it out of the kitchen door, but later when I opened it, the cat was sitting on the step silently waiting to be let in.

I pleaded to be allowed to keep the cat until we could find its owner (which I was quite sure didn't exist), and reluctantly she gave in.

During the summer, when I came home from school, the cat was always there to greet me.

We played games on the living room floor with a ping-pong ball, and hide and seek in the garden, and in the evening he would curl up on my lap to sleep.

The only thing my mother wouldn't allow was for the cat to sleep in my bedroom, because she knew it would climb onto the bed, and that, she told me, was unhygienic.

I named the cat 'Tinker' because he was always getting into mischief.

Like most children, I needed something exclusively mine to love, and I knew that Tinker was devoted to me and I to him.

Then, one day, I came home from school, called his name, and there was no little tiger striped cat running to greet me.

I searched the house and the garden, calling his name. I went and checked my bedroom just in case, and it was then my mother appeared, told me to sit down and announced that she had something to say.

I remember her words to this day. She was quite calm, and had obviously rehearsed the lines many times.

"Your uncle doesn't like cats because they chase the birds, and I agree with him, so this afternoon I took the cat to the vets and had him put down".

I sat in silence, trying to work out where I stood in the family relationships, and why I had not been consulted.

She left me in my room to prepare dinner.

That was the day I grew up; and that was the day love changed to something else – something like duty