It is a sad time in our family at the moment. Henry, the tabby member of our household, is quietly, and with a touching display of aloof dignity, coming to the end of his ninth life.
He has shared our life in a village and in a Thames-side town. He has crossed the Atlantic, under somewhat bleary sedation and has claimed our shaggy Canadian all-over carpeting as his own.
For nearly 14 years he has enriched our lives greatly. For Daniel, aged 11, there never has been a time when home hasn’t meant a cat curled up in the best armchair, on the cosiest bedspread or in the warmest shaft of sunlight.
In younger, friskier times these comfortable snoozes have quite often taken place in my knitting basket, on many a flattened flower bed, or on David’s chest while he’s trying to watch telly. At one stage the favourite spot was a circular seedpan full of rare cactus seeds. I shall not easily forget that moment of acute horror when I popped my head round the door and there was this enormous, hairy mound growing, apparently, from the teeny seeds I’d carefully pressed into the soil the night before.
‘Fancy bringing a cat all the way to Canada!’ said some folk when we arrived here. ‘Well I think you should have him put down right away,’ said others, when the vet told us the diagnosis (poor Henry has leukaemia). ‘He’s not in pain – in fact he has remarkable stamina for an old cat – but I’m afraid he’s probably only got a couple of months left.’
But we do not regret our decision. He is one of our family. And so with medication, little pieces of raw liver and kidney and tempting bowls of cream, we do our best to make his last days comfortable, as slowly he tucks his forepaws under his chest, sinks down on a spot close to his water bowl and dreams his own quiet dreams.
Does he, we wonder, remember that distant happy day in Anna’s young life when the grocer’s wife leant across the counter and said: ‘I suppose you wouldn’t be able to give a home to this little kitten, would you? He was left, with his brother, on our doorstep. Lots of people were keen to take the ginger one but no one wants this little tabby chap and I can’t keep him, because of my dogs.’
‘Oh Mummy, could we?’ breathed Anna, her soul in her eyes.
‘Well I don’t know – I’ll have to see – we’ll ask Dad – I only came in for a pound of cheese,’ I mumbled.
‘… Oh please Daddy, couldn’t we? He’s sweet!’
‘Oh Lor, I don’t know. Ask your mother.’
And so, on a sunny summer morning, we came back from the shops carrying a basketful of tabby fur with white bib, paws and whiskers and smokey grey, soon-to-be-green eyes. A game little bundle which straight away jumped in his saucer of milk, ran up the curtains and disappeared out of the window.
‘We’ll call him Henry,’ we said. ‘It’s a nice, sensible, sedate sort of name and perhaps he’ll grow into it as he gets older.’
‘Henry,’ we called, ‘Hen, Hen, He-en …’
… With a mighty Evel Kneivel leap, our sensible, sedate Hen came crashing down out of the Blenheim apple tree, right into the big old rain butt by the back door. By sheer good fortune we’d been having a lengthy dry spell because there he sat, looking as detached as it’s possible to look in several inches of muddy sediment. I’m quite sure he’d have tried a nonchalant whistle too if he could have pulled it off.
‘And is this your cat?’ said a kindly lady visitor, sitting down and sipping tea in our living room. ‘I love cats,’ she beamed, patting her lap invitingly. Whereupon Henry, eager to please, sprang into the air, zoomed across her knees, shot out a paw to save himself and ended up hanging, by one claw, from her nylon tights. The Fred Astaire phase was slightly easier to live with but not much. I didn’t mind the Busby Berkeley routine in the day-time.
‘I got rhythm – crash – crash,’ he would go, twirling his way along assorted shelves of glass ornaments.
It was the ‘Wee small hours of the morning’ bit I could have done without, as he did his nightly tap dance in the bath.
But there were occasions when we overslept and were glad of his anxious tappings to get the day under way.
And other happy family moments to remember: those lawnmower purrings on lie-abed weekend mornings when he genuinely knew he didn’t have to sound the time-for-work alarm. ‘Hey, hey, the gang’s all here’, he would chortle, rolling among the bed-clothes in great arcs of ecstasy.
One day, not long ago, I found some notes I’d started to make on a typical day in his life. ‘Conned three breakfasts off assorted members of the family,’ I’d written, ‘closely followed by four mid-morning snacks. Curled up in the middle of the jigsaw we were doing and refused to budge. Ate rest of potted palm and suddenly seized doormat in mouth and ran upstairs. After two lunches, took a quick stroll out to the tulip tubs and squatted inscrutably over the right-hand one.’ At this point I must have flung my pencil down in disgust – not to say rage. (We had no tulips at all that year.)
But then I remember the day we accidentally left him locked in the house with nowhere to make his – er – ablutions, and how, with marvellous feline finesse, he chose a spot as close as he could to the bath plug hole.
I remember the always welcoming gleam of his immaculate white shirt front, running towards us as we turned our car into the drive at night.
Even now he wears his best bib and tucker at all times and a tickle behind the ears still produces the rusty echoes of a lawnmower purr. But we know that the moment is close when he will have to make his last journey. Until that time he doubtless has his memories. He will certainly leave us ours of many a smile, a purr and the occasional exasperated sigh. He will also leave a sad place in our hearts.