The old woman in the big house hadn’t been dangerous at all, though. Yes, she’d been human, but she’d given us food and been kind to us; those were two of my earliest memories. Milk on a patterned saucer. Little morsels of meat. She’d also been the last human to stroke me. To bend right down to stroke me and say, ‘Look at you, with those little white socks on your feet! Now, don’t you be going getting them dirty!’
I threaded my way along the quay in the hope that, in this at least, my mother was wrong. And as I walked, I wondered how life might have been if the old lady hadn’t vanished from our lives the way she had. If the man with the dog – our most mortal enemy – hadn’t moved in there instead. If we’d not had to run away from him quite so fast.
‘Well now, you’re back again, are you?’ The voice was loud and close and clear. But not such a fright now, because today I had expected it.
The quayside was once again bustling and noisy, gangplanks slung down from ships like so many giant tree creepers, disgorging sailors and fishermen, deck hands and mess boys; and stern men in hats, who dodged different men in different hats, cursing and chattering, weaved their heavily laden wooden carts in and around and between.
From my vantage point, hidden in the gap between two oil drums, I had curled up and watched him for a bit. He’d come, I realised, from one of the tallest ships currently docked there, and was today, like the rest of the men that teemed around it, dressed differently from previously, in polished shoes and crisp navy kit. Their white hulk of a ship, which had been tied up for some days now, had a tall mast, and two pairs of guns that pointed forward, which I knew were used for something called war.
The man stood in the ship’s shadow and considered me. He then looked around, and strode off, his shoes clicking rhythmically, and, before I had even stretched my paws out and yawned, had returned, holding something in his hand.
He squatted down on his haunches again and held it out to me. ‘Sardine,’ he said. ‘Well, a piece of one, anyway. Freshly caught this morning.’
I drank in the aroma that began to engulf me. I could almost taste it. ‘Go on, little feller,’ he urged again. ‘Help yourself.’
I wanted to. Badly. The smell was almost hypnotic. But I hadn’t been so frightened since the last time I’d been chased – by the dog at the big house, who’d nearly caught me. And curiosity was one thing from a safe spot between two sturdy oil drums, quite another when you were standing out in the open, close to a human, and your heart was pounding almost out of your chest.
I lifted a paw. Took a step. Cautiously sniffed at what he was holding out to me. But my instincts were too powerful. His movement towards me was only very slight, but still enough to have me skittering anxiously away.
‘Here, then,’ he said, laying the piece of fish on the ground in front of me. ‘Only grab it quick or the gulls will have it before you can say knife.’
So I grabbed it between my teeth and bit down on it ravenously, all the while backing away towards the space between the oil drums. It would be terrible if a gull did steal it, because I’d never tasted anything quite so delicious in all my life – or so gloriously without fur or feet or whiskers! I was so engrossed then (almost in heaven; so much fish at one sitting!) that when he reached out to stroke me this time, I didn’t flinch.
Though he did. ‘Gawd, kitty, there really is nothing of you,’ he said. ‘Is there? Poor little mite. Where’s your mum, eh? You a stray? All on your lonesome? You poor little blighter. Look at you shaking! Shhh, now. Don’t be scared. I won’t hurt you, I promise. You know what? I’ve got one just like you back in Blighty. Well, like you, but there’s a good deal more of ’im than you, for certain.’
‘Hickinbottom!’ Another voice rang out, and this one did scare me – not least because, at the sound of it, the man whipped his hand away, snapped back to his feet and spun around.
‘Aye aye, sir!’ he called back, stiffening. ‘Over here, sir! Just coming!’
‘Good. Because there’s two dozen potato sacks here that won’t shift themselves, Hickinbottom!’
‘I’d better go,’ he whispered. ‘You enjoy your breakfast, little Blackie.’
And with that he was hurrying back across towards his ship.
Chapter 3
‘So there’s dry stores, and wet stores – and those big sacks over there, Blackie? They’re all the veg that’ll be going in the vegetable bins down below. Then there’s the tins. Loads of them to load. Corned beef and kippers. Chopped ham. Potted chicken. Feed the brute! That’s what they say. You enjoying that?’
It was the following morning, early, and it had dawned dry and warm. And I’d greeted the sun with a full belly. I had caught a mouse in the small hours, and my joy knew no bounds. Neither did the gratitude I now felt towards my new friend, the sailor who’d given me the fish that had given me the energy – not to mention the confidence – to make my first kill in days.
And now another sardine. This time a whole one, which he’d already told me he’d ‘half-inched’, whatever that meant, from the stack of crates near a fishing junk further down the quay.
‘Polish it off quick,’ he’d said, and I was obliging him by doing precisely that while he puffed on a cigarette and lifted his face to the sun, apparently as pleased to see it smiling down on us as I was.
I should have known that there was going to be something different about today. I was a kitten, after all, so I was supposed to be good at sensing things. But I didn’t. Perhaps because of the fish, which took up all my attention, or perhaps just because I was so happy about my earlier catch. Either way, I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
I was cleaning my whiskers, looking around for a puddle of water I could perhaps lap from when the cigarette end was flicked away and the sailor’s hand reached down to stroke me. Or so I thought. Instead, his hand wrapped right around me and the next thing I knew was that I was being borne aloft – up, up, up, up! – and was held there, high in the air above his head.
Terrified, I pinged my claws out. Then I mewled at him and furiously scrabbled my back legs against the inside of his wrist. He just laughed, pushed his cap back, and lowered me down a little, now holding me, legs dangling, closer to his grinning face.
‘Steady on, Blackie,’ he said. ‘You already know I’m not going to hurt you.’ Then he brought up his other hand and cupped it around my head, flattening my ears. ‘Shhh,’ he soothed, ‘shhh,’ even though I wasn’t making any noise now. Not so much as a hiss. I didn’t dare to. ‘No need to panic, is there?’ he reassured me. ‘No need at all. Look, you even like it,’ he said, rubbing the fur under my chin.
‘Look, you’re purring. See? I’m not so bad, am I?’
I didn’t know about that. How on earth could I? This was a human who was holding me, and that should never, ever happen. Not even the lady in the big house had picked me up, ever. She wouldn’t have dared to. My mother would have gone for her. But he had just picked me up and held me like I wouldn’t mind at all.
And that was the funniest thing. Despite my mother’s lessons clanging loudly in my ears – Never trust. Never touch. Never let a human lure or grab you – I found I actually didn’t mind him holding me. Which was no sort of thing for a kitten to be thinking. Not a kitten who valued all nine of his lives. It was at exactly that point, just as I was enjoying being cuddled, that I realised I might have made a terrible mistake.