‘If we manage to get him there,’ Lieutenant Hett pointed out.
‘Shall I have Dusty see if he can rustle up a crate for us?’ asked Lieutenant Berger. ‘We can’t risk carrying him down there, can we?’
The captain shook his head. ‘No, we can’t. Good idea. Or a strong cardboard box. See what he can come up with. Anyway, how about that, Simon? The hero of the hour!’ he looked more than pleased. He looked delighted.
‘Or a trunk,’ Lieutenant Hett was saying. A trunk? I was alarmed now. ‘We could always pop him in a trunk. And if we put a lead on him, just in case…’
A lead? I was not liking this one little bit.
‘And you can be sure there’ll be a hullaballoo once this hits the press,’ the captain added. ‘They’re sending a collar for him as well, by all accounts. That’s for you to wear in lieu of the medal, Simon,’ he explained to me. ‘Then, when we return to England you’ll be presented with the medal itself – in London. Bit of pomp and circumstance for you to enjoy!’
He still looked delighted. He couldn’t have looked more delighted. But all this talk of collars and hullaballoos was beginning to make me anxious. Not to mention trunks and leads and strong cardboard boxes. And presentations at fleet clubs, whatever they were. It all sounded very, very worrying to me.
I decided that a course of evasive action would be necessary. They would have to have their presentation without me. I made myself scarce. For two days.
We were just over a month in Hong Kong. The Amethyst was restocked with supplies and refuelled, and such repairs that were immediately necessary were completed, and such hullaballoos as were deemed necessary were also completed, all of which I tried to give an equally wide berth.
Not so my shipmates, who seemed to revel in their new status as heroes, and deservedly so. It was only now, with them safe and rested, that I think I truly realised how much of a toll the whole experience had taken.
Everyone had been given leave, and they were making the most of it, allowing me to see them in a very different and welcome light. Now our ordeal was over, they seemed energised; bright-eyed and smiling. To an extent it was as if they’d been reborn – as if they too had nine lives and, having just lost one, were determined to plunge enthusiastically into the next.
So, while I kept to my routines (the Amethyst might be berthed, but there were still rats that needed hunting) my friends came and went, often seeming almost as over-excited as Peggy. I was reminded of the tottering revellers I used to observe at night back when I was still a kitten, sitting on an oil drum or pile of pallets in the moonlight, more often than not mystified by all the strange activities.
Now I studied my friends’ antics from up on the bridge, where I still stood watch for at least some portion of the night, my view of them so different now, and in such an unexpected way.
What a long way we’d all come together.
Though I’d had no particular desire to leave the ship during our time in Hong Kong, on our last day in dock I had a sudden change of heart. It suddenly struck me we’d be sailing for England in a matter of hours.
I knew everything and nothing about this fabled place called England. I knew it was home for most of my friends, that it was always spoken of with love and reverence, and that the men seemed to almost ache for it, so keen were they to see it again. But I also knew it was far away – far further than I’d ever been – and in the north, where it was apparently often cold; a kind of cold I’d been told I would’ve ‘never known the likes of’ and which, in the oppressive heat of a Yangtse night, my friends would yearn for.
I had no such yearning. I didn’t see why anyone would like the cold. As with being ‘wet through’, which had turned out to be decidedly unpleasant, I suspected I wouldn’t like ‘cold’ one little bit. But as all I wanted was to stay on the Amethyst, I was happy enough. I would go where she went; where my friends went.
It did occur to me that with England being so far away, it might be a very long time before I saw Hong Kong again. Who knew? I might never come back here. In thinking that, I felt a sudden powerful urge to say goodbye to it. To sit, for a while, on the end of the jetty. To be close, for just a short time, to my mother. So while everyone was busy with the last of the preparations I slipped away down the gangway onto the dock I hadn’t set my paws on for well over a year.
It was the strangest thing. I remembered the way. All that time away at sea – all those adventures, all those trials, all those lives I’d been living – and yet it wasn’t even as if I had to consciously remember. It was the opposite. It was as if I’d never been away.
I padded away from the quay, feeling unexpected waves of nostalgia and sadness come over me. Having been away so long, I soon realised just how much I’d forgotten, from the sight of my beloved banyans and the caws of the cockatoos, to the green softness of the hills that rose up beyond the city, as if hugging it in their protective embrace. Particularly intense was the feel of sand and earth beneath my paws, both so unexpectedly soft and warm and fragrant after the cold unyielding corticene I’d grown so used to. But I also understood why my senses had forgotten them. Because that was what being a cat was all about. We thrived because we knew how to live where we were, rather than – as humans often seemed to, I’d discovered – where our hearts wished to be.
Not that I wished to be anywhere but the Amethyst now, living with the friends who had become so precious to me. As I left the bustle of the harbour, the feeling only intensified, as every new vista pulled me back to some wisp of painful memory that reminded me how lucky I’d been. Not in losing my mother, whose presence I still felt constantly, but to have escaped from the miseries of those last months as a stray, when I’d hunt till my pads were raw, getting drenched and despondent, and sit at the end of the jetty and wonder what kind of better life there might be beyond the bay.
I felt proud that I’d found the courage to go in search of it – well, once the terror had abated, anyway. That I’d allowed myself to be scooped up by dear sweet Ordinary Seaman George Hickinbottom – where was he now, I wondered? – who I missed still. He would never know how grateful I was that he’d given me the opportunity to live a life I could never have imagined. To become the cat I could never have imagined either.
It was a warm morning, the rain that had greeted our arrival having cleared, and as I padded along the familiar tracks and pathways, alternately bright and shady under the tamarinds and banyans, I let the happier memories of that earlier time wash over me.
Memories of the kind old lady who used to live in the big house – which I now hurried past automatically, slightly braced, automatically fearful – the hunting forays (how proud I hoped Mum would now be of me!), the anxious crossings of the murderous road that spilt the island into two, and our little jetty on the far shore. This stood exactly as I’d left it – reaching out from the sand, gnarly plank by gnarly plank, on past the shingle, to hover above the water as if a path to something wonderful, where we’d sit and gaze up at the moon.