They were a lot safer playing with it than Charles was, I assured her. And if the wee black one let out just one more peep because the others wouldn't let him be Hiawatha and carry the arrow all by himself he was going to get his bottom smacked so hard he wouldn't sit down for days.
If it was any comfort, Charles wouldn't have had much time for archery anyway. He had all he could do that summer trying to keep the garden straight. Now we had not one cat digging holes all over it but five, and as it only needed one to give a speculative scratch for all the others enthusiastically to follow suit, most of the time the garden looked like a map of the moon.
Somewhere or other the kittens, unlike their mother, had discovered that holes could be put to a more practical use than mere play. Visitors going round the garden were continually coming across the embarrassing spectacle of four small kittens squatting solemnly among the roses with four scrappy tails raised like matchsticks and four pairs of round blue eyes fixed on the heavens, earnestly thinking Higher Thoughts.
The trouble was, Solomon could never think Higher Thoughts for long enough. He would start off like the others – tail raised, staring with an air of determined concentration at the sky. Then his gaze would wander and he would spot one of the blue boys similarly engaged a few feet away and, completely forgetting why he was there, start stalking him round a peony. Or he would decide the hole wasn't big enough, start to dig it bigger, and then get sidetracked by a beetle. Beetles always turned up in Solomon's holes and nobody else's. So often, in fact, that we came to the conclusion it must be the same beetle trying to be funny. By the time he had trailed it across the garden – more often than not getting sidetracked again on the way by a bee which Sat on a Flower and Insulted Him or a bird which Flew Over His Head and Said Something Rude – he would completely forget where the first hole was and have to start all over again.
Long after the others had finished Solomon would still be hard at work alternately digging holes and chasing beetles. More times than we could count, the moment we brought the kittens in from the garden he would start raking at the door shouting that he hadn't finished yet and he'd got to go out. And without fail, each time we took pity on him and let him out, no sooner would he have dug another hole and seated himself tearfully on it than that blasted beetle would appear again and we'd be back where we started.
We hadn't done with earth-boxes by any means. Solomon usually finished up on one in the end, having been dragged screeching from the garden half an hour after everybody else. Sugieh always used one. It wasn't ladylike to use the garden, she said, and where the kittens had picked up such a dreadful habit she didn't know. Everybody used it before going to bed. Everybody that is, except Solomon, who could usually be heard trying to dig through the bottom of his box at two o'clock in the morning.
This consituted another problem in the complicated business of cat-keeping. Getting the earth for the earth-boxes. Perhaps hazard is a better word than problem. The problem was, after all, solved simply enough by me, twice a week, after a heated argument with Charles as to why he couldn't go, trundling off to the woods with wheelbarrow and spade and getting a load of leaf-mould. The hazard was that all the cats insisted on coming too.
Try as I might I could never get away unnoticed. Sometimes I left the wheelbarrow outside in the lane waiting for an opportune moment to sneak out and run for it. It was no use. Always somebody was watching. Hidden in the lilac that drooped so conveniently over a corner of the coalhouse roof; lurking ostentatiously round the corner of the woodshed; or, if it was Solomon, simply sitting in the wheelbarrow waiting to go.
It was bad enough on the outward journey. Kittens in the wheelbarrow; kittens tumbling out of the wheelbarrow; Sugieh marching alongside shouting to everybody she passed to Look At Us Going for the Leaf-Mould; and after the first few minutes somebody, usually Solomon, wailing frantically far in the rear to Wait For Him, He'd Got Left Behind!
On the outward journey, however, they did at least know they were going somewhere, and in case it should be somewhere interesting – none of that lot were going to miss anything if they could help it – we usually got there more or less as a unit. The real trouble started on the way back, when they realised with dismay that they were only going home.
Then they started shinning up every tree they came to, saying they were going to stay there and be little birds – all except Solomon, who sat at the bottom and said he was going to be a mushroom. They hid in the long grass and then, while I called them frantically in one part of the meadow, suddenly came leaping over the moon-daisies like a troop of kangaroos, from a different direction altogether. They prepared endless traps for one another. What with the stealthy stalking of the ambusher and the even stealthier approach of the victim that game could be guaranteed to take ages, particularly if the victim was the she-kitten who didn't like being jumped on and immediately started going back the other way. Even when we got back to civilisation they wouldn't behave. Then they dawdled at everybody's front gate, either bawling for me to go back for them, Sugieh included, because they were Afraid to Go Past – or, if there was something interesting inside, like a baby in a pram or an open front door, marching in in a body and having a look.
Often when I got back from one of those trips I was so exhausted I had to go and lie down to reassemble my shattered nerves. Not that I got much rest. If I left the cats in the garden I lay there wondering what they were up to. Once, indeed, I came down to investigate an unnatural silence just in time to spot them marching away into the distance, off to do the leaf-mould walk all over again. If I took them upstairs with me they either played tag all over the bed or sat heavily on me in a body and said they were going to sleep as well. If I left them downstairs, that was usually the signal for Sugieh to show them how to knock down Shorty.
I always got up and reeled wearily down the stairs when I heard the crash, just in case – and it was fortunate that I did. One day I went down to find that the armchair was not in its usual position and Shorty, tail-less as usual and completely grounded, was running madly round on the floor trying to face up to a circle of all four kittens at once while Sugieh, seated maternally on the chair-arm, encouraged them with soft cries to play with the pretty birdie, he couldn't run away.
I remember that so well because it was the last adventure they had as a family. The next day one of the blue boys, after a final game that brought a stupid lump to my throat as I saw his small paw poking excitedly at his brothers and sister through the air-holes of his basket, went to his new home. And the day after that Sugieh – suddenly, tragically, unbelievably – was dead.
TEN
The Giant-Killer
Sugieh died after an operation for spaying. We had decided not to breed any more kittens. It wasn't that we had grown tired of them. Even though they had wrecked the house and shattered our nerves, there was nothing we would have liked more than to go on raising noisy, despotic, fascinating Siamese for ever.