I started gardening – weeding the borders, cutting the grass. I spent hours up by the cat-house, digging between the herbaceous clumps, while Saphra watched intently from the corner of the run. He knew what I was doing, and every day, when I let them out after I'd finished working, he'd make straight for the border and dig an enormous hole himself. It was easy in the earth I'd just turned over, and Saph didn't believe in unnecessary exertion. Sometimes, when he'd finished, he wetted in the hole. Sometimes he dug it simply for the sake of doing what I did. Tani, whom I have never known to dig a hole in her life (ladies always use Litter Trays, according to her), usually walked straight down the path and into the cottage while this was going on. On one occasion, however, she went deliberately in the other direction; up the path and past him towards the garage. He stopped to watch her, forgot what he was doing, and when she'd gone past left his excavation and started after her. Recollecting himself at the edge of the lawn, he turned back, and was digging the hole deeper – he always believed in going down to his elbows – when she sauntered tantalisingly back past him again. He kept his eyes on her as he dug – and was so traumatised that he actually started moving towards her like a miniature plough, paws scooping out the earth as he went.
Sometimes I wondered whether that cat was in his right mind. He always seemed to dig his holes inordinately deep – but invariably after he'd sat on them, gaze fixed on the distance, busily thinking Higher Thoughts, they'd be filled to the brim like miniature ponds. Sitting on a hole, too – it seemed it had to fit his bottom exactly, and sometimes it didn't, and he had to move away and dig another. He could have written a book on Digging Holes for Cats. I reckon it would have rivalled The Specialist.
Cat-befuddled as usual, a week or so later I once more went up to London for a Siamese Cat Club meeting. It meant getting up early to drive to Bristol to catch the London train. Getting up even earlier to give the cats their exercise in the garden before I went, otherwise they'd have raked everything out of the bedroom cupboards while I was away. It was six-fifteen in the morning when I opened the door to take them out, and nearly leapt out of my gumboots with surprise. There, milling about in the yard like a crowd in a fairground, was a pheasant cock and ten attendant hens.
The local pheasants had been coming to me for food for years. The cats knew them, and realised they were too big for them to catch. They – Tani and Saph – would walk round the corner of the cottage and up on the path one behind the other, chittering under their breath at any odd pheasant that happened to be on the lawn, but gazing straight ahead pretending not to see it, which would presumably have undermined their superiority.
The thing was, the current dominant cock – after an absence of several weeks during which he was probably occupied in courting displays in some secluded clearing in the forest – had been coming in the past few days with two or three hens, guarding them, standing back and watching over them proprietorially while they ate with the air of having brought them to his own special restaurant, then shepherding them away again over the wall and into the woods. He came back on his own when he wanted a meal himself – presumably it was infra dig to eat with his wives. I had wondered, though, whether two or three hens was the extent of his harem. And now, at six-fifteen in the morning, here was the answer. He had ten of them!
He looked, I thought, rather embarrassed that I had discovered his secret. The hens looked hopeful for a general handout. Tani and Saph, faced with such a mêlée and unable to do their no-seeing act past that lot, dived into them without delay. Hen pheasants went up in all directions, lumbering into the air like jumbo jets, their wide-spread wings frustrating any attempt by the cats to stop them, while the cock stood his ground, flapping his own wings defiantly, his neck stretched tall, bawling raucous defence calls. I waved my arms shouting 'Stop it!' till the yard was cleared, and the cats continued sedately on their way up the path, smug expressions on their faces, Saph stopping to spray the wall at the top of the steps to remind the pheasants Who was Who round here...
Small wonder that I had little time to get myself ready. That in due course I shot off in the car to drive to the station with hastily snatched-up earrings stuffed in my handbag. Small wonder either, when I got to the hotel where the meeting was being held and attempted to make myself presentable, that I discovered I'd brought one gold stud earring and one of those brass-topped, double-pronged paper fasteners; the sort used for putting through holes in piles of papers. I didn't use it as an earring, but I might as well have done. Nobody in that Siamese-benighted audience would have noticed it.
Back to the valley, and within days there was another crisis. It was breeding time for the foxes and a vixen, hunting for food for her cubs, had on two consecutive days taken one of the Reasons' ducks. They disappeared in the late afternoon, a cloud of white feathers on the Reasons' lawn showing what had happened, and until Janet could get someone to put the survivors in early on a regular basis I offered to do it for her. All I had to do was call them if they weren't in sight, she said, rattle the feeding bowl which she'd leave ready filled with corn, and they'd come straight from wherever they were and make for their house.
Maybe that was what they did when she called them – I'd heard the cacophony of goose and duck voices that greeted her when her car went down the lane in the early evening – but when I went out and banged the bowl at three in the afternoon there was dead silence. I banged again. I shouted. 'Coo-coo' was the only thing I could think of, not having had the sense to ask Janet what she called them, but still there was no reply. 'Coo-coo-coo' I bellowed again, which made a change from being heard bawling 'Tanny-wanny-wanny' or 'Saffy-waffy', but I doubt whether it persuaded anybody within hearing distance that I was less than three-quarters round the bend. And then Gerald and his wives came marching in single file down the hill, round the corner and into the pond, making a terrific show of drinking, washing and flapping their wings, and followed seconds later by the three surviving ducks. Which raised a problem, because Janet had said I need only put the ducks in; the geese could take care of themselves till she got home. But the geese were between the ducks and their house, and since Gerald chose that moment to start mating with them all I could do was stand and wait for him to finish.
Most embarrassing it was, a goose underneath, Gerald on top, Gerald falling off, the pair of them rolling about in Rabelaisian abandon in the pond, then Gerald determinedly climbing back on top again. I explained why I was there to a girl going by on her horse, not wanting her to think I was a voyeur. I doubt whether she believed me. I explained again to a woman I'd never seen before who came drifting along picking up sticks and informed me, apropos of nothing, that she was a countrywoman.