In the event, however, it seemed it was Sheba who was going to leave us and if Solomon was my Number One cat, Sheba, as I’d so often assured her, was my Point Nine Nine Nine Nine. It was heart-rending, watching her sitting about so wanly while Solomon, doing his level best to get her going again, tore round the place like a spider-legged puppy. He shouted, he poked her with his paw, he invited her to chase him. She was Ill, she informed him mournfully.
Couldn’t he stop making such a racket?
She grew terribly thin and refused to eat. The Vet gave her treatment and said we shouldn’t feed her proteins.
They were a cat’s natural diet, he said, but hard on the kidneys. When young, a cat thrived on meat and fish.
When old, it did better on the cheaper tinned cat foods
– and the more cereals they contained, in her condition, the better.
We tried six kinds of cat food but Sheba wouldn’t look at them. So, despairingly – deciding that the most important thing at the moment was to get her to eat something, we’d worry about the cereal business later – we returned to the foods she normally liked. Dropped (knowing their habits of old when conva lescent) in odd, seemingly accidental fragments in front of her, in any place where she happened to be sitting.
It was a long time before it worked. It was Solomon at first who ate the bits, nose to the trail like a walrus-whiskered bloodhound. Jolly good game this, he informed us enthusiastically. Got any more chicken scraps we wanted 11
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tracked down? But we got her eating in the end, on rabbit jelly. Dropped, I regret to say, on the seat of a chair.
Cats have these fads about feeding when they’re convalescent. Solomon once, after a serious illness, consented to take nourishment only in the conservatory, from the toe of Charles’s shoe. Crab paste it was, I remember, and Charles swore that his shoes reeked for weeks. Another cat I knew fancied shrimps in the bath as a pick-me-up. An empty bath, of course; he wasn’t that psychiatric. But nobody was allowed to watch him while he ate; the shrimps had to appear before him one by one or the sight of them put him off; and his owners – I saw them myself – spent hours crouched low beneath the bath-rim, tossing shrimps to him over the top.
If anyone says how typically English that is and it just shows what fools we are about animals, may I also quote an American friend of mine, a hard-headed writer of detective fiction, who once spent the best part of a week on her stomach? Her cat, Robin, was convalescent, and would only eat best minced steak under her bed.
One book we read, discussing this finickiness, suggested dropping the food on pieces of paper. Humour them, it said. Try anything to get them interested. Often, when they’re ill, they won’t eat from dishes, but they’ll take food put on paper because it’s unusual.
Sheba wouldn’t. On the chair, she informed us faintly.
The one behind the door. It was the only place she felt like it
– and if we didn’t hurry up, the feeling would go off. So on the chair it was. And, as I’d recently re-covered the seat in tomato-coloured whipcord, an encouraging little spectacle 12
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it was, too, until I had the idea of slipping a spare piece of material deftly in front of her and feeding the invalid off that. The identical tomato-coloured whipcord, of course, so she thought she was using the chair. When I tried a piece of towelling she looked reproachful and once more refused to eat.
So, on rabbit jelly mixed with glucose, Sheba slowly turned the corner. A more repulsive mixture one couldn’t imagine. It was sticky and looked exactly like sicked-up sherbet. But from that she went on to the rabbit itself and from rabbit to raw minced beef. And then, one day, quite by accident, I discovered about pigs’ hearts.
By accident indeed, for I thought I was buying sheep’s hearts. I spotted them in a butcher’s in town, thought they might tempt our invalid, and in I went. ‘Sheep’s hearts?
Certainly!’ said the butcher, clapping a couple of gory objects on to a piece of greaseproof paper…
Sheba thought they were wonderful. She ate them with more relish than she’d eaten for years. She began to appear in the kitchen demanding them noisily. She sat around looking hopeful if I so much as got out the mincing machine.
And then, after she and Solomon had been eating them for months – two a week between them and they polished them off like wildfire – I went into the shop one day, said I’d have a couple of those sheep’s hearts in the window, and the new young woman assistant said ‘But those aren’t sheep; they’re pigs!’
They were too, which shows how much of a Fanny Craddock I am.
‘A’ course I said they were sheep,’ said the butcher when I taxed him with it. ‘I says they’m whatever anybody asks for.
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Saves disappointing people, to my way of thinking. Most of
’em can’t tell pig from sheep or calf.’
Solomon and Sheba could. Switched precipitately to lambs’ hearts – pork, we’d always understood was bad for them, and here they’d been eating pigs’ hearts, raw, for months – they promptly went on strike. Horrible old Grey Fatty Things, grumbled Solomon, shaking his leg disgustedly at his dish. Just when she was getting Better, said Sheba, turning frailly away from hers.
So, after consulting an expert on cat dietetics who said there was nothing against pigs’ hearts in his opinion –
nothing particularly in favour of them either, unless it was that pigs were often given antibiotics, some of it probably permeated into the heart tissues, and in eating the hearts the cats might themselves be getting minor doses of the antibiotic – we went back to them again. Only two a week of course, along with fish and rabbit and meat. But our cats liked and thrived on them. Robin, in America, liked and thrived on them too. We gave up bothering about Sheba’s cereal. The Vet was right about it in principle, said the expert, but, with an old cat, wasn’t it better to let her eat what she enjoyed? Rather a shorter life by a couple of months or so than an existence on food she didn’t like…
So, watching her closely, we continued. By Christmas she was putting on weight. By spring she was back to hunting.
By autumn – a year from the time she’d been so ill – she looked right for twenty or more.
Heartbreak was not far away from us, however. It was Solomon who died.
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We had no inkling whatsoever. Sometimes he drank more water than usual and I worried about his kid neys – but he always had done everything lustily. Big drinks when he drank. (Siamese drink lots of water anyway.) Hearty meals when he ate. Charging like a bull in a china shop when he felt like a chase around the house.
We watched him, nevertheless. Perhaps a little kidney trouble, we told ourselves, but if so he’d had it for years.
We couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t, after an afternoon’s snooze in the car, come down, stood on the rim of the goldfish pond, and lapped a long and noisy drink you could hear the length of the garden away. But he wasn’t always drinking, like Sheba when she was ill. Most cats get kidney trouble anyway as they get older, and so long as it stays slight it doesn’t harm them.
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So we reasoned, and gave thanks for his seemingly boisterous health. He was heavy; his coat was sleek; he looked and acted like a cat who was many years younger.