– and Nita couldn’t lift the weight for fear of dropping it on her, and was scared of winding up the weight in case Spice was somehow tangled up in it and might come up on the end… By the time the Vet arrived and got her out Spice was stiff and they thought she was dead. She wasn’t, though. An injection against shock and she was herself again – though somewhat bruised – within hours. Spice that is, not Nita, who had nightmares about it for days.
Spice was obviously their equivalent of Solomon. Sugar had her one moment of stardom when she got stung by a bee and they thought it was mumps, just as Sheba once, in the days when she was a kitten, had stayed out all night and we thought that a fox had got her. It was Solomon in our case, however, who so regularly got into trouble, and in the case of the sisters it was Spice.
It was Spice who, the day after her spaying oper ation, was discovered hanging by her front legs from a high branch of a walnut tree, with her back legs waving wildly in the air. So high up they couldn’t get at her, said Dora, and they were almost too scared to look… Panic-stricken, they rushed out a rolled-up carpet which had just come back from the cleaners and spread it under the tree. Spice thereupon hauled herself up – only just, she made it perfectly obvious 115
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– and went and dangled off a branch that didn’t have carpet under it.
It was Spice, too, who climbed all the trellis-work they’d put up round the garden – her one aim, when she’d done it, being to go and sit in the gutter. She was interested in cars, said Dora resignedly; nothing would ever stop her.
If she’d been on a main road, of course, she wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. But this was a cul-de-sac and cars went pretty slowly; the main danger was that she might be carried off by ac cident. Already they’d found her inside their own car bonnet, and there was the time she went missing mysteriously and they’d chased the laundry van…
No, he hadn’t seen one like that, said the laundry-man, when they caught him and described the errant Spice.
Always putting cats out of the van, though, he was… never knew where they’d got in and all he could do was just to put ‘em out…
So they’d looked in all the baskets in the back of his van, called her loudly all the way home in case she’d jumped out and hidden en route… with everybody looking at them, said Dora with feel ing; especially when they stopped and peered in somebody’s garden… And when they got home, of course, there, as they went up the road, was a familiar form waiting for them on the edge of a Gas Board excavation.
Been down the Hole in the Road, Spice informed them affably. They been out for a walk or something?
Spice’s record might not equal Solomon’s yet, but it was obviously going to do so before she finished. Seeley, likewise, was coming up fast in the Solomon stakes. Take dogs, for instance. Solomon’s insistence on facing up to dogs in the belief that all of them were afraid of him had led 116
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us into some situations at times. He’d frightened poodles and the Rector’s Pekinese, been chased through a cloche by a mastiff, and had once been rescued by firemen from the top of a tree.
Spice was pursuing the subject equally intently, what with lording it over a Scottie called Mac and growling ominously at their neighbour’s corgi when it passed her in her gutter. These, however, were short-legged dogs. The sisters nearly had a fit when new people moved in across the road, and there, superintending the furniture as it came out of the removal van, was a man holding a greyhound on a leash. ‘Oh no!’ groaned Dora. ‘We’ll have to move,’ said Nita. While Spice, shut in, hurled insults at the greyhound through the window.
Eventually, after they’d had several pots of tea to soothe their nerves, the van departed. The man with the greyhound was still in evidence, though – standing at the gate, looking interestedly round the garden. They couldn’t go to bed that night, they said, till they’d gone over and enquired of him whether he was the new owner – and when he said No he wasn’t; merely a brother-in-law come to help with the move – ‘Thank goodness for that!’ they’d exclaimed, and apparently he’d looked rather put out.
Now Seeley was on the dog game and we nearly had a fit ourselves when we looked through the window one day and he was out in the roadway, facing up to Jim. Jim was short for Jemima – a fact which was apt to galvanise visitors to the Valley when, as regularly happened, Mrs Penny came panting up the lane behind a huge Labrador on a leash and called, as she passed our gate, ‘Isn’t it a nuisance? Jim’s on heat! It always happens just when I’m busy!’
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Short for Jemima or not, Jim didn’t half chase the cats and when we saw Seeley out in the lane one day, confronting, like a duellist in the Bois de Boulogne, a Labrador who was grinning back at him from a distance of six feet with the alertness of Red Riding Hood’s wolf, we were both of us rooted to the spot. Seeley wore the air of complete unconcern that had been Solomon’s wont when he faced up to dogs. He also looked extremely small and Jim, we knew, was so fast…
Recovering ourselves, we shot into the garden. The pair of them were still in the lane, immobile as the combatants in High Noon. Jim rolled a merry eye and lolloped her tongue in our direction (actu ally she was a very friendly dog; she just liked to run after cats); Seeley, in best Wild West tradition, never took his eye from his man.
It was no good trying to get through the gate and pick Seeley up, I muttered to Charles. He’d run, Jim would run after him, heaven knew where the pair of them would finish. And we didn’t know yet whether Seeley could climb.
If he tried for a tree he might not make it.
Leave it to him, Charles muttered back. And then, ‘JIM!
HOME!’ he rumbled sternly in the deep, imperative voice of Mr Penny.
The command JIM! HOME!’, calling the errant one back from chasing cats, horses, other dogs or leaving home to seek her fortune was as familiar a part of the local sound nowadays as was Annabel bawling ‘Woohoohoo’ or me calling ‘Seeley-Weeley-Weeley’. I hadn’t realised it was so effective, though. JIM! HOME!’ Charles rumbled again
– and Jim, tail down, showing the whites of her eyes in our direction (whether with reproach at Charles for hit ting 118
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below the belt or because she thought it was her master and that he was invisibly with us) slunk obediently off down the lane.
The trouble with that, of course, was that Seeley immediately decided he had been the victor. ‘I won!’ he bawled, following triumphantly after the retreating Jim.
‘I made her go home!’ And though I fetched him back immediately, informing him that he hadn’t won and that it wasn’t wise for little cats to say rude things to dogs –
thereafter he only had to see a dog, of any size whatever, and he was out through the gate, looking it fearlessly in the eye, informing it that he was Seeley. This was his house.
Want to dispute it? demanded Seeley belligerently.
Fortunately for him – and due no doubt to the combination of china-white fur, blazing blue eyes and a mask as weird as a badger’s – they didn’t. One day though, we warned him, they’d work it out that he was only a cat. He wasn’t afraid of them, said Seeley stoutly.