I hope the mouse forgave me. The only way I stopped Seeley from prancing off still further was to seize a dried-up bracken stem and poke it feverishly down the mouse hole myself. ‘Look Seeley,’ I said ingratiatingly, demonstrating that the stem would go inches and inches in and then, when you withdrew it, come inches and inches out…
It stopped him going any further but it didn’t entice him back within grabbing distance. I finally achieved that by lying flat on my back, pretending to be dead, and crying.
‘Woohoohoo,’ I wept softly with one half-opened eye on Seeley. ‘Oh, Woohoohoohoohoo…’ Whereupon Seeley, who apparently did care for me a little, came – albeit nonchalantly – back, walked heavily across my stomach, and went on to sniff a plant beneath the nearest tree. Raising myself up stealthily I grabbed his tail. Seeley jumped yards on the end of it – and I jumped yards myself when, from just behind me, a frightened voice said ‘Oh dear dear me…
I really thought you’d been thrown!’ It was Miss Wellington.
Intent on capturing Seeley I hadn’t heard her coming down the track – and she, intent on gathering pine cones, had apparently nearly dropped herself when she saw me, wearing riding clothes, lying flat under a tree on my back.
129
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 129
25/05/2006 14:24:53
The New Boy
I told her what I’d been doing. Miss Wellington, who was odd herself, was about the only one to whom I could have explained such a manoeuvre and not have been thought dotty. ‘What a good idea,’ she said admiringly. ‘I must try it myself when Sooty won’t come in.’
I made my excuses, carted Seeley back to the cottage – by now it was five minutes to ten – and made it to the riding stables by the skin of my teeth. It was time, I said to Charles that night, that Seeley really was done. I was beginning to have night mares about his roaming off through the forest.
So we fixed it up again and once more the expedi tion set forth. There was a difference this time in that Seeley, now two months older than on his first abortive trip, was so much bigger that he wouldn’t fit into Sheba’s basket and we’d had to buy him a new one. We’d got him one of the kind that looks like a cage, with a dome-topped wickerwork body and a complete wire door as the front. We’d been told that cats who dislike travelling – as had Solomon in the first place and now, indomitably following him, the vociferous Seeley – sometimes change their attitude completely if they travel in something they can see out of.
So we’d bought this basket, which was big enough for a dog kennel (better get a large one while we were at it, said Charles: we didn’t know how much Seeley was going to grow) and in it, on the back seat, sat Seeley, like a little black-faced pea in an enormous wickerwork pod.
I hated to see him in it. Seeley hated it, too – but not so much, quite definitely, as in a closed-in basket he couldn’t see out of. I could get my fingers through the wire bars, too, and thus – letting him chew my fingers instead of the wickerwork, and we hadn’t put a blanket in the basket so 130
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 130
25/05/2006 14:24:53
Doreen Tovey
he couldn’t eat that – we got him safely to the Vet with an empty stomach. We had a morning appointment this time; a special concession so he wouldn’t have to miss his breakfast and his lunch. And the cat flu epidemic was over, and it was a fine warm day so he wouldn’t catch cold.
The one thing we would have done if we’d had time was put another couple of straps on the basket. There was only one at the moment, half-way up the wire door. It needed at least two more to guarantee the basket entirely Seeley-proof. It was all right just this once, though, we decided.
We’d be with him till he was handed over to the Vet. After his operation he’d be too wobbly to think of escaping. That was the reason we’d bought the basket so hurriedly – to give him plenty of room to lie out in when he was coming round.
So we delivered him to the Vet who told us to come back again just before lunch. If Seeley had recovered consciousness by then, he said, we could take him home.
He was definitely taking no chances, however. If he wasn’t round, we must wait till the afternoon.
He took no chances to the extent that, noting that there was only one strap on our basket and knowing Siamese potentialities even better than we did, when he’d done the operation he put Seeley into a cage. A white-barred affair with an outside fastening from which there was no possible chance of escape.
Not until someone opened the door, that is. When we went back just before lunch the assistant said would we please take a seat in the waiting room; she’d see if he’d come round yet. Awed by her white-starched overall and air of efficiency we did so – and were out of our chairs 131
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 131
25/05/2006 14:24:53
The New Boy
like rockets when a few seconds later (gone was the brisk efficiency now, and she was clutching one bleeding hand with the other) she returned to say could we please come at once. Our little Siamese had escaped.
In theory Seeley should have been still extremely dopey and easily transferred to his basket. In practice, he was conscious and hopping mad. When she’d opened the cage to get him out he’d scratched her and dashed into the dispensary. He wouldn’t let her get near him, she said, and he was growling at her really horribly.
If ever our hearts went out to our New Boy it was in the moment when we saw him at bay in the corner of that dispensary – groggy still from the effects of the anaesthetic, but determined to fight to the death. I called to him, and he stopped growling at once, and let Charles and me, between us, pick him up.
Feeling absolute heels – it was nobody’s fault that he’d escaped but it must have been a terrible experi ence for him, coming round in a strange cage like that and thinking his friends had deserted him – we took him home. He was Hungry, he said when we got indoors, so we gave him a plateful of rabbit. He’d been Fighting People he informed Sheba through mouthfuls of food when he saw her.
Obviously the operation itself hadn’t troubled him a bit.
If we thought that was going to be the end of his wanderings, however, we were very much mistaken. Two days later he went missing and, when we did catch up with him, for the first time ever he wasn’t in the woods, but coming back jauntily down the road.
I thought his operation was supposed to stop all that, I said, going out to usher him sternly through the gate. That 132
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 132
25/05/2006 14:24:53
Doreen Tovey
was only for Girls, said Seeley as he marched importantly in. Now he didn’t have them on his mind any more, he could concentrate on being an explorer.
133
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 133
25/05/2006 14:24:53
FOURTEEN
He did too, just as Solomon had done before him. I remember, when Solomon was that age, building a low stone wall along one side of the front path, and so often did I check to see where Solomon was while I was doing it
– and every time I checked I had to down tools to fetch him back – that the wall, when it was finished, had bends in it like the Serpentine.
I wasn’t building a wall now but I was trying to dig the flowerbeds, the procedure usually being – one forkful, Seeley was on the path; two forkfuls, Seeley was still on the path; three forkfuls, Seeley was still on the path; four forkfuls, Seeley was suddenly gone. Transported by means of levitation, apparently, since one never saw him going.
Just one moment he was there and the next he was high on the hillside head ing for the forest, fifty yards up the lane 134
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 134
25/05/2006 14:24:54
Doreen Tovey
making for the village – or, more often than not, nowhere in sight at all and we didn’t know which way he’d gone.