Fighting like cat and dog

During a recent family reunion John was given a photograph. It was probably taken early in the twentieth century and showed a middle-aged lady with a cat on her knee and a dog sharing her chair. When he drew my attention to it John said, 'This makes nonsense of the saying about fighting like cat and dog.' However, on examining the photograph more closely, we both decided we couldn't rule out the possibility that the cat and dog were studio props.

When I was a child we did have a cat and dog who were so friendly that, on winter evenings as they sat in front of the Aga cooker, the cat often licked the dog's ears. They had grown up together since Sooty arrived as a small black kitten around the time that Bran came as a young fox terrier pup.

When strange dogs had the temerity to invade our back yard it was Sooty who routed them. There were no cat-and-dog fights because dogs ten times her size were afraid of Sooty. At least that is how it is remembered in our family.

During her twenty four year life Sooty gave birth to several litters of kittens on a bed of straw in a wooden box in an outhouse. Bran had only to be asked, 'Show us your kittens,' and he went to the back door. As soon as it was opened he trotted straight to the outhouse and over to the wooden box, looking at Sooty and her family before turning to the human who had come to see them.

Bee in a thimble

Even during these overcast July days sentenced by St Swithen, there is usually a time when the sun is permitted a short period of parole. One day recently I found Sherpa, during one of these sunny intervals, stretched out in a state of torpor near one of the bay windows upstairs from where, when she deigns to half open her eyes, she can observe bird life. As I stroked her silky, sun-warmed fur I looked out and saw bees.

Several years ago a swarm of honey bees came and built a hive above the bay window and under the roof. When I failed to see them this spring I concluded they had been wiped out by colony collapse disorder, or had been discovered by the men who painted the house before they emerged from their winter lethargy (the bees that is, not the men), and had been exterminated.

Apart from white clover, I'm not sure what sustains honey bees at this time of year. It is bumble bees I see exploiting the bounty of St John's wort and foxglove. A few years ago I bought a packet of wild flower seeds in a supermarket, and the foxgloves - or fairy thimbles as we called them as children - flowered for the first time this year among roses where I transplanted them. The tallest flowering stems have reached almost six feet, having produced a succession of blooms that have provided the bumble bees with pollen and nectar for weeks.

Divers rats

Five minutes’ walk from our house there is a small estate of bungalows occupied by people who have retired. No-one keeps a pet - perhaps they aren’t permitted to - and rats have been coming to raid their bins.

Emotion plays a large part in the formation of long-term memory and I have several memories of rats; going as a child to see the outhouses belonging to a manor in the interval between the death of its last occupant and the demolition of the house, and seeing rats in their hundreds (at least that was my childish estimation); being wakened by their scurrying when staying in the guest room of a Mission in Zambia and imagining that fright would have turned my hair white by the morning; staying in a cheap hotel in London near a tube station which had been bombed and discovering that rats had been attempting to gnaw through the floorboards. Then there was the time when the engine of my Citroen 2CV refused to start and the mechanic who fixed it discovered gnawed potatoes under the bonnet. Rats had discovered we kept a sack of potatoes in the garage and had been climbing up the wide exhaust of the car to cache them. At that time we kept a dog but not a cat.

I appreciate that, like us, rats need food and shelter and that they care for their young, but they can transmit serious diseases and I prefer it when they keep their distance. I suspect that the smell a cat, even one that is not a ratter, leaves behind when it marks its territory is a sufficient deterrent to enterprising rats.

Haunted by Cats

An article in yesterday's Financial Times tells of an expedition by Tahir Shah and his young daughter, Ariane, to the Moroccan Atlantic port of Sale. From what was a republic in the seventeenth century, pirates sailed far and wide, returning with their booty and slaves.

In the graveyard they find an old fisherman feeding fish heads to the cats which surround him. In Morocco a cat never goes hungry because people believe ghosts of dead humans dwell in them. It turns out that parts of Sale are really haunted because Tahir and Ariane come across nests of cats as they walk along the damp vaulted corridor to the dungeon in the Sqala.

I can't say I recognise in Banjo and Sherpa the spirits of any humans I knew, but once we had a dog we loved very dearly, and more than once, in unguarded moments, I looked at her and saw a very gentle, refined and pious lady with whom we were connected. If you think about it, however, dog ghosts are more unlikely than cats. At least cats have good vision in dim light.

The entire article, 'Barbary Ghosts' can be read on the blog:

tahir-shah. blogspot.com