Two Years Without Cats

The story of Arlo & Zelda begins

We were two years without cats. We have always had cats.

Moppet and Milligan helped us through our first winter of married life, when we were living in a front room hovel in a street of condemned terraced housing in Hanley. The two kittens actually belonged to Bill, who owned the house and rented us the room, but they seemed to like our company as much as his and once they were inside our room we were more than happy to let them stay. Moppet was a beautiful tortoiseshell, and I have loved tortoiseshells ever since.

Little Murphy, the first cat we could call our own, was a tabby kitten bought to deter rodents while we lived in a rented harbourside cottage in Brixham. He never reached adulthood, risking his life once too often on the hill outside my parents’ house when we had moved back home to live with my mother. When he’d first arrived, the poor boy had been so much smaller than the rats that would push open cupboard doors while we were eating meals beside the front-room window, watching fishing boats come and go, that we let him sleep with us to protect him from those great brown Devonshire beasts. But in the end it was a mechanical beast that did for him. He had run loose at the front of the house and was hit by a car coming down the hill. He was still just alive when I went out to him, alerted by the distraught driver. I watched as life slipped away from his eyes, aware of the near physicality of spirit departing his young body. One moment he was alive, the next he was gone.

Of course, we felt a guilty sense of responsibility, having taken on the care of a kitten when we had no permanent, safe and secure home, so it was a while before we felt able to look after cats again. We lived for two years in Huntingdon but never felt sufficiently established there. Finally back in Sussex, we were two years in a small flat with two young children and lots of house plants. It was only after we’d moved to a house and the children were a little older that we finally felt settled and secure enough to take on two kittens.

We called them Reuben and Mishnah, boy and girl, tabby and grey. They moved with us to a much larger house with a long garden and both lived to a good old age. Reuben grew noble in the way only big tabbies can. Mishnah loved to nuzzle an old grey pullover of mine while I read late into the night under a reading lamp. I kept that pullover long after Mishnah was gone.

They are both buried in the garden, a process that disturbed us so much we decided never to do it again.

Reuben and Mishnah were closely followed by Woody, a long-haired grey tabby with white features and a pretty kitten face he retained into old age, and Archie, a large, handsome ginger and white cat much prone to resting his head on the stairs, deep in thought.

Archie died in late middle age after treatment for a bone disease. Woody had a long life but had to be intensely nursed and cared for near its end to the extent that we decided it was time to take a break before taking on more cats.

Once or twice in the past forty-eight months we had looked at what was on offer at cat rescue centres but we have always liked to home two cats together, preferably from the same litter, and so often the younger cats were on their own or had already been reserved.

Then, out of the blue, our neighbour sent my wife a photo of two one-week old kittens, recently born to the sister of their own cat, Yoshi. We made some pretence at arriving at a rational decision, going for a walk on the Ashdown Forest to ‘think it through’, but we both knew what the outcome would be. We had received the photo on the 13th of the month, a lucky date for us. The kittens would be due for collection on my birthday – another good omen.

As it happened, we needed to collect them four days early. One of the teenage daughters had been given a surgery date and the whole family were required to self-isolate, so we were invited to collect them on a Tuesday rather than the following Saturday. We have had them at home for nearly two weeks. A boy and girl. Arlo, an all-over ginger with cinnamon-coloured stripes and whirls, and Zelda, a tabby with small splashes of white.

They are eating well and have used their litter tray religiously since arriving. Arlo is going to be a big male cat. Zelda is much smaller but what she lacks in size she makes up for in agility and more than holds her own when they rough-and-tumble like crazy. Partly because we have family staying with us for their summer visit, we have had to prepare one room for the kittens to use as their playroom, filling it with tunnels, scratching posts, and various toys. The chimney has had to be blocked up and plastic netting pinned across the outside doorway so that the room can receive air during the stifling hot afternoons.

They are due their first vet’s visit in just over an hour. We have received a message explaining that Covid-19 precautions mean that we will not be allowed into the surgery. We must wait outside and the kitten carrier will be collected from the car park. The kittens are oblivious of all this now, quite unaware that they are going to be taken for prodding and jabbing. In a month’s time, getting them back into the carrier for their second set of jabs, is likely to be a much more difficult exercise. I don’t think any cat relishes a trip to the vet.

I am assuming that I shall be allowed into the reception area, to pay the bill and give various details and can only hope that I manage to give their names correctly. Zelda is easy to remember, but when naming Arlo we had not appreciated that giving him a name that begins with the same initial “Ar-“ sound as Archie, also a ginger cat, would inevitably result in a period of mistakenly calling him Archie, followed by a swift correction, or self correction. He probably thinks he has a double-barrelled name, Archie-Arlo.