Cats in May (6 page)

After that he was never put in a cage again. Fortunately he had learned his lesson about chewing tins, but
he achieved other catastrophes with clockwork regularity. He went through a period of imagining that his tail worked like wings, so that he was continually launching himself into mid-air from the backs of chairs and falling flat on his face. Then, apparently having decided that altitude might help, he tried it from the top of a six-foot cupboard and nearly killed himself. Fortunately we were on hand to pick him up. His small button nose was streaming with blood and he had sprained his hind paw so that he limped for days, but after screaming hard for several minutes he calmed down, drank a teaspoon of brandy and water with the air of one who hated the stuff but knew it would do him good, and decided to live.

His next escapade was really spectacular. Through his habit of sprawling in his mash at mealtimes the fur on top of his head had become completely glued down with sugar mixture which had hardened into a glossy cap and made him look like an advertisement for brilliantine. We made several attempts at washing it off, but the gloss was immovable. Blondin himself spent hours vainly trying to comb it out with his claws, sitting up and twiddling away at his top-knot till Charles
said he found he was doing it himself when he wasn’t thinking. Finally, however, Blondin’s patience gave out. One day while we were away he sat down and pulled the patch out by the roots. When we got home he emerged from his basket to greet us, inordinately pleased with himself and as bald as a coot.

This was before the days of Yul Brynner, and we were terribly ashamed of him. People were continually asking how he was and it seemed such an anticlimax to keep producing a squirrel who looked as if the moths had been at him. It was weeks, too, before his fur grew again—until the wrinkled pink tonsure which disconcerted everybody except Blondin himself disappeared, and he looked like a normal squirrel once more. Meanwhile he had progressed beyond the soft-food stage and was at last able to eat nuts. At first they had to be cracked for him, and he had no idea of storing them, but from the very beginning there was an instinctive ritual about his nut-eating. Always, however hungry he might be, he would carefully peel three-quarters of the nut before he began to eat, spinning it round in his paws as he worked. He always held it by the unpeeled portion—and never by any chance would he eat the
part he had been holding. When he progressed to cracking nuts for himself he never discarded the entire shell, but used part of it as a holder for the kernel so that there was no need to touch it at all. He ate slices of bread and apple in the same manner, always discarding the part he had held. Tomatoes were his favourite fruit—probably because the first one he ever tasted was one which he stole himself from a bowl on the kitchen dresser—and these, too, he carefully peeled before eating. But far and away above anything else Blondin loved tea. He decided that he liked it quite suddenly one morning at breakfast, while he was sitting on Charles’s shoulder. Without more ado he catapulted himself down Charles’s arm and dived headfirst into the teacup which he was just raising to his lips.

The tea—fortunately only lukewarm—went everywhere. Over Charles, over the tablecloth, and over Blondin, who emerged looking as if he had had a bath, wiped his chin on Charles’s dressing gown, and retired blissfully to the back of a chair to lick himself dry. After that he would leave whatever he was doing at the first glimpse of the teapot, and the only way to ensure peace at mealtimes was to give him a saucerful before
pouring out our own. Only once I forgot—and when I came in from the kitchen our dear little orphan of the woods, as Grandma still persisted in calling him, was on the table, standing on his hind legs and hopefully pushing his tongue down the spout.

By this time Blondin was quite a sizable squirrel, and perfectly able to look after himself. The only drawback to his prospects of survival when we set him free was the fact that he was, unfortunately, not the rare Red Squirrel which his sandy baby fur had led us to
believe, but had developed into a perfect specimen of the American Grey—and as such he was liable to be shot at sight by anybody who saw him.

It was difficult to know what to do. He was so tame that we hated the idea of parting with him—and the fact that he was liable to be shot if he were at large surely gave us every excuse for keeping him with us. On the other hand it seemed wrong to deprive him of his birthright. If he were to be shot, at least he wouldn’t know anything about it until it happened. Meantime he would have led a full life, climbing to his heart’s content in the windswept trees, perhaps even finding a mate and building a drey of his own …

Finally we decided to compromise—to set him free not in his native woods but in the vicinity of the farm where we were living at the time, in the hope that we should still see him sometimes and that, as everyone in the district knew him by sight, he might escape the gun at least for a while.

So, one fine warm morning in July, we carried him to the far end of the garden and put him gently on a tree trunk. He sniffed about him curiously for a moment, his whiskers bristling with interest, his tail
bushed out and fluttering with excitement. Then like lightning, he sped to the topmost branches, chasing himself giddily round and up and down, until at last he had to stop and lie out along a branch to get his breath back.

Sadly we stood and watched him, waiting until he should take it into his head to make for the taller trees on the other side of the wall and pass out of our keeping forever. But Blondin didn’t go. He romped and played in the branches until he was startled by a crow flapping its way briskly over his head—then he was out of the tree, streaking across the lawn and hiding fearfully behind the kitchen door almost before we knew what had happened. He didn’t like the idea of being a wild squirrel, he informed us with chattering teeth as we carried him back indoors and put the kettle on. He liked us … and tea … and sitting in Charles’s pocket and sleeping in the wardrobe … He was, he announced, regarding us happily over the top of the biggest walnut we could find for him, going to stay with us for Ever.

Five
The Story of a Squirrel

Blondin—sometimes we wondered if it was the result of the brandy—was not an ideal squirrel. He threw nutshells and tomato skins on the carpets. He was obstinate and self-willed. When a situation arose such as his deciding to spend the evening in Charles’s pocket and Charles not wanting him to, it invariably ended in Blondin getting tough and threatening to bite. Squealing with rage, battling tempestuously with his claws, peace would descend only when he was curled cosily in Charles’s pocket, with—presumably it acted as
some sort of radar device—his tail hanging down outside.

With me he preferred to be the other way up. He particularly liked me to wear a sweater, when he would sit inside it on my shoulder with his head sticking out of the top. I cooked, I did housework, I answered the door—all with Blondin gawking happily out of my collar so that I looked like a two-headed Hydra. Not, as Grandma claimed, that he did it from affection. Just so that he didn’t miss what was going on.

Blondin never missed anything if he could help it. As soon as he could climb he had taken to sleeping in our wardrobe, in a pile of Charles’s socks in one of the pigeonholes. There he slept the night through; snug, warm, safe from his enemies—so secure that if we woke up during the night and listened, invariably from the direction of the wardrobe we could hear small but distinct snores. As soon as dawn broke, however, Blondin was up and keeping an eye on things. Hopping up and down the bed, peering into drawers, looking out of the window at the birds and finally, with his tail curled jauntily over his head, settling down to wait
on top of the wardrobe, where he could spot us the moment we got up.

Many a piece of mischief was planned from that little lookout. He was there the morning Charles looked at his watch to see the time and, instead of getting up straightaway and putting it on, stuffed it under his pillow and went to sleep again. We overslept that morning, and when we did get up we had to move so fast that in the rush Charles completely forgot his watch. Not until halfway through a hurried breakfast, when we realised that Blondin was missing from his usual vigil by the teapot, did he remember it—and by that time it was too late. When we rushed upstairs Blondin had it under the bed. Cracking it to get at the tick.

He was there, too, the day Charles brought home his new suit from the tailor’s. From his eyrie Blondin watched with interest, his head on one side, his tail curled into a question mark, while Charles tried it on. He also watched with interest while Charles put it on a hanger and hung it inside. We did notice that that night he went to bed earlier than usual, but nobody thought anything of that. He often popped off up to the wardrobe by himself when he felt tired, and indeed
by the time we went to bed ourselves he was already fast asleep, snoring away inside his pile of socks like a small buzz-fly.

It wasn’t until next morning, when Charles said it was a fine day and he might as well wear the suit, that we discovered what had made our little orphan of the woods so tired. Not only had he taken every button off the new suit, as Charles discovered when he went to put the trousers on. Overcome with achievement, he’d chewed the buttons off all his other suits as well.

There was no need to enquire which of us Blondin belonged to at that moment. He was all mine. He was always mine when he did anything wrong. The time he upset a bottle of ink, for instance, paddled in it and then left a Chaplinesque little trail over a shirt that had just been ironed—he was mine then all right. It was a wonder he and I weren’t sent to the Zoo together.

He was mine, too, the day Charles locked the wardrobe to keep him off his suits and Blondin, equally determined to get back in again, chewed a large chunk out of the door. I was out at the time but it was my squirrel who greeted me on my return, chattering
indignantly away on the top. My squirrel, Charles informed me, trying fruitlessly to fit the bits back in again—who, if he couldn’t behave in a civilised manner, would have to Go.

Normally, of course, he was Charles’s squirrel, and if he’d gone anywhere it would have been over Charles’s dead body. Circumstances altered cases, too. When it was not Charles’s watch but my handbag that he chewed through—a neat, semicircular hole in the flap to get at my fountain pen—there was nothing mischievous about that. It was just, according to Charles, an example of his intelligence that he should have noticed where I kept the pen and—being naturally curious about it—used his brains to get it out.

He was certainly intelligent. Young as he was when we found him—far too young to have learned anything from other squirrels—he still knew instinctively when the summer began to wane and it was time to start storing nuts. He kept his in the hearthrug and nearly drove us mad by the way he had no sooner buried them and carefully patted over the top by way of camouflage, than he got all worried because he couldn’t see them and immediately dug them up again,
turning them suspiciously over in his paws to make sure they were still intact.