The Story of Jennie- or the Abandoned (17 page)

"Ullo,'ullo,'ullo,'ullo,' boomed the first constable. `What's a' this?'

His voice and words had a most amazing effect, just like in a fairy pantomime Peter had once seen when the wizard had spoken magic words and waved his wand and everybody had frozen stock still in whatever position or attitude they happened to be in, or whatever they were doing.

For as much as five seconds, nobody moved in the public bar. Some stood with arms drawn back, others half ducked, others still with their fingers intertwined in the hair of opponents, and the last thing Peter remembered was that Jock, the needle-nosed one, had climbed half-way up Mr. Strachan and was perched there like a monkey on a stick when Jennie said-'Now!'

In a flash they were both off the bar, on to the floor, and out the door and running together down the street as fast as they could.

More and more, Peter was aware of a change that seemed to have come over Jennie Baldrin. She did not appear to be her old, gay, talkative self any longer, but was given over to falling into moods and long silences, and several times he caught her apparently staring off into space quite lost in some inner contemplation. Once when he had offered her the traditional penny for her thoughts she had not replied to him, and the sudden switching and twitching of her tail had warned him not to pursue the matter. Peter set it down to the shock of her experience when she had fallen overboard from the Countess and nearly drowned.

Not that her behaviour towards Peter had changed, except to become more loving and tender and somewhat dependent as more and more he learned the things that were necessary to be a free and masterless cat and less and less leaned on the memories of when he had been a boy. There was no doubt that she looked up to him ever since he had saved her life, and that she enjoyed doing so. Peter, in turn, had experienced some of the dangers of going off half-cock in this new and exciting life, and was always ready and willing to listen and profit from his clever little companion who had learned so well how to take care of herself without the help of human beings.

If Peter was disappointed in their life in Glasgow, having expected goodness knows what of the city to whom its distance had lent enchantment, Jennie was not, for she had already found out that for the poor and underprivileged the slums and backwaters and dock areas of one city are exactly like another, and this Peter was now, too, observing from experience.

It was one thing to arrive in a new city or place, or country, with your parents who would thereupon engage a victoria, fiacre, barouche, or taxicab and drive around to visit the points of interest: the parks with their fine statues reared to the memories of famous heroes and scientists, the main shopping streets with their glittering store fronts, the residential areas filled with beautiful villas and huge, ornate hotels, the museums, art galleries, exhibitions, churches and ruins, as well as the Strand or Corso or Mall where the band was playing. It was quite another to be alone and penniless, without food or shelter or a friend, in a strange city with somehow life to be preserved and a living to be won from it, particularly when, like Jennie, you were unwilling to pay the price of giving up your liberty in return for food, shelter and a home.

Under those circumstances you remained away from the more attractive centres of the city where a stray was most likely to collect abuse, kicks and blows, with the possibility even of a trip to the Pound and loss of life in the gas chamber, and confined yourself to those less favoured sections of the city where the inhabitants had enough to think upon to get along themselves without chivvying and worrying fellow unfortunates in the animal world.

To Peter, the docks along the Clydebank, the smells, the noise, the buildings, the hoists and derricks and tall cranes, the piles of ropes and cables, and the miles of railway trackage were very like those on the Thames in London, and the slums, warehouses and stern neighbourhoods in their vicinity quite alike.

Jennie taught him the art of working the cover off a dustbin to get at the scraps of food and disposed-of garbage remainders. It was done by standing up on the hind legs and pushing upwards with the nose under the rim of the can. The trick, as Jennie figured it out, was not to become discouraged if at the first attempt it could not be budged, but to try all around at various places on the circumference of the bin until sooner or later one found the weak spot where the cover was more loosely attached and would yield a trifle to the first shove. Once it began to go, it was only a question of patience and energy before it could be lifted off.

Peter soon became an adept at this, for he had had a good, sturdy little body as a boy and now was powerfully built as a cat, long and lean in the flank and strong and heavy in the shoulders. Too, in time, he came to be able to recognize a fellow vagrant at once by the tiny bald strip across the bridge of the nose where the hair was quite worn away from pushing up the iron rims of the lids.

Once the lid was off, a few sniffs was as good as a bill of fare to reveal the contents and its state of preservation, and they went at it with their paws or, if what appeared to be tempting and with a possibility of nourishment lay buried too deep, Jennie had worked out a refinement that lay open to the two cats working in concert in such a partnership as was shared between herself and Peter. It was just that the two leaped up and clung both to the same side of the bin as close together as they could, and usually their combined weight was enough to tip it over with a terrific crash and clatter, spilling its contents on to the ground.

Too, they learned to haunt the butcher's shop, the fishmonger and the greengrocer, as well as the alleys behind restaurants and hotels when the big vans from the wholesale houses came to make their deliveries for the chance to snatch at scraps that might fall off or be dropped between lorry and store, and make off with it for a meal which invariably they shared equally. For they ate not only bits of meat and fish when they could get it, or chewed up old bits of bone, but also any pieces of fruits or vegetables, biscuit, bread, stale oatmeal, anything and everything, in short, that could be chewed, swallowed and digested.

And here again, Peter was discovering that it was one thing to be fastidious about your food and complain because Nanny had not cut all the fat off his lamb chop, or refuse to eat his spinach because there was a bit of grit in it, or dawdle over a banana sliced thinly on to cereal with plenty of sugar and milk, and indeed quite another never to have enough in your stomach and not know when or where your next meal was to come from. Of course, being a cat, his palate was quite different from what it had been when he was a human being, but as Jennie pointed out, the average pampered house cat turned loose in a city to fend for itself would soon starve to death if it did not learn to subsist on anything and everything.

They ate old carrots and onions, bits and pieces of melon rind, raw cauliflower and old bread, crusts, cooked turnips and cabbage stumps, mysterious leavings from cocktail parties, cake crumbs from tea, bits of haddock skin and heads and tails of smoked herrings, beef gristle and lamb bones that had been boiled until they were white; they licked out the inside of corned-beef tins to get at the fat, and learned to go down to the quayside where the foreign ships from Sweden and Norway, Finland and Spain and Portugal dumped their more interesting garbage overboard, and fight the screaming and enraged gulls for some of the bits and pieces that floated alongside the stone jetty steps and which they could fish up out of the water with their paws.

But as in London, it proved to be a hard, rough, hazardous life, albeit an adventurous one, and rarely tempered by any softness or luxury. Compared to it, as they ranged up and down the Clyde, along the Broomielaw, Anderson and Custom House Quay, and then across the big steel-and-iron Glasgow Bridge to the southern part of the city, life aboard the Countess of Greenock had been palatial. Glasgow was a manufacturing city, and the smoke and grime drifted down and got into their fur and skin and it was difficult to keep clean, and besides which it rained a great deal and they were hard put to find places to keep dry.

Nevertheless, Jennie seemed to find this quite a normal way to live and did not complain or seem to mind except for those moody silences already referred to and the something which seemed to be occupying her mind.

Nor had the quest for her family prospered particularly or seem likely to, until at last they came across a grey, scarred-up Maltese tabby who appeared to be a distant relative.

There had been one of those cold, penetrating, misting showers for which the Scots city is famous and Peter and Jennie sought out a dry place under one of the arches of a bridge over the Clyde when they were warned by a low, throaty growl and a disgruntled, petulant voice saying, 'Ware. You're trespassing!'

`Oh, I beg your pardon,' said Jennie politely, `we did not mean to.'

Peter, as usual when they had to do with another cat, held his tongue so as not to say something wrong, as he had promised Jennie. The speaker, he saw, was a somewhat weatherbeaten, darkish-grey Maltese with bright yellow eyes and the scars of battle on her ears and nose, and of course the well-known sign of the dustbin ridge. She was not particularly large or formidable looking, and he and Jennie together might well have routed her, but Jennie always insisted upon the politeness and amenities of cats even though frequently they seemed to be superfluous. There was room enough for a hundred or ten times that many cats beneath the span, but because the grey had got there first, by all the rules the territory belonged to her, particularly if she chose to make an issue of it. It all seemed very foolish to Peter, but he knew that Jennie would have insisted upon the same rights had she been there first and that this was a part of the lore of being a cat.

`We will, of course, be leaving at once,' Jennie said. `I was just looking for some relatives of mine. My name is, Jennie Baldrin and this is my friend Peter. The Baldrin is on my father's side, of course. Pure Scot for generations, and Highland at that. On mother's side we're almost a hundred per cent Kaffir. But then you'll have recognized that, naturally. The usual route, you know. Central Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Spain and then that Armada business.'

The grey did not seem to be too much impressed. She said 'Well, we came by way of the Bosphorus originally, but long before the Turks laid siege. We were in Malta already when the Knights of St. John came. Our family got to Scotland with one of Nelson's captains after he took the Island. There's a remote connection between us, probably on the Baldrin side. Where did you say you were from?'

'Well,' Jennie replied, 'we're up from London on a visit, but my mother came from Mull. And of course you know the Baldrins were all Glasgow cats …'

The Maltese stiffened perceptibly. 'London, eh? What have they in London that we haven't twice better here?'

Peter could not resist chiming in-'Well, for one thing, it's ever so much larger, and-'

'Size isn't everything,' the Maltese said curtly and added 'I'll wager you have no shipyards the match of ours. We have no need of any London cats to come up here and lord it over us…'

'But I wasn't meaning to lord-' Peter began to protest when Jennie interrupted him to say: 'Of course, Glasgow is most beautiful and I'm glad I was born here. Do you know where any others of the family are?'

The Maltese looked down the side of her nose. 'Can’t say I bother much. They're all over the place and many of them are no better than they should be. There's a branch supposed to have gone to Edinburgh, but of course WE don't have any dealings with anybody on the East Coast, Provincial. Why did you clear out of here? Wasn't good enough for you, I suppose.'

'Oh, no,' Jennie replied. 'I was taken in a basket. And then, of course, being brought up there one gets used to things being … well, different. But one does like to come back-'

'… and put on airs,' concluded the Maltese unpleasantly 'But they say that's what the family is coming to. Our side of it always found Glasgow good enough for them . . Jennie said, 'Well, I guess we'd better be going …'

`Never mind,' said the Maltese, but not at all graciously, 'you may bide a while. I was just going myself. At any rate, you haven't lost your manners in London, which is something, though I can't say as much for your friend. Good day to you,' and she arose and left.

It was just in time, for Jennie's tail was lashing and waving violently….

Oh!' she cried, 'what a thoroughly odious person. If that's at my relatives are like, I shan't be wanting any more of them. And did you hear her-"What's London got that we haven't twice better?" And she dared to talk about someone being provincial. Of course she isn't really Scottish at all, with all that Italian blood in her. The Scottish are kind and hospitable, once they get to know you …'

The words 'kind' and 'hospitable' suddenly made Peter feel very sad. For, truth to tell, he was missing the friendly companionship of the weird crew of the Countess of Greenock, and even though he was learning to look after himself and had Jennie constantly by his side for company he knew that there was something lacking and that cats were not meant to live as they were living.

And besides, it was cold, wet and drizzly, and in spite of it being beneath the arch of the huge bridge where the rain could not get at them for the moment, the wind was blowing damp in from the water and they had had bad luck and had not eaten for the last twelve hours. Peter began to think not of home and his mother and father and Nanny, oddly enough, but of what it would be like to belong to someone who had a nice cozy place by the fireside for him, who would rub his head and stroke his back and scratch him under the chin, feed him regularly and let him sleep on a cushion, someone who would love him and whom he could love.

'Jennie! I wish … oh I wish we belonged to somebody… '.