In 1978 we moved to Balham.
We lived there for ten years.
Tiki was still with us and still capable of having adventures. His first trick in the new house was to climb
up inside one of the fireplaces the day after we moved in. Fortunately he managed to get out again. We now only let him out of the house if we
were at home. The house was bigger than
the Tooting one but still terraced and on a grid. This meant it had a smallish garden at the
back and opened straight onto the street at the front. In the summer we could open the French doors
from the dining room and the kitchen door and he could walk round and
round. He also liked to climb up the
fence and then roam in the nearest couple of gardens.
There was one occasion when on a sunny afternoon in November
we thought we had shut him in but we had left the front upstairs window
open. There was no noise from him which
was unusual. I was working in the
upstairs front room (the study) and suddenly I heard him shouting. I went to the window and there he was hiding
in the bin stand of the house opposite.
I rushed downstairs, across the road and rescued him. I was very glad he had had the good sense to
stay there and not to try getting into another car. In the end we realised he had rushed inside
from the garden, straight up the stairs and out through the window! Fortunately he was not hurt.
In the mid-eighties both John’s parents died so Tiki lost
his holiday accommodation. We went to
Cornwall for the Easter and left him with the cleaner who knew him well. When we returned she told us he had howled
incessantly and she had been reduced to taking something to help her
sleep! However, we had solved the
holiday problem because we bought a cottage in Cornwall and took him with
us. The first time we made the journey
there was an ‘accident’ in the car but we then developed a system of taking the
cat litter and having a stop where he stayed in the car but was let out of his
basket while we went for a coffee, lunch or whatever. This system worked well with all our
subsequent cats.
In 1988 I got a job in Oxford and lived there during the
week while we sold the Balham house. Tiki
was about thirteen by this time and we reckoned was a bit deaf but he would
still come if you called him. We
developed a trick of taking the carving knife into the garden and rubbing it
with the sharpening steel. That always
brought him back. It was summer during
this move so John would let him out until he was ready to go to work and then
get him in again. One day he failed to
reappear. We were back to the problem of
trying to find a cat in inner London. We
began by printing ‘lost cat’ notices and getting our nephews to post them in
all the houses in the block. As the
houses were large and many were in multiple occupation this was almost all we
could do. The house immediately over the
back fence was on the market so I phoned the estate agent and made him take me
through the whole house in case he was stuck there. And we asked all the neighbours. We did the usual trick of looking under all
the parked cars as we thought he could have got into one again. I still think this is probably what happened
as we never found him. We also realised
that as he was older, in theory he could have just gone off to die, as cats do. It is the only time we have lost a cat and it
is not an experience I would want to repeat.
Not knowing what happened to him was terrible as there was no ‘closure’
as we say these days but when we moved we found ourselves living on a main A
road, even though we were in a village, and we realised he would never have
survived as he had got used to a certain amount of freedom. In due course we got two new kittens and
trained them onto leads so they never had the same degree of freedom.
No comments:
Post a Comment