We had had no cat for many years, after our marmalade expired aged eighteen.
She was a lovely cat. A dark tabby with a brindled shortcoat. Nervous, soft, very affectionate. During the summer she followed my wife around the garden like a shadow. Indoors, she rarely attacked the furniture, never jumped on the worktops even when there was food up there, and overnight she stayed in ‘her’ room although the door was open and she could easily have come and jumped on our bed. Even better, for me, I was not allergic to her as was the case with our first two cats, and if you've ever had hayfever for instance you will know that can be quite unpleasant.
Agile, and a great mouser which in the end was her undoing for having eaten all the mice in our ¾ acre she began journeying up the lane to our nearest neighbours 200 yards away and it was on the way back from one of these forays, last night at 2130h, that she was run over just by the entrance to our drive.
The driver, not knowing that our cottage was there, went to our neighbour up the lane who phoned us, and fearing the worst we descended to find her dead in a pool of blood. All credit to the driver because if she had lain in the road all night she would likely have been taken by a fox, the blood washed away by the rain and we would have known nothing of her fate.
Only in August we thought we had lost her when she vanished for two nights, then she came home very woebegone with an abscess on her head.
Well now we have really lost her. I dug a hole in the vegetable garden in a patch where she loved to roll in summer. Two feet deep for safety from the foxes. We walked her round the garden for the last time then wrapped her in an old woolly and into the hole she went with a board over her for protection and barbed wire buried in the top six inches.
She was the third cat we have lost. The first, a Maine Coon, was run over outside our previous house on 5th June 1981, the second as I have said expired of old age or at least his legs did, and now the third. Considering her age and ours I had sometimes wondered whether she might outlive us.
It seems foolish to become so attached to an animal, particularly one as mercenary as a cat. And her death seems trivial compared to other events in the world.
It seems especially inappropriate that I, who sometimes have little regard for my fellow man, should have cried as we buried her.
V8
) A great life, and it was such a pleasure to have them in our lives. They are buried side by side in our garden, which is a comfort to us. Still hurts, though.