Cat People Read online

  Cat People

  Margaret and Michael Korda

  For Tamzin

  And in loving memory of Kit

  When I observed he was a fine cat, [Johnson said], “why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this”; and then, as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, “but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.”

  —Boswell’s Life of Johnson

  We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way.

  —Irving Townshend, Separate Lives

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1. Of Cats and People

  2. Travels with Irving

  3. Queenie

  4. Chutney

  5. Mumsie and “The Terrible Twins”

  6. “The Stonegate Strays”

  7. Mr. McT in Love

  8. Tootsie Comes to Stay

  9. La Chatte Transatlantique

  10. Cat-harsis: The Cat Life

  About the Authors

  Praise

  Books by Michael Korda

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1. Of Cats and People

  Cats and people have lived together for a very long time, ever since humankind turned from hunting and gathering, for the former of which pursuits dogs were useful, to settled agriculture, for which protecting the harvested grain and seed from rodents began to matter more.

  Large members of the cat family were a predatory menace to early humans (and of course still are in parts of Africa, Siberia, and India), but the smaller members of the cat family no doubt made themselves noticed around the campfires of our remote ancestors by their proficiency at killing mice and rats.

  Perhaps just as important for both species, cats do not at any point in human history seem to have been thought edible. On the subject of dogs, tastes vary, but American Indians prized them highly as food, and usually boiled a puppy as a treat for esteemed visitors; Polar explorers in an emergency have eaten their sled dogs, though no doubt with regret; and dogs still play a part (albeit one that most Americans and Europeans would rather ignore) in Chinese haute cuisine. Cats, on the other hand, are not normally on anybody’s menu, and so far as one can tell, never have been.

  That was good news for cats, right from the beginning. Not, by nature, particularly trusting creatures—in the wild, they are amiable, curious, but cautious—at least in their relationship with humans they were spared the pot, except in the extreme circumstances of great sieges, in which besieged city-dwellers were reduced to eating dogs, rats, and their own boots, before turning to cats as a last resort.

  Since cats made themselves useful by killing rodents, exercised, groomed, and fed themselves, and were, as animals go, exceptionally clean and tidy in their habits, even fastidious, it is hardly surprising that humans accepted them quickly into their domestic environment, surely noting, from the beginning, that cats were not on the whole looking for a leader or master, and indeed had an independent and fairly haughty view of themselves, and their place in the world.

  Dogs are animals of the pack, eager to follow a leader, and even willing to accept a human being in that position, provided he or she feeds them. Cats are independent—leadership is not high on their list of demands—and it must have been quickly apparent that no cat was likely to look up at a human being with an adoring, trusting, or soulful expression in its eyes, or do anything on command.

  Dogs can also be taught a great deal, and most of them enjoy learning—certainly they enjoy being praised—but cats have no interest in learning at all, what they do is done by instinct, and they do not seem to feel they have anything to learn from people, nor does their day generally depend on whether they have been praised or not. Cats don’t do tricks to please their owner—if they do anything resembling a trick, it’s to please and amuse themselves.

  It is hardly surprising that the Egyptians, with their economy dependent on intensive agriculture and storage of grain, came early on to treat cats as godlike figures. Aloof, beautiful, mysterious, able to see in the dark, fierce but apparently passionless killers, who toyed with the creatures they intended to kill as the gods toyed with humans’ lives, cats played a huge role in Egyptian iconography and art, far beyond their importance as rodent killers in the grain storage bins of the kingdom. The catlike eyes, slender figures, and long necks in the portraits of the Egyptian queens make it clear enough that cats were worshipped and imitated for their beauty as much as for their usefulness. The highest form of human beauty in ancient Egypt was to resemble a cat, and cats themselves sometimes wore collars of gold and precious stones.

  Of course the cat’s nature does not inspire universal love. Those who crave obedience from an animal are unlikely to appreciate cats as pets—they do not heel, or roll over and play dead, or hold out a paw on command—and the world since ancient Egypt has therefore been divided between cat lovers and those who can’t abide cats. Not that cats mind much. They have their own agenda, and like to stick to it.

  Perhaps this spirit of independence, and the fact that they remain, even when domesticated, essentially wild, is what gives them their remarkable powers of survival—the proverbial nine lives. When it comes to independence, survival skills, loyalty to your own kind, and unconditional love, we humans have much to learn from cats.

  We live in rural Dutchess County, where winters are long and hard, and there is never any shortage of stray or abandoned cats in the woods and fields around our house. Many of them look scrawny, underfed, and resentful—one guesses that most of them have been thrown out of a comfortable life in somebody’s house or trailer into the wild for one reason or another—but a surprising number of them survive, as we shall see, living in drains, or old barns, and foraging for their food.

  Dogs, of course, can survive in the wild too, except perhaps for the smaller, more decorative species, but they usually need to form or join a pack to do so, whereas cats seem to slip effortlessly back to wildness when they have to, leading solitary lives in harsh conditions. Most of our cats, in fact, have emerged from the woods to the front door or the porches, become accustomed to finding a bowl of food put out for them, then made the transition from strays, to “outside” cats, who hang around the property, then to becoming “barn cats,” who live in the barn and do a little light mousing and ratting to earn their keep, and finally get promoted to “house cat” status, settling down on the chairs and sofas as if they had never roamed wild through the winter or hunted for their dinner.

  Some cats, however, seem to have a problem deciding whether they want to come in from the cold at all. They will come close to the house at night, if food is put outside for them, but resist any attempt to bring them indoors, even in below-zero weather.

  In general, we have never sought out cats—they have sought us out, after a good deal of observation, as if they were “casing the joint.” Some of our cats have been daily visitors—or been seen daily in the fields while we were riding—for months on end before finally deciding to present themselves at the house for adoption. Others accept a meal, but stay aloof.

  At this moment, for instance, as we write, with snow, ice, and frozen rain on the ground (and more coming), there is one male cat out there somewhere on our property, whom we have named Agent Orange (because of his color), who turns up regularly for his meal at Stonegate Farm, but doesn’t seem to want to be caught. For a while he had competition, in the form of a female cat named Tizz Whizz, but she eventually accepted the tack room in the barn as her residence. When they were both living outdoors, they seemed to have divided up our property into independent sectors—the front door porch was his s
pot for his evening meal, while the aisle in the barn was hers. They came and went on different schedules, so as not to run into each other, presumably. You would suppose that teaming up to survive might make sense, but that’s because you’re not a cat.

  Of course it’s possible to buy cats, or adopt them from the ASPCA or similar organizations, rather than picking up strays, but living as we do on a farm that’s never been necessary for us since the day we moved up here with our two city cats. There are always plenty of cats out there, some desperately looking for a home, others, perhaps based on previous experience with human behavior, not at all sure that they want to exchange freedom for domesticity. In any event, however plump, cosseted, and contented a “house cat” may look snoozing on your best chair in front of the fireplace, it is still, at heart, a wild animal, and with whatever regrets for past comfort, able to look out for itself like one if need be.

  This may be another reason that some people dislike cats. Even sitting quietly on your lap, claws sheathed, a part of them is still wild. They may have come indoors, and agreed to accept your caresses, but there’s always the sense that one eye is ever so slightly open and wary, just in case the cat changes its mind. If there’s one thing you can say about cats, they like to keep their options open—not a bad thing to learn from them.

  Still the main thing separating dog lovers from cat lovers is the formers’ ideal of a pet—one which pines when you’re away, rushes to greet you when you come home, and slavishly admires everything you do—in contrast to the cat lovers’ fondness for a pet that ignores your comings and goings, shares your home pretty much on its own terms, and displays affection when it feels like doing so, and not a moment sooner. Not everybody can bridge that gap.

  Also, cats are great energy conservers. Eighteen hours of sleep a day (interrupted by a couple of meals) is nothing to a cat. A dog may share your morning run with great enthusiasm, but a cat is only likely to stretch a little, open one eye a crack as you leave, then roll over and go back to sleep. Cats get their exercise in short, sharp bursts, usually when you’re not looking, or are asleep yourself. We have a cat that likes to watch when Michael does his yoga, perched comfortably on the back of a sofa unraveling the upholstery with her claws, but she has no desire to join in. Like most cats, she is as fit as she wants to be.

  A good lesson for us all?

  We came to cats by different ways. Margaret grew up on a farm in the English countryside, surrounded by cats, with a cat-loving mother, and a father who, like many farmers, was not a sentimentalist about small animals.

  She recalls an example of this in the early summer of 1959. She and her mother, Kit, were sitting on the lawn, her mother in the remainder of the shade, watching the trout in the mill pond come up for insects, making soft, splashing sounds. Her father had gone back out after tea to look at something on the farm, driving off in haste and leaving a cloud of dust behind him, which irritated her mother a good deal.

  “Let’s catch some trout for your father’s supper, and surprise him,” Kit said.

  “We haven’t got anything to catch them with.”

  “Well, we’ll go and have a look, won’t we, lovey?”

  And of course they did.

  As Margaret remembers it:

  “She found a safety pin. Twisted it out of shape, tied a piece of string to it, and got some bacon out of the fridge. Not happy with one, she fashioned two. We leaned over the heavy metal rail and dangled our lines. Within minutes we had two trout hooked and flopping on the lawn. ‘Oh God, we don’t know how to kill them,’ I said.

  “‘No, but I think we can get the hooks out. You get some dish towels from the kitchen, and when they have flipped themselves into the shade, cover them, and we won’t have to watch them dying.’

  “But they never appeared for my father’s supper.

  “‘What happened to them?’ I asked her in the kitchen later. ‘You cleaned them.’

  “‘I cooked them up for the cats, they loved them,’ Kit said.

  “‘But…’

  “‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve for.’

  “And that was exactly the same answer I got when I found her one day filling a large roasting pan with dirt from the garden, to serve as a litter box. ‘It’s for the new kittens, they’ll become house-trained in no time.’

  “‘Better get a new one before we have our next roast dinner,’ I suggested.

  “‘No, no, lovey. A good wash out with boiling water, it’ll be as good as new. And don’t worry about your father, he’ll never know. What the eye doesn’t see…’

  “But my father’s eye missed nothing, saw everything. A few weeks later when my mother went to lose a few pounds at a fashionable spa, he had the gamekeeper come by and shoot them all.”

  Michael, on the other hand, grew up in cities, far from this kind of rural drama, with a father who always owned a dog, but usually liked to have a cat around as well. The dog went to the film studio with him every day in the car—Vincent was an Academy Award–winning art director—while the cat stayed put in the house and sat on his lap in the evening when he came home to read his paper and drink a few glasses of wine in front of the fire.

  An old photograph of Vincent in his earlier days as a painter in Montparnasse, shows him sitting next to a friend and fellow painter; each of them is holding a cat, and Vincent is looking rather enviously at his friend’s, as if he had picked the wrong one. Like most painters of his time he sometimes included a cat in his portraits—cats have the great advantage for a painter that they are usually willing to sit motionless for long periods of time, which is exactly what you want in a model.

  Another nice thing about cats is that they seem immune, or even inimical to the “great man” syndrome. When Richard Nixon’s advisers were trying to improve the president’s image, they recommended getting him a dog, and even chose the breed after much research, a red setter named King Timahoe. (The strategy back-fired, as King Timahoe hated Nixon and growled whenever he saw him, and Nixon’s aides were obliged to keep dog biscuits in one of the drawers of his Oval Office desk so the president could tempt the reluctant dog within petting distance for the occasional photo op.) As you may imagine, nobody advised Nixon to get a cat.

  It’s probably just as well. Generally, those who take themselves seriously tend not to be cat lovers, since cats don’t take anyone seriously. It is hard to imagine Hitler with a cat, for example, instead of Blondi, his faithful German shepherd, whereas Winston Churchill adored cats and on becoming First Lord of the Admiralty in August 1939, adopted the Admiralty cat (named, unsurprisingly, Nelson) as his own when he and Mrs. Churchill moved into the First Lord’s flat. Nelson, a bulky and dignified black cat, used to sleep on Churchill’s bed, sprawled at his feet, and Churchill would pet him thoughtfully while he dictated messages or held bedside conferences, and sometimes ask Nelson what he thought of the issues being discussed, to the great annoyance of the admirals.

  When Churchill moved to 10 Downing Street, after becoming Prime Minister in May 1940, Nelson left the Admiralty to go with him, and distinguished visitors to the Prime Minister’s bedside were always formally introduced to him, and privileged to watch Churchill feed him scraps of bacon off his breakfast tray. Every once in a while, Churchill would glance at Nelson affectionately and say, “Cat, darling.”

  Poor Nelson was afraid of the sound of London’s antiaircraft guns, and during air raids the prime minister would remind him of the hero whose name he bore. “Try and remember,” he told Nelson sternly one evening, to the amusement of Anthony Eden, “what those boys in the R.A.F. are doing.”

  When it was necessary for Churchill to go down to the air-raid shelter, he always took Nelson with him, having made sure that appropriate arrangements had been made for the cat.

  Churchill’s private secretary John Colville captured the Prime Minister’s affection for the ex-admiralty cat—as well as Churchill’s peremptory style and phenomenal nervous energy—with a widely
circulated spoof of a typical Churchill memo, written during the darkest days of the Blitz:

  31 October 1940

  ACTION THIS DAY

  Pray let six new offices be fitted for my use, in Selfridge’s, Lambeth Palace, Stanmore, Tooting Bec, the Palladium, and Mile End Road. I will inform you at 6 each evening at which office I shall dine, work and sleep. Accommodation will be required for Mrs. Churchill, two shorthand writers, three secretaries, and Nelson. There should be shelter for all, and a place for me to watch air raids from the roof.

  It would be easy to take the view that the good guys like cats, and that is to some degree borne out by other examples. A visitor to the White House in the darkest days of the Civil War was surprised to find Lincoln stretched out in front of the fire with his shoes off, while a number of kittens ran up and down his long legs, tumbled in and out of his pockets, and perched on his shoulders, but then it was part of Lincoln’s charm that he did not take himself altogether seriously, and retained a certain playfulness of spirit, to which the kittens must certainly have appealed. There are no descriptions, it is almost needless to say, of Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, or, for that matter, Jefferson Davis playing with kittens.

  Ships, of course, have always had a ship’s cat since man first went to sea; the cats led privileged lives aboard in exchange for killing rats. Unlike dogs, cats, it seems, do not suffer from seasickness, and at least in the Royal Navy and the British Merchant Marine they were treated with the respect due to a full member of the crew, and considered lucky mascots as well. In wartime captains might go down with their ships—Admiral Tom Phillips did when he lost two British battleships, H.M.S. Repulse and H.M.S. Prince of Wales, to Japanese bombers off the coast of Malaya shortly after Pearl Harbor, but the two ships’ cats survived—and even today it is usual to find a place for the ship’s cat in one of the lifeboats, and indeed considered bad luck (and poor seamanship) not to do so and leave the ship’s cat to go down with the captain.