Chateau Midden Cats 1: Dominic & Tiddles

When our family home was being cleared and sorted prior to sale as our parents were both in a care home, and my siblings and I too far away to take it over, there was some eighty years’ worth of family photos to go through.  Being the furthest away, with demanding children, this fell almost entirely to my older siblings.  But they tried to make sure I got to see as many as possible.

I was intrigued by a photo of Granma, possibly in her sixties, holding a black and white cat remarkably like my Felix.  She had always been quite stern with our family tortoiseshell cat Tiddles.  Granma died when I was 13.

“But I thought Granma didn’t like cats” I said to Bigbrother, who is 14 years older than me so had known her longer.

“No, she always had a cat, usually two.”

I got my first cat, Dominic, around my 25^th birthday when another failed romance had persuaded me that I would be forever spinster. 

In the mid-eighties the Squire and I were flatmates.  A Cloggy friend’s cat had had kittens “free to good home”.  She wanted the tabby.  I went with her to choose one saying “If there’s a tortoiseshell and white I’d like it.”

When we got there something that looked like a little bundle of black oily rags ran up to me and I picked him up fell for him.  Dominic grew up into a slinky black witche's cat and was with me for 18 years.

The Squire had his sister Tiger.  When the Squire moved in with her fiancé Tiger went with her.

I was entirely wrong about spinsterhood and about a year later Dominic and I moved in with Phil, the man who became my first husband, in his little Leech Countrystyle cottage in Wallsend.  
It was far too small for us and all our stuff so in 1987 he, I and Dominic moved here to Chateau Midden.

A few months later the Squire phoned.  Her student brother was living in a shared house in Sunderland which had taken in 3 feral kittens.  The landlord objected and homes had to be found or “they’re going to the big cat basket in the sky – and one of them is a tortoiseshell and white”.  We’d flat-shared for five years.  She knew my weakness.  So it was a drive down to Sunderland and back with a mewling cardboard box.  I put down some cat food, which Tiddles scoffed down gratefully.  She stayed within 6ft of me for the next three days and was a beautiful companion.

Dominic didn’t speak to us for a year after she arrived.

Like Granma I’ve had two cats for most of the years since.

There will be more cat history …