“Oh that’s ok” he replied “We’ve homes for all three.”
In the March he rang me back “You know you were looking for a kitten …”
He’d been let down.
So we went over with the cat box.
At the time Will Fixit was single and his house contained an eclectic mix of builder’s tools and materials, musical instruments, recording equipment, various cats and a cockatiel.
The boys were 5 and 3; when we arrived the kittens took one look at us and starburst all over the house. It was like those fluffy worms you see at the pantomime; now you see it, now it’s gone.
“Which one would you like?” asked Will.
“Whichever we can catch!”
I eventually caught a tabby kitten cowering behind an overstuffed armchair in one of the bedrooms, brought her downstairs, put her in the catbox and took her home.
It was a Sunday morning so I suggested we put the box in the kitchen, open the door and then go out for the day so she could explore that room in peace and get used to the smell of a different place. Tiddles was out and introductions could wait until the kitten had found her feet a little.
Off we went to Druridge Bay.
When we came home I opened the kitchen door to find – no kitten.
Not in the box, not under the table with the litter tray and wellies, nowhere to be seen.
There was no way she could have got out so I was flummoxed.
Then I looked in the gap underneath the work-surface between the boiler (an ancient floor standing thing) and the washing machine. There at the back was the tail end of a kitten sticking out of a previously unknown hole.
A pipe (gas or water) came out of the floor by the wall, ran an inch or so above the floor parallel to the boiler for a few inches, then turned 900 and a couple of inches into the side of the boiler.
The kitten had got herself over the pipe and half way into the boiler, couldn’t go any further forward and every time she backed up bumped into the pipe but couldn’t climb backwards over it.
Although I could just about get my arm between the boiler and the washer, I couldn’t reach far enough back to grab her.
The washer would have to be moved.
But in order to do that the kitchen table had to be moved to make a space for it, together with the litter tray, wellies and everything else that had accumulated under and on it.
This was when we discovered that the cats had kicked quite a lot of, thankfully clean and dry, litter underneath the washer.
Eventually Fester lay sideways on the litter strewn floor, grabbed the kitten by the tail and dragged her out, both of them spitting and swearing. She was dumped unceremoniously in the cat box and shut in until we got the kitchen put back together again.
Not surprisingly, given where she was raised and the welcome she got, she turned out to be quite an unfriendly animal (at first) much given to hiding under things. And she was never totally properly house-trained, either that or it was spite.
We rejected several names - Fluffy (too fluffy), Ash (for her colour), Spot (too whimsical) – nothing seemed to suit.
A few days later I phoned Middlesister I regaled her with the story of the kitten behind the boiler.
Ferretfingers, sitting nearby, commented “Stupid bloody animal”; something of a landmark as he hardly ever spoke.
Telling Fester about this he looked sternly at the kitten and said “Yes! Don’t do it again.”
“Matilda!”
I added remembering the chorus and title of an old music hall song, performed in the1970s by the duo Cosmotheka.
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