Bestselling author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Lynne Truss is a journalist, arts and book reviewer, sports columnist and a regular broadcaster for BBC’s Radio 4. She’s had two plays performed at the Edinburgh Festival, including Hell’s Bells in 2012.
Her last novel, Cat Out of Hell, was published in 2014 and marked the unheard-of switch of allegiance from cats to dogs. The Lunar Cats reveals her new-found loyalty to be just as strong.
When you are an inoffensive retired librarian with bitter personal experience of Evil Talking Cats, do you rescue a kitten from the cold on a December night?
Do you follow up news items about cats digging in graveyards?
Do you inquire into long-ago cats who voyaged around the world with Captain Cook?
Well, yes. If you are Alec Charlesworth that is precisely what you do – with unexpected and terrifying consequences…
Abbott, J. L., John Hawkesworth: Eighteenth-Century Man of Letters (University of Wisconsin Press, 1982)
——, ‘John Hawkesworth: Friend of Samuel Johnson and Editor of Captain Cook’s Voyages and of the Gentleman’s Magazine’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 3 (Spring, 1970)
Banks, J., The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768–1771, ed. J. C. Beaglehole, two vols (Public Library of New South Wales and Angus & Robertson, 1962)
Cook, J., The Journals of Captain Cook, ed. Philip Edwards (Penguin, 1999)
Freeman, R., Kentish Poets (Canterbury, 1821)
Hawkesworth, J., Almoran and Hamet (1761), collected in Mack, R. L. (ed.), Oriental Tales (Oxford University Press, 1992)
——, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, three vols (Cambridge University Press, 2013 [1773])
Hawkesworth, J. with S. Johnson, R. Bathurst and J. Warton, The Adventurer (London, 1814; reprinted by Nabu Public Domain Reprints)
Parkinson, S., Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (Caliban Books, 1984)
Pearson, W. H., ‘Hawkesworth’s Alterations’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 7 (1972)
If there is one thing I have learned from life, it is this: it is hard to know where a story truly starts. The present story, for example, has many beginnings from which to choose – but which was the real one? Was it, perhaps, the moment – on a recent dreary December morning – that I spotted the snippet of news in the Daily Telegraph concerning a spate of unexplained nocturnal ‘abominations’ in a far-off Bromley churchyard? I have the cutting before me as I write. Looking at this much-thumbed and badly tattered piece of newsprint with an unfortunate smear of lime marmalade in one corner (the tint is unmistakable), I remember the decision to cut it out, and how I shivered at the time. But to be honest, I still shiver when I pick it up, and my breathing accelerates. This is partly at the remembered bitter temperature of that particular morning, which was unusually perishing. It is partly at the powerful (but quaint) word ‘abominations’ with all its high-flown biblical tone. But it is mainly, of course, at the recollection of the harrowing train of events that the Bromley churchyard story unarguably set in motion in my own life – events that are so heavily seared on my consciousness that they will attend me to my dying day.
At the time, however, I had no idea of its future significance, and I believe I actually said aloud, ‘Oh, I’ve never been to Bromley in my life, have you?’ – which is, I’m afraid, the sort of inane and pointless remark one makes when one lives alone; or alone with only a small and friendly dog for company, as I have done since the untimely death of my dear wife Mary three years ago. One makes such remarks not to the empty air (which would be mad, obviously) but, in my own case, specifically to Watson, as if I really believe that he understands every word I say. It’s just a convention. It’s a habit. What can I tell you? It feels like talking. And while it’s fair to assume that Watson does not understand every word I say, to his credit he usually gives a good impression of taking everything in. So I might say something inconsequential like ‘I’ve never been to Bromley, have you?’ and he looks up at me solemnly, from a sitting position, and behind those dark doggie brown eyes he seems, mentally, to be nodding his consent and admiring my sagacity. Of course, what he is actually doing – not only mentally, but with every element of his being – is feverishly counting the seconds until the clock hands tell me it’s 5 p.m. (at last!), which is generally when his next unappetising doggie repast is due.
But perhaps you will already be familiar with Watson. After all, I have written about him before. More important for me at the present moment is not to introduce you to my charming dog, but to locate the true start of all that is to follow. Is the incendiary Bromley clipping the only candidate? Interestingly, it is not, because one might equally point to the strange anonymous email I received (around the same date, in that same week) from a secretive would-be maritime historian in Greece. I remember I had cleared some space on my untidy desk to put down an untidy mug of tea (everything in the house is untidy, I should explain), and I was about to search online for the number of a local framing shop when the email popped up, the sender’s identity given as (unusual name) ‘Thigmo Taxis’. It occurred to me that this unusual moniker was probably a pseudonym, but then I also had to admit that my knowledge of Greek names was quite limited, and that ‘Thigmo’ could actually be the first name of the current Greek prime minister for all I knew. So I tried not to be suspicious of Mr Taxis. I took a sip of tea and started to read what he had written. ‘Dear Mr or Dr Delete as Applicable now Alec Charlesworth,’ it began, and then it went on to make such a bizarre research request that I quite forgot about the tea.
Of late, I should explain, the ‘Mr or Dr Delete as Applicable now Alec Charlesworth’ so oddly addressed above (I am he) had of late been applying his dusty librarianship skills on behalf of professional authors. Some of these authors required help with research because they were ‘hard pressed’, I was told; but this was far from being the whole story. As soon became apparent, some were just shockingly lazy; others blithely uninterested in their own subject. All, I must report, were astoundingly ungrateful. But none of this made any difference to me. My new life began when my old assistant from the library found a job at a book publisher in London and became a ‘contact’: he recommended me to a well-known TV gardener hastily dashing off an account of the Napoleonic Wars, and I found the work (done mostly in the Cambridge university libraries, but also in London and on the Internet) both pleasant and intellectually rewarding, so eventually I advertised for more. My only complaint was that it seemed silly to hand over the material: why shouldn’t I write the book itself? However, when I mentioned this feeling of frustration to my ‘contact’, he sternly warned me never to feel ‘ownership of the material’. Naturally, I accepted this. But it was a real eye-opener, I have to say.
So, I was used to receiving requests for research. But I had never received an email quite like the one from Mr Taxis. First, there were the peculiarities in the form of address; second, there was no preamble about the book he was supposedly ‘writing’; third, he did not explain how or where he had obtained my name and email address; and last, his request was highly specific. Thigmo wanted me to discover just one thing, as if to settle a bet: was there any evidence, he asked, connecting Dr Johnson’s famous cat Hodge with the first Tahiti expedition of Captain Cook (1768–71)?
I sat back and laughed. Well, of course there would be no such evidence! What a ridiculous request! At first I ignored it. I found the number for the framer and made the call. I went to the untidy kitchen (down the untidy hall) and made another untidy cup of tea. Watson followed closely, of course, because he operates on the principle of sticking as close to me as possible, in case an old biscuit crumb should suddenly slip from my fingers, or a fragment of forgotten dog treat should fall from my pocket when I retrieve a hanky. So he followed me to the kitchen, and then followed me back again, with tail upraised and ready to wag, but not exactly wagging. I considered my options, in relation to Thigmo. A less scrupulous man would take the job, wouldn’t he? He would write back, ‘Be assured I shall put my very best team on this’, and then he’d just stay indoors for a few days, with his feet up, rereading The Moonstone. Eventually he would write, ‘No, I’m afraid after extensive research I have found no evidence of Dr Johnson’s cat being aboard the Endeavour on the voyage to Tahiti. That will be £1,500 plus photocopying charges.’
But, as it happens, I am quite a scrupulous man, so I did as much as a chap could do. I accepted the job. Over the next few days I consulted and searched all the accounts of the Endeavour voyage, looking for references to cats. I looked in the journals of Joseph Banks, the naturalist; in the three-volume Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of his Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere by John Hawkesworth (1773); in Cook’s own journals (as later printed); and in the account of Sydney Parkinson, one of the official artists on board, who tragically died on the return trip, aged only twenty-six, off the coast of Java. Wherever I looked for cats, I found nothing. But I enjoyed myself, and the idea of that great voyage through vast crystal seas certainly infiltrated my dreams at night – the small wooden world of the Endeavour pitching about on those deep Pacific waters, forging through the waves, navigating with such amazing Enlightenment accuracy towards the cartographical pinpoint of Matavai Bay in Tahiti. I heard the wind and the boom of the waves; felt the surge of the water below; the words of the old poem ‘Drake’s Drum’ (‘Captain, art thou sleeping there below?’) kept running through my mind; as did, for some less literary reason, an image of Russell Crowe in a naval frock coat with his hair tied back in a ponytail.
You can tell from all this how ill-suited I am to the research business. I get much too involved. While other people were, annoyingly, on early Christmas shopping trips to London (and therefore getting in the way), I visited the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and also the British Museum – just to look at some of the Pacific artefacts in the Enlightenment Gallery, brought back from the trip. The visit to the museum reminded me that I had once met an evil talking cat who claimed to have spent the whole of the Second World War there (‘I am proud to say that I know the layout of the Enlightenment Gallery better than I know the back of my own paw’) – but I am getting ahead of myself here by mentioning an evil talking cat without preparing you first.
So how much did I learn about any connection between Hodge and the Endeavour? Precisely what I had expected to find: nothing. Not a thing. I noted (purely out of interest) that the Endeavour was itself a ‘cat’ – a type of coal ship, constructed in Whitby (and therefore known as a ‘Whitby cat’). I also found that a later expedition to Tahiti released a small colony of cats on to the island, as a means of dealing with vermin, but they all seemingly disappeared. Sailors in the eighteenth century referred to a small local breeze that rippled the surface of the sea as a ‘cat’s paw’. A beam at the bow of the ship, used for raising the anchor, was known as the ‘cat-head’ – so that the anchor was said to be ‘catted’ when raised or secured. But whether there were actual feline cats on board with ears and claws and whiskers (and there surely must have been), not a single one of our eyewitnesses could be bothered to inform me.
Incidentally, to any modern reader accustomed to contemporary norms of travel writing, eighteenth-century sea journals are astonishingly disappointing. Wherever you expect a bit of ‘colour’, there is no colour. Where you expect a climax, there is no climax. Anecdotes are buried, punchlines never come; all dialogue is reported and flattened in the process. After months at sea, the ship reaches its destination, and you have to keep checking the dates of the entries to be sure that the momentous arrival has really taken place. No wonder all the journals were handed over to a professional writer (the humble John Hawkesworth aforementioned) – but poor Hawkesworth was at a disadvantage in several ways when it came to writing it up. First, he hadn’t been there himself. And second, he was evidently an eighteenth-century landlubber essayist, accustomed to using a lot of abstract nouns, Latinate vocabulary, and costive constructions.
The most frustrating aspect of the first-hand accounts is that even if the decks of the Endeavour had been teeming with cats, none of these stolid eyewitnesses would have considered it of sufficient interest to mention. I felt guilty about Mr Taxis. I wished I could give him better news. And I also started to feel annoyed on his behalf, because of course there must have been cats aboard the Endeavour! All ships had cats – to keep the rats down, if nothing else. Everyone knows this. So why does no one mention them in these accounts? I know I have a suspicious nature, but I was beginning to think that the very absence of evidence for an Endeavour cat looked not only perverse but even a bit suspicious. Is it possible that mention of the presence of cats on this voyage was suppressed? The ship’s artist, Sydney Parkinson (poor chap), helpfully compiled a glossary of Tahitian names for everyday things, including ebapau (a stool), marama (the moon) and emahoo (a turtle), and guess what? There is no word listed for cat! When I discovered this fact at the library, I was so annoyed that I had to shut the book and go for a walk round the reference section until I calmed down. I began to wish I’d taken the Wilkie-Collins-with-feet-up-that-will-be-£1,500 route instead.
At the same time as I pursued the Captain Cook line of enquiry, I also felt obliged to research the cat Hodge – looking for references beyond the much-repeated story in Boswell’s Life, in which Johnson accidentally offends Hodge by saying that he has owned cats that he ‘liked better’ than this current one sitting on his lap. But there was nothing. What mainly struck me was how peculiar it is that this anecdote has become so well known. ‘But he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed’ is often quoted out of context – inscribed on terracotta tiles and the like. I suppose what makes the story so memorable for cat lovers is that Johnson hastily corrected himself, ‘as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance’. A statue of Hodge – generic cat, with oyster shells at his feet – now stands outside Johnson’s house in Gough Square, off Fleet Street, in London. The oyster shells refer to Johnson’s habit of feeding oysters to Hodge – which wasn’t, in the eighteenth century, remotely on a par with decking it out in Prada accessories or providing it with its own account at Selfridges, but was still a mark of an owner’s devoted care and affection. I can’t help finding it odd, though, that this greatest of brainy men is almost best known not for his classical learning, epigrammatic wit, journalistic diligence and superhuman efforts with the Dictionary, but for – once, in front of witnesses – attempting to placate a huffy cat.
The research (if you can call it that) took me about ten days, and for good measure I included Johnson’s well-recorded sayings on the nugatory value of travelling abroad. I have to confess I spent a lot of my allotted time just reading and rereading the email, and wondering about the person who had sent it. The wording was so odd, with unsettling repetitions, particularly of the often redundant word ‘now’. ‘Forgive the now far-fetched nature of this enquiry now,’ it said. ‘I would now be immensely grateful if now you can help me now.’ There was something familiar here, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Given the Greek name, it was fair to assume that the sender was someone to whom English was a second language. But in what foreign language would the word ‘now’ be required for emphasis quite so frequently? Why would anyone hope to connect the cat Hodge with the voyages of Captain Cook in any case? Also – and I will explain later why this bothered me – why contact me in a matter concerning clever cats?
Clearly, both the Bromley news item and the Email of Nowness are candidates for the true start of my story, but I still can’t be sure which one to choose. And there is (you will be unhappy to hear) yet a third candidate for the origin of all that follows – even though at the time it seemed the most inconsequential of events. Like the cutting in the newspaper, and the Hodge–Cook email, it occurred in dreary December. But instead of happening in my untidy house, it happened at the shops, in Poundland. I later referred to the incident as ‘the fracas’ – but I was so ashamed of it that I tried not to refer to it at all. Basically, I was shopping for novelty dog biscuits at a bargain price, for the simple reason that the amount charged for dog biscuits is criminal, and I had started to hyperventilate in fancy supermarkets whenever I saw the price labels on the shelves. So I decided to try my luck in a pound shop, fully aware that Mary would have warned me, ‘You get what you pay for’ – well, I certainly paid for these.
The last box of eight-sided ‘Dogtagons’ was on the shelf. It was marked (as of course you would expect, but it still impressed me) at one pound. I smartly took it down and put it in my basket, and was aware of a scream of rage as I did so; the next thing I knew, I was on the ground with a rather large woman on top of me. ‘Give me those Dogtagons!’ she was screaming. ‘No!’ I shouted back. ‘Why should I?’ The ensuing tussle was appalling. I thought she was going to bite me. No one came to my aid; in fact I noticed, as I thrashed about in fear of my life, that a couple of other shoppers had risen to the occasion only by backing off slightly to produce a better angle for filming me on their mobiles. Nor did the police automatically accept my story of the unprovoked assault: I was arrested for being part of an affray! I was asked how I could live with myself for fighting a woman over a pound’s worth of dog biscuits! Luckily a CCTV camera had captured the whole thing – the way she rushed out of nowhere to knock me flat – and the woman remained in custody while I was allowed to go home.
‘You might as well take these,’ the policeman said, handing me the Dogtagons, which had accompanied us to the station.
‘But I never got a chance to pay for them,’ I objected.
The policeman rolled his eyes at my tiresome honesty. ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ he said.
When I returned home to Watson, I assumed that this ghastly episode could be put behind me, given time, but it ended even more quickly than I’d thought, because Watson rejected the Dogtagons out of hand; he sniffed them once or twice and walked off. So I threw them away. But of course it didn’t end there, did it? Oh no. And my original point is well made, I think: you just never do know where a story properly starts.
So, to sum up, I had no idea, three weeks before Christmas, that yet again a great wave of a story was about to knock me down as I gratefully paddled through life’s shallows with Watson at my side – knock me down and drag me into its churning depths! When I saw the item about the Bromley churchyard in the paper, it’s true that I reacted with a flutter of excitement to the detail of an abnormally large cat sighted twice in the vicinity of the mysterious night-time excavations – because when I say that a great wave of a story might ‘yet again’ knock me over, I need to explain that three years previously I had been caught up in a terrifying (and improbable) series of events involving some cats – some evil talking cats, in fact, one of whom had spent the Second World War in the British Museum – and naturally there were times when I wondered (in a hopeful kind of way) whether the supernatural doings of the wonderfully sophisticated cat Roger and his huge cat-mentor, ‘the Captain’, were really at a positive end.
True, Watson and I had both witnessed the climactic joint death-plunge of Roger and the Captain down an old well in Dorset. (If I hadn’t snatched Watson up in my arms at the last moment, he would have joined them down there.) We both knew for a fact that these two extraordinary cats – stripped of both their immortality and their powers by the selfless machinations of Roger – were gone for ever. The hair-raising events at snowy Harville Manor had provided a more-than-satisfactory conclusion to Roger’s long and sorry life. And yet I’d retained for quite a while an optimistic reflex concerning cats. For at least a year, in fact, if I caught sight of any cat movement – a tail disturbing a bush; a feline leap, in the corner of my eye, from a car roof to a high wall – my pulse would race and I would think (and sometimes gasp aloud), ‘Roger!’
Roger. Oh yes, Roger. It wasn’t that I even knew him for very long. I think what made me fall in love with this beautiful cat was that I initially misjudged him so badly. You see, he alone had known the fate of a young woman, dying a horrible death in a cellar, and yet he had done nothing to save her. He had appeared to be in league with the Captain, who was a remorseless dealer of death; Roger seemed also to have engineered the horrible murder of a small terrier dog (a dog not unlike my own dear Watson). But as it turned out, Roger was the least evil of cats; he was blameless; he had even adored the dog! His entire goal for decades had been to avoid the influence of a demonic ‘Cat Master’ – and to narrate his own life story to a human being; but the Cat Master and the Captain between them had successfully thwarted (and terminated) his every friendship, with the effect that Roger’s innocent course through life was littered with the corpses of the people who had loved him, and whom he himself had loved.
As you can imagine, a Grand Guignol experience involving demonic talking cats wasn’t one I could drop casually into conversation with my Cambridge friends and neighbours. ‘Dorset? Oh yes, what a charming county. Interestingly, I deliberately ran my car over an evil black cat in Dorset last winter but it did no good, of course, because he had been rendered immortal by having had nine lives already. The coastline is supposed to be very pretty, isn’t it? But Watson and I didn’t really see it, being a bit exhausted after witnessing a satanic ritual involving a deafening whirlwind indoors and a cat severing a major artery in a man’s lap and then pumping all the blood out of him so that it spurted up like a geyser.’ It was comforting that Watson had been through it all with me, but at the same time – well, you just never know with dogs how much they’ve taken in. Their intelligence is very different from ours. For example, they sometimes decide that the best course of action when confronted with a dangerous manifestation of a cloven-footed Beelzebub in a dark and empty Tudor house lit only by stubs of candles and with a pentagram chalked out on the floor is to bark at it and nip its hooves.
But if I couldn’t exactly share the experience with Watson, I did emerge from the events with one natural confidant: an actor-chap named Will Caton-Pines (or ‘Wiggy’) – and although we had nothing otherwise in common, we felt bound to keep in touch. It was a relief for both of us that we could discuss those evil talking cats (or ETCs, as we afterwards called them, for short) with another human being. Wiggy had not only interviewed Roger extensively, he possessed recordings. Like me, however, he knew that his entire experience vis-à-vis the ETCs would be disbelieved by anyone neutral, especially if they had the extra qualification of being not insane. And what evidence did we have? The ‘talking cat’ of Wiggy’s recordings could have been a fellow actor. With the physical entities of both Roger and the Captain gone for ever down a well, and with their so-called Cat Master shrivelled to unholy dust on the blood-spattered floor of Harville Manor (in Dorset), we both understood that we had only each other for support. It was just a shame (for me) that Wiggy is a bit of an idiot, and that I have to take care what I tell him, because his imagination seems sometimes to operate well beyond his control.
To take the current instance, a few days after I had completed my Captain Cook research, I happened to write to Wiggy. Having nothing in my own life to tell him about, I told him about Johnson’s cat; cats at sea in the eighteenth century; the Tahiti voyage; and so on. I even mentioned the interesting fact (gleaned from Blackadder the Third) that the word ‘sausage’ does not appear in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary. All I wanted was for him to remember the incident; bookmark it, if you like, so that at a future date I might say, ‘And you remember the email about Johnson’s cat being aboard the Endeavour?’ But no sooner has an idea gone into Wiggy’s head than he must create something from it. In this case, he immediately consulted Wikipedia, and then dashed off a small scene in screenplay form, which I shan’t include here, in case it derails my narrative. I will just say it is a major symptom of Wiggy’s idiocy that he thinks he can write screenplays.
But the point is: were ETCs re-entering my life? When I started to suspect as much, the first thing I did was to check something. If you are familiar with my previous ETC adventure, you will know that I had in my possession a devilish pamphlet written by the penultimate ‘Cat Master’, an appalling man by the name of John Seeward. This pamphlet contained a list of Cat Masters, starting with Sir Isaac Newton in 1691. And I suppose I couldn’t help wondering – what if Samuel Johnson’s name was on this list? Naturally, I had not kept the pamphlet on display in my house. I had hidden it – hidden it rather cunningly, I thought. Anyway, when I retrieved it, I discovered that the list of Cat Masters was less complete than I had remembered. After the death of Newton (who invented the cat flap, did you know?), the post was taken first by Robert Walpole and then by the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding; in 1754, after Fielding’s death in Lisbon, it passed (until 1773) to a figure whose name is given only as ‘the Adventurer’. I made a note, and hid the pamphlet again (it made me anxious to have it out in the open), and I considered the information. I was slightly disappointed, I admit. It didn’t sound like Johnson. ‘Adventurer’ was hardly a name he would have chosen for himself – for his own publications, he chose less energetic epithets such as ‘the Rambler’ and ‘the Idler’. The only ‘Adventurer’ in Johnson’s career (I did investigate) appeared to be a short-lived literary magazine that he wrote for in the 1750s, which was surely not relevant.
I had just one clever thought concerning ‘the Adventurer’. I decided not to tell Wiggy, in case he wrote another screenplay.
So to sum up, the story begins with one of the following:
1) abominations in a Bromley churchyard, as reported in the Daily Telegraph;
2) the email from a Greek man named Thigmo Taxis, asking me to research the putative maritime career of a cat embedded in 1760s literary London;
3) a fracas over some dog biscuits.
Oh, and I suppose I should mention one other thing. In that same week in December, another markworthy event:
4) a demon kitten came to live with us.
The kitten was ginger and white, with pink ears and a pink nose and enormous eyes. Her name was Tetty. We heard her one night when I was putting out the recycling – a faint mewing from between the bins and the garden wall. It was a cold night, and I had intended a quick dash to the gate with a bag of thoughtfully rinsed milk cartons (I was wearing slippers with very thin soles), but I was stopped in my tracks. With the minimum of noise, I placed the milk cartons in the appropriate recycling bin, and then I just stood still. ‘Hello?’ I said – rather stupidly, as if the cat would say ‘Hello’ back (although this is not entirely without precedent, in my defence). I could feel the cold stone biting my feet through the slippers, but I tried hard not to move. ‘Hello?’ I repeated, and carefully shifted one of the bins aside, which caused a rustle of movement and a distinctive high-pitched mew. Gently does it, I thought. Don’t scare the little thing. I heard the faint mew again. Now, if I reach very carefully into this dark corner, I thought, I might be able to—
But such calculations were pointless, because Watson – trotting out to join me, and catching on a little late – launched an immediate all-guns-blazing attack on the unknown intruder, barking and snapping, flushing out the tiny fluffball of a kitten, who made a great and screeching leap to escape him, and in a split second (I still can’t put it together in my mind) some sort of heroic reflex made me catch her around the middle and grasp her to me, wriggling. Her reaction to being saved from Watson was, of course, to try to kill me. Cats are like this. Finding herself rescued, she bared her little sharp teeth; she hissed in my face, the heat of her breath making a cloud in the icy air. She also tore at my hands with her needle-sharp claws, so that they were soon deeply scored and bleeding. With Watson trying to jump up to reach her (despite my repeatedly commanding him not to), I held the kitten as high as I could (she was so light!) and watched her make frantic swimming motions while blood trickled down my hands and inside the sleeves of my jumper. ‘Calm down,’ I kept saying. ‘Calm down, little cat. Calm down.’