Cats have always been an important part of my life although
we did not own one until I was eleven.
My father came from a family of animal lovers so we grew up with stories
of the dogs and cats they had owned when he was a boy. Chief among these was Boots, a black highland
terrier.
When we lived in Hastings my aunt, who lived nearby, had an
Australian terrier, Digger. She also had
a cat for a short time but I seem to remember it was killed by a dog, either
Digger or his predecessor. Washing
Digger on the back lawn was something Margaret and I used to help with on
Saturdays. When we moved to Wellington, very
few people had dogs on the grounds that it was a city and too built up. I now realise that my mother was not an
animal lover and, although I would badger my parents for a cat, they
resisted. This was probably because my
sister, Pip, was small. New Zealanders
in those days were fairly pragmatic about pets.
I put this down to it being a rural society. There were also problems with hydatids and
dogs. Gradually my school friends began
to acquire pets but they were not something you had with small children.
Everything changed when I was eleven. One Saturday afternoon I went to play with a
classmate and discovered that their cat had had kittens. There were six tiny things: three marmalade
tabbies, two ordinary tabbies and one black.
They were looking for homes for them.
My school friend and I promptly walked the mile plus back to our house
and asked my parents, who were having a siesta, if we could have one. I was told yes, provided that we had one of
the marmalade coloured ones and that it was male. It so happened that one of these three was
male. And so Mbula arrived in our lives.
As it turned out he was the only cat my parents ever
had. He lived to be nineteen but not
without some adventures. We acquired him
when he was six weeks old which seemed to be the practice in those days. From what I now know, I realise this was too
young for him to leave his mother. It
meant that throughout his life he ‘made butter’ when he sat on our knees, i.e.
he sat and pummelled us through our stockings.
This was not good for the stockings but it is apparently behaviour
associated with being separated from the mother too young. Mbula was not properly toilet-trained when we
got him. We used to put newspaper down
on the floor but there was no cat litter in those days so he had to be trained
to go outside. I do not remember any
‘accidents’ later but I left home when he was about twelve years old so never
knew him as an old cat.
There were strict rules about cats. These were partly cultural and partly, I
think, based on how my paternal grandparents had treated their animals. One rule was that he was never allowed on the
beds. There were occasions when he would
get on the bed of one of us children but we would yell for my mother to come
and remove him which she did. Another
rule was that he was shut out of the house at night. Not something anyone would do these days. New Zealand houses are different from British
ones. The house we lived in when we got
him had a basement, complete with a door from outside, and we think he used to
spend the night there. When we moved to
a house further up the street, it was a Victorian house which had been moved to
one side of the section. Both houses
stood on wooden piles and it was possible for cats to get under the main part of the house. We know he used to sleep
there. But it was also an accepted fact
that there would be howling cats and cat fights, often at night.
We decided Mbula was three quarters Persian. His mother was half-Persian and we concluded
that his father also had some Persian blood.
He was certainly the fluffiest cat I have ever known. A couple of years after we got him there was
a Davy Crockett craze. Mbula went missing
for some days and we were convinced he had been stolen in order to turn his
tail into a Davy Crockett hat! His
Persian genes also caught up with him when he got terrible fur balls and had to
be carted off to the vet to have them removed under general anaesthetic. I think this was the only time he went to the
vet until he was really old by which time I was not around.
Choosing his name became a family task. Both my father and
my maternal grandfather had served in Fiji in the Second World War and that led
to him being given a Fijian name. Of
course, nobody else could spell it! The
Fijian greeting is ‘Mbula vanaka, voka levu’ (I think) so we used to tell
people his name meant ‘hello’. When he
arrived in our household I was told he was ‘my’ cat and I was responsible for
him. A sensible idea giving a twelve
year old this responsibility but of course it was my mother who did most of the
caring.
He was fed strictly twice a day. In the morning I would get up at seven and
make sandwiches for the whole family as there were no school dinners. Packed lunches were the norm for children and
also for office workers like my father.
In our second house, the bread was delivered by the milkman so I would
go down to the gate and collect the bread and the milk before I started on the
sandwich-making. Mbula often accompanied
me and then would give my leg a sharp nip to indicate it was time for his
breakfast. He lived on gravy beef (shin
of beef) as this is what my grandparents had fed their cats. It would be put out in the kitchen. He would eat all of it but leave two pieces
(out of politeness we used to say). He
was certainly trained to eat all his food at once, unlike the cats we have had
as adults.
Animals were brought up somewhat differently in those
days. There were no vaccinations, no
worm tablets and no annual trip to the vet.
But then there was no pet insurance either, so you hoped your animal
would not get ill. We did not know
anyone who had a pedigree cat as this was considered a step too far. I can remember our father taking us to the
cat show in Wellington. The wife of the
Dean of the Anglican cathedral (who was not a church goer) bred Siamese and she
had them all there. Lots of
kittens. This prompted my father to say
what an awful breed they were because they never stopped squalling! The only Siamese I ever knew belonged to
someone I baby-sat for when I was a student.
It was great entertainment as it used climb in its owner’s large basket
of wool. Unfortunately it died of chest
disease when only a couple of years old and this was considered to be another
reason why you did not have pedigree cats.
Dogs were probably different.
When we went on holiday we would leave instructions for a
neighbour to feed Mbula and leave him shut outside for a fortnight. Mind you, we only went away once a year as businesses
did not give much annual leave in those days.
When I was older and a student, I stopped going on family holidays. I stayed at home and looked after Mbula but
my grandmother also lived next door by then so we were not alone and there was
the neighbour with the deaf tomcat to help if there was an emergency.
As far as I can remember, there was only ever once a ‘crisis’. In our back garden we had a ‘cabbage tree’, a
Nikau palm. These have long trunks with
no low branches. Cats can easily be
chased up them and then be unable to get down again and this is what happened
to Mbula. I do not know who chased him
but getting him down was a real problem.
My grandmother was too old and too small to be of any help and I have
always been bad with heights. I can
remember getting out the ladder and leaning it up against the tree but I cannot
remember how long he was up there (quite a time) or how he got down again. I think he may have done it unaided.
We children were very fond of Mbula. I think cats have a special role to play for
angst-ridden teenagers. That was
certainly the case with me. We would
always go out and break up any fights we saw him getting into. This happened regularly in the second house
because one of the neighbours had a tom cat that was both belligerent and
deaf. When we saw Mbula’s fur flying
past the window we would go out and rescue him.
He was a right wimp and needed our support.
In the first house on Friday evenings
our whole family would walk down to the library which was at the bottom of the
street. Mbula used to accompany us, but then
wait for us either sitting in the gutter or prowling around the vacant section
next to the post office for some time. He never attempted to go round the
corner into the main road which in those days you had to do in order to enter
the building.
When I first left home there were
two things I really missed: the piano and a cat. When you are young and moving around animals
are not generally something you have so I just had to get used to not having
one. They were also a problem in rented
accommodation so it was not until we bought our first house that we were able
to get a cat. (Tiki)
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