When Maui and Rua died we realised we could not immediately
get any more cats but would have to wait several months. This was because we were both commuting to
London and would not be around to feed them several times a day as
kittens. Also the week that Rua died I
was told I was being made redundant.
This was because of general budgetary cuts but I had already decided
that four hours a day commuting was too much after having been ill. I was given several months’ notice of my
redundancy which was to include ‘gardening leave’, i.e. some time when I was
paid but did not have to work. This
meant we could settle the kittens during that time. Of
course I still needed to work and I did apply for a couple of full-time jobs
but given I had had cancer and was 55 I decided it would be better to ‘retire’,
take my pension and then freelance.
Because it was a redundancy I did not have any actuarial reduction to
the pension but giving up the full-time job meant that I was ten years short of
pension contributions. I told myself
that as I had not had any time off for motherhood, I would be in much the same
position as virtually everyone I knew.
In the seventies everyone had had to stop work when they had children,
had usually had a gap of several years and often a lot of part-time work before
they got back into full-time employment.
It is all very different for the next generation.
It was now 2001. We
decided to get two more Siamese in the summer but had to find a breeder. We bought various cat magazines and in the
end found someone about an hour’s drive away.
This was much better than the previous occasion. We were able to go and visit the kittens
before we took them and chose the only boy in the litter and a seal point
girl. She was very tiny and I later
learnt that seal points are generally the smallest in the litter. The boy was the biggest kitten and was
blonde.
We were told he was a seal point
tabby but this was not true. He was a blue
point (like his mother) tabby but he stayed very pale and never got really dark
points. Of our seven cats he was the
only one who was not seal point. Then we
had to choose Maori names. We opted for
Nui for the boy and Iti for the girl. We
learnt that Nui meant ‘big’ and Iti meant ‘small’ so when they were fully grown
we realised we had chosen well. Iti
appeared to have a slight eye infection when we went to collect them but we
decided to risk it. She recovered but
only lived until she was eight so it is possible that there were long-term
effects from this infection.
They adjusted to life in a Northamptonshire village well and
by our standards were lucky to have me at home some days, although I still did
work in London so there were days when they were on their own for extended
hours. We trained them onto leads which
meant they could not ‘escape’. This was
important as we had no gate and although we lived on a dead-end lane it was
quite busy. We also used to play with
them in the garden after dinner in the summer.
The house was built right alongside the lane so the garden was all at
the back. They used to love this summer
playtime as we had a lot of cosmos and they could chase the flowers in the
dusk. We did have the usual
adventures. On one occasion we had let
them into the garden on their leads on a Sunday morning. I suddenly saw that Nui was foaming at the
mouth! It turned out that a frog had got
into the border and he had found it among the flowers.
The far end of the garden gave onto fields as did one side
of it. Nui was not averse to getting
through the fence and wandering around among our neighbour’s chickens and
pheasants, not to mention the cows he kept there. We learnt that male cats will wander but not
females as Iti never did this. The
first summer, we had visitors and one evening forgot to shut all the windows on the garden
side. Nui wandered off during the
evening and we had great problems waiting for him to return, not least because
if one cat is inside you want to shut them in but cannot easily do this without
shutting the other cat out.
Because they were on leads we thought about taking them for
walks. Iti had no interest but I used to
take Nui along the lane to where there was a path up to a field. He enjoyed exploring in there but there was
always the risk of another cat appearing.
The neighbours immediately opposite us had a large area behind their
house that was full of rubbish. On more
than one occasion he managed to drag himself still on the lead across the road,
up their drive and then begin to play among all the rubbish. Rescues were needed and I was always a bit
concerned that the lead would become so entangled that he would be strangled
but fortunately that never happened. On
the whole they were happy to sit in the garden chairs with their leads ‘anchored’
to the ground.
These cats were also keen on sitting in cupboards as well as
sitting up high. They enjoyed Christmas and the decorations. By this time we had digital cameras so we
have a photographic record and I have made photobooks.
Form the beginning they came to Cornwall. We had the journey well organised. Often, we stopped at Waitrose in Cirencester
to buy food and have lunch. There was a
large car park and we would park at the far end of it, then let them loose in
the car. There was also the time that we
were driving back from Cornwall at New Year when we ‘lost’ the spike that
sealed the door to the cat basket. We
had stopped for lunch and then started off again and in the middle of Bodmin
moor, Nui got out of the basket, climbed into the front of the car and started
walking around in the footwells! Not
good news so we had to stop (it was beginning to snow) and get him back into
the basket. No sign of the spike but
fortunately I had some knitting with me so we were able to close the basket
with a knitting needle. We then had to
phone the place where we had had lunch.
They found the spike and posted it to us.
In Cornwall they had their favourite places and once again these tended to be up high.
Nui rearranging the Christmas hangings
Iti on top of the TV in Cornwall
In the summer of 2002 we went to Norway to visit my sister
and her husband who were living there.
We sent the cats back to the breeder where they did well although the
breeder thought that Iti was not litter-trained. She was.
It must have just been the stress of the ‘holiday’.
We moved to Cornwall at the beginning of 2006. The garden here is walled so it seemed safe
to let them off the leads but we always kept a close eye on them. Now it is we who have problems getting around
the garden. Nui was always keen on
climbing up the wall at the back and going to visit the neighbours. This meant our going out the side gate which
we never use and walking up the road and into the neighbour’s garden to collect
him although on some occasions we managed to talk him down from here. As I said earlier, Iti only lived till she
was eight. She developed the dreaded
kidney failure and died one very cold Christmas. Fortunately she was not ill for long although
we realised that she had probably been ill for some time as she used to spend a
lot of time in the airing cupboard and not want to go in the garden, even to
eat grass. We did not think too much about this because
the weather was getting colder and colder.
Nui lived till the day before his thirteenth birthday. We got him two sisters when Iti died and this
worked out very well. He was
particularly close to Hinemoa, the smaller of them. His health was not brilliant as when Iti took
ill he also developed something which gave him awful diarrohea. This recurred at intervals of several
weeks. It meant the laundry was constant
and there were times when I had to shut him out of my bedroom so that he could
not get on the bed. He was also on
steroids for several years as the kidney complaint kicked in.
In summer in Cornwall we could let them loose in the garden because
of the wall and they used to enjoy lying in the sun and sleeping the afternoon
away. They also enjoyed walking around the beds.
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