Raining Cats and Donkeys Read online

  Praise for Cats in the Belfry

  'A chaotic, hilarious and heart-wrenching love affair with this most characterful of feline breeds'

  THE PEOPLE'S FRIEND

  'If you read Cats in the Belfry the first time round, be prepared to be enchanted all over again. If you haven't, then expect to laugh out loud, shed a few tears and be totally captivated by Doreen's stories of her playful and often naughty Siamese cats'

  YOUR CAT magazine

  'An invasion of mice prompted Tovey and her husband to acquire a cat – or rather for Sugieh to acquire them. A beautiful Siamese, Sugieh turned out to be a tempestuous, iron-willed prima donna who soon had her running circles around her. And that's before she had kittens! A funny and poignant reflection of life with a Siamese, that is full of cheer'

  THE GOOD BOOK GUIDE

  'Cats in the Belfry will ring bells with anyone who's ever been charmed – or driven to distraction – by a feline'

  THE WEEKLY NEWS

  'A warm, witty and moving cat classic. A must for all cat lovers'

  LIVING FOR RETIREMENT

  'Absolutely enchanting... I thoroughly recommend it... One of the few books which caused me to laugh out loud, and it sums up the Siamese character beautifully'

  www.summerdown.co.uk

  'The most enchanting cat book ever'

  Jilly Cooper

  'Every so often, there comes along a book – or if you're lucky, books – which gladden the heart, cheer the soul and actually immerse the reader in the narrative. Such books are written by Doreen Tovey'

  CAT WORLD

  Praise for Cats in May

  'If you loved Doreen Tovey's Cats in the Belfry you won't want to miss the sequel, Cats in May. The Toveys' attempt to settle down to a quiet life in the country but, unfortunately for them, their tyrannical Siamese cats have other ideas. From causing an uproar on the BBC to staying out all night, Sheba and Solomon's outrageous behaviour leaves the Toveys at their wits' end. This witty and stylish tale will have animal lovers giggling to the very last page'

  YOUR CAT magazine

  'No-one writes about cats with more wit, humour and affection than Doreen Tovey. Every word is a delight!'

  THE PEOPLE'S FRIEND

  Praise for The New Boy

  'Delightful stories of Tovey's irrepressible Siamese cats'

  PUBLISHING NEWS

  Also by Doreen Tovey:

  Cats in Cahoots

  Cats in Concord

  Cats in May

  Cats in the Belfry

  A Comfort of Cats

  The Coming of Saska

  Donkey Work

  Double Trouble

  Life with Grandma

  Making the Horse Laugh

  More Cats in the Belfry

  The New Boy

  Roses Round the Door

  Waiting in the Wings

  RAINING CATS AND DONKEYS

  This edition published in 2010 by Summersdale Publishers Ltd.

  First published by Michael Joseph Ltd in 1967.

  Copyright © Doreen Tovey 1967.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.

  The right of Doreen Tovey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Summersdale Publishers Ltd

  46 West Street

  Chichester

  West Sussex

  PO19 1RP

  UK

  www.summersdale.com

  eISBN: 978-1-78372-040-8

  Substantial discounts on bulk quantities of Summersdale books are available to corporations, professional associations and other organisations. For details contact Summersdale Publishers by telephone: +44 (0) 1243 771107, fax: +44 (0) 1243 786300 or email: [email protected].

  Contents

  1 Donkeys Get You Like That

  2 So Do Siamese Cats

  3 To Horse! To Horse!

  4 Solomon and the Loch Ness Monster

  5 The Bread Line

  6 When Winter Comes

  7 And Spring is Far Behind

  8 Music Hath Charms

  9 Getting Things Moving

  10 Annie Mated

  11 How to Light an Aga

  12 Vitamins for Everybody

  13 Comes the Spring

  14 Putting a Foot in It

  15 Anniehaha

  16 Like Solomon only Horse-sized

  ONE

  Donkeys Get You Like That

  Charles said the people who wrote this bilge in the newspapers about donkeys being status symbols were nuts.

  At that moment we were in our donkey's paddock dealing with the fact that she'd eaten too many apples, and I couldn't have agreed with him more.

  Take the paddock itself, for instance. Ours wasn't the lush green plot surrounded by a neat hedge or smart wire fence such as various of our neighbours kept ponies in. It was a rectangle so bare it looked as if we'd been visited by locusts. Criss-crossed with still barer paths leading to the various lookouts from which Annabel spied on passers-by. Surrounded on three sides by hedges which gave the impression of having had a pudding-basin haircut (eaten, as they were, up to Annabel height in a solid, unvarying line all round the field). And on the fourth side, which separated the paddock from the cottage garden, it sported a wire fence.

  The sort of fence one associates with gipsy encampments.

  The wire sagging where Annabel leaned on it sling-fashion, or rubbed her stomach in dreamy contemplation when she itched. Other pieces of wire reinforcing the original strands in the places where she had been discovered, at various times, trying to crawl under it on hands and knees. A hurdle gate leaning outwards at a decrepitly drunken angle because Annabel, when she felt like it, used the inside of the gate for resting her bottom on. And just at that moment, in the paddock itself, Annabel with stomach-ache.

  She'd been lent to a neighbour to graze down his orchard.

  Why people borrowed her when she had a record long enough to send her to Botany Bay was anybody's guess, but there it was. People were always saying could they have her round to be company to their pony for a few days, or they had their grandchildren coming and could Annabel come up on their lawn for the afternoon, or there was a nice bit of grass behind their vegetable plot and it would save them scything it if Annabel could eat it.

  The sensible thing, knowing Annabel, would have been to say No to all of them. But how could we when, on the few occasions we had hardened our hearts, the enquirers looked at us as if we were discriminating against them at a prize-giving? So we would say 'Well, if you think you can manage her... ' And off would go Annabel, looking like a picture on a birthday card with her Beatle fringe, her shaggy buff coat and her little round white stomach. (Annabel is a Scandinavian-type donkey, which is why, for three parts of the year, she has a yak-like coat and is continually being mistaken for a Shetland pony or an out-size sheepdog). And we would settle down to some gardening with the feeling of parents who have, against their better judgement, allowed a small boy to go to a party and are now pretty certain that he has taken his pea-shooter with him.

  They'd be back sooner or later with the inevitability of a boomerang. Annabel had chased the pony. Annabel had eaten
the children's ice cream. Annabel – in the case of the grass behind the vegetable plot – had wandered on her tether rope round a rabbit hutch, pulled it over, and dragged it with her like a chain-harrow as she proceeded on her way. For once she herself hadn't eaten anything she shouldn't, but the dragging had opened the hutch door and the rabbits had had a field day in the lettuce.

  Annabel in the case of the orchard grass had, on first reporting, behaved herself very well. 'Just reached an apple down here and there', said the owner of the orchard fondly. 'Nobody'd begrudge the little creature that'.

  Whereupon off he pottered towards his Saturday supper, giving the little creature a pat on the rump in parting, and half an hour later we found her rolling on her back in the paddock, her coat damp with sweat, and groaning.

  We didn't think it was colic at first. Not just on a couple of apples. Fearing the worst, which had become a habit with us after several years of keeping Siamese cats and two years of keeping a donkey, our thoughts flew to plastic bags. One of these, eaten by an animal, is invariably fatal. We'd been reading about it in our pony book only a few days previously. It blocks the intestines completely and, as there is no indication as to where it lies, nothing can be done about it.

  We voiced our fears to our neighbour, Father Adams, who happened by just then as he usually does in moments of crisis. ''Ouldn't surprise I at all', was his reply. 'Old Fred's orchard right by the bus-stop and they there hikers stuffin' theirselves while they wait as if they'm about to cross the Sahara (Father Adams had recently been to see Lawrence of Arabia and references to it coloured his every utterance at the moment) – 'tis a wonder t'aint happened afore'. With which words of comfort – on later reflection we were sure he hadn't thought any such thing, otherwise he'd have stayed and helped us to the last – he, too, proceeded on his way to supper, and I ran for the telephone.

  The Vet came so fast at the thought of a plastic bag he forgot to put his boots in the car. It was a great relief to learn that it was only colic, but we felt rather guilty watching him depart half an hour later – his evening spoilt, his suede shoes covered in mud and his light, off-duty trousers marked by Annabel's flailing hooves as he felt hurriedly to find what was wrong.

  He'd given her a morphia injection to ease the pain and told us to keep her on her feet and walk her about in the paddock. The danger with colic, he said, was the possibility of the gut getting twisted while she rolled. Otherwise, by the time the morphia wore off, the attack would have passed and she'd be all right.

  She was indeed. The only trouble was, we hadn't been able to keep her on her feet. As the morphia took effect Annabel sank on the end of her halter like an anchor and went to sleep right in the middle of the paddock. We couldn't get her up again. We couldn't leave her, of course – just in case her gut did get twisted, or she failed to come round from the morphia, or one of the dozen or so other catastrophes we could think of occurred. So there we were. Me sitting in the field with her head on my lap. Charles enquiring every few minutes whether her breathing was all right. Donkeys get you like that. It didn't stop us realising, however – what with the decrepit state of the paddock, and people coming past and eyeing us curiously when they saw her stretched on out my lap like a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the thought that, for the umpteenth time, we'd got the Vet over at panic-point when it really wasn't serious at all – that our donkey hardly enhanced our social standing. Even though we wouldn't have parted with her for worlds.

  A few weeks previously we'd had a fright because Annabel was limping. There was nothing in her foot when we looked, but, behind the hard rim of her hoof, the leathery part known as the frog looked soft and spongy to us. On one foot a bit of the frog actually appeared to be missing. Footrot, we diagnosed in alarm, remembering what a seaside donkey-man had once told us about not letting donkeys stand around on damp ground. In Ireland, he said, where they live in bogs so much, they often get soft spongy places on the bottom of their feet which can never be cured. The hoof just rots away and the donkey is fit for nothing but to be put down.

  Filled with apprehension – there was a damp patch in Annabel's field and Charles said I knew he'd said often enough about bringing her in when it rained – we consulted Father Adams, who said it was undoubtedly footrot too, and I got straight on to the Vet. It had been a great relief on that occasion to find that it was only a sprained hock – how she'd sprained it when she hadn't been out of her paddock all day was a mystery known only to Annabel – but Mr Harler, having raced over after my call with visions of her feet disintegrating practically before his eyes, was a bit sharp about it.

  He gave her cortisone to reduce the swelling. Advised us to keep her shut up for a couple of days so she couldn't walk on it too much. Let him know if the swelling didn't go down, of course, he said. But, if it wasn't too much to ask, he would like his Sunday in peace...

  What happened certainly wasn't our fault. The previous winter we'd had a jennet called Henry over from the local seaside to keep Annabel company. Jennets, being a cross between a donkey and a horse, are not supposed to be able to mate, but Annabel and Henry had had a shot at it. With the local riding mistress as witness, as a matter of fact, after they'd broken out at two o'clock one morning and she'd found them running around in the road outside her stables. She put them in her paddock for the night and there, next morning, they'd mated. When she told us about it, saying but of course it was all right, jennets and mules were barren, weren't they, Charles recalled with alarm Henry's owner saying they were as a rule but he'd heard of a case or two in the East where they'd managed it, and we had something else to worry about.

  For months we'd kept an eye on Annabel. Nothing had come of it, however. What with all the other exigencies of donkey-keeping and looking after Siamese cats we'd really quite forgotten about it. Until we shut Annabel into her shed in the paddock that weekend to rest her foot, and people came past and saw the hurdle door tied into place, and then – not having counted the months on their fingers as we had – the rumour went round the village that Annabel was having her foal.

  We'd been out on the Saturday afternoon. When we came back the paddock was strewn with apples and cake. A large bag of bread was propped at the paddock gate. Another bag of bread and a box of sugar were at the kitchen door. That evening practically the entire village either called or telephoned to enquire after Annabel's health. And at ten o'clock the Vet rang up.

  What was this about our donkey being in foal? he demanded. He sounded rather brusque for someone ringing up to congratulate us. Perhaps he was annoyed at not being told, I thought. Hastily I assured him that it wasn't true. If it had been, of course he'd have been the first to know, I told him consolingly.

  First his foot, said Mr Harler. It was just that they didn't give cortisone to animals in foal. There could be all sorts of complications and it would be just like us not to know. When I explained that it was a false alarm – about people seeing her shed shut up and her romance the previous winter with Henry – he said that was just like us too. We certainly got no uplift from our donkey.

  TWO

  So Do Siamese Cats

  At first sight, of course, the cats more than made up for the prestige we lost over Annabel. People who would have passed the cottage with scarcely a glance stopped as if struck when they saw them in the yard. Solomon sitting tall and straight behind the fish-pool like a statue of Bast, eyeing them with the incomparable hauteur of a Siamese tom who knows how handsome he is. Sheba beaming cross-eyedly at them from her favourite spot on the coal-house roof 'Oh look – Siamese!' they would exclaim, gazing with new eyes at this little valley cottage which, for all its apparent modesty, housed two such aristocrats of the cat world.

  That was all they knew about it. Those elegant creatures, looking as if the only way they moved from place to place was in a royal litter with Charles and I carrying the poles, regularly got us into as much trouble as a posse of donkeys put together and were, just around then, involved in a feud with
a black and white tom.

  He was an immigrant from a neighbouring village.

  People knew who his owners were and he'd been taken home to them several times with the suggestion that they have him neutered. Miss Wellington, a neighbour of ours who worried about these things, even offered to pay for it. His owners wouldn't hear of it. Apparently they liked a feline Captain Blood around the place. Old Butch wouldn't be the same if they did that, they said, fondling his black and white bullet head affectionately. Too right he wouldn't, and the valley would have been a far more peaceful place in consequence. As it was he'd be back within hours, looking up his girl friends and fighting with the boys, and Charles and I, when we knew he was around, had to keep a non-stop watch on Solomon. Other cats, after one encounter, had a wholesome respect for Butch. Solomon, our black-faced Walter Mitty, had the idea that he, not Butch, was Captain Blood and was prepared to fight till he dropped to prove it.