The life story of an extraordinary cat
My tabby cat Dolly died aged 19 on Midsummer’s Eve. I am aware there are those in the world who most likely cannot ever comprehend how the loss of a cat could ever be compared to that of, say, a son or daughter. Yet I say to those people, look at the time span involved. I was 21-years-old when Dolly came into my life as a kitten. As I write this, I’m less than a year off 40. Then imagine how many formative life experiences I have been through with my cat either at my side or waiting for me at home to remind me I am loved.
I bought Dolly at a pet shop in Kilburn, north London. This was my first stay in London, resulting from my coming out as gay when I was a born-again Christian and needing to get out of the Christian community I’d been living in, in Cobham, Surrey having gone there after leaving home for the first time. I made rash, youthful, sometimes crazy decisions. Dolly was not one of them. As I recall, she cost around five pounds – a disgustingly small sum of money. The litter had been composed of several boys and two girls. I wanted a girl but one had already been sold and Dolly, I was told, was the runt of the litter. That clinched it for me. I bought the runt – certainly the tiniest kitten I had ever seen, her brothers much larger – and walked out of the shop with her mewling in a cardboard box.
I transported my new pet on London Transport, both tubes and buses. Everywhere we went, people stared at the noisy box wobbling on my lap. It was on the Central Line where Dolly was given her name. I had been chewing over several ideas for names ever since leaving the pet shop but eventually – between Holborn and Oxford Circus – I came up with Dolly because of the musical. Hello, Dolly. On her first day with me, she got herself lost in my bedsheets and, incredibly it seems to me now, it took me over an hour to locate her. She had got inside the quilt lining and extrapolating her proved to be as formidable a project as an archaeological dig.
My flatmates, it eventually turned out, were criminals who robbed me of clothes and money. Their worst offence as far as I was concerned was taking Dolly from my room, hiding her for a day and telling me she’d been run over, only handing her over after I had spent hours searching the streets of Leyton, then crying in my room. They found it all enormously funny. It was a huge misfortune to find myself in the company of the deranged. I never found out what they had done with my kitten but from that day forward she was terrified of going outside. Only in her final months here in the countryside did she occasionally surprise D and I by wandering out the kitchen door to take the air, hear the birds and then come wobbling back in. I knew the end was near then, but I move ahead in my tale too soon and must stay with the past, for now.
The flatmates never handed the rent over and eventually the landlord sent his cronies – for he was as much a criminal himself – to break in through the living room window one night demanding the missing rent in full and then some. Otherwise hammers would be used on heads. I recall barricading myself in my bedroom with Dolly and eventually my flatmates had to pay up. One of them then turned on me and beat me up. I’d had enough. I wanted to go home. I called my parents, a broken youngster with a little girl in tow whose love sustained me through those lonely, terrible times.
Dolly was there rubbing her head against me to console me after too many break-ups to count. She came back home with me to my parents from London to Lancashire, a squeaking adventuress in the back of a minivan filled with my few possessions back then. She was my friend when I could only whisper in her ears and could not tell my parents of some things that had happened to me, bad things. I can honestly say Dolly’s presence at times saved my life.
I remember Dolly sitting on my bed watching my college friend Janet and myself writing a play about Lewis Carroll for our final A-level Theatre Studies project. She enjoyed meeting my college, and later university, friends. She did not, however, care for many of the men who came into my life. She had a habit of turning her back on those she disapproved of, and her judgements were immediate and lasting.
I moved to London with ,u (then) boyfriend to start my undergraduate degree. For the first six months, Dolly had to stay with my parents because we had a bedsit at first, too small to have a pet and besides the landlord, who also lived in the house, would never have permitted it. He was too busy, it became apparent, being beaten up and nearly murdered on a regular basis by his Finnish boyfriend, whose idea of gay relationships meant one man was the ‘lady’ – he demeaned his partner with the term – and one the ‘man’ which, for him, meant it was his right and privilege to be the dispenser of arbitrary domestic violence. My then-partner and I got out as quickly as we could. Once we found a home we could bring Dolly to, we travelled back up north for her.
I hated those six months. I missed Dolly every single day. Why I ever agreed to leaving her behind is beyond me, and certainly too far back in the mists of time to remember. What I do remember is how much weight she’d put on when she came to greet me at my parents.
‘Good God, Mother,’ I exclaimed. ‘How much have you been feeding her?’
‘We only fed her when she was hungry,’ my mum protested.
‘She’s a cat,’ I said. ‘She’s always going to say she’s hungry if you’re prepared to put food down for her.’
It was good to have my little girl back in my arms and she returned to London with us on a strict diet. She was there for me when I graduated, watching me from the bed as I got dressed up in my cap and gown, waiting at home for me when I came back. She ran from the angry voices in the living room and the sound of smashed ornaments when my then-partner and I broke up.
Dolly could see through people as if they were made from glass. Until D came into our lives, all men fell short of her ideal, which was, I suppose, thinking about it, me. That cat knew exactly what she wanted for me, I swear. She wanted someone, maybe, she sensed to be compatible in emotional terms. I sometimes think she planned ahead for a time when she would no longer be here. I know in recent years she worried about dying, about leaving me behind, about what would happen to me. Don’t ask me how I know. I just do. Dolly loved D from the very first moment she met him. Her immediate, warm approval sealed his destiny as the (human) love of my life; that, and the fact that this effervescent 19-year-old man’s big brown eyes glowed bright when he first caught sight of my girl, peeping at him.
I guess it wasn’t just love at first sight for D and I. The cat was part of the deal and D always had a good thing going with Dolly. He loved Dolly as much as I did. He spent nearly eight years in her company.
Dolly saw our family of felines expand as we took in tatty, damaged strays in Hackney, where D and I set up our first home together. She never got on with the other cats but they respected her; they had to, or a mean right hook with claws extended brought them into line. The one exception was the only other cat not to be found on the street but bought from a pet shop: B’Elanna, our perpetual kitten, simple – and I do mean simple – but very sweet. She was mothered by Dolly after she got past some initial resentment. I’d had Dolly neutered as a responsible pet owner back when she was tiny and so, for a time, I got to see a side to my girl I’d never seen before and would never see again. She would groom B’Elanna, discipline and chastise her, love her. It stopped when B’Elanna left kittenhood behind but I gained enough insight to know Dolly would have been an excellent mother to the babies she never had.
Dolly was there when we moved out of rented accommodation and bought our flat in London, watching us decorate, watching our friends come and go. She was there when D and I broke up for a short time, consoling me during our never-quite separation. Her joy when D returned to the family home after we’d been through relationship counselling was written all over her little face, although D knows to this day how much he angered her. She felt personally betrayed by him, no doubt about it, but forgiveness was easy for her and after some initial chastisement and sulking, nothing more was detected to suggest she gave his temporary absence any more thought.
Dolly travelled from London to our new home in the countryside with me on the train while the removal van traversed the roads and motorways, and D travelled with his mum in her car with the other pets. Dolly had a rarely-used harness and lead just for times like the day we moved, and when safely in my seat I was able to let her out of her carrier. She enjoyed putting her front feet on the window, watching fascinated as the trees and houses, rivers, cows and sheep rushed past at high speed. She also loved the attention she got from fellow passengers, even children. She was a show-off, proud because I guess her family made her feel that way.
Anybody who thinks losing a pet – and Dolly was, let’s face it, not a pet – is secondary to losing a child or lover, mother or brother, can think again. I’m not getting into debates about whether human life is or should be seen as more important than other species. I am only saying that grief disrespects prejudice and one of the big crimes of our society compared to civilisations that have gone before is the way in which some people expect those who lose animal companions of many years to just ‘get over it’. They think it silly, somehow weak, to express love and care for animals.
I say, get over your own emotional handicaps and don’t judge that which you don’t understand. I’m glad of the time I spent with Dolly. I am left with wonderful memories, and the love, which will never go away. As long as I am alive, she will be remembered fondly as a very special creature and a friend.
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