MagnifiCat

My Early Life
Part II
This ( promises promises) really is all you ever need to know. I'll try to keep it snappy, focus on essentials. No sob-stuff, no trauma.

I lived in a sickeningly picturesque, roses round the door cottage, complete with skull-cracking beams and far too many spiders. Just off the main village street, and the views were exceptional. By village, I don't mean anywhere with a Waitrose and a shop selling ribbons. The house where I was born is in a real village, with two live pubs, a school, a church, a Post Office a war memorial, and road signs to places people cross continents to see...
Writing about places like my birthplace, property journalists always throw in their narky ' why not' about buying.. This is because the entire breed ( estate agents, property journalists , out of work media types) all live in London and hate people who've managed to live somewhere beautiful instead.

O.K. the garden wasn't quite up to Yellow Book standard. The man had better things to do. Campaigning against the arms trade, why would he go in for chemical warfare? He shared his cherries, damsons, plums,strawberries, Tay berries and raspberries with other local wildlife, including the local coati... Not rhubarb, nothing else seems to eat the stuff, not even slugs. When the latter overstepped the agreed mark, he did entice a few of them to delicious death, with dregs of ... the local brew. Local = in the village, none of that C*** P*** stuff in the adverts. Describing my birthplace, I left out the brewery. Oversight... The brewery is one good reason to track down where I live. As for the slugs, death was their own fault and would have been peaceful.

Back to My Early Life

The girl and her father came twice, first to choose me, as the most beautiful and the only girl. Four weeks later, they were back. That was the last time I saw my the house where I was born, or my mother, or my brothers.
No crocodile tears... Why should I care about the brothers ? The two who survived infancy wanted all my share of everything, milk, our mother, space in the basket... My heart goes out to anyone who does have a brother.
Perhaps yours will improve with time. Mine ? We'd come to a parting of the ways, won't meet again.

Two weeks old, blue-eyed and mewling, ( me, not the girl )I was chosen, my fate was sealed. A month later, and any vet will tell you this was far too soon, the girl, her sister and her father came to take me away. One last passionate nuzzle at my favourite nipple... My mother, since you daren't ask, tasted of sweetness. In my own way, of course I loved her, she was my mother, cats don't do complicated, not about our mothers... I loved her, she loved us.
But I couldn't have stayed with her, sooner or later, we'd have to part, ae fond lick and gone forever...

A cat and her kindle of kittens is a classic icon of maternity. One old cat and three young cats = every single bill x 4, the vet, the food, the residential care, and even those laughably inadequate bribes people offer to neighbours, sickly fudge, sour wine, broken biscuits, poncey chocolates and, for godsake, tea-towels.
The last item is, of course, completely unforgiveable. Give a woman who's been kind to you a tea-towel and she will never, ever speak to you again. And if you leave the price on this tea-towel, she will, definitely, speak to every single one of your Facebook friends. She will tweet at the top of her voice until the whole world knows that you gave her a tea-towel and called it a PRESENT.
Cats don't wash up, but please remember this warning.

Prattling on about tea-towels and what not to give, I was avoiding the unavoidable truth, the sad and terrible reason why my brothers and I had to leave our mother so soon.

She was dying.