Re: Phil's Phings
The Cat in the Coalhouse - Part 2
After a minute or two, she headed off back to the gardens at the rear of our house and I went to retrieve our rabbit from a line of our neighbour’s hopeful winter greens. As the light was fading and chasing a black rabbit in the twilight tends to be an overrated pastime, I caught her, with no little difficulty, and returned her kicking and grumbling (the rabbit, not me) to her newly-cleaned hutch. I was just latching the hutch door when my eye was attracted by some movement at the bottom of the garden. To my surprise, the cat was back, but she wasn’t alone. Trailing behind her, in a perfect line as she trotted proudly up the garden path, were three tiny kittens. I stood there in a state of absolute astonishment as this unexpected feline family swept past me and headed toward our back yard. Each kitten was a miniature replica of its mother, mostly white, completely white in one case, but with some tricolour or grey patches. Two were long-haired, little balls of fluff and one was sleek and short-haired, just like his mum.
I suppose that our house was a pretty standard design for a terraced house built in the late 19th Century. The ground floor consisted of a front room, which we rarely used except for high days and holidays, an under-the-stairs cupboard, a living room, in which much of our life was spent, which had a window that looked out onto our half of the yard and the gardens beyond. In addition, there was a long thin kitchen, again with a window looking out onto the yard, and this had a pantry at the end. Sharing that end of the kitchen, with an access from the yard only, was the coalhouse or ‘coal hole’ as it was colloquially known.
Our coalhouse was no longer filled with ‘nutty slack’ but tended to be a repository for all of those things that ‘might come in useful one day’. There were various gardening implements, items for use on the beach (bucket, spade, ball etc.), an occasional small bag of coal and various other items in the dark recesses that were probably there before we arrived and would, no doubt, still be there long after we had gone. The wooden coalhouse door had seen better days and chunks of it were missing at the bottom where wear and tear and rot had taken their toll.
The cat, and her new family, made a bee-line for the coalhouse. I watched as she slipped swiftly through the hole in the door, closely followed by each of her charges in turn. I suppose that the whole episode had only taken a few minutes at most, but to me, as I stood there rooted to the spot, it seemed to have all happened in slow motion. Now that the drama had unfolded, I simply had to tell someone about it, and I guessed that the rabbit wouldn’t be all that interested. I rushed into our house in a state of high excitement. Mum and my sister, Anne were engrossed in the Sunday afternoon film. Dad was slumped in the chair with his eyes shut, ‘thinking’ as he put it, which always seemed to involve a good deal of snoring. All were oblivious to the scene that I had just witnessed. I rattled out my story and we congregated, those of us that were awake anyway, at the living room window. There was no sign of cat or kittens.