Blitz Kitty

“Cats on the rooftops, cats on the tiles
Cats with syphilis, cats with piles,
Cats with their arseholes wreathed in smiles”

My father rather surprised me by opening our conversation about his family’s wartime cat with this delightful little number. The conversation was a result of me telling him about one of our cats going to the vets for the umpteenth time that year, and he boasted about how his cat had survived the Blitz and only visited the vet twice in his life, at the beginning and end. Realising that the digital voice recorder I bought over a year ago had remained unused other than recording some particularly noisy grasshoppers on holiday, I set it to record and handed that and a cup of tea to Dad in his favourite recliner.

“Right Dad,” I ventured, “tell me about your wartime cat.”

“Our wartime cat was a pre-war cat”, Dad began, “and he was brought to us by a friend of my mother’s or perhaps my sisters’ before the war, about 1937. She used to work in the city this girl. And don’t forget, people at that time used to start work at about 14, and if they worked in a City firm they probably started working in the post-room and were not expected to stay there all their lives. She found this cat, obviously a feral cat of some sort, and she brought it round our front door in a cardboard box, and Mother didn’t particularly want to have a cat. We never had one at Dagenham, and we were saying “Oh yeah, must have a cat, must have a cat!” . It was a lovely little thing, I don’t think it was weaned properly. It was black and white, this lovely little kitten poking his head out, and we eventually persuaded her to have it, and she said “Well, you can have it, but you have to look after it”. But in the event we did all the right things, neutered it, and I think we got it wormed. They used to do it for free at the Royal Veterinary College in Royal College Street. We hopped on a bus with the cat in a cardboard box.

“We lived next door to a bakers, and when we first moved into St Silas Place, we used to get lots of mice under the stairs, and we used to borrow the cat up the road, called Tibbles. We used to put her in the cupboard under the stairs every night and she used to catch a few mice every now and again and lay them out for us in the morning. So when we got this new cat, of course, it put this other cat’s nose out of joint. Well, it was only a little kitten, but I must say it had the desired effect, having a cat in the house. It really got rid of all the mice that were in the cupboard under the stairs. We used to call this cupboard “The Mousy Cupboard”.

“We called it Chum, it wasn’t a “petty” cat, it was only in its old age it decided that it could be stroked and sleep on your lap occasionally, but it was really quite vicious. And it hated my sister, Brenda. I used to have a toy crane, with a little wind-up hook on it, and the cat got its paw trapped under the works of this crane, she released it and I think the cat resented it ever since. ‘Cause whenever she used to walk up the passageway by the stairs, which had banisters, the cat used to poke its paws through the banisters, and attack her. It never attacked anyone else, it was all a bit sad really.

“We didn’t buy any special food for it at the time, my mother used to more or less dish up a bit of meat and two veg., like we had for lunch. It might get an odd treat now and again. We used to have the Cats’ Meat Man come round, and he had a tricycle with a box on the front, like you used to have for ice-cream, and people would buy two penn’orth of cats meat, but we never used to do that ‘cause our cat had roast beef and Yorkshire pud.

“Anyhow, it just had a normal existence until we all went down to Potton during the to stay with our relatives in the country. And we stayed there from September to Christmas, in 1939. We came back to London to stay for a while, and of course the schools were all chaotic. We’d only go occasionally, and never had proper lessons as the schools were being evacuated. They authorities were going round the schools, telling pupils they’d have lovely holidays in Devon and Cornwall. In fact they were going up the road to Kettering or St Albans, which was where my sister Peggy was sent with the school. We stayed in London until we went back on holiday to Potton in about September 1940, and that was when the Blitz started. So we came home and we had a weekend of the Blitz when they bombed the docks and everything like that, and we stayed next door, they had like a reinforced outhouse. Don’t know why, it was just made of solid bricks with a roof on it I think, but we all slept in there for about 2 or 3 days before my father sent us back to Potton.

“But the poor old cat of course, he had to stay through all that. I don’t know an awful lot about him during that period between 1941 and when I came back to London to do the art school trade scholarship to St Martin’s about the end of 42. The Blitz had stopped, but there were still raids every now and then, and most nights you used to get disturbed. The cat was quite funny, he’d got so used to it by now, been scared once or twice, especially when a bomb fell at the back of the houses across the road. But he could hear the warning long before any of us could, and he used to run upstairs and hide under the wardrobe. Mum used to say “The cat’s under the wardrobe” and we’d go "Oh bugger me", so invariably the warning would sound and we’d lie there until we heard the guns fire. We used to grab a blanket and a pillow and go downstairs and sleep in our Morrison shelter, which was a big cast-iron table with a steel roof on it, and we could all squeeze in there. It was like a big double bed only not so comfortable, metal slats held in those little springs like you get in beach chairs. Theoretically they kept you off the floor, but in fact by putting your weight on them you landed on the floor. So we all kept our odd quilts and things in there so we could dive under there immediately.

“Anyway, the cat used to stay there until the all-clear sounded, and if the all-clear sounded but the cat didn’t come down, you could be sure that sooner or later they’d come back, and there’d be another warning. As soon as the cat came downstairs you knew you were going to be OK for an hour or two.

“Food-wise, we never got anything special for the cat, until during the war when things got difficult for everybody, we didn’t get enough meat and fish only occasionally. My mother used to hunt around for food for the cat. And she often used to buy lights, you know, cows’ lungs and things. She would boil them up on the stove and it used to look quite good actually. She’d slice it up and the cat used to like that, all the pipes and organs and that hanging out of it.

“The lights and things you could get from the butchers quite readily, if you happened to be there at the right time. But you used to queue for most things during the war, you didn’t just go in a shop and get served, you used to have to wait. There was a shop in Mornington Crescent, right opposite the Cobden Statue, and that was a horsemeat shop that opened later in the war, for human consumption only. You used to queue up for two or three hours at a time in there. You couldn’t have as much as you like, you could get a pound or two, whatever they were letting you have at the time. I always remember some poor old dear in the queue in front of me, and because she had too much pride to admit that she was going to eat it herself, instead of keeping her mouth closed, she said “It’s not for me you know, it’s for the cat”, and the butcher wouldn’t let her have any. We just took it and went, don’t care what people think, and the cat got a bit of horsemeat to eat.

“We used to get a bit of fish occasionally, towards the end of the war. Usually coley, which wasn’t considered fit for human consumption then, but the cat used to like it. So, he did quite well in the end.

"Chum used to pull the lavatory chain. The lavatory was outside, it used to have a cistern at the top then a chain with a metal loop at the end and he used to put his paws through and pull it, it wasn’t hard to do. It’d flush and he’d play with the water as it came down. I don’t know whether he drank it or not. We often had people staying with us and they’d wonder who was flushing the loo when there was no-one there.

"He also used to sit up and beg for his meals. We used to leave water out at nighttime in case it was cut off during the bombings, and he used to drink water out of the bowl in sink. After he learned to drink the water from there, he never drank it from anywhere else after that. If he nipped up on the sink you knew he wanted a drink.

“The poor old thing developed cancer. Must have been when I was about 17, before I did my National Service. I had to take him down to the Royal Veterinary College. He was about 10 or 12 years old. But he never had anything wrong with him in that intervening time. I mean cats develop cancer and that’s it, but in all that time he never suffered from anything, or went to the vets for any strange complaints or anything. I think if he had any little infections we dealt with it ourselves. But we didn’t brush him or anything like that. We knew he was sick, as he started flopping around and not eating and gradually wasting away. It was quite sad because I had to take him down the vet and come back without him. Which is a big thing when you’re about 17 or so.

“I think here endeth the cat lesson.”

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