It was wartime. We kept chickens. We had cats. The chickens inhabited a wire mesh enclosure taking up a large part of the vegetable garden. The cats would sit and stare at the chickens through the mesh, slinking gradually closer. The chickens would begin to assemble at that place. When a cat reached the wire the whole flock would be there squawking and flapping and shrieking and the cats would slink away. This little drama would be repeated at intervals throughout the day. The chickens provided us with eggs all through the war and ate food leavings, doubly helping the war effort. The cats were simply themselves—that’s the function of cats.
My mother loved all animals, even human ones. Growing up, she must often have been lonely at school and moving around different relatives, but there were always animals. Walthamstow Hall boarding school had a ‘young farmers union’ for many years and my mother thrived there in her free time as a girl. We always had cats, mostly pedigree Siamese seal point, and she began to breed them after the war as a hobby. While I was away at boarding school, the numbers rose and my father eventually built her a special cattery at the bottom of the garden; I remember counting 15 cats at one time, but that included two litters of adorable tiny kittens.
Oh, and we also had, at various times, budgerigars in cages (semi-tame), fish in small aquaria (non-tamed), and even for a time, hamsters. These did not mix very well with the cats and there were occasional tragedies. The cats also sometimes brought in trophies of wild birds, which I would take away from them, screaming. Me screaming, I mean—not the birds.
All this gave my friend Sandra and I many opportunities to have burial services. As the granddaughter of a vicar and with a taste for exotic drama, Sandra would devise the rituals. A strange liturgy of a wholly individual nature would be followed by a solemn procession, usually including Sandra’s younger sister Lueen and sometimes my mother, at these tearful burials of small creatures, wrapped up tenderly in purloined hankies.
I loved the cats too, but had no illusions about them. Coquette, my favourite, was very loving and adopted me when my mother was not available. One of her sons, Tito, remained with us. A big, neutered male, he would sit on my lap while my mother was frying a full English breakfast. I would cut up my food, chatting to my mother. The slightest distraction from my plate and there would be an almost invisible flash of paw and I would find the bacon inexplicably gone, with Tito purring lovingly and looking innocent.
One of our Tito’s litter brothers was given to Dr Doreen Firmin, my mother’s friend, head of the ‘Special Hospital’ in Caterham. We would see him there on our visits, as he lived to the ripe old age of 25, monarch of all he surveyed.
But the dogs—ah! The dogs were different. My parents gave me a little Pekingese puppy when I was about 10, I think, and she was my constant companion at home from then on, cats or not. At about the same time Sandra had a slightly larger ‘lovable mutt’—a black and white mongrel called Sooty. My mother looked after Ping, as we called her, in the term-time when I went to boarding school, but all through the holidays Sandra and I would have our doggy companions and explore the world on long walks, up and down leafy lane, or round the recreation ground, to Addington parkland and the Shirley Hills—all countryside then, with few people around except other dog walkers.
One of these walkers was a woman who told us to call her ‘Margery’, and who sometimes had two or three other dogs in addition to her own two, presumably a ‘dog walker’. Sandra, who had been taught to call her mother ‘Audrey’ and her grandparents ‘mummy and daddy’, probably didn’t find it strange. But for me—like most of my age group—it was revolutionary! The closest you got to first names with adults always had the prefix Uncle or Auntie. So Margery was special from the first—and if anything I held her more in awe, not less, for this informality.
I can’t really guess how old she was—adults often just seem ‘old’ at that stage, but I guess now as probably no more than early 40s, if that. She invited us back to her house, a little bungalow on the edge of some woodlands, and we met her husband, who she asked us to call ‘Uncle Ulick’ because, she said, he was a lot older than her. I remember a benign smiling man, always seated in a big chair at the far end of the room, who greeted us but never joined in conversation.
My little dog Ping should have had flowing silky hair, but it never seemed to grow like that. I didn’t mind. I had no wish to show her off and didn’t want to brush her hair a lot, any more than brushing my own short bob of straight fine hair. Sandra and I did go through a phase of dressing our dogs up in silly ways and laughing at them. Without openly criticising, Margery somehow got us to see that our dogs put up with it because they loved us, but were not really at all happy, so we gradually let them be dogs in their own way. I have never really wanted to dress up animals to be funny since then, although I do admit the pictures are very cute.
Margery taught us a great deal else, without ever seeming to. She would pick grass stems and leaves and get us to study them closely, finding similarities and differences, but with a sense of joy and wonder, not of learning lessons or names. She would often take out a magnifying glass, and look even closer.
Then she showed us how you could shine the sun’s rays onto a dry leaf and write words on it, as it charred, moving quickly. I realise that she was very responsible, in all this. She taught us never to shine it on our skin, or dried grass which might burst into flame and never, ever to look through the glass at the sun or any other light.
She gradually shared what I can only call her religion with us, though it was never overt. Margery pointed out that God was Dog spelled backwards and indeed there was a sense that both she and Sandra shared an almost worshipful attitude to their dogs. As we grew a little older, she introduced to us the idea of spelling out these words by burning them into a dried leaf. You had to be very quiet and still—difficult for me, who was a fidgety wriggler at most times—but gradually, under the longing to do this, I held my hand steady and made many quiet ‘prayers’ in this way. Indeed, she also taught us that another name for God was OM, which we inscribed on many leaves and incorporated into Sandra’s religious rituals, with no understanding of where it came from—and none necessary!
Life changes and moves on. Even before I went to boarding school, Sandra’s grandfather retired and later on the whole family moved to the country near Guildford. Sandra and I wrote to each other, even visited a few times, but of course, it was never the same. Gone were the days of long walks and seeing Margery, by a natural change of our holiday ways. I don’t even remember if we ever said goodbye to her at the time, though each of us, separately, paid a sort of courtesy call many years later and found her and Uncle Ulick much the same, smiling, friendly and accepting.
My mother looked after Ping during my terms away at Walthamstow Hall and by now my little dog was old and breathless, more than content to sit curled up on my lap in the holidays, or snoring at my feet while I read about magic castles and beautiful princesses and dreamed of travelling the world. She died while I was away at school and I mourned her, but without the extreme grief that would have attended me earlier on.
Years later, reading about other cultures and religions, I realised that Margery had probably been a practicing Buddhist, well before the Beatles and the whole Eastern hippy movement—and what she had shown us was undoubtedly a form of mindfulness. It also meant that when, at 16 years old I joyfully decided to be baptised and become a practising Christian, I was very open to the whole idea of mindfulness prayer, meditation and the works of mystical saints to which my teachers at boarding school introduced me, without ever realising that Margery herself, this quiet unassuming woman, whose last name I can’t even remember, had been another of the best influences in my life. I knew she had loved Sandra and me, Sooty and Ping, with an unassuming and steadfast love, which asked nothing but gave so much, making no complaint when our company was lost to her.