brigitte downey
CHAPTER 1
My wild Irish youth screeched to a horrible halt the day Dr. Jack decided it simply wasn't sane for a respectable Kerry doctor to be doing house calls with a cat strapped into the baby seat next to him. As a kitten I drove with Deirdre all over Kerry when her Daddy, Dr. Jack visited patients in remote areas. But the minute I became a teenage cat, Dr. Jack ordered ‘no more driving!’. I was a Kerry cat. I had to murder mice, sleep in the smelly shed and not on Deirdre’s duvet and NEVER again get into a car. Deirdre was gutted. This was not the cultured lifestyle she was preparing me for. But no amount of wailing and sobbing would budge Dr. Jack. My driving days were officially over. So was my beautiful youth.
Deirdre discussed my awful situation with her first cousin April who was visiting from Wimbledon at the time. The London branch of the MacNamara family (Mr. and Mrs. Mac and their two kids, Liam and April) were making their annual pilgrimage home to the Kingdom of Kerry. After a deluge of weeping Deirdre gave me away to April who swore a holy oath that in Wimbledon I’d have a cultured lifestyle and retain my driving privileges. I’d eat and sleep indoors and have my own private toilet. Deirdre assured me I wouldn’t be lonely because three quarters of the Irish were already over in London. She swore she’d come and visit me as soon as she could.
The girls slipped a gigantic dose of rescue remedy into my morning porridge plus a few of Mrs. Mac’s sleeping pills. Normally Mrs. Mac “abhors” pills but she needs an arsenal of them to survive the annual family holiday to the wilds of Kerry. Mrs. Mac is originally from the poshest part of Dublin and finds Kerry country life excruciating. Before she married Mr. Mac she hadn’t even heard of slurry or cracked cows’ teats.
The pills zonked me out for 36 hours. I woke up in Wimbledon when April produced me from her rucksack. ‘You deliberately destroyed a brand new rucksack for that cat?’ was Mrs. Mac's livid reaction on seeing me and the huge holes the girls had gouged in the rucksack so I wouldn’t smother and die on the long ferry crossing. To this day I wish I’d been awake to see the Irish sea with my own eyes.
Mr. Mac's take on my appearance in Wimbledon was a fit of swearing. But that was cut short because swearing isn’t allowed in the Macs’ home while the children are awake. I had been ‘smuggled illegally’ into the UK he repeated in a strangled voice. They couldn’t possibly keep me. I’d have to be put down. I had already escaped being put down at birth unlike four others in my litter. My brother Bexley and I had been spared so we could keep the rats at bay around the farm. I escaped putting down a second time because April had a screaming fit and said they'd have to put her down as well.
To this day Mr. Mac calls me ‘that cat’. Mrs. Mac occasionally refers to me as ‘sweetie’. To liceriddled Liam my name is ‘Kebab meat’. April calls me ‘Fluffy’. She thinks it’s my real name. It’s the one Deirdre gave me. But ‘Fluffy’ is not a name I am comfortable with. I am indeed a gorgeous mixed white and ginger fluff ball but I would prefer to be called Lucia because ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ was the CD I heard during those exciting drives in the car through the wilds of Kerry with Deirdre and Dr. Jack. When he’s driving Dr. Jack only ever plays the ‘Goldberg Variations’ or ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’. It was a choice between Lucia, Goldberg or Bach.
After those long drives with Dr. Jack I knew all the Lucia arias by heart and they’re a huge challenge for the greatest of divas. It was my goal to wow all and sundry at the annual Kerry Cat Fleadh where talented felines showcase their singing, dancing and performing prowess. Being the Star of the Kerry Cat Fleadh was another dream that fizzled and died on the ferry over to England.
After the Rescue Remedy Emigration Episode I nearly died from loneliness. Every evening when Mr. Mac returned from work and parked his car my heart broke into a million bits. The memories! Deirdre fastening me securely into baby Shaun’s car seat so that when Dr. Jack braked abruptly, my guts wouldn’t end up splattered all over the inside of the windshield. Oh Deirdre, Deirdre how I missed you! How would I ever survive this weird urban world of Wimbledon?
One evening I heard Mr. and Mrs. Mac reminiscing about how lonely they were when
they were first lived alone in London. Mr. Mac, a man not given to poetic flights
of fancy, commented that ‘Alone in London’ had more killer sadness in it than half
of Shakespeare. Well, try being a teenage cat alone in London! One minute you’re
a spoilt kitten in the Kingdom of Kerry. Life is a whirlwind of activities: pretend
Confession with Deirdre when Fr. Nash isn’t around; e-
I ached for home, the trees, the hedges, the fields and the freedom to roam. I appreciated the comfort of my private Wimbledon toilet and duvet. But the longing in me for the wild country will never die. I missed the feel of fresh country air fluffing up my fur. I missed my brother Bexley and the other wild Kerry cats. I missed the literary evenings under the stars listening to Klone, the oldest cat raconteur in Kerry. Cats for miles around gathered at midnight to listen to his fur chilling tales about our ancestors who sailed on giant ships to Australia and the New World. Only Klone could do proper justice to the stories of those feline heroes and heroines who saved millions of sailors and passengers by murdering the rats that infested those ships. We could all recite the ending of those stories – ‘Without those valiant cats, The Plague and The Black Death would have dispatched millions of people to a gruesome watery grave.’
Now I’ll never again hear one of Klone’s stories.
I’ll never again see my best friends Miraclepuss, Jamie and Thingie. We were the
Fearsome Four. I’ll never again play ‘massacre the midges’ at twilight with them.
Miraclepuss – Mp -
I missed them all so deeply I even felt angry at Deirdre for making me emigrate. But she had never visited London and wasn’t to know that the Wimbledon garden wasn’t even half the size of a decent field. It didn’t have lush, soft grass but a lawn that was shaved bare on a weekly basis. Deirdre didn’t know that the Wimbledon air was filthy and stunk of petrol. The flowers weren’t scented like the ones in Kerry. There weren’t any real birds like corncrakes, curlews or swallows – just those flying rats that shit everywhere.
The Wimbledon home interior rated zero for cat excitement. No Daddy Long Legs skittering up the walls, no juicy spiders strolling around the bath, not a silverfish or a beetle to break the monotony. I’d be the first teenage cat to die of boredom and loneliness in Wimbledon. How was I going to survive?
It was Deirdre and her writing ambitions that gave me the answer. When she grows
up Deirdre is going to be President, or an acrobat or maybe a writer. She practices
by sending us long e-
That’s how I got the idea for these journals. In Kerry, Deirdre was writing up the everyday events. I could do the same. I am a cultured teenage cat. The mental challenge will help me cope with this awful Wimbledon world I live in and distract me from dying of depression and loneliness.
I dedicate my Cat Journals to Deirdre MacNamara of Bailegra, Co. Kerry. I am calling them ‘Diaries of a Cultured Cat’.
