my life in cats
T
S Eliot has his
character J Alfred
Prufrock tell us that he
has measured out his
life “in coffee spoons”.
But some of us
measure out our life
in cats. To begin at
the beginning: Mum
said that there were
kittens at the butcher’s
in the high street. She said to
take a towel, wrap one of the
kittens in it and bring it back.
My brother and I nipped
round the corner to the shop,
picked out a kitten and ran back
home with it.
I was about seven. We lived
in a flat above a shop at 6a Love
Lane, Pinner, in northwest
London. Nearly 70 years later
I can still hear the kitten’s
high-pitched mews. It was a
tabby. The only tabby we knew
was Simpkin. I knew Simpkin
really well. The real one that is,
the one in The Tailor of
Gloucester by Beatrix Potter.
Simpkin saves mice under
teacups but he gets
cross when he finds
out that the tailor lets
them go. He takes
revenge. Our cat
would be a Simpkin.
Mum said that we had to
teach it where to wee and do its
“cuckleberries”. She showed us
how to take the ash pan from
under the stove, take it outside
to our back yard and putSimpkin on it. And Simpkin did
it. I wondered how did a kitten
know that this was where to do
it? I’ve never solved that one.
I reckoned our Simpkin never
forgot the dash through the
streets. There were times when
he would see demons (invisible
to us) in the middle of the floor,
arch his back, bristle his hair,
screech and dart out the room.
Perhaps we should have called
him Macbeth.
I had to buy whiting, which
Mum boiled for Simpkin to
eat, and our father said it
reminded him of his
bubbe’s (grandmother’s)
gefilte fish. He would
regularly explain that he
didn’t like his bubbe’s boiled
gefilte fish but liked only the
fried fish balls that he got round
his friend’s house. It’s the
traditional Jewish Sabbath dish,
cooked the day before so that
there’s no need to work,
filleting fish, on the Sabbath.
I loved it when Simpkin slept
on my bed, even when he smelt
of fish. Then one day we
discovered that he wasn’t a he.
She had kittens. One of them
was very good at climbing the
“mountains” we made in ourThe children’s author Michael Rosen on all the moggies he has
loved — and those who’ve cared for him since his Covid ordeal74 • The Sunday Times Magazine