My husband, Michael and I are owned at this moment in time by three cats - Aimee, a female blue Burmese, Darbia Tangutica (Tangye for short) after the author, Derek Tangye who inspired me to write in the first place, who is a stumpy red tabby and white Manx cat, and Darbia Bling Bling, a proper Manx - no tail at all. He is classed as a Rumpie Riser. In a few weeks time we will be taking ownership of a blue Cornish Rex. Fell in love with one of these at a cat show. It was asleep in a hammock and had chiselled angular features.
We show our cats up and down the country. When initially I made enquiries about showing Tangye I met with the bureaucracy of the complicated forms to fill in. I discovered Tangye was not allowed in G.C.C.F. shows and had to instead put him in a relatively new formed set up, Fife (a bit like the football). I was advised that once we had been to our first show we would meet like-minded people and be hooked – hook, line and sinker. I asked if there were many men who went, as I did not want Michael sticking out like a sore thumb amongst a load of women talking cats. I was reassured that men singly and as half of couples regularly attended all the cat shows.
The forms which I had to complete required the names of the sire and dam – Tangye’s dad and mum, his G.C.C.F. number, date of birth and his E.M.S. code. I had to make a number of ‘phone calls to find this out. It actually means Easy Mind System.
Anyhow I showed Tangye and he got a Premier certificate. He needed three to get in the Premier League and I could then register his Premier status with his Aristocats Club, which we joined. There are five cat clubs which belong to Fife and two Associates.
When showing Tangye – who had really exceptional markings and lovely coloured eyes, and the judges liked him as no other Manx (another one got barred as it spread fleas to a Cornish Rex in the next pen) we found ourselves becoming gradually addicted to showing. We had to travel vast distances to be there for the vetting in at 7.30 a.m. , have all day until 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. at the show, then travel back home. As Tangye was new to showing we did not investigate staying at a “Cat friendly Travel Lodge”, as we were led to believe they did not start on breakfast until 7.30 a.m. which was too late for us (thus we would have been paying for a bed with no breakfast). Michael only needs about five and a half hours sleep at night, so we opted to travel instead. (Michael was the driver).
Anyhow, early morning there wasn’t much traffic. We were expecting to be stopped by the police due to all the revellers leaving night clubs and parties, but alas we never were. Who else would be mad enough to be on the roads at such an unearthly hour?
Being confident on showing show-quality Tangye we decided to show Aimee in a G.C.C.F. Show. The trouble was she was dirty. I have never known a cat who never washes herself and at times she really stinks, so much so that Michael has to spray her with deodorant which lasts about three weeks. She loves the feel of human skin which she has to get near even on a red hot day. (I have her on my back which invigorates my hot flushes) As she smells so much she gets B.O. or in her case C.B.O. Tangye has a go at her face, but she takes so much then returns the compliment by licking Tangye’s head. Bling Bling is more determined. You can see where he has been as he leaves a square of sticking up fur (he’ll do the next square the next day). He has got himself a big undertaking as Aimee is a large, fat, solid cat. Press her and her flesh won’t give.
Aimee’s first show was not very far away from home. She did well – got two firsts, a fourth and a bag of goodies for the Burmese with the best eyes.
Michael did not know why I had put her in that class as Aimee sleeps her life away. In fact, she sleeps twenty two hours a day. He said that the judges would not see her eyes.
Aimee is a lazy cat. Tangye has to cover over her business in the litter tray. That is laziness.
When we looked at Aimee’s results we saw that she had got a P.C. Michael asked me what a P.C. was. I said “Pongy Cat!” Actually, a P.C. was a Premier Certificate. She needs three before she can go to the National Cat Show at the N.E.C., which is equivalent to Crufts.
At her second show I made a boob! The show schedule had to be filled in before Christmas and I was all fazed up with the preparations for Christmas, so she didn’t get her second P.C. – I entered her as a male instead of a female. I won’t make this mistake again.
When showing Bling Bling he stole the show. First show he got an Excellent 1. His second show he and a Sphynx were both nominated when only one cat can be nominated. The choice fell to the Sphynx.
Michael does not like this breed. He thinks they look like little piglets. Naked cats! He asked me what would I feel with that next to my skin. Ugh!
Well, at Bling Bling’s third show, he was nominated, then became best Junior in show. He won a rosette donating this and a cup bigger than him. When he was placed in a cage for judging he arranged himself with his head in the air as if to say “Aren’t I beautiful?” He was a right little poser! He is a small Manx, smaller than Tangye although they are brothers from different litters. When we brought Bling Bling home we were intending keeping him with litter tray, water and the thick box from the computer printer locked in the downstairs bathroom, but Tangye was having none of it. He let him out three times and they greeted each other with their Manx trill and Tangye put his paw on Bling Bling’s head (who we called little one). Their first night together there was no mews from Bling Bling. Tangye had shown him both litter trays (an enclosed one) and an open one insisting you go in there.
It was a different story for Tangye. We didn’t see him for six months. He used to go into spaces (his holes we called them) between cupboards and do his stinking business there. I was going to return him to his breeder, but Michael said that he would grow out of it. He did literally. He got too big to go into his holes, then he took to sleeping , but never in a ball, in the washing machine. It must have been cool for him. We noted that at cat shows Tangye panted and we had to buy him a fan. He was a hot cat.
Aimee was just the start of my love affair with this breed.
Chapter 2 - Three Burmeses
I was working at a sausage factory taking the skins off skinless sausages and packing them onto conveyor belts. This employment offered overtime and better wages than the salaried position I used to be in. I needed as much money as I could get, having to pay a mortgage and rates, plus utility bills and I was by myself. Salaried positions did offer status, but they were then equivalent to a wife’s pin money while her husband paid all the big bills.
Most evenings, while I was at the factory, I went to the local art school. My workmates could not relate to that activity. Their recreation was Bingo. I went along on a couple of occasions to see what the attraction was, but I was bored with it, probably because I never won anything – not a sausage! I’d go back to my lonely house to a black and white moggy whom I’d been given by a workmate. Could not think of a name to give him – was never any good at naming cats as you will see later... Tommy was a faithful cat and was always on top of the entry gate whenever I finished work. A friend with a border collie visited and Tommy would fly onto the top of the living room door, then he decided to sleep on the same door. There he was in a perfect circle. He never fell off except when the nearby town hall clock struck eleven or twelve.
At this time I was on the committee for the local Cats’ Protection League, which every month had a one page newsletter. One month there was an advert for an eighteen month old male blue Burmese for sale for £20. The contact was a Mr Weston, so I contacted him and became the new owner of a very sturdy cat called Leo. Mr Weston wanted another breed of cat – I cannot remember what, so a home was required for Leo. I don’t know how people can swap cats just when the mood takes them. Anyhow, Leo was very friendly with Tommy. They went out together and came back together and at night they slept together near me. Around this time a friend of mine from the Art School was showing her Burmese cats and I went with her to see what showing entailed. Leo, I thought, was show quality and I sent off the paperwork to have him officially transferred to me. My friend said that I would have to get G.C.C.F. regulation blanket, litter tray, water dish and food dish, which were all in white. Don’t know why this law still stands. Maybe it is so that they do not detract from the cat and every cat is equal.
I had to go to hospital for an operation to remove a lump from my breast and my mum was to feed the two cats. She did not realise that there was also a black and white sleek entire tom who often came to visit to sleep on my coat. I called him Puss. My mother said she fed and let out and in, two cats. Little did she realise that she was feeding Puss, while Leo had a night on the town unfed.
Tommy and Leo had each other’s company outside while I was at work. They were always there to greet me on my homecoming until one evening there was Tommy, but no Leo. I called and called him and went onto the road outside my terraced house. There was not much traffic then (today there is a one way system with it being the main road to get into town) and there are more cars nowadays. Everyone has to have at least one car. You can never park outside the house). I went across the road and also down the entries of neighbours’ houses. No sign. Tommy was beside himself. If only he could have talked. He kept running at the door, crying out in distress. I pleaded with him to tell me where Leo was.
There used to be cats disappearing in the vicinity without trace, at dawn and dusk, and it said in the local newspaper that these cats were being stolen for their fur to make coats. I thought that Leo had a lovely coat, unlike Tommy whose fur had a red hue, due to it having ovarid for a hormone imbalance.
I thought he might have gone back to his old home, so when I placed an advert in the local newspaper I mentioned he might be returning there, so I used Mr Weston’s telephone number. Also, the finder could contact Mr Weston, due to my being at work all day and the Art School most evenings.
I did the usual enquiries – the C.P.L., the R.S.P.C.A. and local vets. I made and photocopied notices for all around the square (the gardens around all the houses, businesses and shops – a cat had loads of hunting grounds without having to cross the road). On my notice I asked people to look in their outhouses and gardens to see if there was a grey cat locked in. Not many people around here I’m afraid, would know what a blue cat is.
All my enquiries came to zilch. I even contacted the police as Leo was a pedigree cat and as a last resort, contacted Environmental Health (it was not contracted out then) to see if they had picked him up dead off the road. It is the not knowing where he was which was worse than knowing his fate. I was always looking out for him. Did he become a chinese takeaway, as a Chinese takeaway in the town was prosecuted for having alsatians in their fridge? I accused some elderly neighbours of keeping him shut in their house and a particularly unpleasant Asian I asked him, had he eaten my cat?
Evidently I was very distraught and without Leo I felt more lonely than previously.
A few years later, while in the garden I thought I spotted him in a window of a house adjacent in the square. This was wishful thinking of course. As I could not show him when I went with my friend to cat shows I could not bear to see the pens of Burmese cats, so instead saw the household moggies.
Burmese cat No. 2 was Sleekine Shikari (same prefix as Aimee as the same breeder). She was sold to me as a pet and I had to sign that I would have her spayed. Little did I know that she was already calling!
I had to introduce her to Tommy, so I kept Shikari in her cage and let Tommy sniff her through the bars of the cage. Sometimes I lifted the cage roof and put my fingers on her forehead and transferred her scent to Tommy’s forehead.
At night I kept Shikari upstairs with me and she kept rolling, crouching, swishing her tail and presenting her back end to me in the bathroom. As well as this she was squatting low down. I think she would have walked across the ceiling, the mood she was in!
Due to work my cat show friend and I had picked her up on a Saturday, so I could not get her neutered until the Monday, so I did not get much sleep that weekend.
Shikari means hunter. I dared not let her out due to the traffic. (I was then living with John whom I eventually married) and Burmese, like Siamese (more about Siamese later) have no sense of direction. They just keep on going and forget where they are until they are lost. I kept her confined to the upstairs (shut the stairs door) and Tommy downstairs and outside for his pleasure. John said that I should not keep her hidden as he was there.
John and my first Christmas together, Kath, who was Tommy’s former owner, gave us a turkey carcass for the cats, so we sliced the meat off and threw the remainder in a black plastic bin liner in the front room – away from the cats, we thought. While watching TV we heard a strange noise coming from the front room. On investigation we saw the bin liner move! Shikari was having a Christmas scavenge. John mocked, “You would not get an ordinary moggy to do such bad things”.
Shikari was always hiding when she had the run of the house to herself. I thought of course she had got out. She would never come to our call. She would carry on sleeping. Often we would be calling and she would be on a shelf somewhere we would not think of looking.
One night, though, she did escape. John went looking for her in all the jungles in the square. He did not know the area at all, so Tommy was his landmark in our bedroom window. He said that if Tommy moved he’d be lost. I asked him did he see many cats on his travels. He replied that he had seen plenty of cats’ eyes staring at him and he called them some names which you wouldn’t put on a collar round their necks! He’d fallen into a bucket which he brought home!
Our next Burmese was many years after Shikari. The same breeder as both Shikari and Aimee. She had a litter of kittens and would I like one? My mother said that they were too expensive and that I should get out of having one due to the expense incurred, but she never knew about Leo or Shikari. (My mother only thinks about herself and lives in her own world). In reality, and in her mind, however, she is very dominant and interfering, trying to organise my finances and my life. If she can manage on ‘ x ’ amount of money so should I, she maintains. When I had the house painted outside and a new carpet in the living room, she (nor my father) would come and look at it. I felt very hurt.
Anyhow, the new Burmese kitten, a female, whom I had given a name to – Cassandra – was not to be. She was allergic to the inoculations and consequently died. It was obviously not meant to be.
Chapter 3 - Cats In My Childhood
All of my life my parents have had cats. There was Mini (mark one), a Siamese while they lived in Stretton waiting for their house to be built in Bretby Lane . My parents called each other Min and when I was a baby I didn’t say Yes, but Yas, hence my name Yasmin came about. I invented my own language – “pepin” for handkerchief, “lobbs” for sleeves and “dockets” for knickers, and I was fascinated by the coloured wires at the back of a TV set (my father was a television engineer) and I kept on saying “wire”.
From an early age I was drawing cats like and cutting out round the outlines and stitching them onto small pieces of material. My grandparents, on my father’s side, had a pot dog and cat with red ribbons round their necks and I was always picking up this cat. I can remember my grandfather’s shed full of stacks of newspapers tied up with string and miscellaneous odds and ends, and nuts and bolts. There would be a need of them one day. Nothing would ever be thrown away.
I was a sensitive child and to pacify my grandparents, to ensure I had a good Roman Catholic schooling, I at four and a half years went to a convent school where I made my first holy communion. I remember that I was bashed with a ruler on my knuckles if I read a word wrong when reading. The nuns did give me reading homework which I did not do, for I would sooner do some art. Impatient to get my colouring in of a big drawing finished, my colours ran.
Around this time we had Mini (mark two). I don’t know what happened to Mini (mark one). I expect she was run over, as we lived on Stapenhill Road , on the main road to London .
Somehow Skiffle came into our lives as Skiffle was the music of the day. She was more my brother’s cat than mine. He could do anything with her and dressed her up. She had kittens and our daily at the time - before she started work - would clean their eyes, as Skiffle was a rotten mother.
I started at the local art school Saturday morning classes at nine, and I learnt to read through a Mrs Venables at nine and a half at Edge Hill Primary School in Stapenhill.
We had a Siamese high quality pedigree, whom I named Tai Tai, but he kept defecating all over the house. My parents took him to a horse doctor’s assistant (there weren’t so many vets in those days – late 50s). She said that he had vitamin deficiency and that she would cure him if she had him for a weekend. We never saw Tai Tai again.
Sopers, our neighbours, moved and we inherited their cat Peter Soper, a Jellicoe cat. He would not come to our house at all and insisted in being fed at his old family home. He had his freedom to roam, so he did not last long, and was consequently run over on Stapenhill Road .
For my tenth birthday in 1960 my parents gave me my very own seal point Siamese who had such beautiful blue eyes. My parents called him Dr Bartilow, after the singer, or Bartie for short. I bought him a blue collar and lead and trained him to walk beside me, and I also bought him a gold toilet chain from Woolworths that he liked to play with.
Often I would try and sneak him up to bed, which was easy to do as Stapenhill Road was a large rambling Victorian house and my brother, Julian, would bring into his bed, Skiffle. Skiffle was a clean cat and she would let Julian know when she wanted to go out, while Bartie was often naughty, so he was banished to the kitchen. We did, however, go and bring both cats to either Julian’s or my bed on a Saturday morning.
At eleven I failed my eleven plus exam. The local secondary modern school, Hillside , was considered too rowdy and big for me, so it was arranged for me to go to a small private school called Salisbury Memorial School , which according to its highly glossy prospectus boasted small classes with highly trained staff. It was a Church of England School, so R.E. Assemblies, prayers and singing hymns were a big part of the curriculum.
I was attending, at this time, a drama school where I did elocution, reciting poems and acting. On my way back from there one evening, on alighting from my bus, found a grey scrawny ball of fluff that was supposed to be a cat. After a few good meals and a few contented washings later there appeared a pure black cat whom we called Henrietta, only to become Henry, once she had been to the vet. He got on well with both Bartie and Mini and I remember them all on the Rayburn, partaking of the heat from the back boiler. Our house was not centrally heated (it was only when my parents were selling it!) The Rayburn heated the water which was used for cooking and for drying clothes on rails you pulled down. The sitting room had a fire inn it with glass doors, and all downstairs and the upstairs bathroom had storage heaters. There was no heating in our rooms. My brother and I were only allowed an electric fire when we had friends round. My best friend, Susan Holmes, I was jealous of because she had lots of clothes and best of all, she had a record player and records.
Using this Rayburn I nearly blew up the house, as I was letting hot cross buns to “prove” in the oven and I had to finally cook them I had to have a very high oven. I think I added too much air as all the hot water pipes started jangling and we turned the hot taps on all the sinks and the bath, then we and all the cats evacuated into the garden to wait for the explosion.... We were spared. The hot cross buns were black and rock hard! My parents ate one each so as not to hurt my feelings.
When my parents went out socialising we had a baby sitter called Mrs Fitzgerald. We used to share secrets with her that we couldn’t tell our parents. She bought us some orangey striped sucking sweets, but we were naughty kids – we had hidden a stock of different coloured sized balls that we stored on the sun lounge roof and we used to bombard her with them.
My brother and I were playing ball – throwing it to each other and when it was my time to retrieve it, I had to go to the side of the garage. I stood on something soft which was covered with flies. I somehow knew it was Mini, whom I hadn’t seen for a couple of days, but my mother said that it was a rabbit and that I must be content that I still had Bartie.
This experience deeply affected me (had nightmares of cats without their heads) plus seeing a cat flat on Stapenhill Road, that got more unrecognisable every day, contributed eventually by being accepted to do a B.A. degree course in sculpture at Leicester, for at Derby, where I did my Foundation Course, I made a heap of fibre glass dead cats. Why a heap, was because once I had seen a heap of dead sheep.
Skiffle was having the occasional night away. She came back after her meanderings, very replete and content. Evidently she stayed out for longer until the people she had adopted moved and took her with them. We could not do a thing about it, and no one can really own a cat.
At thirteen I wasn’t learning anything at Salisbury Memorial School . (I learned plenty when I was in Mrs Jordan ’s class, but then I moved up to a class of about six to eight students, which was in charge of a vicar who wanted us to learn the Catechism (for confirmation). I remember writing on a board the word transubstantiation and its meaning. This vicar only seemed to know religion and no other subject.
My parents were very involved in good works for the town and one of the projects they were involved with was LEPRA – aid against leprosy. We had an American student staying with us, who sang for the Michigan Youth Chorale and one of his concerts was at the local Town Hall where there was a huge painting called Lepra, by an artist called David Ffoulkes, standing at the right hand corner of the main hall. I made a drawing of it to paint it. It was of two elongated men wearing blue pantaloons, suffering from leprosy, standing in a cage, and a black witch doctor dancing in the foreground. I was spellbound seeing such a masterpiece and I resolved that one day I would meet the artist (I did come quite close to him when I was at Leicester ). I thought that if I could paint half as well as him I would be satisfied.
My parents, with their involvements with good works, went to several school plays (at Salisbury Memorial School we never had any plays – the hall upstairs was only used for the yearly Speech Days and ballroom dance classes to music provided by a wind-up gramophone. I still cringe whenever I hear the Blue Danube).
They, my parents, often took me to these plays and I was very impressed so much so that I asked them to get me into a big secondary modern school.
Plans were in motion for this to come about. On my thirteenth birthday, as a teenager I was given a transistor radio which did not get Radio Luxemburg. Each and every night I tried to see if it had arrived by magic. When my parents held a dinner party I volunteered to do the washing up – all the glasses with drops of booze in them, which I would mix in one glass, drink and go to bed pissed listening to my radio under my pillow.
Henry and Bartie were always in the kitchen sleeping. It was the warmest place. Various cats came a-visiting our garden including a white Manx cat who just came to sleep under the bushes.
At last I started at the William Allitt School , where I progressed steadily in Art, English and Social Studies. I was there until I was fifteen, then I took an exam at the local Tech College to do G.C.S.E. ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels which William Allitt didn’t do.
