As you might have noticed from my photos - I am quite fond of our cat Bobby. And you have to admit (if you do like cats) that she is quite adorable.
I wasn’t always a cat crazy person – I grew up with a cute black mongrel called Blacky for the first 9 years of my life and cried buckets when we buried her in my grandmother’s garden. I also had a canary and two budgies for a while when I was about seven. Unfortunately they didn’t live long. My hamsters (I had three in succession, not at the same time obviously) didn’t fare better and my mother was quite fed up with burying them and told me that I couldn’t have another one.
Cats didn’t feature in my life until I was 14 and we spent three lovely weeks in a rented private house in Oxford, where my stepfather used to study before he moved to Cologne. The holiday was great, mainly because it was a surprisingly warm summer and we had two furry visitors, two beautiful Russian Blues who were owned by a lovely old lady who originally came from Austria. They were called Loverboy or short LB and Missy.
Missy was a very friendly cat, who came every day into our kitchen for cuddles and play, while LB was often busy patrolling his territory. His owner rarely saw him and occasionally got very worried. I cried buckets when we left. The same happened on our next holiday in Vienna where we spent three weeks in a friend’s flat in the first district. I was 15 and obsessed with Mozart at the time so I spent a lot of my time traipsing around town to find the houses Mozart used to live in – or what was left of them. And I often shared my bed with Pipsy, our friends’ beautiful black and white mog. Pipsy couldn’t go out and was mainly confined to the flat and he often snored!
As luck would have it my aunt’s cat Marilyn got pregnant the following year and she had 6 kittens. I visited them a lot and my mum was as besotted with them as I was. We both set our eyes on Freddy who was often ignored by her mother and very friendly. Unfortunately pets were not aloud in the flat we lived in at the time, but my mother possessed the power of persuasion and the landlady agreed that if all neighbours were happy we could keep the cat. Though originally she suggested I should just get a gold fish. My mum started a petition in the house and all neighbours invited her in and were only too happy to sign. When she came back with the good news she was filled up with liquor and quite sizzled.
So at the age of 16 I finally got my first cat Freddy, the most beautiful petite black and white moggie (I will put up some photos of her). Freddy was a very special cat, very affectionate, nosy and loyal. She was very attached to me. She was my best friend, who went through my ups and downs at school and got me through my break-ups with various boyfriends. Things changed when my sister was born in 1992 and I had to move out. I couldn’t take Freddy with me because it would have been cruel. I lived in a one-room flat. So I visited her as often as I could, which was a lot in the first year as I had the neighbours from hell. I would sleep on my parents’ couch a lot. Which suited them fine as they could go to the pub while I was taking care of my sister. Freddy had to get used to my sister, which wasn’t always easy.
When I prepared my travel to New Zealand in 2000 my main concern was that Freddy was healthy and that nothing would happened to her while I was away, so I went to the vet to get an all clear. I wouldn’t have travelled otherwise.
I missed her a lot during those three months. Things got harder when I moved to Hamburg and then to Kiel, as I couldn’t be with Freddy as much as I wanted to. The last time I saw her was when she came for a morning cuddle and parked herself on my chest purring and kneading away. Later that morning she went outside and when I wanted to give her a goodbye cuddle I couldn’t find her. I was upset. Worse was to come when my mum rang me a week later to tell me that she was missing. It was awful not to know what happened to Freddy. I created posters, went home, and looked everywhere in the neighbourhood, distributed my posters and rang rescue shelters. I even checked the local park. We never found Freddy. She was 14 and a half and had a fulfilled cat life – and it seemed she probably just wanted to die alone. Not being able to bury her and say goodbye was truly horrible. I buried her brush instead in my grandmother’s garden, which is a bit like an animal cemetery these days, and she surprisingly understood, though she is not a cat person. She said that one of her brothers went missing during WW2 and so she could relate to how I felt.
Freddy was a lovely cat. I still miss her a lot. I never thought I would want another cat. On our holidays I would cuddle stray cats. And eventually I joined the local Cats Protection branch where I worked as Press Officer and was in charge of their website for a while. This meant that I had to upload photos of cats in want of a home and I got to see them first. Two cats caught our eyes. Harry, a black and white tom, probably about 6 months old, and Bobby. It wasn’t difficult to persuade my husband Paul to adopt them both, because they apparently got on well together according to their fosterer and my friend Kate. The only problem was that Paul always maintained that he is allergic to cats. He certainly reacts to horses and dogs.
Read on what happened in my next entry.
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