The Cat Who Saved a Lord Chamberlain's Life

by Eric

I'm reading a book by Georges Simenon, author of the Inspector Maigret mysteries. The Cat, however, isn't a mystery. It's one of Simenon's psychological novels. I'm pretty sure Maigret never had a cat (unlike so many modern detectives) although he might have seen a feral feline or two slinking through the alleys in the dark underbelly of Paris. He encountered stray dogs certainly, as evidenced by his novel Maigret and the Yellow Dog.

Our own detective, John the Lord Chamberlain, didn't own a cat either but our two cats, Rachel and Sabrina, made cameo appearances in our Byzantine mysteries. Both are gone now, having lived to ripe old cat ages.

I took Rachel in when he came to my door one bitterly cold November day. Yes -- Rachel was a he. My two children named him. I could never be sure of his age but he was a glutton until the end, thanks to his having nearly starved out in the wild. How could I forget the time he stole a pork chop off the kitchen counter? (In One for Sorrow "Rachel's" tendency to pounce frantically on food saves John's life...you'll have to read the book...)

Sabrina, our final cat, lived to be twenty-two. (Final because at some point you don't want to take responsibility for pets who might outlive you.) There's no doubt about her age. I rescued her as a kitten from a neighbor's garage during my first marriage and she stayed with me after the divorce. She bridged two very different phases of my life. A new marriage, new work, a move to another state. During twenty years of change, Sabrina was the only connecting thread so it was particularly upsetting when she died.

Unlike "final girls" in movies, our final cat didn't spend her life battling homicidal maniacs. Quite the contrary. She was a coddled house-cat. During her last few years she stuck to me like a barnacle. Well, a warm, furry barnacle. I suppose I was the only constant thing in her life and she became more clinging as she aged. She wouldn't let me out of her sight. She insisted on curling up on my lap when I sat at the computer. Which was a real show of loyalty since skinny as I am I offer very little in the way of a lap. I altered my way of sitting to accommodate her. When I got up to go downstairs for a cup of coffee she'd wait for me at the top of the stairs.

Eventually it got to the point that she couldn't make the leap from floor to lap and would sit by my chair and meow piteously until I lifted her up. Weirdly, this attachment was solely to me, and not to Mary although Sabrina had lived with her for nearly twenty years. "Sabrina's a one person cat," Mary said. "If I passed out and was lying on the floor she'd walk over me to get to you."

As the end approached, Sabrina found it difficult to walk so before going to bed we'd put her in the little nest we'd made from a fuzzy toilet seat cover placed on the bottom shelf of a bookcase. We daily expected she'd be gone overnight but instead one morning we found her sprawled part way out of it on the floor. I carried her the rest of the way to my chair and put her on my lap. It wasn't long before she gave a quiet sigh and died there.

It seems as if she managed to get through the night so she could die where she wanted to be. I can't say I am deserving of that kind of devotion.

I Always Wore My School Beret at a Truly Rakish Angle

by Mary

A couple of years before I left England I went to a fancy dress party disguised as a penguin, complete with beak hastily constructed from orange cardboard and string. A colleague from work was the hit of the evening when she sauntered in dressed in a gymslip, white shirt, striped tie, and black stockings, an ensemble immediately identifying her as a sixth-former attending St Trinian's School For Girls.

Not being certain if the series is as well-known in this country I shall scribble a line or two about their content. Here I am talking about the original films, not the remakes, so if you know the former, talk among yourselves until the next couple of paragraphs end.

Why does the British public have such affection for the St Trinian's films? Inspired by Ronald Searle's cartoons, they are set in a boarding school where anarchy rules and pupils run wild, tormenting teachers, each other, the residents of a nearby town or indeed anyone unfortunate enough to cross paths with them Perhaps the appeal is to that little bit of wildness in all of us when we see chaos let loose in an educational setting, where traditionally (To Sir With Love notwithstanding) all is expected to be orderly and quiet and fourth-formers do not concoct spirituous liquors and create explosives in the lab, not to mention constructing deadly traps for the headmistress and staff. Drinking, smoking, and gambling are routine and so are melees during hockey matches. Indeed, the school song brazenly celebrates trampling on the weakest and declares might is always right. Whichever form was involved, however, there was some hope of reform -- none of the girls ever swore.

Every member of staff is depicted as not on the up and up and almost certainly involved in shady doings past and present while the fourth-formers (aged around fourteen) are spectacularly untidy with holes in their stockings, wild hair, and disreputable straw hats. They are capable of and glory in criminal behaviour -- one of Searle's cartoons shows a teacher grilling her class on who had burned the school's east wing down the previous night. Pupils are violent, their weapons of choice being various types of sports equipment, with hockey sticks a particular favourite. On the other hand, the seventeen or eighteen year old sixth-formers are more interested in higher matters, especially the opposite sex, having bloomed into bosomy young women wearing thigh-length gymslips, revealing glimpses of their suspenders. Note to young 'uns: you should know suspender belts and stocking tops were considered as racy as all get when the original films were made.

By contrast, the all-girl grammar school I attended had a strict dress code. Gymslips had to reach our knees and the hem of shorts worn for sports were required to touch the ground when we knelt. Observed on public byways eating or not wearing a school hat or beret while in uniform merited punishment. Urchins at a school lower down the hill from ours had discovered this and attempted to grab one or the other off our heads and run away with it on many occasions. Worse transgressions while abroad in uniform were smoking or talking to a boy. One year a rumour swept the lower forms claiming a pupil had been seen in one such conversation on the street and was punished for it. Even though the fellow in question was her brother -- or so it was said.

The only thing we had in common with St Trinian's were prefects, sixth-formers with the power to hand out penalties for breaking the rules of conduct. Generally they were tasks such as learning an extract from Shakespeare or writing a hundred lines declaring the miscreant must not do whatever it was they'd done. The only time I had to submit lines was because of running in the corridor. I still claim I was just walking fast and everyone else was slow-poking along. A touch of irony enters the picture at this point, given when I took my lines up to the sixth-formers' common room under the eaves of the Victorian building in which the school was housed, the opened door revealed a haze of cigarette smoke.

However, at this remove I feel it is safe to reveal I was guilty of a little bit of wildness myself since I always wore my school beret at a truly rakish angle. Provided of course one of the young hellions from down the hill had not made off with it.