A Street Cat Named Bob

It was obvious that he didn’t want to leave me. As we wandered around, I couldn’t help wondering about his story: where he’d come from and what sort of life he’d led before he’d come and sat on the mat downstairs.

Part of me was convinced that the ‘cat lady’ across the street was right and he was a family pet. He was a fine-looking cat and had probably been bought for Christmas or someone’s birthday. Gingers can be a bit mental and worse if not neutered, as I’d already seen. They can get very dominant, much more so than other cats. My hunch was that when he’d become boisterous and frisky he had also become a little too much to handle.

I imagined the parents saying ‘enough is enough’ and - rather than taking him to a refuge or the RSPCA - sticking him in the back of the family car, taking him for a drive and throwing him out into the street or on to the roadside.

Cats have a great sense of direction, but he’d obviously been let loose far from home and hadn’t gone back. Or maybe he’d known that it wasn’t really home at all and decided to find a new one.

My other theory was that he’d belonged to an old person who had passed away.

Of course, it was possible that wasn’t the case at all. The fact that he wasn’t house-trained was the main argument against him having been domesticated. But the more I got to know him the more convinced I was that he had definitely been used to being around one person. He seemed to latch on to people whom he thought would look after him. That’s what he’d done with me.

The biggest clue about his background was his injury, which looked nasty. He’d definitely picked that up in a fight. From the way it was leaking pus, the wound must have been a few days old, maybe even a week. That suggested another possibility to me.

London has always had a large population of street cats, strays who wander the streets living off scraps and the comfort of strangers. Five or six hundred years ago, places like Gresham Street in the City, Clerkenwell Green and Drury Lane used to be known as ‘cat streets’ and were overrun with them. These strays are the flotsam and jetsam of the city, running around fighting for survival on a daily basis. A lot of them were like this ginger tom: slightly battered, broken creatures.

Maybe he’d spotted a kindred spirit in me.

Chapter 2 Road To Recovery

I’d been around cats since I was a child and I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of them. While I was growing up my family had several Siamese and I remember that at one stage we also had a beautiful tortoiseshell cat. My memories of all of them were generally fond ones, but inevitably I suppose the one that stuck most vividly in my mind was the darkest.

I’d grown up in England and Australia and for a while we’d lived in a place called Craigie in Western Australia. While we were there we had a lovely, white fluffy kitten. I can’t remember where we got it from but I have a feeling it might have been from a local farmer. Wherever it had come from, it was a terrible home. For whatever reason it hadn’t been checked out medically before being handed over to us. It turned out the poor little thing was flea-ridden.

It hadn’t been immediately apparent. The problem was that because the kitten had such thick white fur the fleas were festering in there and nobody knew. Fleas are parasites, of course. They draw the life out of other creatures to sustain their own. They basically drained this poor kitten of all its blood. By the time we spotted it, it was too late. My mother took it to the vet’s but she was told that it had passed the point of no return. It had all sorts of infections and other problems. It died within a couple of weeks of us getting it. I was five or six at the time and was devastated - as was my mother.

I’d thought about the kitten often over the years, usually whenever I saw a white cat. But he had been on my mind a lot this weekend as I’d spent time with the tom. I could tell his coat was in a bad state. It really was threadbare in places. I had an awful feeling that it would suffer the same fate as the white kitten.

Sitting in the flat with him that Sunday evening, I made a decision: I wasn’t going to let that happen. I wasn’t going to assume that the care I had given him was going to make him better. I wasn’t going to take anything for granted.

I had to take him to a vet. I knew my makeshift medication wasn’t going to be good enough to heal the wound. But I had no idea what other underlying health issues he might have. I wasn’t going to take the risk of waiting, so I decided to get up early the next morning and take him to the nearest RSPCA centre, down the other end of Seven Sisters Road towards Finsbury Park.

I set my alarm early and got up to give the cat a bowl of mashed biscuits and tuna. It was another grey morning, but I knew I couldn’t use that as an excuse.