A tale of two kitties

In 1968, my brother and I named a cat after one I had known before. In the 1950s, my parents and I were living in the village of Cranfield, England. Tiddles belonged to our landlady, Mary Street. The black-and-white cat and I would often sit beside each other on the gatepost, observing passers-by. Unwilling to make insincere promises, aunty Mary refused my request to let me take him back to India. As it turned out, we were still in England when Tiddles died. He was buried in the garden, and I wished with four-year-old fervour that he would come out of his grave. Horror stories were unknown to me, so the thought was not the least bit alarming.

‘Tiddles,’ whispered my brother and me, a decade later, peering at a bundle of cream-coloured fur in a basket. The cat stared at us with deep blue eyes in a chocolate-brown face. Born after our return to Delhi, my brother was unacquainted with the original Tiddles. However, he had heard enough to hope that this namesake of the long-lost legend would prove just such a cuddlesome companion.

‘Have you collected the kitten?’ called our mother from the kitchen. The query threw us into a panic. Tiddles was bright and beautiful but certainly not a kitten. Our mother had allowed us to have a pet only if it was small enough to be trained. We had been offered a kitten by a lady we knew but when my brother and I reached her house, we were confronted with a cat. ‘Take him or leave him,’ she said as we stood hesitantly in the doorway.

‘Leave him,’ we could almost hear our mother say, and our father (posted at a distant Air Force station) would probably have concurred. We dared to disagree. However, we brought home the gorgeous Siamese. Our mother grudgingly accepted the full-grown animal but, much to our disappointment, treated him with marked indifference. That was until Tiddles hurt his leg during a nocturnal escapade.

One evening, my brother and I saw the unseen - our mother gently lifted the injured cat, murmuring soothing endearments. After placing him on the bedroom windowsill, she lowered him carefully down to his sand-tray in an adjacent area. Tiddles, like my first feline friend of that name, was a valued member of the family!