There once was a cat called Molly, who decided to live under a trolley.
If you asked her why, she’d refuse to reply.
And then she’d give you the stink eye.
My latest money-spinning idea for Lush Places is to write a series of children’s books about our collection of motley animals. How hard can it be?
As the above attempt demonstrates, quite hard. It is not quite up there with Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy. Molly does not, unlike Hairy Maclary’s nemesis, the terrorising tomcat Scarface Claw, have tearaway adventures. She doesn’t do anything except lie under the tea trolley. I concede this might not make for a terribly exciting cat book.
I could do a book about our collection of saved sheep. Miles the sheep farmer, and breeder of the finest East Friesian sheep, shakes his head looking over the fence at my motley crew. No ears, he says of Elizabeth Jane, whose ears I had to have cut off due to cancer. No neck, he says about Speri’ment. No teeth, he says about Xanthe. No lamb, he says about Becky, though last season she did go on, eventually, to have one.
Once a sheep has a lamb, she is supposed to join the milking flock, thus becoming a productive member of sheep society. Miles doesn’t bother with my lot. Elizabeth Jane is banned from the milking shed due to bad behaviour. When Xanthe was still having lambs, she would present herself for milking twice. There are buckets of grain in that milking shed. Xanthe is not silly.
There are currently five cats, on this frosty night, in the second-best bedroom. One is the matriarch, Nora Batty, who is getting madder by the day. When I wanted to go to the loo this afternoon, I chose to go out the kitchen door, across the terrace and in through the bathroom side door, for fear she might attack my ankles. I don’t know what to do about her. She has beautiful kittens, but she is mad and untameable.
When I first dreamt of a place in the country, I imagined a chocolate-boxy assortment of pretty kitties arrayed, Instagramically, on rustic country benches on a veranda framed by wisteria. Instead, we have mossy paved terraces where doves and chickens poo relentlessly, as well as an environmentally dodgy chocolate vine that, like Nora, does whatever the hell it wants. This is not quite the stuff of a lovely children’s book.
I have a small collection of my favourite children’s books, all featuring animals. There is The Unhappy Hippopotamus, published in 1957. The price is recorded in pencil: 10/6. It is about Harriet, who decides she doesn’t want to be a hippopotamus. Accompanied by her best friend Mouse, she leads a life of fancy frocks, parties and visits to the sweet shop, but still she cannot smile. A spoiler: she does smile right at the end of the book. A good old roll in mud will cure the unhappiest hippo.
I have only one of my collection of Moomintroll books left. My favourite character is Little My, who, like Nora Batty, is wild and untameable and likes to bite. One night, at the Shakespeare pub in Auckland, where NZ Herald hacks liked to hang out talking drunken nonsense, a lunatic woman bit my leg. She was forever after known as Little My.
I have my mother’s copy of Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse, first published in 1877. I don’t know which of us coloured in, wonkily, the black and white illustrations. It is terribly, almost unbearably sad in parts, but has, like Harriet’s story, a happy ending.
My book about Molly has a happy ending. Here she is, still lying under her tea trolley, having not moved a whisker all day except when the crack cocaine jar is rattled. Crack cocaine is what we call cat treats. I had a fleeting fantasy that I approached a book agent. The agent said my Molly book was unpublishable. Oh? Was it the crack cocaine reference? No, said the fantasy agent: “It was just really boring.” I gave him the stink eye.
