Sam Leith Sam Leith

She was just a damn cat – and I loved her

Henry

I’ve never dug a grave before. But that was how I spent my Sunday afternoon. Three feet is awfully deep to dig, and three feet is how deep you have to go if you don’t want foxes to turn a little tragedy into a horror-comedy. I laboured till the head of the spade went out of sight.

My children were eating burgers from the barbecue a few feet away, and I worried that they might guess what I was up to. Thank God for the heroic incuriosity of children. I told the youngest something about planting a tree and it seemed to satisfy him. The truth would have been ‘planting the family cat after we put her down tomorrow’. I worried the hole wasn’t big enough. But then it struck me that it was just about the diameter of a cat door and I felt my throat catch.

It’s just a damn cat, I know. The world is burning, and people are dying up and down the country, and I’m upset about a cat. But there it is. I’ve had her for 17 years, and maybe it’s like that — in some form — for everyone. All politics is local. Charity begins at home. Il faut cultiver notre jardin — or, in this case, creuser une tombe.

She was a black moggy with a white blaze on her chest and I called her Henry before I discovered she was female. As a kitten she stalked my Doc Martens and thundered up and down the stairs in my small flat and fought invisible enemies and stole socks and scratched the shit out of the furniture. Standard cat stuff. She was a standard cat.

She stalked my Doc Martens, thundered up and down the stairs and stole socks. Standard cat stuff

She was also a colossal pain.

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