Sarah Woodall

She was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing
So fine a breath of wind might blow her away

I’ve been slow getting started on this, but it’s been a month, and I can’t put it off any more. It’s a hard one to write because I want to say it well enough.

This was Darcy—my Miss D. Of all the cats in my life, one of the two best beloved. Born July 2000. Killed by a dog on 15 July 2013 in the garden of the Green Dragon, well within her own territory.

She was a grand adventurer and a great climber. I’ll never forget the first time we saw her dancing along the ridge of the roof, and I’m glad I was never personally a witness to her trick of dodging outside the parapet of the footbridge and trotting over the river along the outer edge. She adored boating, too.

Despite her great spirit and her grand ideas, she was a delicate, fairylike little cat. But she was astonishingly robust. She never knew a day’s ill-health—well, she once had to be anaesthetized for the removal of a grass-seed she’d incautiously attempted to swallow, but apart from that it was, literally, never.

She hated to be shut in, and I always knew there were dangers out there. I tried to protect her as far as I could (that’s why it isn’t generally known that her real name was Brandywell Tenderberry, and that she was a chocolate-shaded silver Burmilla, descended from Grand Champions).

She knew there were dangers, too, and she was careful in her own way. She would meet us at the footbridge when we walked home from town, telling us off roundly with vociferous miaows for having strayed beyond what she deemed to be safe limits. She would permit us to pick her up and carry her home so long as there were no bicycles or cars around, but she preferred to trust her own judgement if there were.

Her attitude to the rest of the animal kingdom was basically hostile. She saw them all as either something to chase or something to run away from. She was deeply suspicious of dogs and certainly wouldn’t have courted her own disaster. But she was a free spirit. ‘Maybe that’s the price you pay for the chains that you refuse.’

She loved people, though—all people: friends, neighbours, strangers and even small children. She had a magnificent, luxurious purr, and she bestowed it lavishly on all her admirers. She spent most of the nights of her life on our bed, often sharing a pillow, sometimes curled up on top of one of us (on her last ever night, it was me) and sometimes more decorously arranged between our feet.

She was a joyously enthusiastic carnivore—red in tooth and claw—so I can’t truthfully claim that the manner of her death was unfitting, though it was horrible and upsetting (but mercifully quick). Her victims must have numbered in the hundreds, and she’d killed a mouse that very morning. But at least she usually ate them afterwards—and a cat can’t live without meat.

She was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing
I miss her more than ever words can say
If I could just taste all of her wildness now
If I could hold her in my arms today…..
I wouldn’t want her any other way

(Lyrics by Richard Thompson, though it’s Christy Moore’s version that stays with me, and I’ve taken the words from his site. The rest of the song doesn’t fit what I wanted to say here, but that chorus came rushing into my head four weeks ago, as I stood by our sundial looking down at the fresh little grave, and it’s been there ever since.)