Downton Tabby (8 page)

I
N
E
NGLAND, THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT
fought for women’s rights, while in America, Arthur Wynne’s “word-cross,” the first crossword puzzle, appeared in the
New York World
and opened up a whole new class of things for humans to try to see in the newspaper while their cats tried to prevent them.

At Downton, electricity was finally installed in the upstairs rooms, a blessing and a curse, because the cords were delicious. Before that, illumination had been provided by coal gas—filthy, dangerous, and unreliable, like the
New York Post
, but still a hundred times better than energy-saving fluorescents.

Now I feel I should say something about the other daughter, Lady Etcetera.

Lady Etcetera’s life had been one long variation on being the first person at a party, and then someone else comes in and sees you and says, “Oh good, no one’s here yet.” She was the strawberry stripe in the Neapolitan ice cream. When she
put her paws over her mother’s eyes and said “Guess who,” she had to give hints. She had lived in her sisters’ shadows for so long, she had mushrooms. What I’m saying, dear reader, is she didn’t get a lot of attention. Now she was in heat, too, and I would have mentioned it back in chapter 1, if it had happened to Minxy or Serval.

This happy time of catting around came to an epoch-shattering end on August 4, 1914. The whole family was sitting on the dining room table when Lord Grimalkin announced: “Cats, I have bad news and good news and good news that’s bad news. The bad news is about technology—”

“Not another vacuum cleaner!”

“Let me finish, Minxy. The bad news is that advances in smokeless powder, rifling, and the machine gun mean the next war, if it ever comes, will be fought in trenches.”

“What’s the good news?”

“The good news is, trenches equal rats, and rats are delicious.”

“What’s the good news that’s bad news?”

“The world is at war.”

à Verdun

à Verdun

J’ai mangé beaucoup de rats

—B
ENJAMIN
P
ÉRET

—British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey

. . . H
EY, WAIT A SECOND . . .
cats
can
see
in the dark! Let’s send
them!
”

So, like a cat in midair, the Clowders’ world was turned upside down again.

No English cat wanted war. It involved travel. But the assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, in Bosnia, by a Serb, meant Germany had gone too far.

That much was clear.

Five hundred thousand British cats were sent to war, where they were used as ratters in the trenches and, more important, as an early-warning system for mustard gas attacks. This gruesome fact, which I wish I were making up, may explain why present-day cats refuse to get into any kind of transportation without
a fight, and why gas is now always blamed on the dog.

On the British home front, milk was rationed, and feeding it to cats was prohibited. Meat was
severely
rationed, and in an act of pure spite—I swear I’m not making this up—a zeppelin raid on London in September 1915 dropped seventy bombs and a hambone.

A bitter day for cats and another victory for German humor.

But it wasn’t all bad news for cats. War meant hospitals, and hospitals meant bandages. And bandages are like two of the things cats love the most—toilet paper and socks—rolled into one.

“You’ll be all right, Cat. I know you’ll be all right.”

—E
RNEST
H
EMINGWAY,

A Farewell to Arms

I
N THE DARK YEARS THAT
followed, tanks, aircraft, and the machine gun—the vacuum cleaners of war—added loud and awful new dimensions of terror to the battlefield.

And the throat of war had one more hairball of anguish to dislodge for the Clowders. Matthmew Clowder injured his tongue in a heroic attempt to stay properly groomed in a shell hole at the Somme. He found himself covered in mud with no means to remove it, and, being a cat, vanished in shame. They checked under all the beds, nothing. There was nothing to do but list him as Messy in Action.

Russia had a revolution and the
Mewsitania
sank, bringing hundreds of thousands of Americans into the war, which promptly ended, because it wasn’t cool anymore.

And F. (Scat!) Fitzgerald missed the whole thing.

When the guns fell silent, and the indoor cats came
out from under the couch, Prime Minister Lloyd George asked, “What is our task?” And because he was a politician, he answered his own question: “To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.”

“Homes fit for heroes” was his promise to the men who had protected Great Britain from Germany, Turkey from other parts of Turkey, and/or Serbia from Austria . . . I forget. And since the definition of a fit home is a place with a lot of cats, the cats who hadn’t had kittens yet had their work cut out.

W
ITH THE WAR OVER, AND
the laser pointer still decades in the future, the cats of England turned their thoughts to love.

As they were cats, their thoughts also turned to grooming and bacon. And moths. Those moths weren’t going to eat themselves. But mostly love.

One beautiful English day in April—drizzle, with a chance of rain—Matthmew Clowder returned to Downton Tabby.

He was muddy, and his tongue was in a cast, but the cat came back.

“I thought you were a goner,” said Minxy, cleaning his ears first, and gently spitting into a linen handkerchief. Matthmew said nothing, because of the whole tongue thing.

Could love heal what veterinary medicine could not?

Would he ever be whole again?

For weeks Matthmew just stared out the window at nothing, so that was a good sign.

Then, one miraculous morning, he got up on the dining
room table, went down on one knee, and handed Minxy a small, green velvet box.

“This is tiny. How am I supposed to get my head in this?” she asked.

“No, you don’t put your head in it. Look inside.”

She opened it. It was a ring. “I was hoping for bacon. Or at least a moth.”

“Will you wear my ring?”

“I don’t have fingers.”

“We’re going around in circles.”

“You’re sitting on the lazy Susan.”

That was the moment that Matthmew gave up on ever trying to understand Minxy. She was a secret to him, as every cat is a mystery to every other. A dear book that would shut with a spring when he had read but one page. A glimpse of treasure through unfathomable water, while he stood in ignorance on the shore. Because he was a cat, and he hated water.

He had never loved her more.

If you can love cats, you can love human beings, because you have to be able to love them without getting them at all.

And that being said, Matthmew and Minxy finally got married.