My Life in Cats (Part IV: 1988-1990)

Adolescence, Fire and Ferrets

Missed earlier instalments? Start with My Life in Cats (Part I).

1988, a terrorist explodes Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. Section 28 (Local Government Act 1988) bans local authorities from “promoting homosexuality”. Liverpool win Division One; English football clubs are still banned from European competitions due to hooliganism. The word “yuppie” enters everyday conversation, and for the first time, we see car phones. The Pogues release If I Should Fall from Grace with God, giving us the most enduring Christmas song of all time. The first episode of Red Dwarf airs on February 15th, the day before my birthday. I continue to muddle through secondary school, and Bagpuss mostly chills out.

Bagpuss has developed that fascinating cat quality of always being there, whatever you’re doing; he is always nearby, watching, waiting patiently for the divine moment to interfere. Like all cats, he enjoys stretching out across a board game and destroying all the pieces. At dinner times, which were quite a strict affair, he weaves through the human, table, and chair legs, subtly begging for food so he doesn’t get kicked out. I myself seem to struggle with the rules of the dinner table and am often exiled to the kitchen to eat standing up on my own.

I wear hand-me-downs at school, but after a growth spurt, I’m a little more gangly than my older brothers. The other boys joke that my trousers are always at half-mast… “Who died today?” they say. A joke told every day loses its sting. Rolling up my shirt sleeves isn’t so bad, but I feel awkward that my ankles are always on display, like a Victorian woman, but without the context of it. I hate wearing the school tie, but on the plus side, I’m not one of the poor kids whose parents send them to school in the dreaded blazer with the Hillcrest emblem on the chest; wearing the blazer equates to instant social death. Most pupils don’t even want to stand near you if you’re wearing one of those beauties.

One time on the way home from school, we see Maggot’s mum near the chippie on Halton Crescent. She has a carrier bag that she lifts, a rabbit inside. So cute and soft, I put my hand inside to pet it, it takes me a second to realise it’s dead. Maggot’s uncle has been out ferreting, and this is for tonight’s pot. I feel oddly disturbed by this dead rabbit in a bag, as if it’s not really dead at all. He invites me to come see the ferrets. They’re in a couple of hutches out the back of his uncle’s council house. As we get closer, the stench of ammonia is overpowering, causing my eyes to water. He opens up the lid and puts an arm in, and when he pulls it out, sure enough, a ferret is hanging off his index finger by its teeth. He reassures me that it doesn’t hurt and that this is the correct way to pick up a ferret. I’m not convinced.

Bagpuss senses the smell of another animal on me when I finally make it home. He seems unimpressed, but maybe that’s just his permanent facial expression.

Of course, there are girls at this time. Curious creatures. Neither of us has really developed the ability to talk confidently with them. We approach them cautiously, trying to string coherent sentences together, normally unsuccessfully. For some reason beyond my understanding, if a girl I like makes eye contact with me, my face immediately flashes a burning red. Like a warning signal, ensuring they keep a safe distance. Despite this, we both have girlfriends, on and off. Once we swapped for the day, but his one was a real pain in the arse, so I swapped her back. Occasionally, we get lucky and make out in the backroom of the youth club in the Baptist Church on Old London Road, or after swimming at Summerfields. Groping and slobbering all over each other like primates. These early encounters with the girls our age are awkward and often painfully cringe-inducing. Not helped by my developing tendency to become quite infatuated far too quickly.

Around this time, some of the teachers frequently make an extra effort to remind us that we’re shit and that the best future we can hope for is a dead-end job in a factory in hell, or collecting rubbish, or some other suitably menial task that a certain class of people are apparently designed for.

Any liquid that burns gets poured into a sink and set on fire

Despite this, we love science and CDT. Science lessons are a source of great entertainment for us; we listen carefully for any combination of elements we might use to make things go bang. Any liquid that burns gets poured into a sink and set on fire. If you do it right, you get a great whooshing sound from the plug hole. We play with the Bunsen burners, holding our hands over the yellow flame to see who can keep their hands there the longest. I always win, either through madness or some twisted desire to prove I can take it longer than the rest. Biology class has a fridge-freezer with vacuum-packed dead rats, ready for dissection. I find them oddly fascinating.

CDT: craft, design, technology, basically woodwork and metalwork, but with a more utilitarian-sounding name. This is essentially a weapons-making factory. We spend the first couple of years perfecting the ability to make Chinese throwing stars. Ninjas are in vogue. On the way home, we throw them at everything, including each other. Miraculously, no one ever really gets hurt.

Outside 60 Plynlimmon, I meet two quite eccentric women with a blue Persian cat in a cage. It looks like the identical twin of Bagpuss. Excitedly, I say, “Oh, you must see ours.” I bring Bagpuss out to these horrific characters who remind me of Cruella De Vil. They are disgusted and somehow shocked, commenting on how wild and unkempt he looks, as if my cat is mistreated in some way. But they are the ones with a depressed cat in a cage. Bagpuss, for his part, shows no interest in either of them or their caged cat.

My Life in Cats is a series, part memoir, part observation, part nostalgia, told alongside the stories of the cats I have lived with.