TALES OF MY FATHER
My Father ……. Jack-of-all-Trades, Master-of-None ……. an enigma
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TALE SEVEN:
MY FATHER (AND MY MOTHER!) & THE CAT
PAGE ONE: CATS
AND OTHER ANIMALS
(…. ESPECIALLY HORSES!)
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It goes without saying that my father was a dog person. Dogs would leave their owners when out for a walk and follow him. This brought embarrassment to my mother and me when this happened during a family outing and always brought my father much ill-will from dog-owners. My father always insisted that he was not responsible for dogs following him, but this did not placate the owners’ irritation and often words were exchanged especially when the owners became belligerent! My father did not tolerate abuse even from old ladies, who were, I have to admit, generally the most unkind in their comments. I remember that on one occasion, an especially aggressive old lady struck him with her umbrella! Still, regardless of the age or the sex of his adversary, he generally, verbally, sent them packing much to the horror and dismay of my mother and me.
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Fortunately for my father, and my mother and I, the situation was not repeated with cats. I can not say that he disliked cats. He was kind to them, but they treated him much as they did me …… with a certain indifference. Cats tended to prefer my mother, although she never sought them out more than she did our dogs.
During my childhood, we lived for a number of years over my parents’ Pie ‘n’ Mash Shop in Stepney. While here, we had numerous cats. They were given food and board in return from keeping mice in check, which came into the cellar under the shop with the flour when it was delivered.
At this time, I was allowed to have a cat to live upstairs with us and who was largely ignored when he (we always had a male cat that had been doctored!) by the working cats of the bakehouse and cellar. Like all our dogs, our cats suffered a limited lifespan due to our location on a busy road. Cats often wandered outside and many were killed by trolleybuses or cars racing along the road. Some, I am sure, probably found other homes or became street cats and never returned.
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Recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences is a report that finds that feral cats have helped cause the extinction of at least sixty-three species of birds, mammals and reptiles over the past five hundred years. The only group of invasive predators that has done more serious harm is rodents, which are linked to 75 species extinctions.
Dogs have not been immune to such killings and are responsible to causing the extinction of almost a dozen species.
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The working cats of the shop were never given names – or should I say, I can not remember any, but my cats were always given the name of Tibbles! Despite all my attempts to give them different names, my mother simply referred to them as Tibbles, which they responded to and so the name always stuck.
A Classic Tibbles
Over the years, I continued to try to give our cats more interesting, and perhaps exotic names, but to no avail. I remember soon after I became interested in Chemistry, one of my school teachers, Mrs. Brown, gave me a delightful kitten with dark brown and orange fur. I recall thinking that since I had recently become an admirer of the great chemist, Henry Louis Le Chatelier (1850-1936), as a result of his Principle, (or The Equilibrium Law), I thought that it would be amusing to name the kitten after him.
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Henry Louis Le Chatelier
Le Chatelier’s Principle states that if a chemical system at equilibrium experiences a change in concentration, temperature or total pressure, the equilibrium will shift in order to minimize that change.
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I also found it somewhat amusing to name the kitten after M. Le Chatelier since the French word for cat is Le Chat! When I announced the name of the kitten, my mother sniffed and proceeded, as always, to refer to him as Tibbles! What made this more annoying was that the kitten refused to come to me whenever I used his given name, yet always came when the name Tibbles was employed!
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I think that although my mother liked both dogs and cats, the animal that she loved best was without doubt the horse. Although she like all breeds of horses, it was The Belgian Draft Horse that she liked best of all.
My mother had been called-up at the start of the Second World War and given a choice: either work in an ammunitions factory or work on the railway. She chose the railway, as a friend of hers had been killed in an explosion in an ammunitions factory! Soon after my mother was told to report the Aldgate Depot (today, this is the Aldgate Bus Station).
Aldgate Bus Station (the Depot was once to the right)
At the Depot, she joined the driver of a team of Belgian Horses attached to a huge cart. The team consisted of two horses that had been named Gert and Daisey, after some comediennes from the Radio.
As a child, my mother had never had a pet and the only animals that she knew were the strays that lived in the streets of the East End. She said that the horses were huge with each weighing ~ a ton. She was scared of them at first, but the driver gave her a couple of lumps of sugar to feed them. My mother realised that they were gentle creatures and she said that they soon became firm friends.
Each day, she with the help of others, loaded the cart with goods that were bound for delivery throughout the City of London and The Docks. During the Blitz, this was especially dangerous, as The Docks and the East End were the major targets of The Luftwaffe (the German Air Force.
My mother said that during an air raid, they were expected to remain in place and to cover the horses’ heads with sacs, as they would be less inclined to bolt or rear when their heads were covered. She told me that raids often seem to happen when they were on crossing the Thames over Tower Bridge. Once, during such a raid and while my mother was attempting to place a sac over one of the horses, the horse reared up and crashed down and landed on her right foot! My mother said that the pain was sharp and the driver wanted her to go to hospital to get care. However since she had practically lived in hospitals as a child, she refused to go and get help and preferred to go home and take care of the injury herself.
Fortunately, the horse had landed on the most distal part of her right great toe, crushing the nail. She managed to bath and treat the toe and then to bandage it herself. She maintained this practice until she was 79 years old when she allowed me to remove the nail!
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Somewhat amusingly or not (!), this accident occurred while my mother was eight months pregnant with me!
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My mother never allowed this accident to cloud her love of horses. She said that she was very upset to leave the railway, especially the horses, and went to visit them several times after leaving until they were shipped off to the countryside to enjoy their retirement.
My mother would never pass a horse in the street when I was a child, as they were still in use by the delivery milk companies and others or should she come across one when out in the countryside.
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