he screams coming from the bottom of the garden sounded like bagpipes. Bagpipes playing by someone with no experience in a blacked-out room and a bad case of emphysema. Up and down they rose, torturing the quiet atmosphere of the spring evening - and our nerves.
Three times they came, wildly distraught and contagiously terrifying, and when they had died away seemed still to tingle in the air.
By this time I was down by the garden shed having done a quick headcount in the house, Uno, Dot and Wyndham were all in the lounge looking up anxiously with the ears swivelling faster than the radar dishes on a Type 45 Frigate. I knew what it was, of course, Stanley, our six-kilo Ginger Tom had found an intruder in the grounds and was seeing him off.
It’s nice that Stanley protects his girls so assiduously, but there is always the risk that injuries will happen. And so it proved. When he came in he was holding his tail at a peculiar angle. Stiff, vertical and quivering as he rubs about your legs it was kinked distinctly in the middle to the extent that we almost worried that it had broken.
We tried to investigate and bathe the wound with salt water (tip, never use TCP or anything similar: – the active ingredients are toxic to cats) but he was having none of it. Hisses and spits are some of rudest words in the feline vocabulary, and we got both in quantity and volume. It was when he started laying about with his half-inch claws and deploying his fearsome teeth that we decided that discretion was the better part of valour – or indeed a quick trip to A&E.
I called the vet and made an appointment for first thing the next morning. We have an excellent veterinary practice in Woodstock, and I would have taken him then and there but the cat was stressed, and we had managed to bathe the wound (a bit in any case). In such circumstances, you have to decide on the lesser of the two evils. I decided to take him up first thing the next day.
Stanley, feeling a little sorry for himself
At the surgery, Dimitar, our highly skilled vet and a personal friend, (it is always worth cultivating your vet, it allows you to both know in detail how your pet is doing from two perspectives) whisked Stanley away into a back room. Here he and a nurse clipped his tail and examined the wound. It was a beauty, Stanley’s nemesis had managed to get his canines on either side of Stanley’s stubby antennae and had penetrated flesh and muscle almost down to the bone. No wonder then the exotic language from our normally placid Stan!
The good news was that surgery would not be needed, but an antibiotic injection, a course of antibiotic tablets and pain relief would. So I filled out the insurance form and then took him home. Over the next few days, the swelling went down. Of course, he looked a bit comical with three inches of fur missing from the middle of his tail, and it drooped in the dispirited fashion of a philanderer whose vital statistics have just been outed on Ashley Madison. In fact, his whole demeanour was that of an ageing prizefighter who had stepped into the ring once too often.
Of course, he looked a bit comical with three inches of fur missing from the middle of his tail, and it drooped in the dispirited fashion of a philanderer whose vital statistics have just been outed on Ashley Madison.
Richard Corfield, Stanley's compassionate therapist
The tail-end of self-esteem
Eventually, the letter from the insurance came. They declined to pay up, citing an increased excess because of Stanley’s age. Somehow the letter implied that a cat of his distinguished years should not have been getting into fights.
Anyhow, I coughed up the £140 vet bill (don’t even think about being uninsured – if it had been more serious and he had needed X-Rays the bill would have run into thousands), and Stanley is now almost his old self again.
Naturally, as any father would, I have given him a stern talking-to about not getting into fights with the school bully. The trouble is I think he took about as much notice as I did when my father gave me a similar lecture forty years ago.
Will Stanley rise to fight another day?
I’m afraid I rather think he will.
Perhaps it’s time to change my insurance…
