Jill McGown

George news first – and not a lot else, so non-cat people can forget this letter altogether. I promise not to go on about George next month. And you’ll see that I have managed to get the photographs developed. In one of them you can see his one-eyed mouse between his paws. He still likes it

, but now his very favourite toy is a small soft rubber ball, which he plays with for hours, picking it up in his mouth, and knocking it out with his paw so that he doesn’t know which way it’s going to go, then chasing it. I’d like to see the dog that can throw its own sticks!

I’d forgotten what it was like having a kitten in the house. You have to become an Olympic gymnast in order not to step on him while at the same time endeavouring not to break your neck. He is as delightful as ever – nothing at all seems to make him cross. He doesn’t like having his head patted or kissed unless he is actually being cuddled at the time, but the only way you know that is that he pulls his head away slightly in order to avoid said pat or kiss. Or you might get a reproachful (clawless) paw pushing your hand or face away. He’s curled up on my desk as I write this, watching the screen. He also walks on the keyboard – he did something during one of these walks that made everything on the screen twice the size it was before, and in the end I had to reset to an earlier date, because I had no idea how to change it back again!

He’s a positive dream at the vet’s – he went to have his second lot of injections yesterday, and behaved just as though nothing was happening. The vet has now revised the age estimate – far from George being four months old when we got him, he thinks he’s probably only about three months old now. That makes a lot more sense – he still has his milk-teeth,

and it has become obvious that he has never killed to eat, so what with that and the length of time everyone thinks he was homeless, I don’t think he could have survived.

So it looks as though he was lost or abandoned – whether by his mother or a human being – as soon as he was weaned, and found a week or so after that, starving. The vet, as I said last month, doesn’t think he’s ever lived in a house, and certainly he had to learn to miaow if he was behind a closed door, which he did by the simple expedient of getting himself accidentally shut into the cupboard under the stair. Before that, we had found him sitting at the bottom of the stairs, waiting to be let into the living room, having not made a sound for about an hour during which we thought he was asleep in the conservatory. He obviously didn’t mind that as much as being in the cupboard.

The most noticeable thing was that he didn’t respond in any way to the noise that everyone makes to attract a cat’s attention. I’m not sure how to reproduce it in print, but you know the sort of noise I mean – a sort-of kissing noise. At first, we even thought he might be deaf, until it became obvious that he wasn’t. Eventually he began to react to it, but I don’t believe he had ever heard anyone doing it before.

George seems to be very popular with you, so I hope to start a George page, with photographs showing you his progress. I have now ordered the digital camera, so if I ever get the hang of using it, the photos should be very current. Whether they’ll be any good remains to be seen, but as you can see from these photographs, he’s a natural in front of the camera and poses as soon as he sees me with it, so I’d have to be very bad indeed not to get some decent ones!

And I thought you’d like to see one of the last photographs taken of

Frankie – this is of him helping me check a copy-edited manuscript. In the original edition of The Silent Miaow, Paul Gallico has a photograph of a cat sitting comfortably on the broadsheet newspaper he has spread out on the table, with the caption ‘Don’t mind me – you go right ahead and read’. I’m convinced Frankie read that book every night for handy hints.

And now for the rest of today’s news. There isn’t any. This letter is all about George, really. But the prizes for the June competition have at last gone out (my apologies again for the long delay) and if my signature and any cat drawing appended thereto seem even less competent than usual, it’s not because I’m on the gin. It’s because a tabby kitten was helping me that time, by thoughtfully chewing the end of my pen as I wrote.

Thank you to everyone who has written to tell me that they enjoyed Unlucky for Some. Still no reviews, but never mind – I’m told that sales are good despite that. And I now know that the paperback edition will be published in August 2005 in the UK, so just another year to wait! Hopefully by that time number fourteen will be in a publishable condition.

I’d better go – George is trying to steal Una’s car keys. He picks things up in his mouth and makes off with them – I apprehended him going into the kitchen with my eraser the other day. And we found the front door key in the middle of the living room floor, having been brought in from where we (used to) keep it, on the stair.

See you in October!

Love,
Jill

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