Goodbye, Heidi

A memorial to a very eccentric cat

Hello,

An unscheduled letter today - but my beloved cat Heidi died yesterday, and I couldn’t let the moment pass without posting a tribute. Many of you will know her from Wintering, where she opens the Metamorphosis chapter:

There is a change in the air… My cats have taken on their winter coats. Lulu, our black-and-white moggy, is Marmite brown in the summer but goes boot-polish black when the cold comes. Heidi, our tortoiseshell, loses her warm-weather blonds and becomes plush and velvety, her gingery tones deepening to red. They are suddenly present in the house, having avoided us all summer when the warm nights invited adventure. Just like us, they now crave comfy cushions and the occasional fire.

Both cats are gone now. Heidi was nearly 17, which is a good innings for a kitten found wandering stray at 4 weeks old. She was an eccentric cat to the last. The best way to learn about her is from the post below, published about three years ago on my old newsletter.

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On Thursday afternoon, I was just trying get out of playing with Bert when the phone rang. H answered it and I could immediately hear the confusion in his voice. ‘What? Say that again? Really? Er, okay, we’ll come straight away.’

He put the phone back in his pocket. ‘Someone’s taken Heidi to the vet,’ he said.

Heidi is our tortoiseshell cat. Fourteen years old and in possession of an extraordinarily glamorous coat, her presence in the front garden often means that we have complete strangers leaning over our fence and cooing while she displays herself like an ornament on the shed roof.

‘Is she okay?’ I ask, panicked. ‘Has she been…’ I mouth the words, Les Dawson-style, over Bert’s head: ‘…run over?’

One of Heidi’s more infuriating habits is to play a kind of dancing Russian roulette with passing cars. She’ll wait until you’re a couple of metres away and then dart out in front of your wheels, forcing you to slam on the brakes. By the time you’re parked, she’ll be sitting on a nearby fence looking for all the world like nothing has happened. I honestly don’t know how she’s lived so long. I can only imagine that her timing is very precise.

‘She’s fine,’ says H. ‘Someone thought she was stray.’

Heidi does not wear a collar. We did try, in her early days. As concerned new cat parents, we bought the easy-release ones, but after a week in which she managed to jettison a pack of ten, we gave up. We then tried one with a buckle, only to have her limp in an hour later with one arm stuck through it, as if sieg heiling. We have not brought up the matter of a collar since.

I pack Bert into the car with the cat box, and drive over the to vet. I can’t decide whether I’m mortified or furious: someone has kidnapped our cat. (‘Catnapped,’ says Bert.) They have bundled her up into a box and driven her a few miles down the road, which is a heinous insult to her dignity. Anyone could see she’s well looked-after, surely. I am ever so slightly outraged.

At the vet, the receptionist takes our cat-box out the back, and emerges a couple of minutes later with a very offended-looking Heidi. She is clawing at Bert’s old Spiderman towel as if this were the final straw.

‘Why did they bring her here?’ I ask. ‘Was she shut in someone’s shed?’

The woman shrugs. ‘God only knows. They reckon she’s been living in their garden for three months.’

‘THREE MONTHS?! She slept on my bed all last night! And I’m pretty sure she ate her breakfast this morning.’

‘I know!’ says the receptionist. ‘Just look at the size of her! Anyone could see she’s not a stray. Probably eats at every house in the street by the look of her.’

I want to tell Heidi to cover her ears to avoid any further mortification, but I thank the woman and make good our escape. Heidi yowls all the way home, and when I finally let her out, I expect her to run straight back out of the window to go and protest-sleep in the garden from which she was extracted. But instead she rolls onto her back and spends the rest of the afternoon catching sunrays in the deep pile of her belly fur. ‘Don’t stroke her,’ I say to Bert. ‘It’s a trap.’

I suppose you have to know Heidi to know that she always comes home eventually. She likes to stroll, that’s all. A few years ago, she went properly missing, and after the second night of calling her, we put posters all around the neighbourhood asking people to check their gardens. We had barely got home before the phone calls started rolling in. Several different people thought they owned her outright. We learned she she was working to a very particular rota in the surrounding streets: a couple of hours each morning sleeping in the conservatory of an elderly woman; lunchtime in a bungalow near the town centre. Every afternoon, she positioned herself on the doorstep of a house just in time for the children to come home from school. There, she would play for a while (they called her Chocolate Fudge Cake) before curling up with the family dog. Heidi is not the kind of cat to be pinned down.

And that’s not to even mention the time she tried to stow away in the Sainsbury’s van, leading to a panicked call from the driver half an hour later, asking if we owned an orangey sort of cat?

So I probably can’t stay outraged with her catnapper for long, because they did nothing that Heidi herself would not have done with great enthusiasm. She is a wanderer, an adventurer, an untameable spirit. But, as today’s escapade proved, my number is on her microchip. And that, at least, is something.

Keep wandering, Heidi.

Take care,
Katherine x