The Girl Who Poked Kittens With a Stick.

An Improving tale

Based on an untrue story, narrated unreliably by Nick Morgan

Chapter 1

In which an unreliable tale is introduced,
the scene is set, and the narrator allows a
tinge of sympathy to enter the tone of his tale
a little prematurely, perhaps.

 

Once upon a time… or perhaps it was twice – I can’t be sure as I heard this tale from a quite unreliable source, and I am not convinced that I am all that reliable a narrator either. However, I am the only one you’ve got for the moment, so bear with me. I shall try to recall events as best I can. So, for the sake of argument, let us agree that it was just the once upon a time that seven kittens lived in a small cottage in the North Yorkshire countryside. Their mother had died shortly after they were born, but they were looked after by a man called Dearnley.

Dearnley worked very hard for long hours away from the cottage each day, but he was always sure to leave out food and water for the kittens and was kind to them upon his return in the evenings. They very much enjoyed Dearnley’s company and yet were equally happy during his absences in the daytimes when they used a catflap he had cut into the back door to come and go as they pleased. The catflap was a considerable affair, cut from a lightweight piece of wood painted the same colour as the door itself, and hung from two large, cast-iron hinges formerly used on a barn door. It was far too large for the kittens really as Dearnley had cut through an entire quarter-panel of the back door, and so all seven kittens could use the flap at once. Indeed, so large was the flap that a badger had once ventured into the cottage leaving its footprints all over the utility room floor!

And so the kittens divided their time between playing in the meadow, catching small rodents, chasing butterflies, popping back into the kitchen to snuggle on top of the Aga, running up trees, looking alarmed at apparently nothing, wrestling each other and simply sitting and sleeping and attempting to look wise, as befits all cats of whatever age. Their favourite place to play, however, was beyond the meadow in a small scrubby clearing between some well-established beech trees, a few rather spindly ash saplings and some small, half-forgotten outbuildings and sheds. Here there were places to hide, to pounce at each other from, to bask in the sun, to lie in wait for prey, and in the middle was a large pile of brambles and thorns which Dearnley had once cut out of an overgrown ditch and left there for a bonfire which had never happened. Dearnley never came to the kittens’ clearing, too busy was he with his work, so this was their own very special place, their home from home.

Dearnley did not have any children of his own, but his sister often visited him in the school holidays, bringing her daughter Sophie with her. During most days, Sophie and her mother went out on walks in the countryside or visited local tourist attractions such as the steam railway, the Spoon Museum, the ruined bridge, the gallery full of stuffed animals, the Big Hole in the Ground or the Museum of Agricultural Injuries and Diseases (a bit gruesome, but Sophie always enjoyed their scratch and sniff guidebook). However, one summer the weather was so miserable that they stayed in Dearnley’s cottage for most of their visit, having exhausted the local indoor attractions within the first few days. That left almost two weeks of holiday to go with little prospect of sunnier weather on the horizon. This was during the kittens’ very first summer.

* * *

Sophie was not a kind child. In her own mind, she knew her own value, and indeed the value of others. That is to say, she knew what she was good at and properly admired the achievements and skills of others. In this respect she was fair to a fault: woe betide any person who acted or spoke unjustly, for they would receive the full force of Sophie’s wrath and indignation. However, she was intolerant of the shortcomings of others, having no patience with those unable to achieve a given task or goal, being dismissive of the strivings of the less able, losing all vestiges of patience when forced to witness lack of accomplishment in others, and tending to stomp off in frustration when the limited abilities of others was impeding her own progress to victory or achievement. Do not misunderstand me: she was a loving child in many ways. She looked after her toys, could be charming and polite when it suited her, sought and responded positively to the praise of others, worshipped her mother, was fond of her uncle and indeed was relatively patient with the rotten weather, never taking out her frustration with Dearnley’s lack of a TV on her mother. No, Sophie was not a bad child, merely one whose intolerance of imperfection, whose impatience with others less able than herself, whose inability to value everything for its own sake rather than for its usefulness to herself; all these things blinded Sophie to the fact that she lacked one of the most simple and fundamental of human characteristics: kindness.

Chapter 2

In which Sophie finds the kittens are not to her liking
and responds by inventing a variety of sports involving them,
but which are for the amusement of herself alone.
Oh, and the narrator explains a salient point
which, arguably, he should have mentioned earlier.

 

At first the kittens had given Sophie and her mother a wide berth. Dearnley was the only person they had ever known in the course of their short lives and it is perfectly possible that the existence of others of his kind had not even occurred to them. They soon got used to the newcomers though, and carried on with their comings and goings as if they were not there. Sophie’s mum stroked and played with them from time to time, but Sophie found the kittens dull. They didn’t do anything useful, so what is the point of them? They just eat and get in the way, so why, wondered Sophie, does Dearnley bother with them at all? Now, dogs Sophie could see the point of: they did stuff. They could fetch, catch, round up sheep, do tricks and above all, they would adore you for telling them what to do. In Sophie’s mind, dogs were, therefore, perfect animals, capable of accomplishment and, most importantly, willing to be bent to Sophie’s own will. Cats, and more especially kittens, on the other hand were a waste of space, not worth bothering with. And now amid the second week of enforced captivity in Dearnley’s cottage the kittens were seriously getting on Sophie’s nerves. She would be trying to read when a kitten would brush against her leg, or two of them would enter the room leaping on one another. So distracting. So unnecessary. Sophie would be listening to music on her mum’s iPad, eyes closed, only to be brought rudely out of her rock chick reverie by a kitten leaping onto her lap. And even when you could not see them, there was the constant scampering of paws, clattering of claws on the stone kitchen floor, thuds as one tumbled over another onto a piece of furniture or door, mews and yowls and the intermittent swooshing of the great catflap. The kittens could not be ignored and were obviously not going to allow Sophie to get on with her own doings without distraction, so Sophie decided to engage these pointless, fluffy diversions in sports of her own devising.
Sophie’s first sport she called The Catflap Flatcat Challenge. Try saying that as a tongue twister: rather good, isn’t it? This involved waiting until the kittens were outside, then blocking the catflap on the inside with a large and heavy potted palm in a huge terracotta pot. Sophie would then rattle a knife in a tin of cat food and call the kittens through the kitchen window. She smiled sweetly through the window in the top half of the back door as the kittens raced towards her… and rolled around in laughter as they lay stunned on the floor outside, their tiny kitten skulls having ricocheted off the catflap. Its usual free-swinging operation had been taken so much for granted by the kittens that its sudden immobility jarred them mentally just as much as the impact had jarred them physically. Over a couple of days the kittens became most tentative around the catflap, never approaching it at a gallop as they had always done before, but with a gentle nudge of the head, or a hesitant swipe of a paw. Sophie’s new sport had been fun, but was thus over almost as soon as it had started.
And so the following morning Sophie fetched herself a stick from just outside the back door. It was a long stick, quite sharp at one end, just one of many which Dearnley had brought to the yard ready to be cut up for kindling. This stick was to become the core piece of equipment in Sophie’s second sport which she did not in fact find a name for. Make one up yourself it this bothers you. Anyway, she took the carving knife from the kitchen drawer and sharpened the pointed end further until it was quite dangerously sharp. She hid in a gap between the vegetable rack and the Aga and waited…. and waited… and… finally, a kitten turned up and walked over towards the Aga. As the warm glow of the stove enveloped it, the kitten sat down, raised a paw and began to lick its bottom. Disgusting, thought Sophie, as she reached out with her long, pointy stick and jabbed the kitten hard in the back. It howled, leapt in the air and ran off, not even pausing as it zipped through the catflap. Next, Sophie lay beneath the kitchen table amid the chair legs, hidden partially behind her mother’s handbag which lay on the floor. Two kittens appeared, wrestling each other. One crouched with its back to Sophie, about to pounce on the other. A quick jab from Sophie later, and the kitten had shot up like a rocket, yelping, and run off for dear life. The other kitten, confused, turned to watch its playmate scurry off, only to receive a sharp jab in its own backside from Sophie. It, too, ran off as fast as it was able.
Over the next few days Sophie found a variety of places to hide and lie in wait for the kittens: behind the sofa, beside the cabinet, behind doors, in the cupboard under the stairs, amid a potted palm tree, behind the curtains and inside the pantry. Sophie even found she could combine both sports by blocking the catflap with a pile of bricks on the outside, then jabbing kittens inside so they would flee at top speed, forgetting their earlier caution of the catflap and braining themselves with a sickening thud once again. These sports were definitely entertaining, decided Sophie, and were decidedly appropriate ways of keeping these useless kittens on their toes: that’ll teach them to be so pointless. As I said, she was a child unencumbered by feelings of kindness.
Oh, in case you were wondering where Sophie’s mother was while these sports were in progress, I forgot to mention that she suffered from exceptionally bad headaches, especially on grey days when the air was thick with the promise of storms, such as each day of their current visit to Dearnley’s cottage had been. These severe headaches were not migraines, her doctor had assured her, but that was little comfort. Indeed, it would have been better, thought Sophie’s mother, had the doctor diagnosed them as migraines because at least migraines were taken seriously. When she was taken badly by one of these crushing headaches, people used to ask: is it a migraine? And she always felt, however slightly, a sense of embarrassment when she answered that, no it was not a migraine, just a very bad headache. People never said as much, but she could tell that they thought she was just being a big, girly wuss, whereas migraine sufferers could bask in unalloyed sympathy. And so she was resting upstairs throughout Sophie’s sports, lying still and waiting for the storm outside to break and so release the storm within her aching skull. I’m sorry, I perhaps should have mentioned this earlier as I am sure you will have been wondering how Sophie came to be left to her own devices and had the run of Dearnley’s place, but I am, as noted before, not that reliable a narrator, so do forgive me.

Chapter 3

In which the narrator explains the nature
of this story a little further and the kittens
decide upon a plan of action. Or perhaps they don’t.

 

The kittens decided that this new person was treating them in a manner which simply would not do. They got together to decide what steps should be taken. Now, a reliable narrator might at this point be expected to tell you the kittens’ names, but I am afraid my source never mentioned their names, nor indeed did they confirm that they had names at all. In any case, perhaps Dearnley wasn’t the sort to bother himself with naming his animals, and I imagine that Sophie’s mother had not had time to name them before her migraine… sorry, I mean before her really bad headache imprisoned her upstairs, and you will have gathered that Sophie had not concerned herself in any positive way with the kittens, and certainly I cannot imagine her going to the trouble of giving them names. She was so singularly unimpressed with them that I doubt that she had even given them derogatory nicknames such as Foxfood, Roadkill or Fluffybum. If this really bothers you, I suggest you make up names for them yourself. It’s of no matter to me – do as you like. In any case, it matters not one jot to the story what the kittens called themselves as they acted pretty much as a united force with no obvious ringleader and behaved simply as their tribe of seven saw fit.
Oh, and if you were hoping that I might enlighten you as to how the kittens spoke to one another, I’m afraid it is not that kind of story: kittens do not speak, so their discussion is not something which can be recorded, and I shall not insult your intelligence by speculating on what might have been said, if the kittens indeed could have spoken. If you were expecting some children’s story replete with talking animals, I suggest you pop to the library and read the works of Beatrix Potter – very good they are too, but they are not in the same oeuvre as the current story.
Where was I? Oh yes, while there is no discussion between the kittens to report, it is clear that a decision was made and that it was decided what was to be done. Actually, it is not clear whether what happened was the result of a well formed plan, or was simply improvised as it went along, so perhaps there was no discussion, simply an understanding between the tribe of seven kittens that things were to happen. Hmmm… well, Chapter three seems to have been something of a waste of time, so I will simply move on to Chapter four in order to report how events unfolded.

Chapter 4

In which events unfold.

 

The following day, there was no wind, no rain; just glowering, dark grey clouds. The air was heavy. Outside the light breeze carried few birdsongs, few sounds from the fields. Nature awaited and expected a storm. It would come.

Dearnley had gone to work before dawn.

Sophie’s mother had drawn the bedroom curtains, set a glass of water on her bedside table, placed a cool pillow over her head and was praying for the storm to break.

Sophie was waiting beside the back door, crouched behind the umbrella rack at the foot of Dearnley’s old, oak bookcase on top of which his great aunt’s heavy, ancient yet reliable clock marked time. She clutched her sharp, pointy stick and waited for a kitten to appear.

And the kittens, where were they? Well, I cannot account for all seven, however…

• one kitten was on top of the old, oak bookcase and gently, yet insistently, brushed against Dearnley’s great aunt’s heavy, ancient, yet reliable clock as it ticked a few more seconds away before falling onto Sophie’s head some feet below….
• three more kittens appeared immediately from the direction of the kitchen and, together with the first, somehow dragged an unconscious Sophie through the catflap – no, I know what you’re thinking, and I confess that I’m not sure how they did it either – Sophie was not a large child but nevertheless it was quite some achievement, and my source is quite adamant that they did not open the door, so the catflap is surely how it must have been done…
• one kitten (waiting outside) had dragged a large, blue, plastic sheet immediately outside the flap, ready for Sophie’s comatose form to flop straight onto, whereupon…
• all five of these kittens dragged the plastic sheet with Sophie upon it to their special place, their home from home.

* * *

Sophie awoke some time later. In the first instance it was the cold splash of rain on her face which had brought her round. The cold and the howling of the wind convinced her that she was no longer in Dearnley’s cottage. Her head was pounding and she had a dull ache where the clock had struck her. Her vision was still blurred. She blinked… it was still blurred. Where were her glasses? Sorry, I perhaps should have mentioned earlier that Sophie wore glasses and that these had been dislodged when she was knocked out cold by the great aunt’s heavy, ancient yet reliable clock. She stretched out her aching legs – ow! She was pricked sharply. She looked around and found herself amid a large pile of bracken and thorns. She was, as I am sure you will have gathered by now, in the kittens’ clearing between the well-established beech trees, the few rather spindly ash saplings and the small, half-forgotten outbuildings and sheds. For some reason she found that she could not move her arms. She shouted out for help, but the storm whisked her cries up into the sky and far away, so that only a few rather confused sheep in a neighbouring valley ever heard them. Carefully she looked down her body to discover that her arms were clamped to her sides as she seemed to have been rolled in a blue plastic sheet, giving her the appearance of a bright blue spring roll. Attempts to unroll herself ended in painful jabs from the bracken and thorns. She was stuck. How had she got here? How long would it be before her mother realised she was missing? Hours passed, as did the storm. Her shouts became less frequent. Sophie became quiet, subdued. She stared silently at the world through the lattice of bracken and thorns: a world seen as an unreachable, intangible blur through an impassable, impenetrable prism of spiky pain. And, ironically, a world which featured no fewer than seven cute, fluffy kittens within just a few yards.

Chapter 5

In which Sophie finds herself the
miserable victim of the kittens’ plot,
the storm clears and the narrator defends
himself against the readers’ accusations.

 

A kitten ran past the pile of bracken and thorns and sheltered nearby under a piece of corrugated iron roofing which was propped against a shed. It looked at the girl for a while and then started to wash its ears with its paw. I do not know whether this was one of the five kittens which had been involved in Sophie’s kidnap but I don’t suppose it matters. The rain stopped. Two kittens emerged from somewhere behind one of the small, half-forgotten outbuildings. They stared at the girl. One sat and began to wash one of its back legs, the other just sat, blinking occasionally. The wind dropped. A fourth kitten emerged from amid the beech trees. It, too, stared at the girl. Sophie stared back, though not at the kitten – her short-sightedness meant that she was only vaguely aware of these staring, shadowy creatures which moved beyond the brambles and thorns of her immediate surroundings. A hot tear slowly crept down her cheek then fell to the scrubby ground below. Nearby a fifth kitten mewed as it pushed Sophie’s long, sharp stick around on the ground playfully.

***

Sophie’s mother’s headache lifted as the storm cleared the air. Eventually, as the storm abated, she roused herself and drank the remainder of her glass of water. She went downstairs and started to prepare some lamb chops for their tea. Later, Dearnley came home and fed the kittens. He was saddened to find his great aunt’s heavy, ancient, yet reliable clock with its glass frontage smashed on the floor beside the back door, but was satisfied to hear it was still ticking the seconds away as he placed it, along with Sophie’s glasses, on top of the old, oak bookcase.

***

Now, I imagine you are half-expecting that I shall dodge the matter of what became of Sophie, being an unreliable narrator. I can’t say I blame you if this is what you are expecting of me, but no, I shall not leave the matter there, tempting as it is to leave the brat bleeding and weeping amid her spiky prison and to let you bring the tale to some grisly conclusion of your own devising. But no, there is an ending to the tale so I shall tell it. Yes, I know that so far I can only account for the movements of up to five kittens at a time, but to be honest, five is more than enough to keep on top of. Had I thought things through a bit better before I started writing, I might have said that there were just five kittens in the tale to begin with, but that is not how the story was told to me, so seven it is. Trust me, it’s better to stick with the facts as I received them, I’m sure. So, as I said, there is indeed an ending to the story as it was told to me, albeit by my rather unreliable source, but which I shall now relate….

What’s that? You want clarification concerning the story so far before I go on to finish it? Oh, well I shall do my best – what’s puzzling you? Ah, of course: how did Sophie come to be swaddled in blue plastic sheeting and, more puzzling still, how did she come to be in the middle of Dearnley’s pile of bracken and thorns such a long way from the house? Well frankly I do not know. This is the point at which the Beatrix Potter style would come in handy: a talking kitten at this point could be prevailed upon to give an exposition of how it was done. My source only reported what he saw, and whereas a more gifted narrator might fill in the blanks with some well-crafted fictional piece of plot, you’re stuck with me and I have neither the imagination nor the motivation to come up with anything quite so creative at the moment.

The truth of the matter is that nobody will ever know quite how five small, young kittens, possibly assisted by a further two of their siblings, managed to manhandle a smallish, unkind girl in such a way that she ended up some hundred metres away from Dearnley’s cottage in the middle of an impregnable pile of sharp, spiky bracken and thorns, encased in blue plastic sheeting. It does seem implausible I know, but I have explained the plausible parts of the story as best I can and that will have to do. I don’t hear you giving Beatrix Potter a similarly hard time about her talking animals, do I?

No, I thought not… now, on to the conclusion.

Chapter 6

In which the narration comes to a conclusion
and the reader is invited to draw their own.

 

Sophie awoke. She had drifted off some time earlier having become drained by the constant effort of keeping her head clear of the brambles and thorns and trying to roll herself free of the blue plastic sheeting. The brambles and thorns were gone. Or rather, Sophie was no longer in the middle of them. The blue plastic sheeting was nowhere to be seen either. Sophie sat up. Her head was throbbing. She was in the meadow, a little damp from the rain-sodden grass she had been lying on and still smarting all over her body from the many lacerations of the brambles and thorns. She looked around. Nothing of any significance was nearby. No creatures stirred, and certainly no kittens were to be seen. Or were they hiding? Sophie got to her feet, wincing as further scratches made their presence felt. She walked slowly back to Dearnley’s cottage.

As she opened the back door, she saw her glasses on the bookcase and put them on. A lovely aroma of mint gravy wafted in from the kitchen – looked like she was just in time for tea. Sophie went into the kitchen and sat, silently, at the table. Her mother was at the Aga, finishing off the gravy on the hotplate. Dearnley was in the front room examining his Council Tax bill and emitting the odd sigh and grumble.

A couple of kittens scampered past the table, then froze and stood stock still, staring at Sophie. She stared back.

Three more appeared, moving more steadily than the first pair. They came to rest in a simple V-formation, sitting bolt upright, their eyes focussed unblinking on Sophie. She stared back.

A further kitten arrived from outside and curled up on the floor, looking up at Sophie with an equally intense stare.

Six pairs of small, feline eyes were fixed on Sophie. Their gaze never wavered, not even when Sophie’s mother opened the Aga to take out the lamb chops, unleashing the full force of their rich flavours and smell sensations to fill the whole kitchen. Sophie could not take her eyes off the kittens, arrayed as they were before her on the kitchen floor. She looked like she was about to say something, but every time she opened her mouth, nothing came out. And as she stared at the kittens, and their tiny eyes stared back, it was as if an unspoken understanding passed between them: a moment of knowledge of each other – of Sophie knowing what she had done; knowing what had been done to her… and a moment of forgiveness, of putting everything right.

The final kitten entered the room. Sophie didn’t see it. The kitten went over to Sophie’s sharp, pointy stick which had, somehow, found its way back inside and which stood, propped against the wall beside the fridge. It nudged the sharp, pointy stick with its whiskers and watched as it fell with a loud clatter onto the floor. Sophie squealed, and she and all the kittens fled out into the warm, golden glow of the evening sun as her mother dropped the saucepan full of gravy onto the kitchen’s stone floor.

And from outside there came the sound of Sophie’s laughter and the mews and yelps of small kittens as they played, ran and jumped in the last rays of the day.

* * *

See, I told you I was right to stick with all seven kittens.

THE END