Monty

As a wedding gift, Grandma Spratt gave my parents a cat from a litter born in her backyard. He was black except for a white stripe on his chest, and Mum and Dad named him Monty. They said that when I was born two years later, they’d worried they’d have to give me up if Monty didn’t take to me. Instead, he stood guard over my playpen.

During my childhood, I couldn’t imagine home without Monty shadowing Dad around the garden, curled up under his chair when we ate our meals or crouching before the back door as he waited to be let out. Monty didn’t have words for his thoughts, but there was no mistaking his assessing look each time he entered a room. When I stroked him once too often, he turned his head and glared at me, although he never unleashed a paw with his claws out as other cats would.

Then we moved from our suburban London home up north to Sheffield. A little before eleven on a bright April morning just after my tenth birthday, Dad, Mum, my brother and I set off by foot. The movers had come and gone, and our home of six years, 9 The Drive, was empty. Monty skulked in a box that Dad carried to the Rayners Lane station, then on the Underground. Next to us on a seat on the mainline train out of London, though we talked to him all the way, he yowled and clawed at his prison.

In our new home, Monty looked lost, prowling from room to room, then sniffing around the back and front gardens. I, too, longed for the familiar surroundings of our old neighborhood.

But in time the unusual features of our new street, Button Hill, helped both Monty and me settle in. Overlooking a valley, the houses were elevated even in relation to the road. Each driveway angled sharply down from the garage to the public path running along the high garden wall, then farther down between what I called the “islands” to the road. The islands were mounds of trees and packed shrubbery. Through each island ran a bumpy mud path on which I grew to love riding my Raleigh bike.

It was when Monty found his way to the islands that he became his old self. They gave him more territory to range over than he’d had in Harrow and brought out the explorer in him. Now when he followed Dad around the back garden or nestled next to Mum and him on the couch as we all watched television, he returned to being companionable. He was purring again.

Mum and I would be leaving for a hospital appointment when I’d glance around to see Monty’s sleek back trailing us through the island shrubbery. Turning the corner onto Woodholm Road, I’d look again to find him at the end of the last island, his whiskers curling away from his concerned face. Mum would call, “Bye, Monty,” and I’d add, “We’ll be back soon.” Sometimes he’d be waiting at the same spot to escort us back home.

I spent an unhappy spring at a boarding school when I was eleven. In a letter to me, Mum wrote: Monty is scratching my arm as I sit in my usual place at the tea table. Now he is trying to sit on your letter and is rubbing his head against mine. I’m sure he wants me to send you his love!

One July day two years later, my parents told my brother and me that we were to emigrate to the United States in November. A few weeks afterwards, I encountered fifteen-year-old Monty coming down from one of the islands. I called his name. He glanced at me but kept going, dragging himself up our driveway. He was such a human being of a cat that my feelings were hurt. But I could tell he was in distress. A few hours later, while Mum, Dad and I were playing Scrabble, he crept under Dad’s chair and died.

In the long twilight of that northern hemisphere summer evening, Dad dug a grave in the back garden, behind where we set the wickets when we played cricket, and Mum, my younger brother and I watched as he lowered Monty’s box into the hole. It felt wrong to me that no government official or minister was in attendance.

Next day Mum and I walked over to one of her friends. Each step felt heavy, and I wondered what the point of anything was if a life as precious as Monty’s could come to an end.

“There is a saving grace,” Mum said, as we turned onto Bents Drive. “The flight to America.”

We’d been worrying how Monty would manage in a cargo hold. Had he lived a few more months, he would have been trapped again in a box, this time with no one nearby to hear him and with no heat from the passenger cabin against high-altitude subfreezing temperatures. He’d been spared the ordeal.

Monty’s was the first loss that felt like everything to me. With his death, I started on my road to adulthood, the part that is about experiencing and handling loss and the feeling of isolation that accompanies it.

I’m struck by my bewilderment at the absence of officialdom at Monty’s burial. The boy I was assumed that every significant event came with some sort of sanction. Weddings and funerals on television were presided over by ministers, each school day in England began with morning hymns and prayers in the assembly hall, birthdays and Christmas came with presents. Monty’s burial, with Dad as the gravedigger and the other three of us watching on, gave me my first inkling that big events, like small ones, could happen without ritual or fanfare.

Nowadays, I worry about privacy in a world where George Orwell’s Big Brother is a growing realization. Yet we want officialdom to take note when we get married, when we have children, when we or our children graduate from each level of school. We seek the sense of belonging that comes with the rituals that traditionally mark the stages of our lives. We even want the world to know when we pass away, though one would think we wouldn’t care by then.

Our move to America was to be marked by the issuance of passports and green cards, customs agent questions, airline crew greetings, and any number of other rites. But, as Monty’s burial prefigured, the meaning in our emigration had little or nothing to do with officialdom.

While I was writing this remembrance, it came to me that Monty had green eyes. It’s tempting to think he’s telling me he’s still around somewhere and approves. One thing’s for sure: Preservation of his memory hasn’t required officials and records; only love.

Note: This essay replaces “The Legacy of a Cat,” which I posted in July 2017 and is now deleted. The impetus to get the essay more right follows the death two weeks ago of Pinky, another human being of a cat whose family will always miss her.