A Chowder of Cats, a Murder of Crows and a Tent.

I noticed the other day – or I realised the other day – that I lived in Los Angeles longer than I had lived anywhere. I moved there in January 1995 and came away in July 2011.

I lived in other places, of course, and the other long residence was in Northamptonshire where we were for another fifteen years. We had three addresses there (three in LA too) and ended up in a village about six miles or so from the town of Northampton itself.

It might have been like the TV series I wrote about last time Father Brown with a drunken vicar, the headmaster of the school having a ding dong with one of the teachers, a few village idiots (one having a dubious relationship with sheep), gentlemen farmers and a certain amount of small mindedness.

We had a very warm kitchen where we would sit around the table for meals each day and I seem to remember having to buy quite a few water jugs, which were placed in the middle of the table at meals, as they were always being broken.

I would brew my own beer and wine and make bread and pizza and I seemed to be very productive writing bad poetry, mediocre songs and a fairly good play.

I also made comic tapes for the children, which made them laugh when they came in from school, and there are still copies of the 'daft daddy' tapes knocking about.

We had three dogs (not altogether) and loads of cats; a lot of them died which broke all our hearts.

We had a female cat called Alex and one called Tibbles. They both had kittens and were killed not long after on the main road. Tibbles' kitten was called Flossie and was pure white.

One day she was shot somewhere near the thigh; she came home, climbed on top of my stereo music centre and slept for 24 hours. When she woke up she was fine – she was shot because she was white and must have stood out luminously at night when the village boys with their shot-guns were prowling.

She was killed too on the main road and then one day a young cat came into the house; she was tortoiseshell, we called her Biddie and she decided to stay.

Sometimes we would call her Auntie Biddie.

She had loads of kittens, which we gave away, but kept four of them and they lasted till they died of natural causes – so there we were with five cats (a chowder of cats) and when I went to live in Los Angeles I left 3 of them behind and the dog – Whiskey.

It sounds like an idyllic life, doesn't it, and in fact it was; when I got to Los Angeles I was there by myself for 18 months (or as the Americans say 'a year and a half') and we went back to the start of our marriage when my wife came.

Our children were grown up, property owning and independent; it was as if mummy and daddy had died and gone to heaven but they could still contact us. In fact our biggest expense when we lived there was the telephone bill.

That and the trips back to London and the children came to us too – so United Airlines were the winners. We thought the children might have wanted to join us but it wasn't to be so that's the reason we came back – children and grandchildren.

We had 2 cats in Los Angeles; 2 American cats who liked to bite and didn't like human food, fresh chicken, fish or milk. It had to be cat food from the Supermarket.

One was called the Big 'ne the other the Little one – they had other names for the vet - and we kept them till they died naturally.

The Big One came back to London with us but because of the British Law had to go into Quarantine for a while – not for that long as he'd had a rabies jab and a passport – and when he moved in to our house here, he lasted nearly 4 months and died.

So I buried him in the garden and it was very sad – here he is smiling.

The other night I had a dream – I was back in the house where he died and I came down the stairs and when I looked through the window, in the moonlight I saw his tent. I didn't see him but knew somehow that it was his; the tent was the size of a small dogs' kennel and at the head of it were two or three large very black crows; on each side of the tent three or four more and at the other end, another two or three others.

A Murder of Crows.

They seemed to be sniffing out the Big One; El Grande.

My one fear, when he died, was that I might not bury him deep enough as I was nervous about the foxes and crows eating him.

So maybe that was somewhere in my subconscious as I looked through the window; I carefully went out into the garden and who would be at the far end of the tent?

Biddie; the tortoiseshell cat and the mother of them all!