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we had all the requisite skills for stowing away on board. When you think about it, any ordinary cat is good at making himself invisible, scavenging, defending his territory – and we were not remotely a pair of ordinary cats! I recall that we always encountered trouble at first from the pre-existing cat population, but the Captain was more than a match for them. On the firstship, which was bound for Cape Town, we were no sooner out of the Thames Estuary than we were cornered in the engine room by four big heavy cats. In my mind’s eye, these cats had tattoos and heavy accents, but I’ve always been a big reader, so my imagination might be embellishing things a little. Anyway, I remember how I took several deep breaths, readying myself for a fight with these tough mariner felines. But the moment I started to yowl and spit, the Captain struck me in the chest to silence me, and hissed, “I’ll take care of this.”
    “What happened next was simply amazing to watch, and requires no embellishment whatsoever. Soundlessly, he walked towards the four big cats, and sat down in the middle of their circle. They were confused (as was I!), but at the same time couldn’t believe their luck. The Captain looked at the biggest of the four – the cat looked back. And then something phenomenal happened. The other cat started to edge backwards, and he also shook – as if he had lost control of every muscle – and I’m not lying, for a moment or so, he sort-of lifted off the ground. The Captain looked into the eyes of the next cat, which immediately edged back as well. I had my paws over my eyes – he was going to slash all their throats, wasn’t he? He would kill them the way he had killed all those others! But he wasn’t interested in killing them, it seemed. He just overwhelmed them, vanquished them, terrorised them, and they retreated, and we never saw them again – because (as I later realised) they threw themselves overboard. In my innocence, I thought they hid from us for the remainder of the voyage. I would sometimes remark to the Captain that we hadn’t seen them since the encounter in the engine room, and he would say, “You’re right!” – as if he couldn’t explain it either.
    “It was the grandest of grand tours. We saw art. We saw architecture. We read books, and learned languages. All this time, the Captain was teaching me to talk, to read, to reason,to memorise. Long sea voyages are excellent for all such projects of self-improvement, as long as there’s a fairly stupid person (there usually is) in charge of the human stores. Oh, the reading! How we loved to read. The Captain with his Conrad, me with my Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. From Cape Town, we made for India. After India, we saw Egypt, Italy, Greece. The Pyramids by moonlight. The Forum by moonlight. The Parthenon by moonlight. My best memory of all is of lying on a rocking wooden deck on a starlit night, in the Aegean, with the Captain reciting Tennyson’s Ulysses faultlessly beside me.
    Roger is evidently so moved by the recollection that for a moment he almost turns conversational.
    “It was Greece that captured my heart. Have you been?”
    Wiggy starts to draw breath, but Roger changes his mind.
    “It doesn’t matter. It will have changed so much since the 1930s in any case. Have you read the Durrells?”
    “Um –”
    “We knew them in Corfu – well, they didn’t know us , because we kept ourselves to ourselves, but we lived very happily for a while at all three of their villas. We borrowed Larry’s books; we read some of his manuscripts. We even helped ourselves to some of Gerald’s smaller zoological specimens. In the end, the Captain and I spent three whole years in the Greek islands, and it was the very best of times. I was coming of age, I suppose. I was finally beginning to understand – and enjoy – my freedom from normal mortal constraints. I’d been reading some fabulous travel writing. Mixing with top-notch people.