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big enough earlier, said the vet, examining her. But definitely not Tani. She was still very small – needed to grow a bit more. She was a lovely little girl all the same, he said, cuddling her closely, which she decided was what she'd come for. So I brought her home for another month, unwisely told Miss Wellington what had happened, and started her off on another of her campaigns – which this time was not to have Tani spayed at all, but to let her have kittens.
    Â Â Miss Wellington will be remembered by my readers as the elderly lady who concerned herself deeply with everything that happened in our part of the village. Whenever the stream flooded in the valley, though her own cottage was at the top of the hill and she was in no way inconvenienced by it, she took it on herself to patrol the swallet – the large natural hole in the limestone bed of the stream higher up in the forest down which the surplus water was supposed to go but very often didn't. She rang the Council to tell them when it was blocked with silt – and again when they didn't arrive at the double to unblock it. She foresaw catastrophe every time it snowed, rained hard or the wind got up to gale force, and scurried round trying to organise forces to counter whatever threatened – masculine forces if possible, so that the male residents of the valley usually took cover when they saw her coming, though she did once suggest that she and I should move an enormous tree trunk to stop the overflow from the swallet sweeping down the bridlepath. In vain I protested that I would do myself an injury. Before I knew it I was on the other end of the log, struggling like Samson to shift it.
    Â Â Way back when Annabel was young Miss Wellington had tried hard to persuade us to let her have a foal. Every time she went to stay with her friend who lived by the sea in Devon she would send us postcards showing mother donkeys on the beach with their cuddlesome offspring and Some day – this? written heavily across them. 'Old Mother Wellington's at it again,' the postman used to announce when he delivered her holiday greeting; and when we did try to get Annabel a foal – a fine old caper that turned out to be, too, what with her measuring fifty-four inches round the waist (Annabel, that is); collapsing in the lane telling us she could Go No Further, it was her Condition, when we tried to get her to exercise; and keeping us on the hop for three months waiting for a late delivery when in fact she wasn't having a foal at all – a good few people thought we'd been brainwashed into it by Miss Wellington, when what we'd hoped for was a small companion for Annabel.
    Â Â Now, Mrs Binney being otherwise occupied in lurking behind her curtains watching for Mr Tooting, it was Miss Wellington who popped up at the front gate just about every time I put my nose outside to tell me what a beautiful little cat dear Shantung was, what a lovely mother she was sure she'd make, and what wonderful companions the kittens would be for me.
    Â Â I recalled the one and only litter we'd ever bred: Sugieh's, consisting of Solomon, Sheba and the two Blue Boys who, with Solomon as their self-appointed leader, had terrorised the valley so many years before. Playing ring-a-­roses round the chimneys high up on the cottage roof because in those days, before we'd had an extension built on at the back, it had been possible to jump from the hillside across to the sloping roof of the single-storey kitchen and thunder in a miniature posse up to the ridge.
    Â Â I remembered Solomon, who couldn't climb for toffee though he considered he was best at everything, going up the damson tree at the front gate by sheer force of impetus and falling on the head of the Rector, who never came to visit us after that without pausing at a distance to stoop and peer up into the tree to be sure that Beelzebub, as he called him, wasn't up there. Solomon going up a pine tree on the