I'm starting off the new year with some sad news. My lovely black and white cat Linnet died at the start of this month. I had her for nine years after she was rescued from terrible conditions and I thought I'd share her story here.
Here she is when I first met her at the cat shelter back in 2016. She was very frightened of people and would 'freeze' if you came within touching distance of her. She was found in a house with 16 cats, all of them related to each other. She had only ever been carried by the scruff of her neck and, having had a litter of kittens, the owner kept her in a rabbit hutch to stop her having more. When rescued, both her nose and paws were torn where she had tried to dig herself out.
It seemed unlikely that anyone would choose to give such a traumatised cat a home but I thought maybe I could help her. Years ago I took in a feral cat who had been hit by a car and had a broken leg and she turned into a very loving pet so that gave me confidence.
Needless to say, Linnet wasn't impressed by coming to live in my house. Here she is on the first day, trying to squeeze herself into a small space to hide from me ...
Once I'd gone to bed though she found a much better hiding place. I have an old fashioned bath on legs and she took up residence under there, only coming out when I was asleep or out of the house. For about three weeks I had to lie on the bathroom floor if I wanted to see her (which was very difficult if she looked the other way so that her white parts were hidden). I took to sitting on the floor up there regularly and talking to her and, one evening, she ventured out for a stroke. That was very exciting but she still wouldn't come with me into the rest of the house.
Then this happened ...
Before meeting Linnet I'd gone to the shelter determined to choose a kitten and, having discussed it with the staff there, decided to also adopt a kitten in the hope that it would help to socialise Linnet. I collected Tolly when Linnet had already been with me about a month; the delay was partly because he was too young to leave his mother but also to make sure that Linnet would be the top cat in the cat hierarchy here.
Anyway, as soon as she realised another cat had moved in, Linnet decided it was time to come downstairs and see what was going on and, from then on, she moved around the house freely. She was still very wary of me; I was sometimes allowed to stroke her but only if I kept at arms length. The kitten was obviously more of a known quantity to her and they were soon playing together (after a fashion).
It wasn't long before they were sleeping together on the settee, although Tolly has never really mastered the whole 'curling up tidily like a proper car' thing.
He wasn't very good at washing his face either but, luckily, Linnet was on hand to help ...
This is a much more recent photo and is typical of how Linnet would be sleeping nicely somewhere, only to be joined by Tolly who was twice her size once fully grown, sprawling alongside and sometimes on top of her.
It took Linnet years to learn to sit on peoples' laps. I think Tolly helped here because she could see him doing it. For quite a while though she would only stand on my lap, purring away but not quite being brave enough to sit down. Instead, she would curl up next to me like this ...
I learned to automatically leave her a space to the side of me whenever I sat down. It probably took her more than three years to become a lap cat but she got there in the end. She was always a tiny cat but when they both decided to sit on me, it was a bit of a squash, especially as Tolly never did learn to share space nicely.
You'd think that was just one cat on my lap, wouldn't you? But if you look from the side ..
... there's Linnet, as close to me as she can get. In the last few years she became even more friendly and would come and sit with me wherever I was. She always had a fondness for cramped spaces though - echoes of that rabbit hutch perhaps?
One of the best things was seeing how much Linnet loved being in the garden in the summer. I don't think she'd ever been outside before and she was very wary when I first opened the back door for them.
It wasn't long though before she was spending hours sunning herself in the garden. Here she is in the long grass in 2020 ...
... and in one of her many 'nests' over the years.
This next one is from last summer where she's guarding the pots for me (mostly from Tolly who likes to bite leaves).
She may have been tiny but Linnet was definitely top cat in the neighbourhood and many bigger cats (and several dogs) learnt not to mess with her. Meanwhile, Tolly would copy whatever she did and go where she went (as long as it didn't involve fighting - he's a real coward).
The downside of her love of the great outdoors was that she was also a natural hunter. She brought in countless mice and birds, the biggest was a blackbird. I don't know how she got that through the cat flap. One evening she even came in with a live bat! Needless to say, Tolly isn't a hunter. He did once catch a mouse but then dropped it and it ran away.
It's always sad when a pet dies but I'm glad to have given Linnet a good life after such a difficult start. And I still have Tolly. He's rather confused by her absence and is definitely more clingy. He's taken to sleeping up on my bed now that she isn't there to curl up with. When she was feeling ill, Linnet would hide on the floor of the airing cupboard and, since her death, Tolly has taken to curling up there too. Being a bigger and stronger cat though, he can get up to the shelves where there are nice clean towels for him to lie on. It's probably the warmest place in the house in this cold weather.
And here's one last picture of Linnet, helping me make my patchwork curtains.
