Nan’s missing eye meant that she ignored all but the biggest and brightest of cat toys, and accounted for one of her many eccentric traits - she’d lean into your hand when you stroked her ... and lean ... and lean ... and fall over on her side. Despite that, her missing eye didn’t hold her back, as Katherine discovered when carrying plates of fishcakes into the sitting room, only to have Nan mountaineer up her leg, even as she walked. Nan's eyesight was good enough for her to amuse herself by batting emerging print outs back into the printer, and when she wasn’t climbing us for food, she’d climb and topple the kitchen bin instead.
We'd spent a lot of time with cats in the past, but Nan was still a learning experience for us. Previously, the cats we'd known had been either completely trouble-free, or the responsibility for dealing with any odd behaviour was shared between flatmates. Nan was all ours, and we had to learn which of her funny habits were something we should worry about.
The things we worried about seem ridiculous now. Nan was our first gravy-licker, for example. For all her bin-toppling and leg-climbing antics when there was human food on offer, her own food bowl was usually full of dessicating meat chunks from which she’d licked all the gravy. Fairly standard behaviour for cats really, but we spent most of our first week with Nan terrified that she must be on the brink of malnutrition. In a desperate attempt to get a substantial meal into her, we filled her bowl with tuna. We learnt two lessons from this: it's ok for your cat to lick the gravy and leave the meat; and a pectin-rich medicine named Pro-Kolin is what you need to administer when your cat is suffering from volcanic diarrhoea after an especially rich dinner. We also learned that cats hate the taste of Pro-Kolin and that the best way to get them to eat it is to smear it down the front of their shins so they’re forced to lick it off as they wash.
Bit by bit, Nan got healthier and friendlier. Her coat became glossy and her little voice developed into a fully-fledged meow. She became playful, gazing up at you with one innocent eye as she tugged the socks off your feet, or hiding under armchairs ready to pounce on your feet. At nights she’d snuggle down between us and purr happily until she fell asleep. Unsurprisingly, we were completely smitten with her. You can imagine what happened next.
The question you're asked most frequently when you foster cats is “doesn’t it break your heart when you have to give them up?” Normally, the answer is no. Well, sort of. Maybe a little. The thing is, you couldn’t have an endless parade of cats coming and going through your house if you didn’t love them, and because you love them it hurts to see them go. But you learn very quickly to focus on the positives - they come in unhappy and leave happy. They come in as strays and leave with loving families. And you realise that a bittersweet loss can be borne so much more easily than a true loss; to be painfully blunt, though we've had to give cats up, we've never had to bury one. You learn to think that way as a defence mechanism immediately after giving back your first foster cat.
The cat shelter gave us a week's warning that they’d like Nan back in the shelter for the following weekend to be rehomed. The shelter had a set of cat pens in the cellar that functioned as a cat showroom, and knowing that they’d get lots of visitors at the weekend, they’d try to fill the pens with cats that were ready to be homed rather than the ones that had only just arrived at the shelter. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we went through all seven stages of bereavement, but we definitely went through the main ones: denial, depression, bargaining and planning to move to France without telling the cat shelter.
She’d been with us for 26 days, which was enough for her to become part of the family. Loading her into the cat carrier wasn’t the upsetting experience it could have been - her visits to the vet had been marked by bursts of terrified quaking, but she accepted this last boxing at our hands without a shiver.
We were brave and stoic until we popped her into a spare pen in the brightly lit cellar of the Archway branch of Cats Protection and walked to the far end of the room to drop off her cat carrier. We turned back to see her sitting patiently in the doorway of her pen, her one eye watching us calmly, waiting for us to come back and get her. We were in floods of desperate tears then. Even now, just picturing her trusting expression makes my chest go a little numb. We left the shelter saying to ourselves over and over again, “we can’t do this, it’s too hard.” And we really meant it.
The following day, an lady from Muswell Hill visited Nan in the shelter. She came back a second time that afternoon, now with her bewildered lodger in tow, and we're told that she introduced the young man to Nan with the words “this is Nan and she’s going to live with us. I hope she likes you, because if not, you’ll have to move out.” We flinched for him, but were delighted that Nan had found someone as devoted to her as we had been.
As for us and our belief that we couldn’t possibly bear the trauma of looking after these cats and then giving them up? Well, the staff of Archway CPL sorted us out. When Alex, who became a good friend and our go-to-gal for cat wisdom, did a home check on our teeny flat, she described it as being “perfect for a blind cat” and we took it as the compliment she'd intended.
Alex was our main contact at the CPL. She would fix us up with fostering assignments, point us in the direction of supplies, brief us on anything we needed to know, and if things got hairy she’d turn up out of nowhere to help out. She was the cat charity equivalent of a CIA handler, and there were times when she displayed a Machiavellian degree of cunning. She had the cat lovers of North London arranged like clockwork - having said farewell to Nan, we were handed our next fosterees within the hour. Although we were still hiccuping and red-eyed, the arrival of two gorgeous, soot- stained kittens freshly rescued from a house fire kept us too busy to mope.
