Clara and Willow were a pair of ginger and white kittens rescued from a house fire in North London and deposited in our care barely twenty minutes after we’d dropped Nan off for adoption. We were sill all soggy faced, but any thought of wallowing in self-pity was banished by the need to wash the soot off two boisterous 14 week old kittens who’d rather be wrestling, climbing, pouncing and defecating.
Like I’ve said, fostering is a learning process, and the first thing we needed to learn was how to bathe kittens, something we’d never done before. Getting them into tepid water wasn’t too much of a problem, and the intricate cross-hatch pattern of a thousand tiny cuts caused by a wet kitten scrambling up your arm are more itchy than painful, but hardening your heart to the miserable, uncomprehending ‘mew, mew’ of a kitten that doesn’t want to be wet? Very draining. Equally draining is the process of hair-dryering them, fingers caged in front of their little faces to gauge the temperature of the air and move the dryer back if needs be.
It wasn’t just Katherine and I that found the whole process rather stressful. Clara and Willow were pretty much wiped out by the whole affair and promptly fell asleep on our laps. Fortunately, we had live coverage of the Tour De France on TV, and I was able to combine my two favourite pass times-watching cycling and snuggling cats. It’s amazing these two didn’t end up being named Carlos and Sastre.
Over the course of that sunny afternoon as we all recuperated on the sofa, we got a worrying hint of how much crap they’d inhaled in the fire, as our spotless little’ns slowly snored out twin soot streaks under their nostrils. They’d been very, very lucky, and already we were deeply attached to them, and they hadn’t even had their first night with us...
