A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye – #1962Club

Wow, there are so many 1962 Club reviews coming in! I am behind with updating the page and not even managing to read all the reviews at the moment, but will go back and explore them. And I did manage to read one more, very short, book for my own 1962 Club contributions – A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye.

I picked this up in a brilliant bookshop in Whitehaven earlier this year – they had an awful lot of books by Derek Tangye and I foolishly only bought this one. They all seem to be about his life in Minack, Cornwall, with his wife and a series of different animals. In the previous book in the series, A Gull on the Roof, he apparently introduced Monty the cat. And A Cat in the Window takes us back to tell us about Monty in more detail.

Novels about cats are very hit-and-miss in my experience, often being too fey or leaning into a kind of kooky magical realism that isn’t my cup of tea. But non-fiction about cats, like Tangye’s, are almost always wonderful in my experience. Because they are written by people who love and know cats – who appreciate their character, their dignity, their independence. And who form loving friendships with cats, knowing that the cat isn’t slavishly desperate to please them but, rather, any affection is earned.

But Derek was not such a man at the outset, as he confesses in this book:

Dogs, then, had been entities in my life. Cats, as if they were wasps with four legs, had been there to shoo away. They did not belong in my life nor in my family’s life. All of us were united that whenever we saw a cat the most important thing to do was to see it out of sight.

But as I moved slowly out of the environment of my family, I found naturally enough people and homes who accepted cats as we accepted dogs. Cats were not vulgar as, in some mysterious way, I had been led to believe. I began to note that cats were able to bestow a subtle accolade upon their apparent owners which made these owners rapturous with delight.

One such cat-lover was Jeannie – the woman that Derek fell in love with. And she, with the cunning of all of us who adore cats, introduced a little kitten to the household – saying that living with them was his only chance of survival. Derek is reluctant. He has never known the charm of a cat. He allows the kitten only if it stays outside and in the kitchen. Certainly Monty will not be allowed upstairs.

We all know what’s going to happen don’t we?

My capitulation was complete, and within a few weeks there was no pretence that Monty was a kitchen cat. Every room in the cottage was his kingdom; and at night, if his fancy was to sleep on the bed, I would lie with legs stiff so as not to disturb him while he curled in a ball at the bottom. I endlessly wanted to play with him, and felt put in my place when he was not in the mood, stalking away from me tail in the air showing he had something more important to do, like a vigorous if temporary wash of the underparts.

Nobody has the zeal of the convert. The rest of this slim volume is about the joy of living with a cat (one cannot say ‘ownership’). He understands Monty’s character beautifully, not fabricating things that are not feline. He also understands Monty’s place in the food chain – killing rodents, but also under threat from neighbourhood foxes.

Perhaps only a cat lover would love this book, but I heartily recommend it to anybody who understands the majesty of cats and the privilege it is to share a home with one or more. I certainly felt more affected by Monty’s death (thankfully at the end of a long and happy cat life) than by most human deaths in the books I read.

Reading for club years is always enjoyable for seeing how times have changed and what’s stayed the same. Most of the 1962 choices I’ve seen mentioned (including my other two reads for this week) couldn’t be written in the same way today. But A Cat in the Window could. Cats are happily unchangeable – and the way a felinophile would write about cats hasn’t changed at all either.