Soden Jeoffry

The Poet's Cat
2. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7509-9593-1
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

'An inspired an original tale ... Jeoffry is the greatest cat in the English language' - Hilary Mantel 'Simply unforgettable ... one of the most beautiful and haunting books of recent times' - Alexander McCall Smith 'A heart-lifting delight; I absolutely loved it. A triumph' - Alexandra Harris Jeoffry was a real cat who lived 250 years ago, confined to an asylum with Christopher Smart, one of the most visionary poets of the age. In exchange for love and companionship, Smart rewarded Jeoffry with the greatest tribute to a feline ever written. Prize-winning biographer Oliver Soden combines meticulous research with passages of dazzling invention to recount the life of the cat praised as 'a mixture of gravity and waggery'. The narrative roams from the theatres and bordellos of Covent Garden to the cell where Smart was imprisoned for mania. At once whimsical and profound, witty and deeply moving, Soden's biography plays with the genre like a cat with a toy. It tells the story of a poet and a poem, while setting Jeoffry's life and adventures against the roaring backdrop of eighteenth-century London.

OLIVER SODEN is a writer and broadcaster. His first book, a biography of the composer Michael Tippett, was a Book of the Year in the Observer, Times Literary Supplement and The Spectator. It was shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize and won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Storytelling. Soden's essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of publications including the Guardian, Literary Review and Art Newspaper. He grew up in Bath and Sussex, and lives in London.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Soden, Oliver

Leseproben

2

THE RAID

1753–1759

Living more openly in the house, growing older and larger, Jeoffry had access to the outside world. The bundle of straw that had been his toilet, the scrap of glass that had been his glimpse of sky, had begun to cede to the infinite possibilities, the boundless realms, of the flagstones in the backyard. Freedom, escape, release. Jeoffry was entranced. His nose was growing into itself, his teeth sharpening, and his eyes were wide open, reflecting in their dilations of discovery what to Mother Douglas’s ladies was a small courtyard surrounded by a high wall, and what to Jeoffry was a kingdom over which, day after day, he exercised a natural tyranny. The establishment was not the type to leave out crumbs for passing birds, but birds had nevertheless passed, skipping along the grimy wall and fluffing themselves on the lower branches of the bedraggled trees that poked over its edge. But soon the yard was a danger zone, not only to birds, who saw at least three of their comrades snatched from the wall by Jeoffry’s playful paws, but to squirrels, who jabbered angrily at the ginger threat and, giggling, easily outran their round-eyed pursuer, pelting him with what nuts or debris they could find.

On rainier days Jeoffry would retreat indoors, skimming up the stairs to the highest rooms of the house, although he did not venture into the stuffy and smoky bedrooms of the lowliest maids. Many hours were spent on Nancy’s deep windowsill, bundling his ever-lengthening tangle of limbs into the yard of sunlight that arrived on cue after lunch in the summer months. Otherwise he would make his way outside again to feel the heat of the flagstones on his back, to lap from the pools of filthy water that Mrs Craft and her girls would swill from the kitchen door, or to scratch on the privy to elicit the outraged shrieks of anyone within. He saw the world in a two-hundred-degree vista of moving lights and darks, a tingling monochrome of brightness and motion, interrupted by spurts of blue and green. Reds were foreign to him, but so was complete darkness, and at night he prowled round the yard and along the wall, not yet daring to leap down into the hinterland beyond, tracking the symphony of scent that spun itself across the paving stones, as clear to him as a web of coloured lines, each one to be tracked, followed, separated one from the other, understood. Each evening a pock-marked boy whistled his way across the piazza and, standing on the shoulders of his companion, lit the street lamps, some of which flared from Bow Street to shine like a beacon illuminating Jeoffry’s domain. The cat became nothing but a frisking tawny shadow, dabbling in oily globules of lamplight as he coiled his way around the yard.

Cats run at a higher temperature than humans, and while Nancy and her fellows bundled themselves in shawls and huddled ever closer to their increasingly meagre fires, muttering crossly at the blaze they knew to be raging in Mother Douglas’s private grate, Jeoffry was sitting on the wall of the yard, unperturbed by the icy wind and the way the sky had filled with the white-grey haze that threatens snow. He was at his favourite position at the far end of the wall, pausing occasionally to stare wide-eyed at low-flying crows, but otherwise content to rock gently back and forth. Already his romantic attitude to safety was maturing into a more careful consideration of the world and its dangers, and Mrs Craft had giggled to herself at just how long he had been sitting there, thinking his unknown thoughts. Nonchalantly he suddenly made good his hours-long planning as if on a whim, and tipped himself off the wall and into the street below. Mrs Craft, powdered in flour, saw an inelegant scrabble of hind legs, and wondered briefly if they would ever see him again.

But Jeoffry was crafty. A leafless tree stood at the corner of the wall, and its branches were an easy journey for a determined and curious cat. For a week or so, regular as clockwork, Jeoffry crept cautiously a few steps along the dung-covered route of Hart Street, feeling his raspberry-soft pads sore against the cobbles and moving slowly round the corner into Bow Street, appraising with his ears the noise of the city, and with his eyes the fast-moving shoes of the tradesmen, just starting to stack up their crates and saddle their horses, boasting to each other of the morning’s success. It was around midday. The sun was nowhere to be seen. Unsold fruit was piled in alleyways, popping with insects and assaulting Jeoffry’s nose with a thickly rank sweetness that he did not quite dare explore. Far above him the wind blew the bleached signs hanging outside the public houses back and forth in creaking symphony. All this was enough to drive him back up the tree and into the grateful familiarity of the yard.

But soon he mustered courage. He moved speedily enough to dodge kicks or stamps from passers-by who were not looking where they were going. It did not take many weeks for him to learn an observant and dodging slink, to snake his way among boots and along gratings, his pads hardening from silk to leather, his lungs assaulted by the acrid London air and by the bursts of meaty smoke that rose from subterranean kitchens. As the evening drew on, female voices called from the windows above. Jeoffry, recognising not only the garish colours of the window curtains but the rhythm and melody of allure, knew that these houses had functions similar to the one in which he lived. He quickly fostered a loyalty to Nancy and her colleagues, becoming distinctly superior about the many bordellos that studded his soon-regular walking route along the Covent Garden streets. Stature prevented him from looking at them down his nose, but he had his own, rather pungent, ways of marking his disdain.

Five minutes’ trot along Hart Street and a quick scrabble round a corner brought him into the dense and colourful jostle of Bow Street. As the months progressed his world began slowly to expand, to take in the headquarters of the Bow Street Runners (who were soon to have a decisive influence on the course of his life), the public houses tipping their intoxicated customers vomiting into the street, and the signs that, in secret rooms beyond those of wooden tables and tin tankards, darker and just as intoxicating wares were on offer to the paying client. Men with their collars turned up against the cold emerged from shops holding piles of books thickly wrapped in brown paper, and barely paused to realise that they had bumped into a ginger cat, whom they swiped into the dung-heaped gutter, ignoring the indignant cries.

The clientele of the Bow Street bordellos was as nothing to Jeoffry compared to the blurry realisation, on his journeys into the outside, that there were others in the world like himself. His brothers and sisters long forgotten, it had not occurred to him to ponder whether or not everyone he met would tower above him on their two legs. It was a scent, familiar and yet horribly foreign, that first alerted him, and he was brave and curious enough to follow it some twenty yards into a side street that quickly revealed a bundle of spitting black fur, from which two hostile eyes stared with quite horrible focus. This was enough to send Jeoffry scampering back to all that was soft and familiar, but when he again came across another of his own kind, he made himself sit still in front of the strange furry entity (a mangy brown moggy of matted fur to which Jeoffry compared his own with smug pleasure), and meet its piercing gaze. Once or twice he had caught himself in Nancy’s looking glass without recognition and struck out. It took an effort of will for his adolescent brain to make its slow connection, using a map of smells more than sights, between his own felineness and that of his enemy. His back arched of its own accord; each individual hair on his body stood to attention with an almost pleasurable prickle of fear and intent. For three long seconds the two cats were astonishingly still, before a flurry of batting forepaws whirred between them, scored to a yowling duet in a low and guttural register he had not known he possessed.

He won that round, but would not win all of them. Of dogs, and his encounters with their noxious enthusiasm or salivating rage, we will not speak. Nancy, when she had time, fussed around him as, week after week, he returned to her room either cocksure and frolicsome, or in a sulking bundle of bloodied fur and ragged ears. Some time late in 1753, or early the following year, Nancy made an entry, undated, in her diary. (Not all the ladies of Mother Douglas’s establishment were born poor, or born prostitutes. Many were literate, educated. Fortunes fall fast. Why Nancy, whose diaries prove her eloquent and canny, fell into the profession is unknown.)

Mr E–– having departed, his morning visitation having been quite awkward, for I was so tired, and somehow I cannot quite make my chamber conducive to such activities in sunlight, dear Sq [i.e. Jeoffry] came and sat in my lap for some twenty minutes, purring noisily, & I confess I might have been happy to sit there until the afternoon, had not wretched K entered loudly to clean & quite startled dear Sq from my skirts – he had a sore at his neck but would not consent to my applying the white of an egg for more than a few seconds, & I fear he spent most of the day with his fur quite clotted with egg – he was in a fearsome temper with me & all others of the house & we did not see him until the late e[ve]ning, when I was occupied with Lord R––, who drove me quite beyond my patience by insisting I call him Sweet Babe & requiring that I spank him for having p––d in...