The Glaring Read online

  The Glaring

  by

  Aeddan Howells

  Aeddan Howells © 2016

  This edition first published in November 2016 by WHATMORE BOOKS a division of WHATMORE Productions UK Ltd

  3 Brookfield Avenue

  Urmston

  Manchester

  M41 5PF

  www.whatmoreproductions.com

  1

  Copyright © Aeddan Howells

  www.aeddanhowells.com

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the Publishers prior consent.

  Typeset in Times New Roman

  Dedication

  Preface

  (i)

  (ii)

  (iii)

  (iv)

  (v)

  (vi)

  (vii)

  (viii)

  (ix)

  (x)

  (xi)

  (xii)

  (xiii)

  (xiv)

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  To

  R. F. M.

  If you find a friend you fully trust

  and wish for his good-will,

  exchange thoughts,

  exchange gifts,

  go often to his house.

  From - The Hávamál

  A collection of Old Norse poems from the Viking age,

  presented as a single poem in the 13th century Icelandic Codex Regius.

  Preface

  “It always gives me a shiver when I see a cat seeing what I can't see.”

  ~ Eleanor Farjeon

  Aeddan Howells © 2016

  (i)

  It was, without doubt, one of the weirdest sights he had ever seen, and in his own back garden too!

  He’d come down to the kitchen mid-afternoon to make himself a cup of tea and was stood at the back door looking out whilst the kettle boiled away furiously beside him; his mind still back in his study, so to speak.

  Suddenly, his unfocused eye noticed a movement in the bank of bluebells half-way down the garden as a large rat burst out of them onto the lawn, chased by his neighbour’s cat. The rat was across the lawn in a couple of bounds and, right in front of him now, just below the kitchen door, it turned and stood its ground; it turned to face the cat rather than run up the wall or a pipe or disappear under the outhouse door just to one side.

  The cat stopped before it rather than rush in for the kill, as if it, too (as well as the observer), was taken aback by the extraordinary bravura of the rat. The rat even made a few feints at the cat, which backed away clearly nonplussed by this unexpected behaviour, and for several seconds the two animals – predator and prey – simply stood their ground.

  How was this scene going to play itself out, he wondered? The cat was decidedly shy of moving in for the kill for some reason and the rat… well, the rat seemed to be provoking it, challenging it, daring it to strike. Wanting it to strike?

  The rat then went for the cat - that was the only way of describing it. The rat attacked the cat by leaping towards its head, only it never got there. The cat, finally remembering the way things were meant to be, caught it, shook the thing vigorously and bit through its neck. After worrying the bloody mess under its paws for a bit the obviously well-fed or, perhaps, fastidious cat completely lost interest and considerately left it for others to clear up.

  On reflection (much later on), it was the first inkling he’d had that something was seriously wrong with part of the animal world – only he did not fully appreciate it at the time.

  **

  (ii)

  Thomas Lionel Cartwright, always Lionel Cartwright or, more formally, T. Lionel Cartwright, but never T.L.C. (how could his parents have been so silly!) was a man at war. But only latterly.

  Of late, his usually inexhaustible patience and his genial forbearance towards all and sundry had both been sorely tested, and tested to the limit. And the normally placid and well-mannered retired librarian had given vent to considerable ill-feelings – towards cats!

  That said, he wasn’t a natural ailurophobe; indeed, in the past, in what were still called - back then - his ‘courting’ days, he’d even become very attached, fond even, of a very singular cat. A pretty tabby cat with the onomatopoeic name of Prump: a wholly deserved soubriquet on account of the low, prumping sort of noise she made once she’d condescended to sit on a person’s lap and allowed herself to be stroked and generally loved-up.

  Ailish’s parents lived deep in the Norfolk countryside and, being old school, gave Prump only the minimum of bought cat food – the rest she was expected to forage for herself. And Prump was very good at that. There was usually a small, neat parcel of mouse or young rat, mole or vole innards on the stone-flagged kitchen floor every morning, just inside the cat-flap, and – sometimes – the remains of a small bird. As an amateur ornithologist, the latter practice offended Lionel’s sensitivities, but as Prump overwhelmingly preferred creatures belonging to the genus Mus of the family Muridae of the order Rodentia to most common or garden Avifauna Lionel generally forgave her. And she did at least eat the birds, all except the beak and legs, usually, which was something.

  Once married, and despite Ailish’s frequently expressed wish for a cat or cats (especially after the last despairing visit to the fertility clinic) Lionel consistently refused her, Prump or no Prump: a rare instance of obstinacy (in him) in their otherwise very close and loving relationship. He, on the other hand, had always wanted a dog, but Ailish disliked them with a passion, so the obvious compromise was that neither of them got their way. Lionel’s assurances that if they moved well away into the countryside that would be a different matter altogether or that Ailish could do as she wished, of course, if he passed away did not entirely placate her. And Ailish responded with dozens of cat figurines all over the house and even a highly realistic toy cat - all gingerly curled-up and permanently feigning sleep on a spare bed - that Lionel disliked intensely.

  But Lionel’s principal objection to them ‘owning’ a cat or cats (does anyone? he complained) was that there were already far too many of them in the neighbourhood and that they were a serious blight upon it: scratching up the young plants in his vegetable garden and wreaking havoc upon the local bird population.

  Now Lionel had gone out of his way - it was a long-term pet project of his - to create a garden that was especially attractive to birds, for feeding and for breeding. To this end he had planted, years ago, several native British trees – good, in time, for nesting – and he’d dedicated the bottom third of his modest town garden to a site that he unpretentiously called his ‘wild garden’, and sown it with packet after packet and plant after plant of native wild flowers. It was meant to be a magnet for bees, butterflies, ladybirds and other insects and a veritable larder for birds. It was also festooned with as many feeders as could be sensibly accommodated – niger seeds for the goldfinches, nuts for tits and house sparrows and mixed seeds on a couple of bird tables for robins and starlings, etc., – and bird-baths and ground trays for all and sundry. And he did have some modest success.

  In the annual survey conducted by volunteers up and down the country for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, to determine the numbers and fortunes over time of Britain’s garden bird species, he regularly logged collared doves, wood-pigeons, blackbirds, robins, tits, goldfinches, dunnocks, sparrows and so on, though greenfinches and starlings had dropped away somewhat and sparrows were not in the numbers they used to be and town pigeons – encouraged by a ‘stupid old bat’ down the road who over-fed them
twice a day – had become almost verminous in their numbers. He’d also spotted a wren on a few occasions and hoped against hope that it might be nesting in his garden, though he never could find its nest.

  But the cat numbers multiplied too and each year Lionel found the Spring a particularly cruel and distressing time as he was forever burying dead nestlings and fledglings in his garden, the bloody ruin of a night-time assault, usually, on his garden. Two occasions a couple of years apart really upset him: one was the discovery of three slaughtered blackbird chicks on his patio one morning, the offspring of a blackbird pair that had brought him such joy with their singing. They had been killed just for the pleasure of doing so, presumably, because there was no evidence of any attempt to eat them. Another time, it was the slaughter of a nest of robins, the first (and last) time any robins had nested in his garden – and that had upset him greatly.

  Ailish’s advice to him was to accept the way things were, there was so little he could do about it, she’d said, and it was only upsetting him.

  “Cats are what they are and they will hunt… It is regrettable, I know, but it’s Nature, isn’t it –

  red in tooth and claw.”

  “Yes, but people could make an effort to keep their cats inside at night… to give the birds a chance,” he’d replied with feeling.

  He remembered the conversation vividly.

  “There could be a sort of national cat curfew…”

  “Yes, but how on earth could you insist on that or even police it?” Ailish had pointed out. “It couldn’t be a statutory duty imposed by the law with fines or even imprisonment for persistent wrong-doers and non-payers. Whatever else they are… and don’t start me on that topic… our law-makers aren’t entirely stupid… they don’t usually pass laws that are completely unenforceable. Can you really see the millions of cat-owners agreeing to your compulsory curfew?”

  “Well, a voluntary curfew then… by the more intelligent and better-informed members of the public… it would be a start at least. Do you know, Ailish, it’s estimated that cats – domestic and feral – are responsible for the deaths of fifty-five million birds a year in Britain, and billions of birds and small mammals, apparently, in the USA… an average slaughter rate of 2.4 billion per annum!

  “Yes, dear, I accept that it’s a worry for you, but…”

  “And that’s based on the numbers that are brought home, the known ones…house sparrows, blue tits, blackbirds, starlings, thrushes and robins are the main victims over here, in the UK… and some of those populations have crashed of course.”

  “But I thought that the real decline, the really worrying decline was in field species… because of the loss of habitat and use of pesticides and so on?”

  “Yes, that’s true, but we mustn’t lose sight of the garden species either.”

  And he vividly remembered his wife shrugging her shoulders at this point, in that all-too-familiar way, so expressive of contemporary life – be the issue one of litter, the decline in good manners or the seemingly unstoppable flow of more and more foreigners coming into the over-crowded country – that shrug of utter impotence and total resignation. But, then, Ailish was a church-goer – which, apart from her name, was the last residual cultural trait bequeathed to her by her Irish great grandfather – and her favourite maxim was the so-called ‘serenity prayer’: the one that went…

  God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

  Courage to change the things I can,

  And wisdom to know the difference.

  It usually stopped Lionel in his tracks.

  They had sipped their morning coffees pensively, Lionel sucking on some digestive biscuits he insisted on dunking in his drink, much to Ailish’s disapproval – though she’d let it pass without comment on this particular occasion; he was so obviously distressed. She also knew, instinctively, that he wasn’t finished yet.

  “At the very least the damn things could be made to wear a bell on a collar. I’d legislate for that… a good way of telling the feral ones apart from the so-called domesticated variety as well. You could insist on a post-code on the collar too, that way you could identify the owners of any strays… Who could gainsay any of that? A bloody bell at least…”

  “Lionel!”

  “At least a bell would give the birds a bit of a chance, the adult ones certainly… still not enough for the fledglings and nestlings, of course.”

  “Lionel, can we change the subject? You rant more and more these days, now that you are retired, mostly about your birds and the state of your garden… but it worries me a little. I don’t want you becoming a stereotypical grumpy old man… it’s not good for you, or your blood pressure.”

  Lionel had smiled a little wanly at her.

  “Am I? Am I really? Sorry sweetheart, I’ll try not to get all Victor Meldrew on you.[1] I’ll develop a new interest perhaps… Maybe you and I could join a Beginners Italian class or something like that. What do you say?”

  “Possibilmente,” Ailish had replied, which had unaccountably irked Lionel at the time – though not now; no, definitely not now.

  They were quiet again each with their own thoughts: Ailish on the idea of learning Italian or Spanish – it was supposed to be an excellent way of warding-off or minimizing the risk of dementia, she’d read somewhere; Lionel still thinking about his garden birds and the latest mess he’d had to clear up that morning.

  “You know, Ailish, there are an estimated seven and a half million cats in this country.”

  She groaned, but he didn’t hear her.

  “Do you remember how loud and how varied the dawn chorus was when we first came here? Beautiful it was. I used to lie in bed transported by the noise, the gorgeously rich and life-affirming noise of blackbirds, robins and wrens at first and then the rest chiming in. You even complained about it, on at least one occasion… But it wasn’t only full of diverse songs, and longer lasting and more thrilling than it is now, it changed during the course of the year – being more intense in the breeding season and altered somewhat by migratory birds… But now! Well, it’s almost down to a duet these days… (he sighed heavily). We’ve lost so much, Ailish.”

  “Yes, Lionel, I do understand, I sympathise, I really do, but you’ve done your best – here in this garden – and short of becoming a serial cat-killer, I don’t know what else you could do.”

  Catching a look on his face.

  “And, no, Lionel, you are not going there… I’m ashamed of you for even thinking it.”

  And Lionel remembered blushing slightly at that point, of having his thoughts and intentions toward cats so easily read. However, Ailish would have been really shocked if she’d known how dark his innermost thoughts in re felines could be at times.

  But she never did know, for not long after this remembered conversation he lost her - in a matter of weeks - to a very aggressive cancer.

  **

  (iii)

  Lionel Cartwright looked like countless other men in their mid-sixties with his male pattern baldness and tonsure of silvery grey hair. He was of average height, with an average waistline for his age group and gender, and average opinions (middle of the road) – the nearest to thing to any political excitement being his and Ailish’s early enthusiasm for the SDP![2]

  The only slightly bohemian or unorthodox thing about Lionel was the short goatee beard he affected, though it was forever coming off and forever growing back again. Ailish had never been fully reconciled to it. She told him, in that witty and slightly acerbic way of hers, that he looked for all the world like a cross between a dodgy antique dealer and an ex-Polytechnic lecturer in Liberal Arts – though she never explained her insistence on the ‘ex’ or why it had to be a Polytechnic lecturer (an institution now long gone), except that Lionel knew it to be an essential part of the brilliant put-down. Oft-times when he saw his reflection in the bathroom mirror, he would smile a sad little smile to himself recalling her wit and some of her remarks about him.


  Yes, life was very hard for Lionel after Ailish. Never a particularly gregarious type – Ailish was all the company he’d ever needed – he had to guard against becoming a complete isolate, and a potentially cranky one at that. Luckily, he had a good memory and conversations with Ailish over the years, more particularly certain sayings of hers or just looks, he could recall easily and vividly; and doing so kept him sane and stopped him becoming a bit odd or strange, at least at first. However, it wasn’t long after Ailish’s death that Lionel really went to war over the cats – a war soon mired in attrition and certainly not over by the following Christmas.

  He began by planting cat mint at the bottom of the garden in amongst the wild-flowers and ferns. It established itself soon enough and gratifyingly began to spread. However, Lionel surprised a big black tom sunning itself right there one afternoon, completely indifferent to the supposedly hostile surroundings, and Lionel cursed the local garden centre softly under his breath.

  From an on-line garden-supplier he bought a couple of black metal cats with marbles for eyes; purchased on the strongest assurances that this would deter even the boldest cat. But they were so wrong, so laughably wrong. The neighbourhood cats took not the slightest notice of these creatures (supposedly on their ‘own’ territory). Indeed, the one he staked in the middle of the lawn was clearly the target of a feline joke – or a display of haughty arrogance at the very least – since Lionel found a fresh pile of cat excrement right beside it the very morning after he’d put it up: as if to say ‘so there, that’s how much you scare me!’ But, then, Lionel was already beginning, unconsciously, to anthropomorphise his bitter enemies, attributing all sorts of humanlike qualities and traits to them, like cunning and malice aforethought.