Two Years Without Cats

The story of Arlo & Zelda begins

Michael Thorn
5 min readAug 10, 2020

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all photos are copyright of the author

We were two years without cats. We have always had cats.

Moppet and Milligan helped us through our first winter of married life, when we were living in a front room hovel in a street of condemned terraced housing in Hanley. The two kittens actually belonged to Bill, who owned the house and rented us the room, but they seemed to like our company as much as his and once they were inside our room we were more than happy to let them stay. Moppet was a beautiful tortoiseshell, and I have loved tortoiseshells ever since.

Little Murphy, the first cat we could call our own, was a tabby kitten bought to deter rodents while we lived in a rented harbourside cottage in Brixham. He never reached adulthood, risking his life once too often on the hill outside my parents’ house when we had moved back home to live with my mother. When he’d first arrived, the poor boy had been so much smaller than the rats that would push open cupboard doors while we were eating meals beside the front-room window, watching fishing boats come and go, that we let him sleep with us to protect him from those great brown Devonshire beasts. But in the end it was a mechanical beast that did for him. He had run loose at the front of the house and was hit by a car coming down the hill. He was still just alive when I went out to him, alerted by…

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