Galtieri the sea cat: Ecce Magna Felis
In “A Point of View”, recently broadcast on Radio 4, Will Self meditated on a fifteen-year relationship with his elderly and now slowly dying Jack Russell terrier. It was an example, he said, of “our most significant symbiosis”. Much as I like dogs, I have never entered into that symbiosis. I am a cat person, which entails a very different kind of relationship, less symbiosis than a form of cynical parasitism (on the part of the cat). There have been several significant cats in my life, though I could not claim that I was ever truly important to any of them. The most significant arrived in an unusual manner.
It was the afternoon of the 10th of August 1983, and I was so bored at work that I had been reduced to reading the personal columns of The Times. I came upon the following small ad:
Caring home wanted for Galtieri. Stylish, people-loving ex-ship’s cat rescued Jedda. Cannot settle in multi-cat household.
This was irresistible. I had recently taken a year’s lease on a comfortable flat in Kentish Town, which I felt was crying out for a cat-share. I rang the number given and spoke to Jean, the charming Australian lady who managed the multi-cat household.
Jean lived alone in a house at Mile End with eighteen assorted cats, who generally got on pretty well with one another. Most of these animals had been acquired in various corners of the globe by her brother John, a radio officer in the merchant marine. Whenever his ship docked in Britain, he put his latest feline refugees into quarantine, from where they moved in the fullness of time to the Mile End cattery.
The year before, 1982, John had been serving on a “reefer” – a refrigerated cargo ship – carrying untold millions of frozen chickens from Brazil, where they had lived their brief lives, to a series of ports in Africa and the Middle East. Entering the Red Sea, they had called at Jeddah, docking at a long jetty far from the shore. Saudi border guards patrolled the jetty to ensure no infidels jumped ship.
While on the night watch, John heard the most dreadful crying – “like a baby being tortured”. Peering out onto the dimly illuminated jetty, he glimpsed a scrawny cat lying behind a capstan. A few minutes later a guard fired a couple of rounds from his submachine gun, but missed. When the guard had wandered off, John took a chance, crept down the gangway, picked up the weak and unresisting mog, and carried it aboard.
The animal was obviously unwell and starving. He popped it in a cardboard box in the radio shack and asked the second mate, who kept the medicine cabinet, what might help. The mate, of course, had no idea but handed over some antibiotics. While the ship was discharging a load of chickens for Saudi consumption, John popped one of the tablets down the cat’s throat. A few hours later, as they steamed out into the Red Sea, the animal gave out an almighty squawk, stretched and stood up. “It was like the Incredible Hulk,” John remembered. After a couple of square chicken-based meals, he – it was a tomcat – was unrecognisable from the poor emaciated thing languishing on the jetty.
Although very young, this creature was large and powerfully built, muscular with long legs and sharp claws. His short fur was mostly white with a black cap and tail, and he had the pale unwinking eyes of a remorseless hunter. He communicated volubly in a very loud voice, and clearly regarded himself as the equal of any human. John had not met a cat quite like him before, but when they sailed into Aqaba a day or two later, he saw hundreds of similar animals squawking on the jetty. (The Jordanians were clearly more tolerant of cats than the Saudis).
The next thing was a name, especially as this unexpected supercargo quickly became a great favourite of the reefer’s multinational crew. This was during the Falklands War, which John – a classic Australian rebel – firmly opposed. The rest of the crew, 20 men of many different nationalities, none of them British, all stoutly supported “Mrs Thatcher” and the “Task Force”. Perversely, John decided to name him “Galtieri”, after the alcoholic general who was President of Argentina. The crew settled on “Galty”.
For nearly a year Galty sailed the seven seas, scouring the reefer for vermin and sea birds, adored and well fed by his shipmates. He was not best pleased, in fact he was furious, when early in 1983 John took him ashore and placed him in quarantine near Tilbury. John soon shipped out, and one can only imagine the cat’s suppressed rage over the next six months before Jean arrived to deliver him from this hell.
Jean had some idea of Galtieri’s fierce character and had made careful preparations. For the first two or three days, he was locked into the ground floor sitting room of her three-storey terraced house, while the rest of the menagerie were fed upstairs and encouraged not to descend. Galty objected, voicing his displeasure loudly from behind the locked door. By contrast his eighteen new housemates were silent and gathered uneasily on the first landing to await developments. When Jean unlocked the living room door, Galty exploded like a champagne cork out of a bottle, roared up the stairs and injured two cats so badly they needed to be stitched up by a vet. Hence the advert in The Times.
So, without delay, though protesting loudly, Galty moved to my flat in Bartholomew Rd NW5. As soon I released him from his basket, he stalked imperiously round the two rooms, bathroom and tiny kitchen, sniffing and peering under things. His nose had already told him there was no feline competition. I set out food and water, and sat down to watch. The tour of inspection concluded, he walked up to me and howled. I scratched his head, he jumped onto my lap, his claws sinking momentarily through my trousers, and began to purr. Galty’s purring, like everything else about him, was loud and intense, deafening almost, like a large diesel engine idling.
We both settled to a comfortable bachelor existence. He had learned during his life at sea to use a litter tray and was remarkably clean. He seemed not to mind when I went out to work. On my return there would be a passionate, loud reunion, and then I would let him out onto the terrace from where he would leap, panther-like, down to the back garden for an hour or two of creative prowling. At first, I let him sleep in the bedroom, but the purring was so outrageously loud that I was forced to banish him to the living room.
Galty thought of himself as a human. He kept up a running conversation for much of our time together and was always swift to point out injustice and demand recompense. He was sociable and liked it when friends came round. A dinner party for eight did slightly discombobulate him, but that was because the guests were too busy talking to give him his due: though he dealt efficiently, one might say ruthlessly, with any crumbs that fell from their plates.
I listened to a lot of music in those days, which Galty mostly ignored, except for a fabulous live album of the great blues guitarist Magic Sam, whose explosive solos elicited a chorus of high decibel miaows, and a certain amount of agitated stalking round the room. Anything else – Beethoven, the Staple Singers, the Pretenders – was okay with him. My practising bass guitar didn’t impress him, but then it didn’t impress me much either, and I soon gave it up.
A comfortable berth in Kentish Town
In May 1984 I was thinking of buying a flat, and, as the lease on Bartholomew Rd was up for renewal, my father suggested I move in with him for a few months while I looked around. A widower, he lived alone in a beautiful house in the Vale of Health, a small enclave in the middle of Hampstead Heath. I took up the offer gratefully, especially as he didn’t require any rent, just the odd case of wine.
The move upset Galty, and he was unable to settle. Perhaps it was the simple fact of three alpha males trying to rub along in, for him, unfamiliar territory. The Vale must have seemed rural, a wilderness even, not at all the sophisticated urban environment to which he was accustomed. And it’s fair to say that my father didn’t take to the old sea cat. He preferred dogs, and he didn’t like being disturbed by Galty’s conversation.
This tale ends, as it began, with frozen chicken. One Saturday night, my father got a bird out of the freezer and put it on the kitchen worktop to thaw overnight for Sunday lunch. When he came down the following morning, he found the chicken stripped of its meat, some of which Galty had sicked up on the floor. There was an explosion of rage – I was still asleep upstairs – and Galty was kicked out the door, never to return.
I hope that this great-hearted cat survived for a time on the Heath, eating birds and rodents, before befriending – bewitching – another hospitable human. He certainly deserved such a happy ending. I still miss Galty, and when I think of him, I recall Robert Louis Stevenson’s lines from Requiem:
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
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