Cat Out of Hell by Lynne Truss Read Free Book Online

length; and that’s how I was marched away from the Acropolis, from the Captain, from all my happiness. No one lifted a finger to help me, despite my obvious distress. The Greek cats cheered. When we reached the bottom, the boy shoved me into a wicker basket; that same afternoon I was taken with a heap of other luggage to the port and put on a ship for England. In my panic, I kept repeating in my head those lines from Milton’s Samson Agonistes :
“Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed
As of a person separate to God ,
Designed for great exploits, if I must die
Betrayed, captived, and both my eyes put out ,
Made of my enemies the scorn and gaze;
To grind in brazen fetters under task
With this heaven-gifted strength?
    “Gosh,” says Wiggy, impressed.
    “Well, I admit, not everything in that passage fitted my exact predicament.”
    “But the gist – ?”
    “Exactly!” Roger is pleased, for once, with Wiggy’s grasp of essentials. “Yes, what I’ve found so often in life is that recollecting poetry at key moments is all about the gist. Why, I asked myself. Basically, why was I made so special if I was going to end up in a cat basket?”
    Wiggy makes a sympathetic noise.
    “So there I was. Not eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves, but defeated by the tiny buckle that kept the door of a simple wicker basket closed! I had no way of telling the Captain what had happened. I just had to hope he would return to the Acropolis and that somehow he would work out where I’d gone.
    “Poor Captain.”
    “Yes.”
    “And poor you, of course.”
    “Thank you, Wiggy. I’m afraid I do think ‘Poor me,’ even though, on the voyage, I suppose I was treated well enough. The boy’s parents were academics who had the best literary conversations I’d ever heard, although they were far too soft on Robert Browning for my taste. The boy was not neglectful of me – he just made me very anxious. I could hardly forget that he had read about cats like me . But here’s the point. When we arrived back in England, we came straight to London, and I escaped – and came straight to Bloomsbury.”
    “How did you manage it? The escape?”
    “Oldest trick in the book, I’m afraid. Laundry basket.”
    “And why Bloomsbury?”
    “I suppose I only had one idea. Where would the Captain think to look for me? I’d worked it out on the voyage – he’d last seen me at the Parthenon, so the obvious place was the London home of the Parthenon marbles!”
    “Oh, that’s clever.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Are they anything like the Elgin Marbles?”
    “The Parthenon Marbles and the Elgin Marbles are the same thing, Wiggy.”
    Wiggy says nothing.
    “So that was my thinking, for right or wrong, and the British Museum was my actual home both during the war and for a long time after. Even when all the objects were evacuated, I stayed put. I still visit as often as I can. I am proud to say that I know the lay-out of the Enlightenment Gallery better than I know the back of my own paw.
    “The boy became an academic himself, in time. I followedhis progress. He specialised in pre-Christian attitudes to animals – in particular, their relationship to the afterlife – as companions, and so on. He co-wrote a masterly work on the subject with a quite famous historian, and he also once wrote an affectionate piece in the Times Higher Education Supplement about the cat he had found at the Acropolis which later (or so he’d been told) lived wild in the British Museum, even throughout the Blitz. This cat had inspired him, he said. Well, as if I gave a damn about that! All I knew was that he grew up, he got older; in the fullness of time, he grew old. I, by contrast, have remained exactly the same, aside from becoming (if I may say so) much, much cleverer than he could ever be. But what he did, when he abducted me from Greece, was ultimately to draw to him the wrath of the Captain. He lives still, but it’s a miracle, and I have reason to believe that