After my marriage ended three years ago, my husband’s parting words were: “You always loved the cats more than me, anyway.” It would’ve been funny if it weren’t true. Not that he didn’t share my passion for our feline family. And not that I didn’t love him. I did, deeply, though never with the ferocious intensity of the strays I’d rescued. Even as I leave behind those I’ve outgrown or fallen out of love with, the consuming affection I feel for my cats is unbreakable.
Everything I ever wanted in life came from music, books and animals. Raised as an only child by my animal-loving German father with a houseful of strays and convalescing wildlife, I’m sure my love of felines is inherited. My nickname growing up was Mačka, cat in Yugoslavian. I’d disappear for hours in my room, reading and listening to records, with the cats – all 13 of them.
Little has changed. I spend a lot of time with my mogs. I’ve only got three at the moment, but it’s usually seven or eight. They sleep with me every night and when I watch Mad Men or wildlife documentaries, they watch, too. When I read or work, they slouch around me. I adore being in the company of these deeply complex creatures. I’m enthralled by their wilfulness and wildness – it’s like living with tiny leopards and panthers. Cats are pure emotion and live their lives on their own terms. For the same reason I’m drawn to rebels and rock’n’roll people, and I’ve named most of my cats after them: Dylan, a shy tabby-girl, after Bob Dylan; and Edie Sedgwick, a delicate black-and-white beauty, who could’ve been the reincarnation of the American 60s It-girl and Dylan’s muse (like Edie she loved the sun and spent the last year of her life in California).
At one point, I lived in a three-storey Victorian terrace with two friends and 15 cats, eight of them mine. When we needed another housemate, we advertised in Loot, the free paper, with an ad that read: MUST LOVE CATS. We got Stewart, the unlikeliest cat-man, a hunky football-playing bloke, now a cherished friend who fondly remembers “living in the witches’ lair with a tsunami of cats as the best of times”.
Cats are irresistible even when they’re surly or obnoxious. They’re naturally bright, spectacularly beautiful and supernaturally knowing. When I’m away, I can’t wait to come home to them. It’s like that first flush of love, except with cats it never goes away. There’s a scientific reason for this: cats produce oxytocin, also known as the “love hormone”, in the presence of their humans and loved ones. Charles Bukowski, the laureate of American low-life and liquor, considered cats his greatest teachers. “Cats tell me without effort all that there is to know,” he wrote.
The cats and kittens that have padded through my life have taught me compassion and to live simply and joyfully. It may seem strange to think of a relationship with a cat in such profound terms. I know there are people who don’t get the connection, dismissing it as a sign of craziness or codependency. I’ve been told endlessly that it’s not healthy to be so obsessed with cats, that they don’t care about me the way I care about them, would eat me if they could, forget me when I’m gone.
Maybe I am cat-obsessed or maybe I live the way I want. Sometimes I’d wake up my equally cat-mad boyfriends in the middle of the night, remembering a dream usually about one of the cats, telling them: “I dreamed Teddy ran away from home to become a tobacco farmer; or I saw Edie Sedgwick in the cemetery writing poems on a paw-adapted typewriter.”
Many of my happiest memories involve cats. Lying under an acacia between a pair of cheetahs, Cleo by my side with a rumbling purr and her sister Pride resting her head on my cheek. I felt such a rush of love and seriously thought about packing up everything and living in the bush. I’d been volunteering at a family-run sanctuary in Namibia, looking after full-grown lions, baby leopards and all sorts of wild orphans. I’ve never forgotten the way those two big cats made me feel.
Anyone who lives with felines, big or small, is aware how tender they can be. I had a gorgeous lioness of a cat, a Maine Coon with a massive mane, called Honey after the Beatles song Wild Honey Pie. I saved her and her sister from a bad home. I saw the sad, skinny moggies who came to me with broken spirits and blossomed into the most magnificent felines, making themselves the matriarchs of our multi-cat household of eight.
Over the past 20 years, while working long hours as a jobbing journalist or magazine editor, I’ve been rescuing and fostering cats and birds. I must have taken in hundreds of strays – though sometimes it felt like thousands – paid neutering and vet bills and found them loving homes. I took an entire family of scrappy adolescent kittens, one with three legs, and a daddy cat, off a rooftop. With the help of the Vietnamese family living above the restaurant, who’d been feeding them, I trapped and homed them all. I once saved a palm-sized baby cat with big mournful eyes and a broken leg in Havana. I hardly saw Cuba and my entire 10-day holiday was about fixing Francesca’s leg and finding her a home.
Somehow the desperate and the stray always find me. Four years ago, while living in Los Angeles with my filmmaker partner and our five felines, I stumbled across an extraordinary true story in a Montana newspaper about a drifter and cat who hitchhiked across America for 10 months, surviving blizzards, bears, coyotes and armed rednecks. The headline caught my eye: “Homeless Man Travels 3,600 Miles To Take Cat Back Home.” The story had a sense of magic about it. Michael, the homeless man, had said: “The cat was a rainbow in a dark world.” I was so touched by his love for this cat he named Tabor, I wrote a book about their adventures and how they healed each other.
I began writing Strays as my own life started falling apart. In two years, I lost everything: my partner, our two elderly cats, Edie and Tallulah (both became terminally ill), and my savings trying to save them. But there’s always a glimmer of light: I had found Michael and Tabor’s wonderful story.
I dedicated Strays to my six-year-old cat Bobby Seale, a tiger-striped ginger with gold eyes, named after the stylish Black Panthers leader. Bobby loved life and people and adored the tiny 18th-century cemetery our garden backed on to, a serene secret place, where the neighbourhood kitties and kids played. One day a bunch of teenage thugs set their pit bull on Bobby. We found her headless body a few feet from our garden wall, obviously trying to run for her life. Her chilling loss tore a hole in my life that could never be filled. I did everything I could to keep my cats safe from cars, but it never occurred to me to worry about psychopaths, too. (I no longer think cats should roam freely, especially now with the Croydon cat-serial killer on the loose.) I didn’t stop crying for months. I walked around London utterly broken, with a heart full of fire and fury. Nine years on, that wound is still raw. But as Joan Didion once wrote: “What we make of that loss is what makes everything else matter.”
After returning to London, I decided to devote myself to animals. I wrote more conservation stories and created a boutique festival for cat lovers, debuting this summer, to help cats in need. When I was a music journalist, nearly every rock star I’d met or interviewed, from Kurt Cobain and Pete Doherty to Paul McCartney, was besotted with cats and that inspired Catfest. The festival, a culmination of a long-held dream, is drawing people from around the globe and featuring inspiring speakers, including Giles Clark, big-cat expert and star of the BBC’s Big Cats About the House; Gwen Cooper, the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Homer’s Odyssey about her rescued blind cat, and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, who’s written nine bestsellers on the emotional lives of animals, including the revolutionary When Elephants Weep, and multi-million-selling The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats.
For many of us “cat people”, the relationships we have with felines are so deep and complex it’s difficult to put into words. They are our constant companions. Friends. Soulmates. Wild beings that we care for. They make us laugh, cry, lose sleep and eventually break our hearts. Bukowski thought “the cat is the beautiful devil”. He got that right. Nothing steals your soul like a cat.
Catfest, Oval Space, London, 14 July 2018, catfestlondon.com. Strays: A Lost Cat, A Homeless Man and Their Journey Across America by Britt Collins (Simon & Schuster, £14.99)
