Queen of the Wild Cats

Another excerpt from my children’s book, The Wild Cats of Piran…

So how was it, then that Felicia had become the Queen of the wild cats of Piran, even if it was an unofficial title? From whence did she derive her natural authority? To understand that, you would need to understand something of her past.

Felicia was born into the first of her nine lives on a summer’s evening in Naples, in the Year of Our Lord, 1721. She was middle kitten of a litter of five. The five kittens were to be brought up as pets in a mansion house, or more accurately ‘palazzo’. This magnificent home had been built for a high ranking officer in the Neapolitan Navy and his family. Something of this sailor’s spirit had passed from master to domestic animal. It was the longing to set sail and to go on adventures.

A wandering spirit of adventure was not something conducive to the life which was planned for Felicia. Although she was a natural aristocrat, sitting around in stuffy, richly-furnished drawing rooms listening to chamber music didn’t do much for her. She didn’t particularly care to be waited on by servant boys dressed in powdered wigs and shoes with gold buckles. This type of life it was that her mother Alessandra had wanted for her, not to mention the human mistress of the household. This particular bundle of nervous energy’s full name and title was the Contessa Felicia Monteleone.

As well as her ‘given’ name, Felicia inherited certain characteristics from the Contessa: her pride, her effortless style, her ability to get her own way, even when in the wrong. But Felicia’s need to roam the world, which she had inherited from the Admiral, was that much stronger, and so one fateful night, stray she did.

She waited until the human household was asleep, and told one of her cat sisters: “I’m just going out for a drink”. This was taken to mean she would take a drink of water from the garden fountain. In fact, once outside, Felicia gripped hold of a climbing vine, shimmied up the wall, and disappeared forever into the sultry Naples evening.

Escape was simple, but saying goodbye was hard, or rather, not saying goodbye. You see, Felicia knew that if any of her family thought she was leaving, they would surely have tried to stop her. It was an early lesson to the very young cat, still little more than a kitten…

The lesson was that you sometimes had to be cruel to be kind.

Felicia had escaped the privilege of her circumstances and everything safe and reliable. At first, her flight from the Captain’s palazzo at first took her no further than across town to the Spanish Quarter, the poorest of all the poor parts of Naples. Here Felicia learned how to fight and how to steal, and she died the first and second of her nine lives. She emerged stronger and wiser each time.

After a few more years exploring everything the feline underworld of Naples had to offer, Felicia was off, on a journey that took in much of Italy and Sardinia, but also a life – several lives – spent at sea. ‘Before the mast,’ as they used to say.

She sailed with a Spanish Sardinian merchant ship at first, then later, but not much later, with a legendary Pirate captain named Edward England. He was known as being a comparatively humane kind of pirate, in that he tried to kill as few captives as possible. What is not so well known was the part Felicia played in stopping Edward England from executing prisoners. She also persuaded him, using all her feline wiles, to desist from using that hideous whip, the so-called ‘cat o’nine tails’ on disobedient sailors. This is just another example of how the influence of cats is so underwritten in the official version of history.

As a ship’s cat aboard a pirate ship, Felicia had of course thrown her lot in with a band of terrifying desperadoes, but happily, she was well-liked by them all. She became particular friends with Captain Edward England’s parrot, a very chatty fellow named Desmond. Friendships like this between cat and bird were quite rare. Like Desmond, Felicia slept in her master’s cabin, and together they sailed the seven seas. To Jamaica and then Honduras they would go, then through the Florida channel to Virginia and New England. From there it was on to West Africa, before sailing the Cape of Good Hope for the isles of Madagascar then later Mauritius. All the way Felicia dined on a steady diet of mice and rats and fish, and was considered a good luck mascot by Captain and crew.

When the ‘the Fancy’, Edward England’s fastest ship and the pride of his fleet, weighed anchor, Felicia would go ashore with the men. She liked nothing better than discovering new tastes, sensations, rhythms and colours.

Then one day out at sea, Felicia thought she could make out the Italian coastline. The mere idea of it pulled at her heartstrings. It was all up with the pirate life, as far she was concerned. She longed to be among animals and even humans whose ways were akin to hers. So, the next time the Fancy pulled ashore, she jumped ship and caught another on its way to Tunisia, from whence she sailed first to Constantinople (or Istanbul as it is known today), and from there to Venice.

The crew of the Fancy had been right about Felicia, she had brought them good fortune. However the luck of the pirates aboard the Fancy ran out almost the instant she left. For history does record that Edward England ended his life of crime as a miserable beggar, dressed in rags.

For decades Felicia wandered up and down all of Italy, from Palermo to Trieste. She was in Venice, that most serene city, when Napoleon’s troops marched in on a day in June 1797. Afterwards there was a brief stint with the world’s most famous colony of feral cats. The Coloseum cats of Rome might have seemed like the natural peer group for Felicia, but she had been born to lead, not to follow. The Colosseum cats already had a virtually invincible Queen, whose name was Agrippina. She and Felicia did not get along.

But she simply could not bring herself to return to Naples. The fact was Felicia still burned with shame whenever she thought of her desertion from the family litter all those years ago. Her memories were sometimes vague, but that particular one remained raw.

This was another of life’s lessons: that while pain seems to have no memory, shame most certainly does.

However, anywhere else in the ‘old country’ would do. It was all “Bella Italia”, and surely that was where she belonged, if anywhere.

So strange then, that Felicia should end up just over the border from Italy in the little Slovene town of Piran. She had travelled to Piran by stowing away under the back seat of a car – an Alfa Romeo Giulietta convertible to be precise. Well, by then it was the 1980s and Felicia was onto her seventh life. She had only been intending to visit Piran for a day or two. One or two other cats had told her how pretty it was.

Once there she had roamed about the old town, and took what she wanted from all those outdoor restaurant tables on the waterfront promenade. As greedy as any cat, she strolled about the place until she came across a fellow feline. It was the rather fierce-looking, blue grey Chartreux cat, whom we now know as Dragan. At the time she encountered him, he was eating lunch on the terrace of a stout and kindly Italian lady, head first into a bowl of fish stew.

“Ciao micetto, (Hello kitty)” she had said, indicating the bowl. Encountering no resistance, Felicia dived in head first as well. But Dragan had been so preoccupied by eating he hadn’t even noticed Felicia. Now he jumped backwards, brandished his claws and hissed.  Felicia looked back at the plump but handsome blue grey Chartreux cat and simply fluttered her eyelashes. Dragan was no match for that.  He in turn smiled his famous, unsettling Chartreux cat grin.

“Well, what is the meaning of this?” he then huffed, trying to sound as grumpy as possible: “interrupting a tomcat while he’s eating?”

“My name is Felicia. Piacere di conoscerti. (It’s a pleasure to meet you).”

“Well, I mean to say. They call me Dragan. There’s plenty here if you’d like to dig in.”

“Sei molto gentile (You’re very kind).”

There is no greater bond for cats than sharing food together, which you will agree is a sound proposition all round. Suffice to say, the two cats had immediately hit it off. Which is to stay, they started bickering and sniping at each other from their very first acquaintance.

To Felicia’s utmost surprise, the little Slovene town had very quickly begun to feel like home. But it was more than that.  Here, finally, everything she had ever learned about leadership, from the Navy man of Naples, the pirate Edward England, from Napoleon himself, Felicia could put into practice. Suffice to say, Felicia was not a cat you could cage for long. Throughout her long journey from her home town of Naples all the way to Piran, she had lashed out more than once at those who had tried taming her. Yet those first two or three decades in Piran had been a walk in the park, compared to what was in store for her. All of Felicia’s cleverness, strength and intuition would soon be stretched to the limit, as you, perceptive reader, doubtless foresee.