Ian McMillan: At long last, I can let the cat out of the bag

Let me explain. Years ago, when I was a lad, we had a big pampered black and white cat that was called, with a lack of originality and with no irony, because these were the days before irony, "Pussy".

Pussy was a fixture in our house at Barnsley Road, licking milk

noisily from a blue bowl or purring more loudly than a steam engine restored by enthusiasts and taken to weekend steam rallies somewhere in the Dales. Then, in the mid-1970s, when we moved down to Edderthorpe Lane at the other end of the village, Pussy didn't take too kindly to the relocation.

My memory is vague about what actually happened, and perhaps that's a good thing. I can't remember if Pussy met some dreadful end crossing the road to get back to the old house, or if she just wandered off in what she hoped was the right direction and ended up in somewhere like Grimethorpe where she was taken in by kindly people.

Anyway, Pussy disappeared. One minute she was there, lapping and purring, and the next there was a cat-shaped hole in the South Yorkshire Universe. My mother took the loss hard. It stood to reason: she was in on her own much of the day and the cat and Radio 4 were her constant companions.

One day, a few weeks after Pussy's vanishing, I was sitting on

the settee reading a Superman comic and my mother came in; she was wringing the tea towel in her hands, a sure sign of emotional distress.

"I miss that pussy-cat so much," she said, and as I write the words down I realise that they might seem trite and a bit comic, but

you'll have to take it from me that they were heartfelt and full of

raw feeling.

I replied, with a teenager's swaggering squeaky-voiced logic:

"I'll buy you another." She wouldn't hear of it. Pussy had just turned up on the doorstep one day a few years before, like a foundling in a

Victorian novel, and if there was to be a replacement then the same

thing had to happen. My mother was a great believer in that kind of magic, where things just happened, and any new cat would simply have to drop from the sky. Figuratively speaking, of course.

A couple of weeks passed and Pussy's loss didn't dull in any way;

the tea towel was continually being wrung to within an inch of its life, and Radio 4 murmured unheeded. I was telling one of my mates about it and he said: "Our cat's just had kittens, you could take one for her." I explained that it wasn't that simple because the new kitten had to be found, not just picked up from a litter. "Well, tell her you found it somewhere and just brought it home," he said, and that's where the decades-long deception began.

I went to my mate's house and picked up a little ginger kitten that was the thinnest and most bedraggled of the litter because I thought that might make my mother love it more. I'm ashamed to say that I picked up some grass and muck and rubbed it into the kitten's thin fur to make it look even more homeless. I went into the kitchen. My mother was making a cuppa. "Look what I've found..." I said mock-dramatically, and she turned round, wreathed in steam from the boiling kettle. I held the kitten out to her and she dropped the tea towel and took it into her arms.

And that was that. This new cat, also called Pussy because we never waste a good name in Barnsley, soon became part of the family,

and I never told anybody that I didn't find her but got her from somebody's house.

The web of lies grew. "Where did you get her?" "At the farm down Edderthorpe Lane. It was drowning in a pond and I fished it out..." "Oh, poor thing. You good lad!" Over the years I almost confessed. Once or twice I cleared my throat. Once I actually managed the words: "Er, about the cat..." I never completed the

sentence. I once went upstairs and shouted into the toilet bowl: "I didn't find the cat!" Nobody heard me because the house was empty.

My mother's been dead for more than three years now, and Pussy 2

is long gone. So I confess. I didn't find it. I got it from my mates. But it made us all happy, so does it matter? Does it?