When Queenie’s kittens were two months old they were given away, with the exception of Bella,a black kitten the liveliest and smallest of the litter, Two went to friends and the third, Bruno, came downstairs to live with us.

He was a beautifully marked kitten, a brown tabby with long hair which stood on end, giving the appearance of having received an electric shock. He showed no signs of nervousness when he arrived and settled down immediately, took to his litter tray and fell asleep on the back of our sofa.

This was where Queenie spotted him the following morning. He may have been ready to leave but Queenie was not ready to let him go. Her calls at the door were unsettling to us as well as Bruno so we opened the door to her and from then on she arrived at least three times a day to give Bruno what we could not. So Bruno continued to enjoy his mother’s milk, having his face and ears cleaned and his litter checked, just to make sure he was being careful. Which he was. So Bruno had a pretty good life, with us amusing him with toys, spoiling him with love and giving him 4 meals a day in addition to being nursed by his mother. He grew fast and he grew handsome and we loved him.

Beautiful Bruno

Queenie adapted well to having one kitten upstairs and one down, but it was not in her long term scheme of things. She started enticing him to follow her back upstairs but Bruno was too small to manage the 30 high steps and could only watch her departure. Meantime upstairs his sister was spending her time alone, looking miserable and totally oblivious to her brother living downstairs.

We could not resist nature. Bruno grew in leaps and bounds, quite literally, every day. His mother’s patient tactics gradually paid off. Bruno made it up the steps. At first his sister hissed and spat at him but within a couple of days they were inseparable. Soon he was crying to go out at night and it became increasingly difficult to keep him in. Eventually the three cats became a family again. Queenie got her freedom and began to roam further afield while the young cats played together to their hearts’ content.

I watched Queenie teach him how to catch birds, in theory at any rate. The two kittens climbed the olive trees and chased one another in the branches. Life was fun. A really wonderful cat’s life.

The pleasure Bruno gave me was tempered by concern about the safety of the two kittens. A road passed the house upstairs, not busy enough to give them cause to be careful and they regularly squeezed under the gate.

One morning my husband found Bruno on the road outside the gate. He had been killed by a car in the night. He spared me the sight and took him down to the land where we are building a house and buried him. I did not want to know where. We mourned him for months. Even now we cannot speak of him without sorrow. Nor I write without tears.

Queenie has probably mated again. She disappeared for three days and when she returned Bella was no longer welcome to share her bed. So Bella visits us regularly and sleeps in a little bed under our porch roof. She comes for company but she is not our cat and the food and comfort we give her will be gone when we move into our new house.

The owner upstairs has told us that he will give us two kittens from the next litter…. But we have to think carefully about that…. A cat’s life in Greece seems to be rather a short one.

The family reunited. Bruno(left),Bella and Queenie (right)