IF CATS COULD TALK
When Tallulah went missing nearly a decade ago, her family pondered many times what had happened to her — the truth was closer to home than they ever thought...
The cat who returned home after nine years — and the owners’ didn’t recognise her.
The cat burst into the kitchen one autumn evening through the cat flap — it was painfully thin, covered in dirt, its fur was matted with mucus across its face, and you could instantly see that the poor creature was unwell, and was barely able to breathe.
“There’s a strange cat in our kitchen,” Scott Clarke called out to his partner Fiona Partridge. “It’s not looking very well. I’ll try to catch it.”
However, the cat slipped back out of the cat flap before he could pick it up. “How odd,” Fiona told Scott later. “Maybe if it comes back again we could keep it?”
“There’s no way we’re having a cat,” replied
Scott firmly, who was not a feline fan.
But little did they know the secret that surrounded this black moggy — and how this cat would become part of their lives... AGAIN. If only the cat could have talked, all would have been revealed there and then.
The next day, the bedraggled cat turned up again — and seemed at ease sitting at their back door and with their Border Collie, JJ, who also appeared to be unconcerned about this moggy hanging around their home in Harpenden, Hertfordshire.
“We thought she was a young cat that perhaps had had kittens and had become sick as she was so tiny,” said former police officer Fiona.The couple had been in touch with their local Cats Protection team and the underweight puss was caught in a trap. Scott was still adamant that he didn’t want to add a cat to their family
I didn’t recognise
her at all.
and she was quickly taken to the vet’s for medical attention.
UNFAMILIAR FACE
The next day, the phone rang. The mystery cat had been scanned and the microchip showed that it was Fiona’s cat who had gone missing NINE years ago, in 2011.
“I was astounded,” said the 53-year-old. “It was my cat, Tallulah, but I didn’t recognise her at all. She looked nothing like the cat I had known because she was in such a sorry state. I couldn’t believe it — and I couldn’t work out where she’d been all that time.”
If only Tallulah could talk, thought Fiona, she could let me know what adventures she’d had over all those years and tell me how she’d become so badly neglected.
Fiona and her two young daughters had got Tallulah and her brother Bugsy — named after characters in the film ‘Bugsy Malone’ — from the RSPCA as older cats in 2008 and they had been unfazed when puppy JJ joined the family. Bugsy loved watching the fish tank and Tallulah was a fan of snoozing and sunbathing.
Bugsy enjoyed roaming the nearby gardens and had started coming home smelling of cigarette smoke, which Fiona had thought was weird, but had thought no more of it. But gradually
Bugsy, and then Tallulah, started staying out for longer periods — and then the pair stopped returning totally.
“We were heartbroken,” said Fiona, .“We did everything we could to encourage them home and always kept the cat flap open but there was no trace of them anywhere. It was so sad, especially for my daughters.”
Time passed and the family decided that the cats must have died — perhaps they’d been run over or attacked by another animal. There was no other explanation that they could think of.
So when Tallulah turned up in September 2020, the family were amazed and astonished. Where could she have been?
But the vet who she’d been taken to had bad news. Tallulah was in a very poor state, with kidney failure and chronic inflammatory bowel disease being her main issues.The vet bill ran into
hundreds of pounds, but there was no way that the family weren’t going to do their best for Tallulah after she’d somehow made it home again to them.
Scott, 53, had met Fiona after Tallulah had gone missing, so he had never known her. But slowly and surely, despite his initial indifference to cats, he fell in love with her.
Fiona added:
“We brought Tallulah home and took care of her with various medicines — and she ruled the roost. We were all so happy to have her back where she belonged. She had a lovely bond with us and Scott became smitten with her, and the dog fell in love with her.
“Tallulah was the funniest, crankiest, batty old cat you could have wanted — and we really loved her; we treated her like a queen. She never left the house again.
“She was still very much a sick cat though, on a special diet and with lots of ongoing treatment and scans, and was often at the vet’s. We gave her all the love we could.”
Fiona kept wondering where Tallulah could have been for those missing years, but there was no clear answer.
Then, sadly, Tallulah went down hill and the family had to make the hardest decision any pet owner faces.The vet said that it was time for the cat to suffer no longer, so she was put to sleep.
Fiona said: “We were devastated. After she found us again, we wished we could have had longer with her, but we were so glad that we could share the last bit of her life.”
But where had she been for those nine years? Fiona often pondered this question and wondered how if she’d been reunited with Tallulah earlier
We were all so happy to have her back where she belonged.
she could have got her veterinary treatment sooner which might have stopped her suffering so much and prevented her premature death.
MYSTERY SOLVED
Recently, Fiona found out a little about what had actually happened to Tallulah and Bugsy all those years ago. It seemed a neighbour started to entice the cats into his home and feed them. When that neighbour passed away, another neighbour — who thought Tallulah had been a stray — then made a bed for her in the greenhouse and would feed her and give her cat treats.
“I was so upset when I found out that my cats had only been metres away from me,” said Fiona. “I was in tears. These second set of neighbours thought they were doing the right thing for Tallulah, but if she’d been taken to the vet’s, or had Cats Protection been involved at the time she was missing, then her microchip would have reunited us and we could have got the proper treatment she needed much earlier.
“I hope Tallulah’s legacy might be that people realise that it’s not a good idea to feed strange cats that turn up at their door, but instead to contact an animal charity or take them to the vet’s. We missed years of Tallulah’s life and in the meantime we found out that Bugsy died without apparently seeing a vet either. We will never know if he suffered but they were devoted to each other so it must have been very hard for Tallulah without him.”