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II fed the stray cat for months before she brought them to our door: a gang of wild and fragile kittens. I had never had a pet before, and like many people who didn’t grow up with animals, I was perhaps missing a certain emotional dimension. The arrival of this group of spitters and shakers broke me wide and just when I needed it.
It was 2016 and I was living as a property carer in a derelict care home in East London. I was 23, broke, ambitious and sick. Then I could be found having routine panic attacks in the PPE-blue bathroom of the former NHS. These days I know it’s all the waves of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. At the time, though, I just assumed that was what happened to unemployed writers. Enter Kitten Babyleaf and her fluffy relatives – looking just as traumatized, infatuated and desperate for security as I am.
With that, a dormant paternal instinct (or maybe a savior complex) kicked in as I literally set about herding cats that would have scattered like dust. They meowed louder than their size would suggest, and it wasn’t until I spent three hours getting all three into one box that I heard the others. As I hung my head over the wall of an adjacent cabin, my eyes met six more staring back like marbles lost in the long grass.
We set to work; stairs are placed, deckchairs are placed. We waited and watched. For eight hours, the stray mother would painstakingly drag each kitten by its scruff to the top of the wall and then just… let it go – a new take on helicopter parenting.
In the weeks that followed, I creaked open the door to that unused bathroom—now their panic room, not mine. I would sit still for hours waiting. Slowly, day by day, step by step, the kittens came to me, hesitantly from abandoned U-turns led by Babyleaf, prophet of domestic promise. As their fear was replaced by curiosity, my anxiety was sorted by action. Ours was a monastic life – together, all our unruly edges rounded.
However, reality knocked. The strangers we lived with wondered why the pipes kept meowing and eventually a surprise check by the landlord meant it was game over. If I wanted to keep my home, I had to kick the kittens out of theirs.
No charities would take them, neither friends nor foes. Finally, as a joke, I stood and watched as a pet store owner gravely inspected the genitalia of each kitten, then placed them in a cardboard box. And that was it. I never saw Babyleaf or her siblings again. I often wonder what happened to her. Is she an Insta-cat, collecting ad revenue by unboxing PlayStations? Does she have a political podcast? Anyway, despite the fact that this pet barely had time to fill the role, I hope she remembers me and hopefully forgives me.
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