Free Downton Tabby by Chris Kelly Page B

the tail slowly: “I pooped in the shower.”
    Tapping the tail slowly while making eye contact: “I adore you, even in those sweatpants.”
    Drawing the tail in, and to the left of the body: “Each moment away from you is torment; each in your company, ecstasy.”
    Drawing the tail in, and to the right: “Have you lost weight?”
    Tapping the tail slowly, stopping, breaking eye contact to look at a point just behind you: “Oh, God! It’s a murderer!”
    Tapping the tail slowly, stopping, breaking eye contact to look at a point just behind you: “Oh, God! It’s a june bug!”
    Touching the top of the tail with the tongue: “I shall forgive, but never truly forget.”
    Touching the underside of the tail with the tongue: “I ate your underpants.”
    Turning around and leaving, tail in air: “This never would have happened if you’d given me the cold cuts.”

1914
    I N E NGLAND, THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT fought for women’s rights, while in America, Arthur Wynne’s “word-cross,” the first crossword puzzle, appeared in the New York World and opened up a whole new class of things for humans to try to see in the newspaper while their cats tried to prevent them.
    At Downton, electricity was finally installed in the upstairs rooms, a blessing and a curse, because the cords were delicious. Before that, illumination had been provided by coal gas—filthy, dangerous, and unreliable, like the New York Post , but still a hundred times better than energy-saving fluorescents.
    Now I feel I should say something about the other daughter, Lady Etcetera.
    Lady Etcetera’s life had been one long variation on being the first person at a party, and then someone else comes in and sees you and says, “Oh good, no one’s here yet.” She was the strawberry stripe in the Neapolitan ice cream. When sheput her paws over her mother’s eyes and said “Guess who,” she had to give hints. She had lived in her sisters’ shadows for so long, she had mushrooms. What I’m saying, dear reader, is she didn’t get a lot of attention. Now she was in heat, too, and I would have mentioned it back in chapter 1, if it had happened to Minxy or Serval.
    This happy time of catting around came to an epoch-shattering end on August 4, 1914. The whole family was sitting on the dining room table when Lord Grimalkin announced: “Cats, I have bad news and good news and good news that’s bad news. The bad news is about technology—”
    “Not another vacuum cleaner!”
    “Let me finish, Minxy. The bad news is that advances in smokeless powder, rifling, and the machine gun mean the next war, if it ever comes, will be fought in trenches.”
    “What’s the good news?”
    “The good news is, trenches equal rats, and rats are delicious.”
    “What’s the good news that’s bad news?”
    “The world is at war.”

à Verdun
    à Verdun
    J’ai mangé beaucoup de rats
    —B ENJAMIN P ÉRET

1915
THE LAMPS ARE GOING OUT ALL OVER EUROPE.
    —British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey
    . . . H EY, WAIT A SECOND . . . cats can see in the dark! Let’s send them! ”
    So, like a cat in midair, the Clowders’ world was turned upside down again.
    No English cat wanted war. It involved travel. But the assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, in Bosnia, by a Serb, meant Germany had gone too far.
    That much was clear.
    Five hundred thousand British cats were sent to war, where they were used as ratters in the trenches and, more important, as an early-warning system for mustard gas attacks. This gruesome fact, which I wish I were making up, may explain why present-day cats refuse to get into any kind of transportation withouta fight, and why gas is now always blamed on the dog.
    On the British home front, milk was rationed, and feeding it to cats was prohibited. Meat was severely rationed, and in an act of pure spite—I swear I’m not making this up—a zeppelin raid on London in September 1915 dropped seventy bombs and a hambone.
    A bitter day for cats