One cold winter afternoon, I went to get some coal for the boiler after school and discovered something unexpected.

It wasn’t the first time I’d found something odd when getting coal.

Our house was at the top of a hill and its back garden and the garage and the large coal bunker were below it on a slope which became our back garden. When we’d moved in, there was a field between the end of our garden and the gorge where the river was. Now there was a housing estate.

The drive at the side of the house which led to the garage wasn’t long (our house was the normal sort of size), but it was steep. Dad taught me how to control the clutch on the car and how to do hill starts on that drive before I was old enough for lessons on the public road.

The coal bunker was at the bottom of some very steep steps and was so large it only needed to be filled twice a year. There was no mains gas in the village, so we used Calor gas for cooking and coal to feed a boiler which heated water and the central heating which Dad had had put in after we moved.

One of my chores after school was to get coal for the boiler if necessary. The first odd thing that had happened during this exercise was on a chilly March afternoon when something other than coal slid into the enormous scuttle. It was a package addressed to Dad. When he came home and opened it, he said ‘Oh! I’d forgotten I’d ordered this. They mustn’t have been able to put it through the letter box in December. Shame we didn’t realise. Still, it’s undamaged. Happy Belated Christmas Paula!’ It was a hardback copy of the Diary of Anne Frank with a tooled leatherette cover. I still have it.

But this time, the surprise was alive and not in the bunker but in the garage, making a pitiful squeak.

Now, the garage was enormous, but no car ever went inside because there wasn’t, somehow, room. However that’s another story though you can get the gist here. I put down the scuttle and went to investigate.

A tiny ginger kitten peeked out through a gap in the door and mewed.

Now, a couple of years before I’d smuggled a black kitten home in my cookery basket. She had belonged to a friend who said the kitten would be drowned and had likewise smuggled her to school. I can’t actually recall how we managed during the school day, but we did. When I got home, I called the kitten Magic. I kept her hidden for maybe just a few hours before I confessed, expecting to be told that I could keep her, even though we had another cat already, but the answer was no.

I had been heartbroken. This time, I was older and further into my teens and I wasn’t going to back down without a fight. So I picked up the little frozen scrap of ginger fur and took him indoors.

I have no idea what had changed since I’d smuggled Magic home, but I didn’t have to fight. The answer was yes, we could keep the kitten. But while I was trying to think up some imaginative, mystical name for this hungry ball of grubby reddish fluff, my mother named him Ginger and that was that.

We never discovered where he’d come from. For all we knew, he’d been dumped on us purposefully. But it seemed somehow that he’d just arrived from nowhere all on his own. Whatever really happened, whoever didn’t want him missed the loveliest pet.

Our existing cat was none too impressed at first. She was middle-aged and very ladylike. All of a sudden her quiet domain was invaded by a hooligan of a tearaway, rushing round the house, bouncing out on her from corners, trying to entice her in games and wrestling. She watched with disapproval and occasionally swiped him when he stepped too far out of line.

Ginger didn’t care. He was the sweetest, gentlest cat I have ever known. A neighbour child brought his little sister round once. She was around eighteen months old and waddled over to Ginger, who was watching her in curiosity. Before anyone could stop her, she grabbed his ears and twisted. It’s as well she didn’t do it to the older cat who’d have swiped her without compunction, claws and all. Ginger just sat there until I could rescue him, although you could tell he wasn’t happy. We didn’t have any other small children round after that, but if we had, I’m sure he’d have hidden as far as possible out of the way until they’d gone.

With that and three other exceptions, Ginger was the happiest cat.

One exception was travelling in the car to visit grandparents in Berkshire and Wiltshire. The older cat loved it. She’d be sick once, which we prepared for. Then she’d clamour to come out of her basket and spend the rest of the journey wandering about the car before settling on either the back window shelf or Dad’s shoulders. Ginger on the other hand, huddled miserably in his basket until we’d arrived wherever we were going, at which point he returned to his normal curious, chirpy self.

Another exception was when a young gander appeared in our garden and stayed there for a week. Apparently he’d been introduced to a harem of older geese in a local farm, and flown off in terror at their – er marital – expectations. For the whole week while we tried to work out who the gander belonged to and get him collected, the two cats stayed indoors, staring out in disgust at the invader in their garden, ears twitching as it honked loud enough to wake the dead, .

The final exception was a few years later when our older cat died.

Ginger spent days hunting round the house for her afterwards, chirruping miserably. He looked in all the places where she used to hide from his exuberance and all the places where she curled up to have her old lady naps. It was some time before he became used to being on his own.

I had left home long before Ginger himself passed away and I never got to say goodbye. By then, I suppose, he was Mum’s cat really. But I always thought of him as mine somehow: that little bundle of orange fluff that appeared from nowhere and became as I say, the prince of cats.

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).