It’s what Cheshire cats do…continued (3)

In the last episode we suspected that Misty had squeezed herself through the hole that led to the sub-cellar beneath the kitchen floor; which was bad news, because there was no way into that cellar apart from through the floor or through the walls.

When our late Victorian townhouse was built the builders used some of the cellar rooms in some of the houses as ‘rubble tips’. As you go further along our road you find that the houses have four and sometimes five cellar rooms, but our house has only three and a large passage. Some years ago we converted these rooms into a laundry room, a bathroom, and a large room that we used to use as Gaynor’s office, but at the moment has no designated use. (There is a long, upsetting, and costly story about our cellar conversion that I may go into in more detail at some point, but not now). Anyway, we also have two sub-cellars that are half full of rubble and have no access. It was into the one below the kitchen, behind our cellar laundry room, that we feared Misty had dropped.

What were we to do? If she was down there we couldn’t leave her, she’d die and it would be a long, horrible, and then smelly (for us) death.

The floor was out of the question. Back in the twenties it was fashionable to cover floorboards with a thick layer of an asphalt-like material and then to paint and polish it. At some point a previous Charleston dancing owner had done this and then we’d subsequently re-floored the kitchen on top of it. This made the floor about two inches thick and it would be really hard (and costly) to make a hole through that. So it would have to be the walls.

I went outside into the back garden. Fortunately the floor of our kitchen is about two feet higher than ground level and there are (or should I say were) two large, intricately sculpted, Victorian airbricks that allowed air movement and gave the cellars ventilation. There was nothing for it. I fetched a lump hammer and a chisel and smashed the irreplaceable and century-old airbricks to dust and rubble so that I could shine a torch into the cellar from the outside. The destruction of such beautifully ornate, glazed red-brick, masterpieces broke my heart but it had to be done; there could be a life at stake, a very small one, but a life just the same.

I shone the torch into the darkness and dust of the rubble heaped cellar. There was nothing in the far right hand corner, nothing along the back wall, nothing in the far left hand corner, nothing in the middle, and…I couldn’t angle the torch to see what was immediately below, the wall was too thick, there was a complete wall and two corners that I couldn’t see and Misty could be there, only inches below me, hurt or even worse.

Oh well, in for a penny as they say. I went back into the house, down to the cellar, then into our newly refurbished and freshly painted laundry room.

Firstly I removed all of the cupboards from the tiled plasterboard wall that the sub-cellar sat behind, then with an electric saw, I cut two eighteen inch square holes in the plasterboard; one in each corner of the laundry room exposing the solid brick wall behind. I couldn’t make the holes in the plasterboard any larger because of the mess of electric cables and water pipes that I had luckily missed with the power saw when I cut through the plasterboard. Finally I took my lump hammer and smashed two largish holes into the brickwork, this allowed me to shine a torch into the sub-cellar. I shone the torch into the darkness and the dust of the rubble heaped cellar again this time illuminating the other wall. There was nothing in the far right hand corner, nothing along the outside wall, nothing in the far left hand corner, and still nothing in the middle. There was no sign of Misty; just broken bricks, lots of dust, and some spiders.

We shone the torch around for an hour or so and checked at least a further three times throughout the evening, but there was neither sight nor sound of Misty. Perhaps she wasn’t in the cellar at all.

Eventually we went to bed, but we didn’t sleep very well.

Next morning I got up early and went downstairs. I hoped to open the kitchen door and see Misty scampering around on the red quarry tile flooring, but she wasn’t. I went outside and shone the torch through the holes where the beautiful airbricks used to be, but the torch beam only shone on bricks and dust. I went into the laundry room and shone the torch through the holes where the cupboards used to hang, but there was no sign of a dark grey kitten with little white socks and a fluffy white chest.

Eventually it was time for me to leave for work and I had to give up. Gaynor was at college that morning and when she came home that afternoon Misty still hadn’t turned up, so he repeated the process that I’d gone through that morning with the torch. Again there was neither site nor sound of our kitten. We were losing hope fast.

Driving home that evening I reached a decision. The kitchen units would have to come out! What if Misty had climbed up the back of the units and was stuck on a pipe or cable? There was enough room between the units and the wall for her to scramble up and get stuck. I’d take a methodical approach; first remove the fridge-freezer from its housing and check behind it. Then remove the work services along with the porcelain butler’s sink. And finally, and only if I had to, I’d take out the entire length of kitchen units; despite the damage it would do and the money it would cost to put it right. We had to eliminate every possible hiding place.

I told Gaynor what I was planning. She wasn’t happy but understood. As a last and final check of the cellars, and before starting the necessary destruction of our eighteen month old and quite expensive, kitchen I decided that I would flood the sub-cellar with light just to be absolutely and completely sure that Misty wasn’t down there alive or dead. I drove to B and Q and bought the biggest, brightest torches I could find and with Gaynor positioned outside, and Holly and me inside, I began to count. One…two…three! We switched on our torches simultaneously, flooding the pitch black two-and-a-half feet high cellar space with light. I thought I could make out a motionless grey lump behind a large brick. Could that be Misty? If it was she wasn’t moving. I called to Gaynor, asking her if she could see it, she couldn’t, and then suddenly and in a flash, Misty darted across the cellar floor immediately in front of the hole I was shining the torch through. She was only in the light for a second or two before she disappeared into the recess of the chimney and the darkness again; but I’d seen her and she was alive.

“We’ve found her! Did you see her?” I called to Gaynor. She hadn’t, it’d all happened so quickly. Holly hadn’t caught a glimpse of her either; but I knew I hadn’t imagined it. We’d found her at last.

It was all over pretty quickly after that. The hole in the laundry room wall was far too small for either Gaynor or me to climb through, but Holly, very gamely, said that she’d do it. The hole was high up in the wall and there was a bit of a drop down to the dirty, rubble-strewn floor behind it, Holly, who is thin but tall, managed to contort her body through the hole and into the cellar without hurting herself too much. She was wearing gloves and old clothes but it can’t have been pleasant avoiding the cobwebs and spiders and not always succeeding. Fortunately Holly found Misty and almost immediately and picking her up gently, made here way back to the hole passing Misty through to me, and safety.

Misty was fine, a bit dirty, but apart from that fine. She didn’t seem scared or at all fazed by her adventure, in fact she was purring like a…well, like a cat. Holly squeezed herself back through the hole out of the darkness of the cellar and we all went up to the kitchen to feed Misty milk and kitten food and celebrate with a glass of wine (Coke for Holly).

And that was that.

I sealed up the hole by the dishwasher again, this time very, very securely. I temporarily blocked the airbrick holes with old slates (they are still temporarily blocked, nor have I fixed the plasterboard or re-hung the cupboards in the laundry room yet), and we decided to keep Misty in the large cellar room with the door closed at night until she was too large to squeeze through the hole under dishwasher door again (this only took three weeks, she’s going to be a big cat).

I guess with the plumber’s bill, what it’ll cost to replace the airbricks (with plain old airbricks and not ornate Victorian ones), and making good the damage to the laundry room, that this episode in Misty’s still very short life has cost us around three hundred pounds, and that’s if I do the repair work myself.

If she continues at this rate and lives as long as Tia (our previous cat), then we’re probably looking at thousands of pounds worth of damage over the years. Is she worth it?

I’ll let you know. Yes, I’ll certainly let you know.