Filey & the Cat’s Whiskers
When Julie Andrews sang about one of her favourite things being whiskers on kittens, I totally get it. My personal story could be told many ways, I’ve lived as various different characters, played many parts. Some quite convincingly, some not so much. So let me share with you this particular snippet. The part where I‘m eight years old, wearing a Grandma Betty’s knitted jumper and puffer coat, hair in a half pony, peering down the wishing well, salty tears flowing down my hot wind whipped cheeks. I would often gravitate here, throwing in pennies desperately wishing for something different. A different life. I longed for the eternal, a Chronicles of Narnia landscape of forests, wolves and barefoot freedom. I’ve always felt trapped in the middle world of illusion.
We had a cottage in Filey growing up, inherited when my grandparents passed away. Every weekend we’d pack up the car and drive the two-hour trip from Huddersfield to Filey, stopping off for drive through granary sandwiches and a rum truffle at “Merry England” an old world themed café infamous only to locals. We had our cat “Sprocket” in his pet carrier. (Named after the dog in the lighthouse in Fragglerock). Feeling his whiskers tickle my hand, little nylon javelins peeking out from the gridded bars, I’d smile a protective smile over him. My young fingers stroking his protruding velvet ear tips reassuring him, we were in this together.Nineteen Reynolds Street was a two hundred year old fisherman’s cottage, tiny and claustrophobic. It had an oil painting of Sarah Jane my granddad’s cobble boat and was packed full of horse brasses. There was pot pourri in dusty bowls on every surface, an ancient black box television with ceefax, a gas fire and a small yard for the cat to stalk Bill’s pigeons. It killed me to watch Bill Colling, a retired fisherman in his navy blue gansey, pipe in mouth, hands in pocket, gazing up to the heavens on a Saturday afternoon waiting for his beloved feathered friend to return. Knowing all the while we were harbouring a fugitive, and that Sprocket had buried his innocent victim beneath the caravan. Walking past Bill was difficult most times.
By day, dad took pride in grooming the window boxes, full of the promise of garden centre pansies and petunias, painting the blue shutters with devotion. Bantering with old friends about who knows what, but it was an adult language that felt comforting. Then after a warm supper drink we’d hit the pillow. It was after we’d settled that “The Foords” pub directly opposite our cottage would emerge like a mythical beast from the underworld. Pumping out the underwater sounds of Saturday night karaoke. Supposedly asleep in a twin share room with my older brother, I’d creep from behind heavy, quilted covers to the window. A silent, kind of guilty prowl to peer from behind the shiny, claw-clicked, orange-gold curtains and survey the Wild West scenes below. Short skirts and Spam legs, fights with fists, blood and broken glass, grabbing, yelling, women sobbing, end of the night hook ups, it was all there for me to stare at in innocent disbelief, at the piss and shame of it all. A window scene of agony. Whilst I craved growing up, I never aspired to adulthood, if it meant this fractured, war scene. I made a decision right then and there, a firm commitment to stay in Narnia. I curled back into my warm bed and Sprocket, my benevolent Aslan purred for chin rubs, his white whiskers brushing my young wrists absorbing some of my startled, confusion. I refused to believe this was 3D reality.
Years passed and I grew up, at least outwardly I did. My teenage years were punctuated with me sitting in the cottage window, legs too long for the white windowsill hammock. Socks slippy on the glossy sill listening to “The Drugs don’t work” “Torn” and “Ironic” in an emotional angst reserved specifically for teenage rites of passage.Then at seventeen my world collapsed suddenly when dad died from deep vein thrombosis he was fifty-four, it was December in the year two thousand. The shock, trauma and grief of it all shook me to my young core, it shattered something inside of me like safety glass and I was thrust into that window scene underbelly of a cruel and unsafe world.
We sold the cottage, but before moving house to York we lived there temporarily. It was a final farewell whilst we navigated cardboard packing boxes and selling dad’s car and the caravan. I was modelling in Manchester at the time, feeling very lost in the matrix, a labyrinth of lonely in a dense fog of cigarette smoke and seeking oblivion. Filey was a quiet sanctuary of salt air, the cries of seagulls who seemed to understand and solitude.
My brother spotted a sign in the newly opened Italian restaurant in Filey advertising for a waitress “Enquire Within. It’s such an interesting request “Enquire Within” don’t you think? I digress. Dutifully, I nervously enquired and they asked me back that evening in a waitress uniform of white top and black bottoms for a trial. I dug through our packing boxes to find the right clothes and turned up full of wide-eyed youthful optimism.
They explained the table configuration and order of service. It was overwhelming. I crumbled. Trying my best to illicit the confidence to approach a table of customers to take their order. The restaurant figured quickly I wasn’t going to be their best new hire and relegated me to squirty cream topping the muddy butterscotch desserts with an aerosol can. I remember watching carefully as the frothy promise of the canned cream dissolved. The night passed in a blur of Italian loud voices and my struggling to carry drinks on a large tray. At eleven o’clock they closed the doors and paid me ten pounds for my for four hours trial. My brother dutifully met me at the war memorial to escort me home in safety. His first words were “Sprockets died” he delivered the news with grim, matter of factness that disturbed me.
Although technically not sacked I was never asked back to work at the restaurant, we sold the cottage and Sprocket sadly had several fits the night I was out of the cottage and fully immersed in a Carbonara of distraction. I thank him for leaving in such a selfless way. So a chapter of my life came to a close very abruptly. I learnt to rebuild that summer. It was a hard lesson thrust upon me, but one that I’ve carried with me. I learnt something so profound aged seventeen, nothing really dies, it just transforms into something new.
Rebecca Milnes