He looked up at her and said: ‘That must never happen again.’ And I suppose it never did. There sat my father and there I sat, murderers, and feeling it. But she was looking for it and she sat a long time stroking and talking to it. My mother had not asked for this cat to be spared, because it was old, and not very well. When my mother returned from her trip, and the neighbour who had brought her had gone, she walked quiet and uncommenting through the house where there was now one cat, her old favourite, asleep on her bed. Some of the cats had escaped – three never came back at all to the murderous household, so they must have gone wild and taken their chances. Under My Skin Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. You think of Iris Murdoch’s adulterous bed hopping, or Doris Lessing abandoning her two children, or Joni Mitchell putting her child up for adoption, and wonder if this would be tolerated among. The servants went in and carried off the corpses to the disused well. To Room Nineteen Collected Stories Volume One. Then he swore a good deal, then he went back into the room and the shooting continued. My father came out of the room at one point, very white, with tight angry lips and wet eyes.

The cats that were still uncaught had sensed their fate and were raging and screaming all over the bush, with people after them. The gun sounded again, again, again, again. My father went into the room with his First World War revolver, more reliable, he said, than a shotgun.

“In the end, the cats were rounded up and put into a room.

On cats by doris lessing