Korky the Cat by Tommy Crocket
When I was a wee boy, I lived in the Gallowgate, in Glasgow. This was in the early 1950s and a better place to live I cannot imagine, unless you were a cat called Korky.
We lived in a tenement flat, above ‘Reeta Fashions’, just along from the ‘Sarry Heid’ and across the road from ‘the Barras’. The families up the close all got on well and there were lots of children to play with. The street was a busy major thoroughfare, teeming with lorries, trams and horses and carts, so the weans were not allowed out the front of the close without adult supervision. Normally we played in the back court, but on wet days, we took turns playing in each others’ houses. If a mother needed some time-off from minding the weans, it was no problem to leave them with a neighbour.
Most households numbered a cat amongst its residents, not because of any fellow feeling for feline friends; more to catch the mice, which clearly and vastly outnumbered the humans. Our cat was a beautiful black and white specimen, named after the front page star of the Dandy comic.
Across the landing from us resided the Hassan family. My best pal was one of the sons and his big brother had a chemistry set. He also had a magnifying glass which Pat liberated one sunny day and brought down to the back court. His big brother, ‘Professor Hassan’, had shown him how to light fires with this magic implement.
We spent some time trying to burn one another, then lighting papers and setting fire to the midgie bins in the other back courts. (We were young but we were wise to the ways of the world regarding the pain of a well-skelped bahookie.)
After a while Pat’s maw flung up the windae and shouted down to him. Fate had decreed that on this day he had to accompany his mother to her mother’s. A bit of gentle persuasion and a small bribe along the lines of a Superman comic from ‘the parcel from America’ ensured that the magic glass would remain in my possession for the afternoon.
Shortly after Pat’s departure, my mother shouted me up for lunch. I can’t remember what I had as later events ensured that much of what followed lives in my memory as a sort of speeded-up blur. (I suspect it was sausage roll and beans. The Co-operative sausage rolls were excellent.) As my mother busied herself in the kitchen, I went into ‘the big room’.
The warm day had persuaded my unsuspecting mother to open the windows throughout the flat.
Korky lay sunning himself on the window sill.
The magic glass forced its presence into my head.
Does cat’s fur burn?
Did you know that cats can fly? Not very well, I grant you, but they certainly seem to fall slowly as they frantically scrabble at the air.
Did you know that cats bounce when they land on sunshades such as the one that extended out over the windows of Reeta’s Fashions?
Did you know that cats lose their sense of direction when they bounce off a sunshade and land on the back of a moving lorry?
Did you know that when cats lose their sense of direction they run off the back of a moving lorry and land in the road, directly in the path of another moving lorry?
Did you know that cats don’t have nine lives? They only have three or four and poor wee Korky had used all of his up on that fateful day.
I never admitted my part in Korky’s disappearance, but I’ll tell you this: I don’t like sunbathing and I was crap at Science when I went to secondary school.
