Leaving your house (and cat) can be a moving experience

I’m writing this sitting on the stairs in my empty house, laptop on my knees, the desk having just been carted off to the final crate of the pantechnicon.

The removal men packing up the contents of the past 17 years have been here for three days and 36 cups of tea and they feel like old friends. They have filled ten pallets, they say, which sounds like a lot of stuff for a couple whose children have grown up and who are supposed to be downsizing.

One of the men said he once spent eleven days emptying a house and got to sleep there overnight until the job was finished. We should have done that, invited them to stay for the duration because there just wasn’t enough time in the day to hear all their stories.

Removal men are like journalists, privy to strangers’ secrets. But unlike us, they are sworn to silence – though they can be made to talk. In three days, I heard four eye-popping tales, two relating to royalty and one about a disgraced former friend of the PM. I only wish I could tell you more.

Back to the downsizing. There were 80 boxes of books apparently, all that remained from a faint-hearted clean-out in the weeks before. How many will even make it to shelves in our next home, I wondered when asked if I’d read them all by the poor chap tasked with their packing. 

It was no easier to bin the nearly two decades of homework, the early years art, some of the primary school projects I’d worked on late into the night, and the moth-eaten pinafores and blazers that should have been donated to the uniform exchange years ago.

But, after several weekends in the attic, you become increasingly ruthless. That is until you open the suitcase with your dad’s old dinner suit, and his white dress shirt and bow tie. And his still shiny leather-soled shoes. I haven’t laid eyes on these precious items since the last time we moved house but can’t quite let go of them. Or his boy scouts’ shirt from a school near Bulawayo, circa 1943, with all its badges intact. 

When all the rooms are cleared and everyone has left, I walk around expecting waves of nostalgia, but with all our belongings gone, the house that has seen toddlers grow into teens no longer seems like ours.

Passing on the bricks and mortar to the next occupants is not traumatic at all as it turns out. But I will miss the neighbours.

They have, without mentioning names, climbed onto the roof to replace missing tiles, tracked down an emergency plumber when the top bathroom sprung a leak, planed the freshly painted front door that wouldn’t open, cut the hedge, fixed everything we broke, drunk our gin, and fed our cats. In fact, that’s just one neighbour.

Others have provided medical assistance, accompanied me to concerts, sent their sons round to do the garden, their daughters laden with cakes, and come to all our parties. Without our neighbours, who colluded in a Covid supper club under cover of darkness, we might have found lockdown a struggle.

They have been the kind of neighbours you’re proud to recommend to the new owners. But none of them offered to take the cat. Some have dogs and some have jobs, and I understand that. She may be small and undemanding but she is an extra mouth to feed and she is getting on a bit. 

Re-housing her, even temporarily, has proved harder than finding a flat for ourselves in the limbo between leaving the old home and moving into the next one. Her fate was the only thing that kept me awake at night, more worrying than the new hoover taking bites out of the bedroom carpet.

In the end, salvation for Flossie came from an unlikely source, a friend with a house in the country and cats of his own. 

On the day he was due to collect her, she knew something was up. I kept her inside to stop her from running away when the time came, and together we looked out at the lovely garden. She had spent a lot more of her life out there than me and would never see it again, never sleep under the magnolia tree again or sunbathe in the neighbour’s pot plants.

What a wrench of my own making. There must be people who stay in their houses too long for fear of upsetting the cat, who wouldn’t contemplate a parting of the ways, whatever the personal cost to themselves.

After she’d gone, cats seemed to appear from everywhere. Mittens from Number Three was quick to commandeer Flossie’s window sill. There was a picture doing the rounds of Liz Truss, the new Foreign Secretary, bending down outside Number 10 to stroke Larry, the Downing Street cat.

Now I’m about to hand in the keys and say the last goodbyes. A friend calls to wish me luck and asks what I’ve done with the cat. She has moved on, I say, and so must we.