Richard’s principal friends are his human family. Here he is lying on the floor with me in my father’s jacket.
Here is baby Richard with my father.
Here is baby Richard with my mother, learning to read.
Finally, here is Richard playing with my sister. She doesn’t come here very often, but he knows she’s one of the family.
Richard also likes the man who lives over the wall, Mr Brown, of whom I don’t have a picture. Mr Brown practices golf in his garden: Richard thinks this is a Game for the Entertainment of Cats, and sits in bushes watching him. Sometimes he runs after the ball, and sits on it; once when Mr Brown hit a ball over the wall Richard picked it up in his mouth and carried it back to him.
Richard’s principal enemies are any other cats. The first cat he met, when he was less than a year old, was a feral tom which terrorised another neighbourhood cat.
We called this cat Ginger Tom, and Richard was not afraid of him. From a diary I kept in 1991, on the 16th of April:
‘About ten to six he was out and Mum was wondering where he was, so she went out to look for him. When she got into the garden she saw he was on the roof of a nearby garage looking at Ginger Tom who was on the wall beside him. He jumped down and faced up to his evil stripy partner. Mum shouted "Richard, don’t start fighting with Ginger Tom!" Richard looked at her, then looked back at Ginger Tom and gave him a whack with his paddy. Mum went to fetch Dad and then ran round to the other garden. When she came up Ginger Tom of course ran away, and she was able to catch Richard and hand him back over the wall to Dad who posted him inside.’
Later on Ginger Tom vanished, and for a while Richard had the gardens to himself. Then in 1995 we started to see a lot of another feral tom who I named Pussy Whiteface.
This is Pussy Whiteface on our front doorstep. He was very uppity and used to come and raid our dustbins. When Richard saw him going past the window he always wanted to charge out and fight him; if he was shut in he would get into a frenzy of running backwards and forwards growling. If they met outside there would be a stand-off, perhaps with some slashing of claws. This is Richard pursuing Pussy Whiteface up a tree in our back garden.
Eventually Pussy Whiteface stopped coming, for some reason. (I don’t think he can have been run over, as he was very good at crossing roads: I watched him once, and he knew to look left, right and left again before venturing across when the road was empty.) However, we didn’t get any peace from that, because the old lady next door moved out and a young couple moved in. They had two kittens, whose names we have never learned to pronounce, so we called them orangekin and torty.
Richard hated them on sight, not for being objectionable, but just for being cats. He wanted them to understand that he was In Charge, and so though he never hurt them he would shut them up in bushes and pretend to be very dangerous until they were thoroughly frightened. We had to free them several times by taking him away. Eventually orangekin came to know her place, and kept out of his way. She was (is) a nice little cat, who was keen to be friendly, and would let us stroke her. Torty, on the other hand, has always thought that the right thing to do when you meet someone is to run up to them meowing, roll about invitingly, and when they reach out to stroke you wave your claws at them. She is not afraid of us, and never runs away: she just thinks that anyone who talks to her ought to be clawed. Richard isn’t going to stand for this, and puts her down whenever he has the chance. The "fights" are never serious, but they involve terrible noises. Here is torty advancing on Richard to claw him, and here she is retreating after she found out what he was really like:
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