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Once I met a Real Live Writer in a most unlikely
place. Walking along the cliff path near my home in St David’s, I saw two
women sitting in a cleft in the rocks overlooking the cliffs at St Non’s.
They looked like Easter Island statues. I smiled. They smiled. We began
to talk. It turned out that they were spending some months in Laugharne,
where they often spent time, but on this particular day, they had come
to St David’s to visit. When they heard I was working as a journalist and
trying to be a writer, one of the women, the one who did all the talking,
said, “My friend here is a writer, Hilda Vaughan. And she is the widow
of another famous writer, Charles Morgan.”
The two ladies invited me to Laugharne to tea.
By the time I arrived the following Wednesday, I’d managed to read two
of Charles Morgan’s novels. (My father had them on his bookshelves.) But
when I arrived at four o’clock, the lady who’d done -most of the talking
on the cliff path said that her friend, Mrs Morgan, was not yet dressed.
We should go for a walk across the fields while the Real Live Writer was
getting ready for tea.
Off we went. Coming back across the meadows, I
observed that we were being followed. A little grey cat with golden eyes
was keeping pace with our steps. When we paused, it paused and when we
stopped by a stream, it played with the water, batting it with its paws.
I was captivated. The cat looked like a free spirit of Dylan Thomas’s Laugharne
but it transpired that it was in need of a home. Mrs Morgan’s companion
informed me it had been abandoned by some people who’d spent Christmas
in a caravan near their house in Laugharne. Their gardener had been feeding
it. But it did need a home. Why didn’t I take it?
I did. In a cardboard box. But no sooner had I
set off back to St David’s after tea and talk with Mrs Morgan than I heard
a violent scrabbling noise in the car. When I paused and looked in the
box, the little cat had vanished. I could see her nowhere in the car but
when I felt under the passenger seat, I felt the soft touch of fur.
When I got home, the cat wouldn’t come out. My
father arrived in the garage carrying a saucer of milk, got down on his
knees by the side of the car and purred at the cat until she finally, shyly
appeared. From then on, that little cat was the head of our household,
we all loved her so much. We called her Miss Price – Miss P for short -
after Miss Myfanwy Price, the shy gentle character in Under Milk Wood.
And after she sadly lost one of her legs in a gin-trap quite a few years
later, my brother renamed her Miss 3P. But she never lost her speed in
running or the golden gleam of her eyes.
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2002