Casper the Commuting Cat: The True Story of the Cat Who Rode the Bus and Stole Our Hearts (17 page)
Authors: Susan Finden,Linda Watson-Brown
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Biography
Marc’s own little boy, Liam, although only a toddler, was starting to link what Daddy did with the cat on the bus. Rob, the driver who had done so much publicity with Casper, had two little girls, Caitlin and Libby, who saw their dad with him and were amazed. They suddenly believed that Daddy was famous and were desperate to meet the cat who was all over the news.
One day I got talking to a young teenage girl at the bus stop and asked her if she had ever seen Casper. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘but my dad has had him on his bus.’ Everyone knew Casper! I met her dad, Mike, a few days later and he told me that his five children and four grandchildren all knew about Cassie and they came together to hear stories about him. Mike had welcomed Casper on his bus on many occasions and seen him in the bus shelter even more often – well before the story came out. He says that cats do like bus shelters and he often sees them there, but he’s never before come across one who actually got on the bus.
It put a smile on his face but I felt positively faint when he told me something that I’d never suspected: Casper apparently did not just do the number three circuit; he sometimes got off at the Square, crossed the road and got on another bus to Saltash. Mike joked that Cassie must have had something to do there, as he always seemed quite focused on his trip, but my blood ran cold. Just how far was this cat travelling and how many times was he facing danger every day? Mike has rescue cats and he knew that I was worried when I heard this, but there was nothing I could really do apart from cross my fingers every time my cat left the house.
Another bus driver was gaining a bit of celebrity status himself. Wookie is well known across Plymouth for his various props: the large foam hand he sticks out his window to give the thumbs up to any driver who lets him out, the deerstalker with ear flaps and peaked cap that he wears no matter what the weather and the bizarre green cuddly toy monkey he carries everywhere. Wookie took pictures of Casper and Monkey sharing a snack of chips together, and even posted photos of the two of them on Facebook. If ever anyone epitomized British eccentricity, it was Wookie, and I feel that he and Casper would have got on brilliantly if Cassie ever decided to get on his bus. He considered it on many occasions, but perhaps thought that the luminous green monkey was too much competition.
I heard so many lovely tales from the drivers of how Casper was a wonderful talking point when they arrived home after a shift that my heart was full of pride at how much my little cat was achieving without doing very much. Our society is so fractured at times, and families feel such pressure with work and trying to juggle everything at once, that the happy topic of a cat on the bus brought some light relief and provided a common subject. It wasn’t just the drivers and those at the depot who were experiencing this, but passengers too.
One gentleman contacted me some time after Casper’s story first hit the papers. He wrote:
Dear Sue –
I have been reading the stories about your delightful cat with great interest. Some time ago, I lived in a small state in America where I worked as a teacher When I moved there, a tiny ginger and white cat, not much bigger than a men, had been hanging around the school playground and the teachers weren’t too sure what to do about it. The school I worked in was what we would probably now call one for those with learning difficulties – at the time, there was less concern for what to name things, but sometimes not as much concern as I would have liked for the children. They loved to see this little cat, but there were two members of staff in particular who were adamant that she should be discouraged. The way in which there were so many arguments about this cat taught me more about the school politics than I could have learned in years. The head teacher had named the cat ‘Betsy’ after a cat she herself had loved as a child, and even the way that some teachers refused to call it by that name was a clear indication of how little they liked the head teacher herself rather than anything else. There was a standoff about Betsy the entire time I was at that school which was almost four years. All I could see was that there were children with allergies, or who could not have a pet for other reasons, who lit up when they saw this little ginger thing run across to them. I could see that there were children who were so used to being frustrated by life, by the things they couldn’t do, but who would brighten when they held her in their arms. They always managed to be gentle with her, and she always seemed to know just what they needed. I came back to the UK and never did find out the fate of Betsy, but, for some reason, when I read about Casper in the paper, he reminded me of her all those years ago. I would be willing to bet that your cat has given more love and more hope to people than you can possibly imagine. I now have three cats myself and I am constantly amazed by how they just seem to sense what we need – it seems as if Casper was very much a ‘people cat’ and I am sure that he would have cottoned on to what his fellow travellers needed.
Jim, Manchester
I wish I knew what had happened to Betsy too.
My cats had always shown tremendous compassion for us and for their fellow felines whenever they needed to, and I had no reason to suspect that Casper was any different. I was very proud of my cat for drawing families together and giving a little bit of comfort to people who saw him every day.
I knew from experience that cats can be a great source of comfort in times of need. The year before we got Casper, Chris had been feeling very unwell and we were pretty sure that he had kidney stones. He went to the doctor for some confirmation blood tests one morning before going to work. The results came through that evening, such was the urgency of what had been uncovered.
He was told to get home immediately and be at the haematology department of our local hospital the next afternoon. I couldn’t understand why he would be sent there for kidney stones. We drove to the hospital in a haze. We were both pretty sure what was going on, as all of Chris’s symptoms pointed to the diagnosis we felt sure he was going to receive. As soon as we arrived, he was taken in to the specialist, who didn’t waste any time in telling us what was wrong.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘there’s no easy way to tell you this. You have leukaemia.’
When she spoke those words, I turned around and looked at the wall behind me. Who was she talking to, I wondered? It couldn’t be us, could it? No, we were here because Chris had kidney stones. She needed to concentrate, I felt, get things right, make sure she had the correct notes. Leukaemia? That was cancer. Chris couldn’t possibly have cancer, he just couldn’t.
There was no one behind us and she
was
talking to my husband. It was his diagnosis and our world shattered around us the moment the consultant uttered those words. So many people have been in exactly the same position; I’m sure they’ve felt totally alone, just as we did. There were words floating around that no one wants applied to them or to someone they love – chronic myeloid, oncology, chemotherapy. All of these words are so loaded. When you hear them being said to the person you share your life with, it’s like a bomb exploding. You wish that the clock could be turned back – not weeks or months but to that moment before you heard the word ‘cancer’.
I’d worked in healthcare for years and I think I would have known what to say to someone else, but this was Chris. He was the man who had changed my life, who had made me happy and allowed me to be the person I had always wanted to be. He had seen me through my own health scares and had always been such a good person. Maybe everyone starts to think how unfair things are, and, of course, no one deserves cancer, but what had Chris ever done to harm anyone? We had been through so much over the years that it seemed an act of unspeakable cruelty to throw this at us too.
We had never considered cancer a possibility. We had come to hospital that day to find out about kidney stones. It turned out that when Chris had seen the GP (only the day before but it felt like a lifetime ago), his spleen had been three times the size it should have been, which is one of the first signs of this type of cancer. His white cell count was reading 150 when it should have been 5. If he hadn’t gone to the doctor when he did, he would have been dead within six months. Now he had a fighting chance, but it would be far from plain sailing.
It was a terrible time. Chris had to get a bone marrow biopsy, which was a horrible process, a bone marrow harvest, constant blood tests. In fact, he had five bone marrow tests in one year. Initially he didn’t respond to any of the chemotherapy treatment or injections, and his consultant sent him to a specialist in Hammersmith to look at the options. Things seemed very bleak but this man offered us one glimmer of hope. There was a course of treatment with a new drug that had been producing marvellous results in the US. However, it wasn’t on the list of accepted medicines in this country. We were sent home with the information about it, aware that the consultant believed that this was really Chris’s only option. If he couldn’t get access to the drug, there was very little else that could be done.
Chris went back to his own consultant, who said that it was very unlikely that the local health authority would authorize a prescription. The drug cost over £17,000 a year and the budget simply wouldn’t allow for it. I was furious but what could we do? ‘Move to Scotland,’ he said. ‘They give it out like sweets up there. In the meantime, I’ll write to the health authority and see what they say, but I really think there’s very little chance. I’m so sorry.’
When Chris and I went home that night, it was difficult to be optimistic. His future was in the hands of faceless bureaucrats who would look at their balance sheets rather than the human cost of not authorizing the drug we now felt to be our only hope. I clung to what the doctor had said. I had no aversion to moving house; I’d done it plenty of times before, and this time it would be for a better reason than itchy feet. ‘Why don’t we move to Scotland?’ I said to Chris. He had worked there many times and liked it, and I would do anything to increase his chances of surviving. We discussed it well into the night, and I would have been quite happy to start packing the next day, but Chris is more pragmatic and suggested we wait to see what the health authority said; perhaps they would surprise everyone.
They didn’t. They refused the application.
The consultant was furious. He had done more research by this time and concurred completely with the Hammersmith doctor that this drug would give Chris the best chance. He went back to the health authority many times, pleading the case, making strong arguments, but they were difficult. In the end, he wrote the prescription anyway.
It was a miracle drug. Chris was in remission within a year and his case persuaded the authority to prescribe it much more freely when they saw the results. I was still so angry though. It infuriated me that my husband’s health, his life, had been considered to be worth so little. If that drug had never been prescribed, he wouldn’t be here today nor would all the other people who were given it as a result of his test case.
While Chris was terribly ill, the cats sensed something was going on. They became very gentle and watchful with him, and there always seemed to be one of our furry boys or girls sitting beside him when he was too weak to move or too sick from the treatment to get off the chair. While humans sometimes feel awkward or useless in the face of serious illness and the possibility of death, animals seem to take it in their stride, offering love and comfort in a simple way that does so much to help.
Ginny used to curl up beside him no matter how ill Chris was. She gave him such love, and even used to bring him presents of worms and baby frogs. There was never a mark on them, even though she used to carry them home in her mouth. She would deposit them in front of Chris as if she needed to give him something. Cats seem to need to do things for us just as we need to do things for them.
As Chris gradually got better, I felt that we had escaped. Perhaps now we could settle into a normal life, free of worry and concern. Casper’s adventures brought joy to our days, and he managed, in some part, to tackle and negate the terrible negativity that I’d previously felt about humanity.
It was 8.45a.m. on 14 January 2010 when I got the knock at my door that I’d always dreaded.
I was halfway through getting dressed when I heard the noise. It could have been anyone, I suppose – a delivery, some early post, a neighbour. But I knew I just knew, as I walked down the stairs, that as soon as I opened the door, the rug would be pulled out from under me. Do we have some sort of sixth sense when bad things, awful things, are about to affect our lives? Not always – there can be a phone call in the middle of the night that we never expected or a letter that contains information that will change our lives, and they are bolts from the blue. However, I’ve always had feelings about things – premonitions and senses. On this day I desperately wanted to be wrong, but a sense of foreboding warned me against opening the door, told me not to listen to whatever the person on the other side had to say. Sadly, I had no choice. I had to open the door.
Waiting for me on the other side was a lady I vaguely knew. She lived in the same street and I often saw her walking past with her little girl. We had said ‘hello’ and exchanged a few words about Casper from time to time, and she was always friendly and interested in what he was up to. That day she was as white as a ghost and shaking.