A Cat & a Tray

There are few objects of which I have very early memories but this is one. It's an Arab tray, made of brass and exactly three feet across. According to the carefully typed lists of her important possessions which my mother made towards the end of her life, it had an "origin uncertain," but "came with C. when we set up house in Zanzibar," 'C' being my father, Cecil.

It's most likely to have been bought by my father in Port Sudan, Zanzibar or Dar-es-Salaam, all places where he had worked before he met my mother. I don't know what the Arabs, who came down to East Africa in their ocean-going dhows to trade and settle, used these trays for, but have always imagined it piled with rice on top of which was a whole, roasted goat, all swimming in fat.

As far as I'm concerned it never did anything except prop up a wall in all of my mother and father's houses until I inherited it, since when it has propped up our walls - except it did once do something very, very special.

When we lived in the old German bungalow in Upanga Road, Dar-es-Salaam, the tray was kept in a small, dark, room at the back of the house. One day - and I remember this vividly - my father told me to come with him, leading me to the little room and pointing at the tray. After a minute or two, from behind it emerged....

....the most beautiful black-and-white kitten, my first cat, who went by the name of Tinker MacKellar Haylett.

I don't recall where the 'Tinker' came from, but he had the name MacKellar because he was given to my father by the captain of the Clan MacKellar, a Clan Line ship which came in to the African Mercantile agency. Tinker was the only remaining kitten of the ship's cat, all his brothers and sisters having been taken by gulls. One thing was never explained: how the ship's cat found the tom who sired the gorgeous, placid, affectionate cat whom I loved dearly.

When we moved to Mombasa, where this picture was taken, Tinker came too. For some reason, he couldn't travel with my mother or father so my father's boss, a very pleasant man called Cyril Hunt, took Tinker with him by air, sewn into a large kikapu, a basket woven from palm fibre, which was placed at the back of the 'plane's passenger compartment. At some point in the flight Tinker walked up the aisle and jumped up onto Cyril Hunt's lap.