The following spring, The Cat and Sprocket gave birth to kittens only a few days apart. It was the first time The Cat had given birth to her kittens in the garden, and it seemed natural that all the kittens should be brought up together in one colony, with mother and daughter sharing their care.

The Cat was as relaxed as ever, while Sprocket fretted about her new responsibilities. She was reluctant to be out of sight of the nest and I had to walk her round the garden every day with me, otherwise she would have remained within a metre or two of the kittens. She and her mother had very different approaches to mothering, but were nevertheless very close.

They had each given birth to two ginger or ginger-and-white kittens, one grey-and-white tabby, and (for The Cat with her darker coat) a black kitten, with Sprocket (a calico herself) having a very dilute tortoiseshell kitten who was almost white. The black and the white kittens were the respective runts of their litters.

After a fortnight in a den of twigs in The Cat’s Garden, Sprocket painstakingly carried each of the kittens up the olive tree and across a high wall, through the balustrade to our first floor terrace, where the extended family set up home in a pile of olive branches for two weeks.

Until the kittens emerged, we had no idea how many of them had survived their first two weeks. The Cat remained at the back of the den, presumably with the runts and weaker kittens, while Sprocket was in charge of keeping the more active ones under control.

Not until all the kittens were well enough to emerge did The Cat join them outside the den, on the terrace.