Carrying on with yesterday’s theme, it’s important to say that not all The Cat’s daughters were tortoiseshell or calico.

We don’t know whether Splodge’s littermates Ginge, Tabby and Blackie were male or female as they were completely feral and lived mostly in the fields. But a few years later, when The Cat and her daughter Sprocket combined their litters into one big family, the two girls in The Cat’s litter of four (also shown in the header photo) were Big Bang and Prince, neither of whom were tortoiseshell or calico.

Big Bang (a grey-and-white tabby) was very closely bonded to her mother. When the other six kittens from the combined family went out into the fields exploring under the tutelage of Sprocket, Big Bang would far rather stay in the garden with her mother. This did not endear her to Sprocket and there were times when a stern cuff was dispensed before Sprocket and her young charges took off into the night, without Big Bang.

Prince (who was black and, despite her name, female) was a more independent character and probably closer to Sprocket than to The Cat for her first few months. However, after Sprocket was killed on the road, Prince became a lot closer to her natural mother, even to the point of being clingy.

And, a couple of years later, there was one more non-tortoiseshell daughter still to come for The Cat, with the arrival of Whitefur who was mostly white with some grey.

Whitefur was the firstborn of a litter of three, and, as big sister to two younger brothers (although by only a few minutes), was endowed with a good deal of confidence and plenty of brains, rather like Sprocket who really was super-intelligent and continually amazed us.

At the end of the day there was a wide variety of colours in The Cat’s family whichever way you looked at it, as no two tortoiseshell or calico were ever the same in any case. And even those of The Cat’s daughters who did not seem particularly closely bonded to their mother still retained the highest measure of respect for her throughout their lives.