Unlike Stardust, some cats did seem to respond to their names being called, but whether they genuinely knew their names or maybe were just responding to hearing our voices, it was impossible to tell.

Ana was often out in the fields so it was useful to have a way to communicate and let him know that there was food waiting. He was a clever cat, and soon realised that ‘kissy’ noises meant food – and they were the sort of sounds which carried well and he could hear them from a block away.

One of the most notable times was when Ana had cornered another male on the farmer’s outhouse roof in the fields in the early morning. As we came out of the front door and called Ana for breakfast, he looked over, pausing momentarily with his paw resting on the head of his adversary at arm’s length, as though he was saying ‘hold it right there, I need to dash – we’ll pick this up again later’. Food was a great motivator.

When Dinky started to stay out in the fields, we would call him by scraping a spoon down the inside of a cat-food tin – that always brought him running.

Dinky too was very food-motivated; as a Bengal cat, he was very active and needed a lot of calories to sustain his levels of activity. He was not a fussy cat and seemed to go for the ‘pile it up and fill me up’ style of feeding, woofing down quite standard food at which some of the other cats turned their noses, so it was hardly surprising that the sound to which he responded involved food.

Pedal responded to his nickname ‘Boy-boy’, but it had to be shouted with a particular inflection – he was a anxious cat, keen to protect his mother, The Cat, and his sister Sprocket despite being quite young himself.

Dandy Grey knew that when he heard me call ‘D-Dandy! D-Dandy!’ it was time to eat.

Well, that’s what I like to think! but it was hard to know whether he actually knew his name as I would also shake the kibble tub (and, to be fair, it wasn’t just Dandy who came, as any cat within earshot would come running, so maybe they all thought they were called Dandy!). In fact, Cheese came when she heard the kibble tub on its own, so it was probably a case of the combination of human voices, the sounds of food bowls and the time of day which brought them running.

And Mini who was a very nervous cat and easily bullied by the others at feeding time responded to the call of ‘Min-Min!’ (again with a certain inflection), which she knew meant that I had placed a bowl of food for her on top of the water tank under the olive tree where she could eat in peace and quiet (usually after all the other cats had finished their food).

Here, she is sharing her dining room space with her younger brother Cosmos who has even less keen on humans than was Mini.

So, in conclusion, it was impossible to know whether the cats actually ‘knew’ their names, or whether the simple association of particular sounds with particular events (such as feeding) was enough to inform a specific response.