Remember Snopake? She was the tiny kitten who was the last of The Cat’s and Sprocket’s litter to leave the nest on the terrace (see post from three days ago).

Snopake was the closest that The Garden Family ever came to having a white kitten and, at a glance, you might have been forgiven for thinking that she was completely white, or maybe white with a few grubby patches.

But she was in fact a very dilute calico kitten. Her tail was dark and banded with white, grey and pale peach, her eyes were blue, and her ears were translucent pink, tipped with peach. Her fur, although predominantly white, had quite large patches of pale peach and, as the weeks passed, it became fluffier. Here you can see her tail with its three colours, and some of the faint patches in her almost-white fur.

By the following month, Snopake was filling out. She was a good eater with a healthy appetite and had the sense to have three or four small meals at every sitting. Her bigger size made it easier to see her lovely markings; her tail looked almost as though the three colours had been twisted up together into a spiral, and you could see the light through her ears (and all the veins, if you were close enough).

As she grew, her fur became thicker and more luxurious – a far cry from the tiny waif-like kitten who had been the last to emerge from the family’s nest on our terrace a few months earlier.

(‘Life With The Cat’ through the years will be back tomorrow.)