Blackie, with littermates Ginge, Tabby and Splodge, was born to The Cat in the field. This was before The Cat was friendly, but all the same, she was beginning to associate the humans with the provision of food in the drive, so when it was time for weaning, she brought the kittens into the drive.

From there, it was a short step into the garden. Well, a short step if you were The Cat… long of body, strong, agile and graceful, and able to jump up from the field wall onto the high wall under the olive tree, and then make her way neatly down the tree into the garden.

For four small kittens, that jump was too much so they cleverly improvised by jumping into the olive tree’s low-hanging branches and scrambling up through the tree, onto the high wall. Their determination to follow their mother served them well, even if it did take them a lot longer to reach the garden than it took The Cat. Once there, they adventured, ate, slept, ate some more, and then followed their mother back to the fields. It was quite a trek for the youngsters.

But after a few days, it seemed odd that it was always Blackie who arrived in the garden first, quite a while before his (or maybe her – we never knew which) siblings got there. He wasn’t any bigger than his littermates so he couldn’t have made the jump, so what was his secret?

And then it became clear. Blackie had discovered that there was a ground-level drainage pipe between the garden and the drive, and it was just the right size for a small and determined kitten to wriggle through. While Ginge, Tabby and Splodge were fighting their way through the olive branches, Blackie was relaxing with his mother in the garden.

No scrambling through trees for Blackie (but no sharing the pipe with Ginge, Tabby and Splodge either!).