Most of the cats who came from the fields were feral. Stray cats, although a problem in some areas, were not a problem where we lived and incidences of dumped cats were mercifully rare, although not unheard of.

There is a big difference between stray cats and feral cats, and many of the feral cats we fed had no desire to be friendly with the humans. They avoided contact and often visited only when we were not in the garden (hence a lack of photos). But in time, some of these became accustomed to our presence, although, given the choice, they would still rather we hadn’t been there.

And then there were others who never overcame their initial fear, those who would disappear back to the fields when they saw us coming, when they heard the front door open, or heard our voices. Their fear was unfounded but deeply rooted, and nothing we did could ever make a difference.

The first such cat was Mystery. She seemed to know when we were watching her and would disappear into the prickly pear shrubs in the fields and wait for us to give up and go indoors before she came to the path to eat (Mystery is also shown in the header photo). It took a zoom lens to find out what she really looked like and, even from that distance, she was still highly suspicious. And we could only assume that Mystery was female – in fact she could easily have been a he.

G5 was probably the most wary of the orange gentlemen. Even when he was eating on top of the garden wall, he checked continually over his shoulder to make sure he was safe.

Kbir was a handsome grey-and-white cat who came to the garden for food. He was not a regular visitor so maybe he ate somewhere else as well. This is typical of many of the photos we have of these shy cats – just a blur, or a tail disappearing around a corner!

Mrs Bright was one of the most nervous cats. One day, she was at the food bowl in the front path when a human came through the gate. She jumped onto the wall and down to the drive (a drop of over 5 metres), ran straight across the drive, scaled the wall on the other side and jumped down into the field. It took her seconds, such was her fear. We only have one photo of Mrs Bright, and this is it – a photo taken at a distance of her sitting in one of our neighbour farmers’ fields, surveying the crops.

Sultan was only ever spotted on Sunday around midday, coming from the fields opposite to eat (probably when the farmer who fed him was away from the fields). He was very wary and only a couple of photos exist.

And finally there was il-Ħadd who visited regularly for a year or two but never became settled with humans around. He would visit only when there was no one around and, had we continued down to the drive after taking this photo, he would have disappeared off into the fields.

Luckily for these cats, food and water were always available and there was plenty of opportunity for them to visit without setting eyes on a human.