12 Greenhough Lane
Pokfulam
February 14, 1980
Dear Mrs. Ranelagh,
Thank you for your letter of July 3. I'm sorry you feel that a follow-up visit would be of no benefit, particularly as your reference to 'a new calm' suggested that our previous conversation had been valuable. However, as you so rightly point out, there is no compulsion on you to attend further sessions.
I have pondered deeply on the question you posed toward the end of our session. Why should your husband escape punishment for raping you? And I pass on some wisdom I received as a child in Auschwitz concentration camp when I asked a rabbi if the Germans would ever be forgiven for what they were doing to the Jews. 'They will never forgive themselves,' he said. That is their future and also their punishment.
Should you not have asked, however, whether it was right for Sam to escape your punishment? And are you so free of guilt yourself, Mrs. Ranelagh, that you feel comfortable standing in judgment on your husband?
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Dr. J. Elias
THE CHESHIRE CAT HOSPITAL
CHEADLE HULME, CHESHIRE, UK
Mrs. M. Ranelagh
Jacaranda Hightor Road
Cape Town
South Africa
December 3, 1998
Dear Mrs. Ranelagh,
In response to your detailed inquiry about the ill treatment of cats in the UK, I enclose a copy of a leaflet we produced last year to boost interest in a fund-raising drive. As you will see, it makes grim reading, but I make no apology for the contents. The work we do is costly and time-consuming and would be entirely unnecessary were it not for the terrible cruelty that is regularly inflicted on defenseless animals.
I have no difficulty in believing that someone would put superglue in a cat's mouth and tape its muzzle with Elastoplast or parcel tape to stop it from eating or crying. In the past, we have seen cats with their paws dipped in quick-drying cement to prevent them walking; cats with their back legs paralyzed by broken spines; cats with their claws and teeth pulled out by pliers; cats blinded with red-hot pokers; and cats with rubber bands wound so tightly round their muzzles that the flesh of their mouths had closed over the band. And all, apparently, to the same purpose: to stop them from catching birds and mice.
I would like to be able to tell you that a person who pursues this sort of vendetta against cats is easily identifiable, but I'm afraid I can't. There is considerable evidence-largely through behavioral-science studies in the U.S. and the UK-to indicate that cruelty to animals in childhood leads to sociopathic behavior in adulthood. However, cruelty is far more common in adults than it is in children, and such cruelty is usually the result of an obsessional dislike of certain animals or an uncontrollable temper-often drink-related-which lashes out at anything it finds irritating.
Sadly, I cannot say with any certainty that because Miss Butts treated her own cats with kindness she would not have inflicted cruelty on strays intruding into her house. I can only draw parallels with people, and people are notoriously unwilling to show the same charity to foreigners as they show to their family and friends.
Yours sincerely,
Betty Hepinstall
*10*
The following day I drove my mother to Kimmeridge Bay on the Isle of Purbeck. It was a beautiful summer morning with puffs of white cloud dotted across the sky, and we climbed the cliff path to the Clay Tower on the eastern arm of the bight. Larks sang in the air above us, and the occasional walker passed us by, nodding good day or pausing to look at the bizarre folly behind us that some long-dead person had built as a permanent sentinel to guard the ocean approaches. Mother and I conversed with the strangers but not with each other and, in the silences between, we stared as resolutely across the channel at the tower, unwilling to speak in case we started another argument, locked in mutual ignorance despite the genes and experiences we shared.
In the end I mentioned a vicar's wife I knew who drove to clifftops whenever the pressures of life became too much and screamed her frustrations to the heavens. I suggested my mother had a go. She refused. It wasn't her sort of thing, she told me. Nor could she understand why a vicar's wife would want to do something so common. What sort of woman was she?
'Eccentric,' I murmured, as I watched the seagulls float effortlessly over the sea like fragments of tissue paper. 'Very thin and gaunt.. . hates being married to a vicar ... likes her booze ... fancies being a lap dancer... looks like a vulture.'
'That explains it then,' said my mother.
'What?'
'The screaming. Thin people are always more high-strung than fat ones.'
It sounded reasonable, but then much of what my mother said sounded reasonable. Whether it was true or not was another matter. I decided she was being snide because
