A Friend Like Ben: The true story of the little black and white cat that saved my son
Julia Romp
Originally published as Ben’s Gift.The heart-warming true story of a little boy and the cat that changed his life.Nine-year-old George was severely autistic; quiet and withdrawn, he appeared lost in his own world most of the time. His mother Julia despaired as she couldn’t bring George out of his shell. But when a black-and-white stray cat appeared in their garden, everything changed.George’s new four-legged friend, Ben, had a wonderful and unexpected side-affect. George and Ben bonded and George began to open up, making up stories about their adventures together to recount to Julia. Finally, Julia could communicate with her son – and Ben had made it possible.But then disaster struck – Ben went missing. The cat who had coaxed George out of a world of silence had disappeared, and George began to retreat. Determined to reunite George with his furry friend, Julia knew she had to do everything in her power to bring Ben home again …A Friend Like Ben is the remarkable true story about the extraordinary empathy between a boy and his cat, and a mother’s determined journey to make her son whole again.
Copyright (#ulink_47e89c75-0372-517f-93d1-e2e580769da1)
HarperElement
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published as Ben’s Gift by HarperCollins 2010
This edition published by HarperElement 2018
SECOND EDITION
© Julia Romp and Megan Lloyd Davies 2010
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photographs © John Daniels/Ardea.com (http://www.ardea.com) (cat); Shutterstock.com (http://www.shutterstock.com/) (background)
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Julia Romp asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007382743
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007382750
Version: 2018-02-15
Dedication (#ulink_16678589-7429-560d-a5fc-3a957e65c4fc)
For George, who opened my eyes to your world and what a
wonderful place it can be, and in loving memory of my dad
Colin, who gave me the laughter that I try to
pass on to George every day.
Contents
Cover Page (#u60008d67-20a5-510a-b645-e7a32cd0ac36)
Title Page (#u2828fc0f-8469-591d-ae0b-5c70c193d5f9)
Copyright (#ub2393d9d-0a54-5d2a-bf97-e64cf2fd9136)
Dedication (#u913e4a30-7a78-5952-9aa8-719a4ac0ed07)
Prologue (#u2c9dc49c-bcc4-5334-a7cd-c875d8384bee)
PART ONE Before Ben (#u7dc3161d-a0c2-538b-b458-d8db5af33000)
Chapter 1 (#u3da93343-3a26-5beb-bcc9-ed24dc221d7b)
Chapter 2 (#ubbdb3fb7-d334-517c-a542-32d931b70c60)
Chapter 3 (#u0f1d432e-c834-53eb-89b0-04c4be0be067)
Chapter 4 (#ud36fd46f-92a4-5a40-869e-8c202d1d9b38)
Chapter 5 (#u6a3f2d39-942d-55c8-8f52-7024a3d4353f)
PART TWO Finding Ben (#u2f665961-870d-5dac-82c0-3260fc1c9b52)
Chapter 6 (#u88de5032-3cd8-518f-9b00-c226e0f7981c)
Chapter 7 (#u5cd75622-8587-51ff-83a0-6942c52076e7)
Chapter 8 (#uf93088c7-b234-5c47-984d-9fda9ad93c74)
Chapter 9 (#u09e7353d-27bc-53c8-8ef6-6c432e36d313)
Chapter 10 (#u79fbedde-f6e2-5c51-82fa-9b52f4da59bf)
Chapter 11 (#u8c1d1985-23ef-5042-bee6-d59b8217e011)
Chapter 12 (#u840cbe24-3596-5396-b34b-d98a83dad8f8)
Chapter 13 (#ua330f3a7-1858-558c-9a2d-83573a31e05a)
PART THREE Losing Ben (#ua674424a-fdc7-5336-9abe-0168c829b9a6)
Chapter 14 (#u00e61794-7268-5d4f-9b18-bef3605c5787)
Chapter 15 (#u04206806-3d43-59ef-b475-a87f2d5b7a3f)
Chapter 16 (#u77122d8b-88da-57bf-b4f1-e8787dd462c1)
Chapter 17 (#ueb22bd6d-6094-5945-962a-a593271c7908)
Chapter 18 (#ua03e28c1-4f62-5b90-a1d5-6bae0fcc41bd)
Epilogue (#ub4954d48-1213-5d45-840a-5a3934ed19c7)
Acknowledgements (#ufbf6c02c-7637-57b9-8d80-11f08ccb48a6)
Moving Memoirs (#u0edbb057-7054-53d8-80bb-22a729597e6e)
About the Publisher (#ubb0c8463-2a08-59e9-953e-0c15ce9990a8)
Prologue (#ulink_eb2be922-64ba-511e-81d1-dd4f483df1a8)
When it came to first impressions, Ben didn’t exactly shine. He wasn’t a small, pretty kitten with a blaze of ginger hair or even a sleek adult cat with a shining tortoiseshell coat. In fact, his black and white fur was covered in dried blood, his red rump was completely bare and his thin tail looked more like a hairy twig. Thankfully, I couldn’t tell by looking at him that he was also home to scores of fleas and ear mites.
But as off-putting as he looked, when the sickly stray started visiting my garden I left out food, because I’ve always been soft when it comes to animals. Even my pet rabbit Fluffy lives in a shed that I painted with bright flowers – it’s like the Ritz for rabbits – so I made up a bed for the cat in a carrier, which I left in the shed, hoping it would sleep there. The stray was looking worse each day and, I thought, once it felt at home in the carrier, I’d shut the door and take it to the vet.
Please let him be sleeping, I’d think each morning as I walked up the garden with my 10-year-old son, George, to check if the food had been eaten or whether the blanket had been disturbed.
Together we’d peer into the back of the dark shed and see the cat’s eyes peeping out at us. They were light, acid green, like the first leaves on a lime tree in spring, and every time I saw them, they stopped me in my tracks for just a moment. But although the cat was sometimes sitting on a shelf or sometimes next to a flowerpot, it was never in the cage.
‘Boo!’ George would say as he tried to play hide and seek with the cat whenever we went to see it, and I was glad because he didn’t often play games with anyone.
Autism made George’s world a very lonely place at times and other children found him almost as inexplicable as he found them. They were afraid of the rage which burst out of him in screams and shouts, while he was just as frightened by the noises they made and the way they jostled him in the school corridor. That’s why it was good to see George take an interest in the cat, even though the cat didn’t take an interest back. Whenever George or I went too near it, the cat would hiss and spit, its teeth bared and fur coat springing to attention. It obviously didn’t want anything to do with either of us.
But time and good food can do powerful things to animals, just like they can to people. Slowly the stray got comfortable enough to start sleeping in the carrier bed, and after another few more weeks, I managed to shut the door with a broom handle.
When I took the cat to the vet, I explained that I wasn’t its official owner and left the cat in their care, telling myself my job was done. I’d put up posters in the local area with a picture of the stray, and if anyone came forward, I would put them in touch with the vet. But no one did, and a few weeks later came the call I’d been secretly dreading.
‘Would you give the cat a home?’ the vet asked, and I didn’t know what to say. Now, if you knew me, you’d know how unusual that is. My mum says the phrase ‘talk the hind legs off a donkey’ was invented for me and she’s right. But I was lost for words when the vet asked me about the cat, because on the one hand I loved animals, and on the other I’d vowed never to have a cat because my childhood home had been so full of them that there was hardly space for me. Besides, although George had seemed interested in the stray, we hadn’t had much success with animals, because he found it hard to bond with anything. Polly the budgie had had to be rehomed because its noise disturbed George, and he’d quickly lost interest in Fluffy the rabbit. It wasn’t his fault. George just didn’t connect with things the way other children did – however much I wished he would – and I didn’t want to take on anything else, because it was such a full-time job looking after him.
But as I hesitated, the vet suggested that maybe we could just pay the cat a visit.
‘He seems sad,’ he said. ‘I think he’d like to see a friendly face.’
What could I do? My heart won over my head and I took George to the vet’s, where we saw a familiar ball of black and white fur curled up in a cage. Then it stood up, and I saw that the cat had a huge shaved patch on its stomach and a plastic collar around its neck to stop it worrying its stitches. It looked even uglier than it had before, but that didn’t seem to put George off in the slightest as he knelt down beside the cage.
‘Benny Boo!’ he said in a high voice I’d never heard before, sounding expectant, excited.
‘Is you feeling better now, Ben?’ George asked. ‘Is you well?’ Again, he spoke in a sing-song voice I didn’t recognise, and the cat miaowed back as he talked to it.
‘I think he likes you,’ the veterinary nurse who’d shown us into the room said with a smile.
George immediately went silent. He didn’t like talking to anyone, let alone strangers, and he couldn’t look people in the eye if they tried to speak to him; instead he stared silently past them at something in the distance, anywhere other than in their eyes. But as soon as the nurse busied herself with something else and George knew he wasn’t being watched, he bent down to the cage once again.
‘Benny Boo!’ he said in his high voice. ‘Is your tummy hurting?’
He pressed his face even closer to the bars of the cage and I started moving forward, sure that the cat would claw at him through the bars, just as it had whenever we’d gone to see it in the shed. But then I stopped because, as the cat looked solemnly at George, it stepped carefully forward before turning its body against the length of the cage and rubbing up against the bars. Where had the hissing, spitting, cat we knew so well gone? I thought I was seeing things. Then I decided I was hearing them when the stray started making a throaty, rolling purr as it moved in time with the words George was speaking to it.
‘Ben, Ben!’ he chanted. ‘Is you well now? Is you well?’
The cat sniffed the air and George bent down even closer to it. As his head drew level with the cat’s, it looked him square in the eyes and I was sure he would turn away. But George didn’t. Instead of staring past the cat or hanging his head, he stared right back at the cat. The two of them did not break eye contact for a second as George carried on talking softly. I held my breath, looking at the two of them in shock: George talking to the cat and smiling as though it was something he did every day, the cat staring back with its green eyes full of something I can only describe as acceptance. It looked like an old soul who’s seen it all and is surprised by nothing.
Well, I knew what I had to do, didn’t I? Like they say, hope springs eternal. I didn’t know why George liked the cat – maybe it was just a moment in one day or maybe it was the fact that he knew the world would have a hard time accepting the strange-looking animal, just as it did him. But I’d seen a glimmer of something that I’d spent George’s whole lifetime longing to see him show another living thing: love. And the cat seemed to feel just as strongly about him. That was enough for me. All I hoped back then was that the cat might become a friend for George. What I could never have known was that it would change our lives forever – in more ways than I could have ever thought possible.
PART ONE Before Ben (#ulink_81b4bdcb-554a-5524-8304-65e55f9cfd5a)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_6a45fd22-21ce-51e4-8ec1-d6e616a820ff)
London is a global city, but it can still be very small if you are born and brought up there. Away from the royal palaces and parks, sky scrapers and museums, red buses hooting around corners and pedestrians jostling for space on busy streets, are places where you know your neighbours and where the streets you walked on as a child don’t look so very different when you finally grow up. That’s the kind of place I was born in: one of London’s western outer boroughs called Hounslow, where families who had been there for generations mixed with others who’d arrived more recently and where everyone knew each other by sight at least, if not from a chat over the garden fence.
London, you see, isn’t just made up of the mansions and sky scrapers printed on postcards. These are few and far between by the time you get a few miles out of the centre of the city. There instead are rows and rows of terraced houses battling for space with tower blocks, and while some areas get smartened up, there are a lot that don’t. Hounslow, where I grew up, wasn’t the poshest of places but it wasn’t the roughest either. We lived on an estate built in the 1930s in one half of a semi with my nan and granddad, Doris and George, next door. I was born in 1973, the decade of flared trousers, the Bee Gees and skateboarding – like a more up-to-date Austin Powers film but for real – and while many people say this, I know for sure that mine was a truly happy childhood.
There were six of us at home: my mum, Carol, who looked after us all; my dad, Colin, who drove a black London taxi for a living; my older sister, Victoria; and our younger brothers, Colin and Andrew. Not that anyone knew us by our names, of course. Victoria was known as Tor, Colin was Boy, Andrew was Nob (weird, I know; I have no idea where that one came from) and I was Ju. We didn’t ever question why we didn’t go by our proper names, because we didn’t question anything. Our life together was as comfortable as an old pair of slippers.
Back then, it was different for kids to how it is today. At weekends and during the school holidays, we had left the house by 9.00 a.m. and we only went back for a bit of lunch or to get a plaster on a cut knee. Tor, Boy, Nob and I played in the local parks with our friends, where there was always someone to keep an eye on us. The worst trouble usually involved falling out over a water fight and the best noise of any day was the sound of the ice-cream van. On high days and holidays, my dad would pile us into his cab and whizz us into town, where he’d drive us up the Mall to watch the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace or down the Embankment to the Tower of London. On more run-of-the-mill days, we’d go in to see Nan and Granddad or up to Mum’s allotment, where she grew all our veggies on a patch of ground behind the local army barracks.
‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’ Mum would ask after what felt like hours of digging, and she’d pour us all a cuppa from the flask she always had with her.
If American kids learn to love milkshakes early and French ones like a bit of watered-down wine, British children have the need for tea soaked into their bones from almost the moment they’re out the cradle. Tea was the answer to every one of life’s setbacks, according to my mum and dad, and a cup of tea like one of those I’d had as a child on the allotment, when I’d dreamed of fixing up the shed just as they did in Calamity Jane, was poured once again when I left school at 16 and we all wondered what I’d make of myself. I’d never got on at school because I was a day dreamer, and my teachers had said again and again that I wouldn’t go very far. But just before I left, I did work experience at a flower shop and a whole new world opened up for me: I enjoyed the work, was good at something for a change and was paid £15 for the day. I couldn’t wait to leave school.
So that’s just what I did, after a chat over a cuppa with Mum and Dad; and a few years later they poured another when the local vicar asked to marry me. I’d met him when I was working at the flower shop, where I was on the phone almost every day to the local undertaker, Alan, who was on the phone just as much to the vicar, Harry. Funerals, just like weddings, are important business to any florist, but when I made up wreaths I liked to think I was also helping grieving families say a proper goodbye. Then at the end of a busy day, I’d meet up with Alan and Harry, who weren’t much older than me, and we’d go out.
‘Aren’t you the florist, undertaker and vicar?’ people would ask, looking really surprised that three people so used to the sad business of giving the dead a good send-off could enjoy themselves. We were even spotted in the local disco a few times, and we all laughed when people’s mouths dropped open in surprise. I liked Harry more and more as I got to know him. He was kind and considerate, and never judged anyone who came through the doors of the church youth club he ran and where I volunteered. He had all the time in the world for everybody – day and night – and I liked that.
Trouble was, though, I was totally unprepared when he asked my dad if he could marry me. I thought Harry was just coming round for tea, but he only went and told Dad that he wanted to pop the question, didn’t he? I was young, about 20 at the time, and couldn’t believe it. I’d always dreamed of having what my parents did, but I wasn’t ready just yet. I burst into tears of surprise when Harry spoke to Dad because I didn’t want to leave my lovely, comfortable home. Most of my friends still lived with their parents and I liked the way things were.
‘Let’s have a cuppa, Ju,’ my dad said after Harry had left.
The vicar had got the message that maybe I wasn’t ready to be his wife when I’d started crying, and I wasn’t the only one who’d been surprised by his proposal. Dad had laughed out loud when Harry spoke to him and I think he was almost as shocked as I was that anyone would think I could make a wife, because I was still so young and dizzy. But as I sipped the hot sweet tea, I wondered for a moment if I’d made a terrible mistake, because Harry was such a good man.
I didn’t stop to think about it too much, though, because I didn’t stop to think about too much of anything back then. I just trusted that things would work out as I wanted them to; that another honourable man would come along and ask to marry me. I never questioned the fact that one day I would settle down with my Prince Charming. I was such a dreamer back then that my idea of a bad day was getting into work – after moving to a florist in London’s poshest district, Mayfair – to find out they’d delivered flowers to Michael Jackson at a nearby hotel. He was my idol and I was heartbroken that I’d missed him. As I say, I didn’t realise how good I had it.
Then came the afternoon when Mum and Dad had to make another pot of tea as I told them I’d unexpectedly fallen pregnant. I was 22 and had been seeing a local boy called Howard for a bit. Having been told I had polycystic ovaries and would find it hard to conceive, I was – you guessed it – young and dizzy when it came to contraception and now had to tell my parents that I was pregnant.
‘Let’s have a cuppa,’ Dad said and we sat down together as I cried.
My parents looked stern. They’d brought us up with rules and I knew they’d be disappointed.
‘What are you going to do, Julia?’ Mum asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I wailed into my tea.
But I did really. I knew I was going to have my baby, even though Howard was understandably a bit shocked by the whole thing. It might not be quite how I’d planned it, but this baby was mine and I would be a good mother. Howard tried to do right by me and I even moved in with him to see if we could make a proper go of it. But six weeks later I rang and asked Dad to come and get me because neither Howard nor I was comfortable. I felt as if I was letting everyone down as I sat in the cab and burst into tears.
When we got home, I ran upstairs to my bedroom and opened the door to find the room had been decorated for me. There was white tongue-and-groove boarding around the bottom of the walls and a wallpaper frieze covered in roses around the top. Once I’d slept in that room with my sister, Tor, and now there was a cot in it. I started to cry even louder.
‘Come on, Ju,’ Dad said, hugging me. ‘Dry your tears now and come downstairs. Mum’s put the kettle on.’
I think most first-time mums have a dreamy image of how it’s going to be but mine wasn’t just rose tinted. It was cerise. As I got fatter and fatter, I dreamed of the little girl I was going to have with huge blue eyes and blonde curly hair like that I’d had as a child. I couldn’t stop looking at babies in prams wherever I went and wondered what pretty clothes I was going to dress mine in. I loved their smell, their smiles, the dimples in their cheeks, everything about them.
But when he was born George wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Stiff and red, he screamed from the first moment he met the world, and his cries echoed around the room as the nurses took him away to look at him because he’d swallowed meconium; his head had also been misshapen as his tiny body squeezed down the birth canal. I couldn’t help but feel a little worried. I thought babies came out smiling and smelling of talcum powder.
When they brought George back a few minutes later, the nurses suggested giving him a bottle of water and Mum took the baby because I was still so shaky I didn’t trust myself to hold him. But as he was lowered into Mum’s arms George just carried on screaming, and as I looked at them together I could see she was struggling to feed him. I wondered how I was ever going to do it if Mum couldn’t. She was an expert after four children but even she was having trouble.
‘He’ll learn,’ Mum said with a smile as she looked at George wrapped up in his blanket, his face red and blotchy from wailing. ‘These things take time, but it will come naturally. Don’t worry, Ju.’
I didn’t know it then, of course, but this was something I would hear again and again over the weeks, months and years that followed. Mum was only being kind, but hers was the first of a thousand explanations about George.
‘His hips are a bit stiff, so he might be a bit uncomfortable,’ one nurse said as he screamed and screamed in the days after he was born.
‘It was quite a difficult delivery, so he needs time to settle,’ another told me.
I’d be a rich woman today if I had a pound for every time I heard the words ‘It will take time.’ Back then I believed what I was told and was sure George would be calmer when I took him home. I’d read all the books and knew that some babies take a while to adjust to life. He’d settle when he was surrounded by love and warmth instead of a clinical hospital ward. But even when we got home to Hounslow and I started giving George warm baths or putting him in his pram, walking him up and down the garden, draping him over my shoulder, lying him on his back or rocking him in a bouncy chair, nothing calmed him.
You see, I loved George from the moment I saw him and wanted to do my best for him. He was my baby, a tiny, defenceless creature I had created and would be responsible for forever; a part of me that I would do anything to love and protect. But as the days turned into weeks, I began to feel as if he didn’t want the love and care I had to give him. It might sound silly to say that about a tiny baby, but George would scream even louder whenever I went near him and I just didn’t understand it because I thought babies loved to be cuddled.
When the midwife visited, she said that I should take him to the doctor, who referred me to the local hospital, who said George might be suffering from constipation and gave him some medication. But still he didn’t stop crying. Then the midwife suggested that massage might help, but George went rigid the moment I touched him, as if the feel of my hands burned his skin. Later he’d lift his head when my skin made contact with his and jerk the moment I touched him. It was the same if I tried to calm him by rocking him or laying him against my chest. He just didn’t want to be close to me and screamed night and day.
Each day I told myself that things would get better, but they didn’t. I hung a mobile over George’s cot, thinking he’d like the bright colours, but he stared past it. I wiggled brightly coloured toys in front of his face, but he turned away and cried. The hardest thing was his sleeplessness, because he would only nap for half an hour at most; day and night, he was awake.
I could see my kindly midwife thought I might be being impatient when I told her he didn’t rest. ‘All babies sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s important that they do.’
But George didn’t.
‘He’ll have to drop off in the end,’ Mum would tell me. ‘He’s been fed, he’s warm and he’s got a clean nappy. He’ll go to sleep.’
But George’s screams would echo around the house all night as people tried to sleep. Our home had four bedrooms: Tor was in one, Nob in another, and both had to get up for work every morning. Then there were George and me in the third, and Mum and Dad had the last one with my nephew Lewis, who was three and a half. My brother Boy and his girlfriend, Sandra, had had Lewis when they were only teenagers and were too young to cope when he was born at just 22 weeks, weighing two and a half pounds. Lewis was christened during his first few hours in the hospital because the doctors didn’t think he’d survive, but he did. He came home nine months later to be looked after by Mum and Dad, because he still had such bad lung problems that he needed permanent oxygen, which is why he still slept in their room so that he could be checked every hour. George’s screams meant no one was getting any sleep though, and it’s one thing trying to calm an unhappy baby but another when you’re worrying about everyone else too. So I started staying in my room more during the day, because I thought that at least people would get a bit of a break then with a couple of walls between them and George’s cries.
‘Don’t worry, Ju,’ Dad would say as he opened the door to see me holding the baby, who’d gone rigid and red as I lifted him up. ‘It’ll be all right. He’ll grow out of it.’
On days when Mum could see I’d just about reached the end of my tether, she’d strap Lewis into one side of the back seat of her car while I put George in the other and we’d go out for a drive, hoping the rhythm might send him to sleep. Hounslow is just a couple of miles from Richmond Park, a huge green space where Charles I took his court to escape the plague. It’s a beautiful place and we often went there for a picnic or a walk, so it held many happy memories for me. But all those seemed to fade as we drove through the park with George screaming.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Mum would tell me. ‘Some babies just take a while to adjust. Things always get better.’
But as I stared at packs of deer running across the park with the skyline of inner London far in the distance, I began to wonder if they ever would.
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