Casper The Commuting Cat: The True Story Of The Cat Who Rode The Bus And Stole Our Hearts

He always found a way to get out – he was such a little escape artist. Unless I fitted this cat with a tracking device, I would never be able to keep an eye on him twenty-four hours a day – even then, I bet he would have found a way to get round it. Casper didn’t just enjoy being a wanderer, he seemed to need his freedom desperately. Perhaps it was a legacy from his life before us, but it was causing me more sleepless nights than ever.

CHAPTER 21

Who is Casper?

Casper’s fame had brought new people to the fore. I’d had a few showing what I felt was too much interest in where I’d got Cassie. One day Edd rang me to say that something strange had happened. A man had called him to say that he believed Casper was his cat and he was, in effect, putting in a claim on him He wanted to talk to me; he wanted to come and see Casper. Edd asked whether I was willing for him to give the man my phone number? What could I say?

I’d got Casper ‘second-hand’ and knew that he had a life before me; there had always been the chance that he had another family out there who would track him down one day. I remembered what had happened when the vet had discovered he was chipped all those years ago: the cat rescue lady had been desperate to ensure that Casper remained with me as she felt that he could not be returned to his previous home. Although she hadn’t been able to give me any more details, there was an implication that he had been with someone who’d abused him I would fight with every breath in my body to keep him from being returned to such an environment.

Minutes after I’d spoken to Edd, the man rang me. He seemed friendly and said that he, his wife and his two teenage children would like to come and see Casper – or ‘Tom’ as they called him When they arrived, I was nervous, but Cassie showed absolutely no interest in them whatsoever. When they called him using the name they said they’d given him, he didn’t prick up his ears.

I asked them why they thought he was theirs and how they’d lost him in the first place. The man informed me that they’d had ‘Tom’ for a few years and then got a kitten. Once the kitten was brought into the family, ‘Tom’ started spending most of his time with an old lady who lived nearby. When she moved, ‘Tom’ disappeared. I wondered why they’d left it all this time to track him down, but they were very evasive and couldn’t even remember if he’d been chipped.

They didn’t get down on the floor to play with Casper, they didn’t hug him or seem relieved to have found him, which I would have expected if he had been the cat they’d lost all those years ago. They took lots of pictures as I asked again why they thought he was their cat. All they could come up with was that he had the same markings – black, white and brown.

This comment confirmed to me that they were making it all up. Casper would not have had brown splodges on him when he was younger; these were the equivalent of age spots that had appeared after years of lying in the sun. Strangely, they made no further attempts to claim Casper; they simply said ‘goodbye’ and left. I told Edd about it, but neither of us heard from them again, and I suspect they just wanted a day out to see the famous cat.

I took the opportunity to contact the chip people in order to try to find out a bit more about Casper’s life before he’d come to me, but it was rather like dealing with an adoption agency. The whole process is shrouded in secrecy. All they would tell me was that he was originally called Danny and had been registered in Hampshire. It was very frustrating but I had to accept that I would never know the full story. Even after Casper died and I contacted them again, pleading for details and pointing out that surely privacy wasn’t an issue now that he was gone, they refused to say anything.

I had my hands full with other matters too. In 2009, Jack started to deteriorate rapidly. He was one of Chris’s favourites, but I knew that I would have to be the one to make the decision about whether it was his time to pass. He was getting thinner and thinner, because he was not eating properly and he was becoming weaker by the day. I’d been off work for some time with my own health problems but I knew that I would have to go back at some point soon. I was terribly worried about how Jack would cope while I was away. He was at the stage where he had to be helped in practically all of his day-to-day activities, such as being taken to his food dish or lifted into the litter tray.