Catwatching (13 page)

If the buyer insisted on seeing it, he would be told that it was too lively to risk opening up the bag, as the animal might escape. If the cat struggled so much that the trickster let the cat out of the bag, his secret was exposed. A popular name for the bag itself was a 'poke', hence that other expression 'never buy a pig in a poke'.

At first sight this is as puzzling as the well-known footballer's lament of being as 'sick as a parrot'. In both cases the mystery is solved if you know the original, unabbreviated saying which has long since been discontinued. The complete cat phrase is: 'No more chance than a cat in hell without claws'. It was originally a reference to the hopelessness of being without adequate weapons. (The original parrot saying, incidentally, was 'as sick as a parrot with a rubber beak' a similar allusion to the lack of a sharp weapon.)

When we say 'she will have kittens if she finds out about this' we mean that someone will be terribly upset, almost to the point of hysteria.

At first sight there is no obvious connection between distraught human behaviour and giving birth to kittens. True, a panic-stricken or hysterical woman who happens to be pregnant might suffer a miscarriage as a result of the intense emotional distress, so suddenly giving birth as a result of panic is not hard to understand. But why kittens?

Why not puppies, or some other animal image?

To find the answer we have to turn the clock back to medieval times, when cats were thought of as the witch's familiars. If a pregnant woman was suffering agonizing pains, it was believed that she was bewitched and that she had kittens clawing at her inside her womb.

Because witches had control over cats, they could provide magical potions to destroy the litter, so that the wretched woman would not give birth to kittens. As late as the seventeenth century an excuse for obtaining an abortion was given in court as removing 'cats in the belly'. Since any woman believing herself to be bewitched and about to give birth to a litter of kittens would become hysterical with fear and disgust, it is easy to see how the phrase 'having kittens' has come to stand for a state of angry panic.

The cat's resilience and toughness led to the idea that it had more than one life, but the reason for endowing it with nine lives, rather than any other number, has often puzzled people. The answer is simple enough.

In ancient times nine was considered a particularly lucky number because it was a 'trinity of trinities' and therefore ideally suited for the 'lucky' cat.

This refers to the whip called 'the cat', employed on early naval vessels, and not to the animal itself. The cat, or cat-o'-nine-tails (because it has nine separate knotted thongs), was too long to swing below decks. As a result, sailors condemned to be punished with a whipping had to be taken up above, where there was room to swing a cat.

The reason why the whip itself was called a cat was because it left scars on the backs of the whipped sailors reminiscent of the claw marks of a savage cat.

This phrase became popular several centuries ago at a time when the streets of towns and cities were narrow, filthy and had poor drainage.

Unusually heavy storms produced torrential flooding which drowned large numbers of the half-starved cats and dogs that foraged there. After a downpour was over, people would emerge from their houses to find the corpses of these unfortunate animals, and the more gullible among them believed that the bodies must have fallen from the sky and that it had literally been raining cats and dogs. A description of the impact of a severe city storm, written by Jonathan Swift in 1710, supports this view: 'Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow, and bear their trophies with them as they go… drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood." Some classicists prefer a more ancient explanation, suggesting that the phrase is derived from the Greek word for a waterfall: catadupa. If rain fell in torrents – like a waterfall – then the saying 'raining catadupa' could gradually have been converted into 'raining cats and dogs'.