Slatter lived five miles from the Turners. Normally that murder would have been discussed for months people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about. Yet it was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking at once, making the most of an hour or so’s companionship before returning to their farms where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their black servants for weeks on end. There was, it seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. ‘A very bad business,’ came the reply – and that was the end of it. ‘A bad business,’ someone would remark and the faces of the people round about would put on that reserved and guarded look.
It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing. For they did not discuss the murder that was the most extraordinary thing about it. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters, or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. No other writer conveys so truthfully the real interdependence of humans and cats or convinces us with such stunning recognition of the reasons why cats really matter.But the people in ‘the district’ who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. And she tells the story of herself in relation to cats: the way animals affect her and she them, and the communication that grows possible between them-a language of gesture and mood and desire as eloquent as the spoken word. She tells their stories-their exploits, rivalries, terrors, affections, ancient gestures, and learned behaviors-with vivid simplicity. On Cats is a celebrated classic, a memoir in which we meet the cats that have slunk and bullied and charmed their way into Doris Lessing's life. Her fascination with the handsome, domesticated creatures that have shared her flats and her life in London remained undiminished, and grew into real love with the awkwardly lovable El Magnifico, the last cat to share her home. Doris Lessing's love affair with cats began at a young age, when she became intrigued with the semiferal creatures on the African farm where she grew up.
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