March 26, 1923

Novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard (March 26, 1923  to January 2, 2014) exemplified the "cultured bohemianism of her milieu (love affairs with men like Cyril Connolly, Cecil Day-Lewis and Kenneth Tynan – always conducted with drinks before dinner," according to one assessment. This author was described also as the finest woman writer of her time. And, perhaps less appreciated, she cared for cats. We excerpt an article which describes Howard's relationship with her god daughter, the child of C. Day-Lewis and Jill Balcon. This is Tamasin Day-Lewis and we quote them both, rearranging the order of the text in places, to bring out a cat story.

First, the humans in our story: that is Howard on the right, Tamasin in the middle.




Tamasin's words:

'...Jane came into my world as a fairy godmother long before I really got to know her.....

'My father was ill through my teenage years and died months after my 18th birthday. The road-map had run out... Jane, her then husband, Kingsley Amis, and her brother Monkey were the three people who got me through that awful period; our family moved in with them for my father's last few months, but, when I look back, I can see it all started much earlier on. She was always there in the background......

[When Homer arrived...] I was five or six, and my childhood was quite solitary and uninterrupted by events and excitement. Dan and I lived on the nursery floor, four floors up from our father's study, with our nanny and a hectic green and yellow budgerigar called Rupert. We drew, we wrote stories, we read books and were read to, and we devised plays. Not many outsiders entered our small world...'

Elizabeth Jane Howard's words:

'.......When she was about seven I brought her a large cardboard box to open on her birthday. In it was a small black kitten - the child of one of my own cats. Her look of astonishment and extreme joy is with me still. He was called Homer, due to his being half Greek, and, although he was not much liked by the rest of the family, she adored him. By then she was growing fast into a thin, elegant, tense little creature, with a quantity of dark hair and a gaze both penetrating and wary. ...'

I believe those last adjectives refer to Tamasin, not the cat. Tamasin, who recalls:

'He is half Greek, a quarter Siamese and a quarter Paddington,' I seem to remember Jane saying, when I had got over the initial thrill of realising that the soot-black primrose-eyed ball of fur in the box was all mine. 'I smuggled his mother, Katsika, back from Greece under my jumper.' Even now I don't know whether that was true, and I don't really want to know, either. Homer became my friend, my ally, the person I told all my troubles and secrets to throughout my childhood.....'

We all need godmothers, and cats.