Hello there, my name is Johnson. I am a cat. My life has been a mixture of good and bad times, and now I'm at the ripe old age of 14, that's 70 in cat years. My fur used to be jet black with white socks and a white splash across my stomach, but now it's a sortof dark grey. My mother was a tortoiseshell, a species that has never ceased to amaze me, a blend of tabby, ginger, black, white and each tortoiseshell looks different. Not only that, but also the fact that all tortoiseshell's are female. There have been a few conspiracy cases where people will announce they have found a male, but having conversed with some of these cats myselves, the owners are either lying or have very bad eyesight when it comes to urr... determining the gender of the cat, shall we say. Well, back to my mother, I remember she had a patch of tabby over the left side of her face, and her tail was completely ginger except for the tip, which was black. I never learnt who my father was.

In my litter there were 6 of us, two black and white, another tortoiseshell, and two tabby's (another fascinating aspect of the tortoiseshell is that they can give birth to a mixture of species). My mother used numbers instead of names, so that when our owners came we could receive proper names and learn them quickly. I was given the number 4, and I grew especially attached to number 6, the other black and white kitten. She was easily the prettiest of the litter, an almost heart-shaped spot on her face, showing her beautifully piercing blue eyes and dainty pink nose. Her white socks were small and neat, with little pink pads on the underside. Her tail was quite long for a cat, coloured black, tipped with white, and she sat with it curled about her.

But as soon as we were old enough, we were seperated from our mother, and taken to the front of the house, an area we had never ventured before in our adventures about the rest of the house. The front of the house was a pet shop, or more accurately, a cat shop. Many small containers lined the walls of the shop, familiar to those found in a vet's, where they keep the patients. In each of these containers were one or two cats, and I was put into one with 6.

Unfortunately the owners of the cat shop did not paticularly care about the cats themselves, only the money that they profited from selling them. Therefore the living conditions were indeed, horrible. The newspaper on the floor of the container was never changed, and our excrement was shovelled out every few weeks. The food was satisfactory, but they never even bothered to put it in a dish, and occaisionally they would remember to give us some water. They never took us out to give us a bath, so our fur became dull and matted.

One day the cat shop door opened and a woman with a young girl came inside, the woman looked about her in horror as she saw how we were being treated, her hand rising up to her mouth. But the little girl was oblivious to all this and only stared gazing at all the containers, then she spotted me and 6, and rushed over crying "Kittens!" in the most adorable voice I had ever heard.