THE boys have been out of their minds with worry.

Hermione, our cat, hasn’t been herself over the past week or two. She’s a gentle and affectionate English Blue who loves to be stroked and made a fuss of.

But she has been hiding away lately, quietly slinking behind chairs and crouching under tables, avoiding all human contact. She hasn’t been eating as much as usual either.

The older boys remember going, after primary school one day, to pick their new kitten out from the litter that had just been born to a local farm cat, more than ten years ago.

She’s been one of the family ever since. She and the boys have grown up together.

We have a poem our oldest boy wrote about her in school stuck up on the kitchen wall: “My cat is a cuddly cat. She’s a snugly cat. She likes laying near the heater.”

When he arrived home from university for a reading week, he noticed Hermione looked a lot thinner than when he was last back, a month ago. Not so cuddly. Not so snugly.

He followed her around the house, tracking her progress, his concern growing by the day: “She’s walking strangely and her coat’s quite scraggy.

I’m really worried about her, Mum.”

The others tried to get her to eat, without success. I advised them to stop cuddling her so much, just in case she was in pain or feeling fragile.

“She’s not going to die, Mum, is she?” said the youngest.

I took her to the vet’s. She noticed that Hermione had a bad tooth, with swollen gums: “That could explain it,” she said. Hermione had to stay in for blood tests and to have the tooth removed, under general anaesthetic, next day.

The treatment, she said, would cost around £300. I gulped, trying hard to stop my jaw hitting the ground. Of course, we couldn’t leave Hermione in pain, or unable to eat, so I managed to nod in agreement at the same time.

“Three hundred pounds? Three hundred pounds? To take a cat’s tooth out?” I said to anyone who would listen when I got home.

The nine-year-old disappeared upstairs and brought down his metal safe, which has all his birthday money in it. He handed it to me: “Hermione is worth every penny,” he said.

“Of course she is,” I reassured him, resisting the urge to explain to him that there might be a lot of cats having to put up with toothache at the moment because many owners just don’t have that amount of spare cash to spend.

The older boys were concerned too. “She won’t be in pain now.

They’ve given her some sort of pain killers, haven’t they?” said one. “Will she be okay in those strange surroundings?

She might be scared,”

said another. Next day, they were urging me to ring up the vet’s to see if Hermione had slept all right.

It did occur to me that they didn’t show this much compassion when their 12-year-old brother Roscoe was up half the night in the summer, crying with pain, suffering from bad toothache. “Shut up Roscoe. We’re trying to get some sleep,” I seem to recall them shouting out in the early hours.

And when I had to have a wisdom tooth removed two months ago, following weeks of agonising pain, I can’t seem to remember much interest in my condition, apart from one of the boys being keen to confirm that I would still be able to pick him up from some after school activity on the day of the gruesome procedure.

But Hermione is special. And, unlike Roscoe or me, she never complains.

Powerless to do anything about the pain, she had simply been suffering in silence, poor thing.

THE youngest two boys came with me next day to pick Hermione up. Still recovering from writing out a cheque for precisely £306.25, while reading the postop information sheet which revealed, among other things, that we should be brushing Hermione’s teeth every day, I hardly noticed the nurse carrying Hermione, still in her cage, out to us.

“Look Mum, look Mum, here she is,” Albert shouted. Hermione, desperately trying to get out of the cage to get to them, was visibly excited to see the boys. They stroked her head and her nose through the gaps.

Children have a natural connection with animals. They give to each other. Watching the boys with Hermione reminded me of that wonderful line from the nursery rhyme, Mary Had A Little Lamb, when the other children ask the school teacher why the lamb loves Mary so.

Her wise reply resonated now: “Because Mary loves the lamb, you know.”

NINE-YEAR-OLD Albert and I arrived late at the rugby club when both his 12-year-old and 16- year-old brothers’ games were under way on Sunday. As we walked towards the pitches, coaches, parents and other supporters were voicing support for their various teams. “Why is everybody so angry?” asked Albert.