I moved to my childhood home with my parents when I was 18 months old. Understandably I do not remember living anywhere before this. Our house was built on the site of an old forge. It gave the name to our small bit of road.

As long as I can remember I shared my room with black cat. He was an entity that every night would come in through the glass of my unopenable window ( the top would open but not the main pane of the glass for safety). He would wind his way round my blind and walk across the wall over the top of all my toys. The top of his shadow showing bumps for each of my toys. Like my Cindy doll and Care Bears would have shadow versions about half a meter above where they would actually be. No matter what toy would be there it’s shadow would show as I lay in my high sleeper (bunk bed without the bottom bunk) .

Black cat would then wind round my partially open door, I would allow it to be closed, and disappear from my sight. I did not know why I called it my black cat as it was a shadow without any form or even why I knew it was a he.

My parents knew all about black cat but never questioned me about it to my memory. By the time I was ten I would not sleep until black cat had made his trip and when I was tired I would call out to black cat to come so I could sleep and black cat would come as if waiting for my call.

We moved from that house when I was 13. Fast forward a few years and my teen mind thought I’d invented it all. So I asked my mum one time about black cat. What she told me made me amazed that we had not moved from that house years earlier.

My mother thought black cat was an imaginary friend, until one night she was still upstairs and heard me call black cat. She waited and then watched black cat slide out of my room down the corridor past her and then turn down the stairs and out of the house through the window at the bottom. Mum said that it held no form but was the size of a black panther and moved like a cat.

Her and my dad decided not to tell me that they had seen black cat but mum did say she had asked me if I had ever felt scared by black cat to which I had told her in a little child way that black cat was my friend!

I’m now an adult with almost grown kids of my own but I still miss my black cat and I hope that whoever lives in my old room is friends with my black cat.