RICHARD Plumb thought he had lost his two pet cats - until one of them was pictured in the Standard being rescued from a roof. I was talking to a woman and showed her a photograph which I keep in my pocket, said Walsoken man Mr Plumb. She said that loo

RICHARD Plumb thought he had lost his two pet cats - until one of them was pictured in the Standard being rescued from a roof.

"I was talking to a woman and showed her a photograph which I keep in my pocket," said Walsoken man Mr Plumb. "She said that looked like the cat in the Standard which was being rescued."

Mr Plumb, 64, moved to Walsoken from Outwell about a month ago and kept his two cats, Pixie and Dixie, inside for about a week.

He said: "I started to ease them outside, onto the front lawn, to get them used to their new surroundings and, all of a sudden, they vanished.

"I thought I had lost them and that I would never see them again."

Mr Plumb started searching for both his cats, knocking at doors close to his Church Road home, when he was told about a cat being rescued by fire crews from a roof in nearby Woodland's Court, pictured in the Standard.

He started making enquiries to the fire service and the RSPCA and, within a couple of hours, the RSPCA phoned back to say Pixie was at their Block Fen Animal Shelter, near Wimblington.

Mr Plumb said: "They had called him Fiddler, because he had got stuck on a roof."

The search for Dixie is continuing, but Mr Plumb said: "I showed the woman, who lives at the home where Pixie got stuck, a photograph of Dixie and she said it was the one who comes in her back yard.

"We have also had sightings of a couple of cats very similar, but they were not him."

Mr Plumb bought the black-and-white, domestic short-haired cats from a Russian lady, who lives in Wisbech, just over three years ago when they were kittens.