But it wasn't my daughter's fleece. I realised almost immediately that somehow our beloved six-month-old black cat, Mossy, had crawled into the machine for a bit of warmth and peace. I'd clocked her prowling round the kitchen that morning, but then forgotten to check.
I don't think anything has upset me quite so much. It was such a shock to discover this creature, whom I adored and who trusted me so implicitly, lying there in among the wet laundry, a heavy, limp, saturated lump.
Unable to delve any further into the washing, I fled upstairs to make a hysterical phone call to my husband, who couldn't believe what I was telling him. Ten minutes later, when Dan came home, I heard him from the upstairs bedroom take Mossy in his arms and sob. Later he dug a hole in the garden ready to bury her that evening.
For hours I stayed upstairs, agonising over what to tell the children. They had always seen my habitual vagueness and clumsiness as a health and safety hazard, and I had proved them right.
The irony was that Dan and I had been totally opposed to getting this cat and had only succumbed after a year and a half of relentless pestering from our eight-year-old daughter. In the end, we had adored her as much as the children had. Having always been indifferent to cats, I found ours endlessly fascinating, marvelling at how she would rugby-tackle Dan as he walked down the corridor or lie on my knee for hours on end while I tapped away at my keyboard.
My first instinct was to lie to the children about what had happened, not to save my own skin, but because the way she had died was just too gruesome. My mother-in-law was all for pretending that Mossy had simply disappeared. But how could we go through with the pretence of putting up posters or watch the children anxiously guarding the catflap in anticipation that she might suddenly dart through?
By 2pm, knowing they would soon be home from school, I rang the Child Bereavement Trust in desperation, presuming that the same advice must apply to pets as to people. A soft-voiced counsellor advised me that children need to hear the truth from their parents. "They would never forgive you if one day they found out from someone else how their cat had died," she said.
I told everyone who called that day about Mossy - even the woman from BT - because in my incoherence it was all I could think and talk about. I was amazed at how many similar ghastly tales I heard: a friend's brother, who had come down from a ladder and crushed his cat; my cousin, who had rolled over on his hamster; and three other people who had accidentally run over their pets. I even heard of a woman who had unknowingly shut her cat in the washing machine and switched it on. Except she was blind.
I left it to my husband to break the news to our three children - Phoebe, 11, Flora, eight, and Reuben, three. Of course, they were utterly distraught; yet after that first evening of shock, disbelief and tears, they seemed to rally. Reuben has barely noticed Mossy's absence; Flora, after 24 hours of acute misery, has taken comfort in the thought of getting another cat, particularly as I have now said that this one can have kittens (as she pointed out, "you owe us a life"). Only Phoebe is still sad, her emotions intensified by the fact that she won't tell her friends about the incident. When I asked why, she said: "Because if they asked how it happened, I couldn't bear to tell them."
Recrimination and blame have, of course, come my way, though in a surprisingly matter-of-fact manner. On that first day, seeing how distraught I was, Phoebe limited herself to one accusation: "Why are you so careless?" Since then there has been the occasional "cat killer", "mass murderer"-type dig. And yesterday, when I apologised for mistakenly turning off the lights in Phoebe's room while she was still in there working, I heard her say through gritted teeth: "You make too many mistakes."
Most people I have told have been both horrified and sympathetic. Only one woman came up to me in the playground and said, "I know it's very sad, but . . ." and proceeded to burst out laughing. She soon stopped, realising that while the cartoon image of the pet in the washing machine may be hilarious to some - a macabre materialisation of an urban myth - for me it could never be a laughing matter. Had Mossy been human - and she had seemed to be sometimes - I would have been charged with manslaughter. And lately, when it comes to working out the exact events leading up to my criminal act, I seem to be suffering from a kind of accused's amnesia. Sometimes I think Iactually saw Mossy get into the machine.
But perhaps, as some people say, pets are here to teach us something. Mossy certainly taught our family about love and death. And, as I went round the house yesterday removing every matchbox in sight to combat my three-year-old's increasing pyromaniac tendencies, I thought that perhaps, after all, there was a purpose to our cat's untimely death.
