Gobbolino the Witch's Cat Read online

  Contents

  Foreword

  1 Gobbolino in Disgrace

  2 Gobbolino is Left Alone

  3 Gobbolino Finds a Home

  4 Hobgoblin

  5 The Orphanage

  6 Gruel

  7 The Lord Mayor’s Coach

  8 The Lady Mayoress Doesn’t Like Cats

  9 Gobbolino on Show

  10 Gobbolino at Sea

  11 The Little Princess

  12 Punch and Judy

  13 Gobbolino in the Tower

  14 Gobbolino the Woodcutter

  15 Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat

  16 Gobbolino the Kitchen Cat

  About the Author

  Foreword

  When I was young, I had a lot of books about cats. I didn’t see my father very often, as he and my mother were divorced, but every birthday he sent me a book, and at least six of them were cat stories – Millions of Cats, The True Philosopher and His Cat, The Cat, the Dog and the Dormouse, Tinkle the Cat, Puss in Books, The Cat of Bubastes. (I still have them all, which is lucky, as I’m afraid many of them are now out of print.) But one book I didn’t have was Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat, because it came out just after I had left school and was reading adult books. I had never read it until I was asked if I would like to write a foreword. Always happy to read a new cat story, I said I would love to, and read it in one joyful gulp.

  Who could help loving Gobbolino? He is such an endearing character that it seems impossible that he should have so many misfortunes, that he should not be able to find a friendly home in the very first chapter of his story. And yet, time after time, something awful happens and he loses his opportunity.

  When I was young, and in the middle of a gripping book, I used to creep out of bed and lie on the floor, reading by the ray of light that shone into my room from the oil lamp on the landing (there was no electricity in our village at that time). I read until some adult came upstairs and caught me at it and gave me a tremendous scolding. Gobbolino would certainly have been read in that way, for who could bear to stop reading when the poor little fellow is trudging along lonely roads or through wild forests? Some of his adventures are quite hair-raising, especially the last one, when it seems impossible that he can escape being thrown down the Hurricane Mountains by the evil witch.

  I wonder why the witches in folk tales nearly always have cats, not dogs or pigs, as their companions? Is it because cats used to be worshipped in ancient Egypt and other long-ago civilizations? Or because cats are so cool and self-reliant, giving us the notion that they can get along quite nicely without us, thank you – apart from a bowlful of food when they want it, a warm bed to sleep in when required, and a bit of stroking five or six times a day.

  Surprisingly, although cats so often figure as witches’ associates, there are not many folk tales in which cats are the heroes. There’s Puss in Boots, of course, but he is rather a bossy, uncat-like cat. There is Dick Whittington’s cat, another bossy character, persuading his master to turn back and become Lord Mayor of London. There’s the cat who rushed up the chimney squawking, “My stars! Old Peter’s dead and I’m the King of the Cats!” We don’t hear any more than that about him. And I remember, from Andrew Lang’s Pink Fairy Book, a touching story called “The Cat’s Elopement”. But apart from these I can think of few cats in folk tales – cats don’t choose to have their stories told.

  Poetry seems to suit them better. There are plenty of cats in poems. There is “I love Little Pussy, His coat is so warm,” to which my father added the lines “And if I annoy him, He’ll chew off my arm.” There is a wonderful refrain in “Millions of Cats”: “Cats here, cats there, Cats and kittens everywhere, Hundreds of cats, Thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats.” There is “Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been? I’ve been up to London to visit the Queen.” And then there is Thomas Gray’s cat who drowned in a tub of goldfishes. It must have been a very large bowl, or a very small and stupid cat!

  Real cats, of course, vary in their natures just as much as humans do. I have met spiteful cats, loving cats, clever cats, stupid cats. A highly intelligent orange cat, January, who adopted my father one New Year’s Day, learned how to rattle the latch of the dining-room door, so that it would swing open and let him in. He also, all by himself, invented a charming trick: when you softly clapped your hands above his head, he would lift up his right front paw to be shaken. Then there was Gracchus, a tabby belonging to my sister, who used to come and stay at our house along with my two nieces for summer holidays. He was epileptic and had to be given a tiny pill every day. This aroused great feelings of jealousy in our cat Hamlet, who thought he was missing out on some treat – so terrific dexterity and diplomacy were needed to get the pill into the right cat. And then there was Darwin, dear Darwin, who always took a shortcut through the banisters, and liked to lie with his shaggy arms around one’s neck . . .

  If, out of a lifetime’s acquaintance with cats, I were asked to pick one to take with me to a desert island, I would find it very, very hard to decide. But if I were asked to make a choice from all the cats in books that I have come across, the choice would be far easier. Not Puss in Boots – I want none of that phoney Marquis of Carabas routine on my island. Not Kipling’s Cat that Walked by Himself – he would always be walking off. Not Whittington’s cat, forever ordering me to turn back – because where would we turn back to? None of these would do. No – who but Gobbolino could be relied on to find a comfortable, snug home somewhere on that island, and lead me to it . . .

  Sussex, 2001

  1

  Gobbolino in Disgrace

  One fine moonlight night little Gobbolino, the witch’s kitten, and his sister Sootica tumbled out of the cavern where they had been born, to play at catch-a-mouse among the creeping shadows.

  It was the first time they had left the cavern, and their round eyes were full of wonder and excitement at everything they saw.

  Every leaf that blew, every dewdrop that glittered, every rustle in the forest around them set their furry black ears a-prick.

  “Did you hear that, brother?”

  “Did you see that, sister?”

  “I saw it! And that! And that! And that!”

  When they were tired of playing they sat side by side in the moonlight talking and quarrelling a little, as a witch’s kittens will.

  “What will you be when you grow up?” Gobbolino asked, as the moon began to sink behind the mountains and cocks crowed down the valley.

  “Oh, I’ll be a witch’s cat like my ma,” said Sootica. “I’ll know all the Book of Magic off by heart and learn to ride a broomstick and turn mice into frogs and frogs into guinea pigs. I’ll fly down the clouds on the night-wind with the bats and the barn owls, saying ‘Meee-ee-ee-oww!’ so when people hear me coming they’ll say: ‘Hush! There goes Sootica, the witch’s cat!’”

  Gobbolino was very silent when he heard his sister’s fiery words.

  “And what will you be, brother?” asked Sootica agreeably.

  “I’ll be a kitchen cat,” said Gobbolino. “I’ll sit by the fire with my paws tucked under my chest and sing like the kettle on the hob. When the children come in from school they’ll pull my ears and tickle me under the chin and coax me round the kitchen with a cotton reel. I’ll mind the house and keep down the mice and watch the baby, and when all the children are in bed I’ll creep on my missus’s lap while she darns the stockings and master nods in his chair. I’ll stay with them for ever and ever, and they’ll call me Gobbolino the kitchen cat.”

  “Don’t you want to be bad?” Sootica asked him in great surprise.

  “No,” said Gobbolino, “I want to be good and have people love me.
People don’t love witches’ cats. They are too disagreeable.”

  He licked his paw and began to wash his face, while his little sister scowled at him and was just about to trot in and find their mother, when a ray of moonlight falling across both the kittens set her fur standing on end with rage and fear.

  “Brother! Brother! One of your paws is white!”

  In the deeps of the witch’s cavern no one had noticed that little Gobbolino had been born with a white front paw. Everyone knows this is quite wrong for witches’ kittens, which are black all over from head to foot, but now the moonbeam lit up a pure white sock with five pink pads beneath it, while the kitten’s coat, instead of being jet black like his sister’s, had a faint sheen of tabby, and his lovely round eyes were blue! All witches’ kittens are born with green eyes.

  No wonder that little Sootica flew into the cavern with cries of distress to tell her mother all about it.

  “Ma! Ma! Our Gobbolino has a white sock! He has blue eyes! His coat is tabby, not black, and he wants to be a kitchen cat!”

  The kitten’s cries brought her mother, Grimalkin, to the door of the cavern. Their mistress, the witch, was not far behind her, and in less time than it takes to tell they had knocked the unhappy Gobbolino head over heels, set him on his feet again, cuffed his ears, tweaked his tail, bounced him, bullied him, and so bewildered him that he could only stare stupidly at them, blinking his beautiful blue eyes as if he could not imagine what they were so angry about.

  At last Grimalkin picked him up by the scruff of his neck and dropped him in the darkest, dampest corner of the cavern among the witch’s tame toads.

  Gobbolino was afraid of the toads and shivered and shook all night.

  2

  Gobbolino is Left Alone

  In the morning Gobbolino heard the witch talking things over with his mother.

  “I think we ought to apprentice the kittens very quickly,” she said. “There is Sootica, who is eager to learn, and will make a clever little cat, while the sooner the nonsense is knocked out of her brother’s head the better.”

  So when the moon rose round and full the witch and her cat mounted their broomstick with the two young kittens in a bag slung behind them, and sailed away over the mountains to apprentice them to other witches, for that is the way to train a witch’s cat.

  They flew so fast, so fast, that little Gobbolino, peeping through a hole in the sack, saw the stars of the Milky Way flutter past him like a shower of diamonds – so fast that the bats they overtook seemed to lumber along like clumsy elephants.

  It made him dizzy to look below him at the sleeping hills and rivers, the chasms and lakes, the watchful mountains and brooding cities. Little Sootica mewed for joy at their wild and giddy flight, but Gobbolino shivered at the bottom of the sack, while tears of terror dropped on his white front paw.

  “Oh, please, stop! Oh, please, please, please!” he sobbed, but nobody paid any attention to him.

  At last with a glorious swoop like the dive of a wild seabird, the witch and her broomstick came down on the Hurricane Mountains, where lived a hideous witch who agreed almost at once to take little Sootica into her cavern and train her as a witch’s cat.

  The kitten was so overjoyed she could hardly stop to say goodbye to her little brother, she was so eager to begin learning how to turn people into toads and frogs and other disagreeable objects.

  Gobbolino cried a little at parting with his playmate, but the witch quite refused to take him with his sister.

  “A witch’s cat with a white paw! Ho! Ho! Ho!” she croaked. “You’ll never get rid of that one!”

  So Gobbolino rode away on the broomstick once more, behind his mother Grimalkin and her mistress, and although they visited fifty or more caverns before the dawn broke over the Hurricane Mountains, not a witch would look twice at the kitten with the white paw and beautiful blue eyes.

  So they flew home again and flung Gobbolino into the cavern among the toads, and there he stayed day after day, till one fine morning he woke up and found himself all alone.

  The witch had gone and Grimalkin too, the cauldron, the book of spells, the toads, the foxes, the magic herbs, the brews, the broomstick, everything that had once made magic.

  They had all flown away and deserted him for ever.

  3

  Gobbolino Finds a Home

  The witch and her cat Grimalkin had been so unkind to him that little Gobbolino was not sorry to be without them, but all the same it is a terrible thing for so young a kitten to be left all alone, and he spent some hours at the door of the cavern crying bitterly and wondering what was to become of him.

  “Suppose they never come back!” sobbed Gobbolino. “Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?”

  But at last the idea came to him that if his mother Grimalkin and her mistress the witch had really left him for good there was no need for him to stay in the cavern and be a witch’s cat any longer. He could go out into the world whenever he pleased and find a happy home to live in for ever and ever.

  When this happy idea had struck little Gobbolino he stopped crying immediately and began to look round him.

  The witch’s cavern was on the edge of a forest, but not very far away were fields and woods and a river, and beyond these must be houses and farms and cities such as he had seen from his ride on the witch’s broomstick.

  Surely somewhere there must be a comfortable hearth and kind people, willing to offer a happy home to a little cat?

  Gobbolino washed his face and then his coat and paws very carefully before he left the cavern for ever.

  He trotted through the fields feeling very bold and brave, till the forest was out of sight behind him, and there in front was the river, winding its way in and out of reeds and shallows, bubbling and churning like the spell-water in the witch’s cauldron, or flowing smoothly, with bright fishes in it that caught little Gobbolino’s hungry eye and made his mouth water.

  He had had nothing to eat the whole day long and the sight of those bright fishes reminded him how hungry he was.

  “Never mind,” said Gobbolino. “Presently I shall come to a fine big farmhouse with a fine big kitchen, where they will invite me in and give me a saucer of milk and a corner by the fire. Then they will ask me to live with them for ever – Gobbolino the kitchen cat!”

  As he said this he thought of his little sister Sootica apprenticed to the witch high up on the Hurricane Mountains, and he began to cry again, but after all, it was what she had wished for, so there was no more to be said about it.

  Presently Gobbolino met a little bridge that crossed the river from bank to bank. It was a very narrow bridge, no more than a plank, and so low over the water that the little cat could touch the ripples with his paw as they passed beneath it.

  He thought he might catch a fish this way, so he settled himself in the middle of the plank and waited until one of the beautiful creatures should come swimming by.

  Before long a lovely trout dressed in pink and gold and blue swam slowly down the stream towards him.

  Little Gobbolino trembled with excitement and waited for it to pass beneath the plank.

  He stretched out his paw at the same moment as the trout saw him and flashed by with a scornful swish of its tail. The little cat made one wild grab after it, reached too far, overbalanced, and tumbled head-over-heels into the water.

  There was a terrible splash and commotion as he thought he was drowning, and then Gobbolino began to swim.

  He swam and swam as the river carried him swiftly downstream, far from the forest and the cavern where he was born. He swam till the river ran into farmland, towards a great mill where the mill-wheel waited to churn Gobbolino into a thousand bits.

  The little cat did not know his danger, and it was lucky for him that the children of the farm were playing on the river bank just above the mill-stream.

  “Look! Look!” they cried to one another. “Here comes a kitten swimming for its life!”

  “It will get caught
in the mill-wheel!” said one of the little girls. “Quick! Quick! And get it out!”

  Her brothers ran to get a stick and fished out Gobbolino as they might have fished a plum out of one of their mother’s pies.

  “What a black coat he has!” they said.

  “It is almost tabby!” said the little girls.

  “And what bright eyes!” said their brothers.

  “They are a beautiful blue!” said the little girls.

  “He has three black paws!” said the boys.

  “But one is pure white!” said the girls.

  They took Gobbolino into the farm to show him to their mother.

  The farm was fine and big, and it was the kind of kitchen Gobbolino had dreamed of.

  There were red stone tiles and bright pots and pans sitting on shelves all the way round the room. There was a blazing fire in the hearth and a kettle singing on the hob. There was a baby in a cradle that rocked as the children’s mother pushed it gently to and fro.

  “Oh, what a lucky cat I am!” he said to himself, in spite of his weariness and cold. “Here is the first house I come to, the home of my dreams! A friendly roof, a good fire, a worthy mother, and kind-hearted children! Now I can settle down happily and be a plain little kitchen cat for ever and ever.”

  The farmer’s wife took Gobbolino on her lap and wiped his wet fur with a warm cloth.

  “And where do you come from, my little cat?” she asked him kindly. “How did you come to fall in the terrible mill-stream? Don’t you know you might have been drowned?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” replied Gobbolino gratefully. “I fell in catching fishes. I come from the cavern in the forest up yonder, and the river brought me down here.”

  When his fur was dry the farmer’s wife gave him a good drink of warm milk, and while she went out to milk the cows he amused the children and the baby by all kinds of strange tricks that every witch’s kitten knows by heart. He made blue sparks come out of his whiskers and red ones out of his nose. He became invisible and then visible again, and hid himself in all kinds of strange places for them to find him again, in the cuckoo clock, in a teacup, in the farmer’s shoe, till the children were tired of laughter and begged him to be quiet, and give them a little peace.