Thomasina. Paul Gallico

Why You’ll Love This Book by Michael Morpurgo

      Paul Gallico always brings to his stories the ring of truth. It is what writers of fiction have to do if their stories are to be believed. It must be the first rule of every writer of fiction to make our readers believe. If they don’t, then they simply won’t care. They must have a burning desire to turn the page and find out what happens next. One way to achieve this is for a writer to set the story in a known historical context or against a very specific and recognisable geographical background. In The Snow Goose or indeed in The Small Miracle, two of his most popular stories, this great storyteller does just this, leaning heavily on actual events and places for inspiration as well as credibility.

      With Thomasina, as with his other great cat story, Jennie, Paul Gallico leaves the comfort zone of reality, and launches off into an unlikely adventure told by a remarkable cat, Thomasina, Mary Ruadh’s ginger cat. Murdered (put down) by Mary’s father, Andrew MacDhui, a country vet; reincarnated by Lori, Red Witch of the glen, Thomasina becomes Talitha who can trace her ancestry back to an Egyptian goddess. She has only revenge in her heart for her murderer. Unlikely it all may be, but because Gallico is such a compelling and inviting teller of tales, we go with him, we believe it absolutely. Whether or not you like cats, this is a tale you cannot put down. You go where Thomasina takes you – she and Gallico between them practically turn the pages for you.

      Like Gallico I’ve written several cat stories, but none as fantastical as this, and none as feline either. This is a story that cats would love as much as I do!

       Michael Morpurgo

      Michael Morpurgo OBE is one of Britain’s best-loved writers for children. He has written over 100 books and won many prizes, including the Smarties Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Whitbread Award. His recent bestselling novels include The Fox and the Ghost King, An Eagle in the Snow and Listen to the Moon. His novel War Horse has been successfully adapted as a West End and Broadway theatre play and a major film by Steven Spielberg. A former Children’s Laureate, Michael is also the co-founder, with his wife Clare, of the charity Farms for City Children.

       CHAPTER ONE

      Mr Andrew MacDhui, veterinary surgeon, thrust his brick-red, bristling beard through the door of the waiting-room next to the surgery and looked with cold, hostile eyes upon the people seated there on the plain pine chairs with their pets on their laps or at their feet awaiting his attendance.

      Willie Bannock, his brisk, wiry man-of-all-work in surgery, dispensary, office and animal hospital, had already gossiped a partial list of those present that morning to Mr MacDhui and which included his friend and next-door neighbour, the Minister, Angus Peddie. Mr Peddie, of course, would be there with, or because of, his insufferable pug dog whose gastric disturbances were brought on by pampering and the feeding of forbidden sweets. Mr MacDhui’s glance dropped to the narrow lap of the short-legged, round little clergyman and for a moment his eye was caught up in the unhappy, milky one of the pug rolled in his direction, filled with the misery of belly-ache, and yet expressing a certain hope and longing as well. The animal had come to associate his visits to this place, the smells and the huge man with the fur on his face with relief.

      The veterinary disentangled himself from the hypnotic eye and wished angrily that Peddie would follow his advice on feeding the animal and not be there wasting his time. He noted the rich builder’s wife from Glasgow on holiday with her rheumy little Yorkshire terrier, an animal he particularly detested, with its ridiculous velvet bow laced into its silken top-knot. There was Mrs Kinloch over the ears of her Siamese cat which lay upon her knee, occasionally shaking its head and complaining in a raucous voice, and, too, there was Mr Dobbie, the grocer, whose long and doleful countenance reflected that of his Scots terrier who was suffering from the mange and looked as though a visit to the upholsterer would be more practical.

      There were half a dozen or so others, including a small boy, who he seemed to have seen somewhere before, and at the head of the line he recognised old, obese Mrs Laggan, proprietress of the newspaper and tobacco shop who, with her nondescript mongrel, Rabbie, his muzzle greyed, his eyes rheumy with age, was a landmark of Inveranoch and had been so for years.

      Mrs Laggan was a widow, and had been for the past twenty-five years of her seventy-odd. For the last fifteen of them, her dog, Rabbie, had been her only companion, and his bulk draped across the doorstep of Mrs Laggan’s shop was as familiar a figure to natives as well as visitors to the Highland town as that of the fat widow in her Paisley shawl. Since the doorstep was Rabbie’s place, nose between forepaws, eyes rolled upwards, customers of the widow Laggan had learned to step over him when entering and departing. It was said in the High Street that descendants of these clients were already born with this precaution bred into them.

      Mr MacDhui looked his patients over and the patients looked back at him with varying degrees of anxiety, hope, deference, or in some cases a return of the hostility that seemed to be written all over the well-marked features of his face, the high brow, the indignantly flaring red-tufted eyebrows, commanding blue eyes, strong nose, full and sometimes mocking lips, half seen through the bristle of red moustache and beard and the truculent and aggressive chin.

      His eyes and, above all, his manner always seemed cold and angry, perhaps because, it was said in Inveranoch, he was on the whole a cold and angry man.

      A widower of the stature and flamboyance of Mr Veterinary Surgeon MacDhui was subject enough for gossip in a Highland town the size of Inveranoch, in Argyll, where he had been in practice for only a little over eighteen months. By the nature of his profession he was a figure of importance there since he looked after not only the personal and private pets of the townspeople, but was responsible also for the health of the livestock raised in the outlying farms of the district, the herds of Angus cattle and black-faced sheep, pigs and fowl. In addition, he was the appointed veterinary of the district for the inspection of meat and milk and hygienic dairies as well.

      The gossips allowed that Andrew MacDhui was an honest, forthright and fair-dealing man, but, and this was the opinion of the strictly religiously inclined, a queer one to be dealing with God’s dumb creatures, since he appeared to have no love for animals, very little for man, and neither the inclination or the time for God. Whether or not he was an out and out unbeliever as many claimed, he certainly never was seen in Mr Peddie’s church, even though the two were known to be good friends. Others claimed that when his wife had died his heart had turned to stone, all but the corner devoted to his love for his seven-year-old child, Mary Ruadh, the one who was never seen without that ill-favoured, queer-marked ginger cat she called Thomasina.

      Mind you, said the tattlers, no one denied that he was a good and efficient doctor for the beasties. Quick to cure or kill, and a mite too handy with the chloroform rag was the word that went around. Those who felt kindly towards him held that he was a humane man not disposed to see a hopelessly sick animal suffer needlessly, while those who disliked him and his high-handed ways called him a hard, cruel man to whom the life of an animal was nothing, and who was openly contemptuous of people who were sentimentally attached to their pets.

      And many of those who did not encounter him professionally were inclined to the belief that there must be some good in the man else he would not have had the friendship and esteem of Mr Angus Peddie, pastor of the Presbyterian flock of Inveranoch. It was said that the minister who had known MacDhui in their student days had been largely instrumental in persuading his friend, upon the death of his wife, Anne, to purchase the practice of Inveranoch’s retiring vet and move thither leaving behind him the unhappy memories that had bedevilled him in Glasgow.

      Several of the inhabitants of Inveranoch remembered Mr MacDhui’s late father, John, himself a Glasgow veterinary, a dour, tyrannical old man with a strong religious bent who, holding the purse strings, had compelled his son to follow in his footsteps. The story was that Andrew MacDhui had wished to study to become a surgeon in his youth but in the end had been compelled for financial reasons to yield