Gobbolino the Witch's Cat

Ursula Moray Williams Gobbolino the Witch's Cat (1942)
This is a Puffin book which I was given for either Christmas or a birthday back when I was an age for which a book about a witch's cat might be deemed appropriate. I read but I wasn't a big reader, and I never got around to reading it because, quite aside from it being obvious that there wouldn't be any spaceships involved, I was put off by the cover illustration which made our boy look pleased with himself in a way that bothered me - and which somehow reminded me of Nicola Bennett at school. I remember her marching around the playground during some game or other with more or less the same expression and I found her a bit annoying.

Then suddenly on the fifth of November, 2010 - which I know because the receipt is still inside the book - I found this copy in a charity shop in Coventry. I bought it because I still felt profoundly guilty at having failed to read the thing when I was a kid.

So here goes - half a century late, but never mind…

It pains me to say because I wanted to get something out of this, but the best that can probably be said is that it is what it is. Gobbolino - which is a fucking terrible name for a cat - just wants a quiet life and doesn't really enjoy doing bad stuff, so his owner dumps him. She's a witch so obviously Gobbolino is a huge disappointment. The rest of the story entails Gobbolino finding a new home, getting settled, then having that ticket to dumpsville renewed once it becomes obvious that he's witches a cat; and this happens over and over and over because children like repetition. Williams apparently insisted that she wasn't writing children's books even though children enjoyed what she wrote, which I personally find a bit unconvincing. Gobbolino the Witch's Cat does its best with all the usual stuff about orphans, knights, princesses who live in towers, Lord Mayors, a travelling Punch & Judy show, and so on, but is let down by its star acting more like a dog than a cat, particularly with all the arse kissing and self pity. Maybe Williams didn't actually know what a cat was, and the frequent saucers of milk seem to support this given that cats are lactose intolerant. Also, the reference to a little black slave on page 102 is a bit weird.

Well, if low on surprises, Gobbolino has its moments at least as much as anything you probably should have read before you developed pubic hair. It's not an unpleasant read, nor was it in any sense a chore, and it's nice to see that at least someone was waving the flag for cats in the kiddie books of our youth given that I seem to remember a lot of scheming felines forever paying the price for being too clever, not like all those loyal hounds.

I just wanted it to be better, and I wanted my six-year old self to have been wrong.