The Great Escape by Megan Rix

Robert Edwards, 12, and sister Lucy, 9, love their three pets - rambunctious Jack Russell terrier Buster, older, wiser sheepdog Rose, and Tiger, a marmalade cat who loves his creature comforts.  But now, it is September 1939, war has been declared and London might be unsafe once it really gets under way.   Mr. Edwards is a reconnaissance pilot for the RAF and Mrs. Edwards is a nurse on a floating hospital on the Thames.  And so, the children are to be evacuated to their grandmother's in Devon.  This is the farm where Rose used to herd sheep before the children's grandfather died suddenly and it is a place that Rose longs to return to.

But before Robert and Lucy travel to Devon, it is decided that neighbor Mrs. Harris will keep their pets for which she will receive some remuneration unbeknownst to her husband.  Trouble is, Mr. Harris doesn't like animals and resents the money needed to feed and care for the pets when he could be spending it in the pub.  And so, it is off to the animal shelter to have them put down behind his wife's back.

The line is long and before they get inside, the animals manage to escape from Mr. Harris and run away.  Now that they are on their own, where to go?  Rose seems to have an idea, but it is a long way home.

Believing their pets are safe and well cared for, Robert and Lucy arrive in Devon, only to be met by their grandmother's neighbors, the Fosters.  Their grandmother hasn't been acting right lately, and the Fosters thought it would be better for Robert and Lucy to stay with them.

As the children settle in with the Fosters, Buster, Rose and Tiger begin their long trek across southern England in the direction of Devon.  Learning to work as a team, they manage to find enough to eat most of the time, but as the weather gets colder, the trip becomes harder and harder.  Along the way, each animal is caught and cared for by someone, until they decide it is time to rejoin their companions and resume their trip west.

Will the children and pets ever be safely and happily reunited?

The Great Escape is a heartwarming, exciting novel.  It is an adventure story about courage, survival and loyalty.  And not just the loyalty of pets to their owners, but of friends and family to each other and to their pets, as well.

The story reminded me somewhat of Robert Westall's book Blitzcat, about a black cat that goes looking for its true human, a pilot in the RAF during WW2.  But unlike Blitzcat, The Great Escape alternates between the animal's journey, the children struggling to adjust to new circumstances especially to their new school and their grandmother's increasing dementia, their friend Michael, who has been allowed to remain in London and help his father with his activities at NARPAC (National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee) and who is frantic over the disappearance of his friend's pets.  Michael is also an animal lover and is upset at the growing number of pets that are not roaming the streets of London or being put down by people frightened by rumors that when the Nazis invade, they will infect the animals with rabies.

Part of Rix's purpose in The Great Escape is to make readers aware of the fate of these wartime animals.  She writes in her Afterword that over 400,000 cats and dogs are put down with only 4 days time at the start of the war.  Ironically, by Christmas, there was a shortage of dogs that could be trained for search and rescue purposes once bombing began.  You can guess that Rix is an animal lover in the same vein as Robert, Lucy and Michael.

The Great Escape is a perfect novel for any animal lover and perhaps an eye opener for those folks who might no love animals as much.

This book is recommended for readers age 10+
This book was purchased for my personal library

I have only come across one other story for young readers about NARPAC in WW2 and that was in an old Girl's Own Annual, Volume 62, published circa 1940 and called Nancy and NARPAC by Phyllis Matthewman.  If anyone knows of other NARPAC stories for young readers, I would appreciate hearing about it.

A list of Megan Rix's Top 10 Wartime Animal Books can be found HERE 

The Staircase Cat by Colin Thompson, illustrated by Anna Pignataro

***Spoiler Alert***

I don’t like to write about books that are not easy to obtain, either in the library or bookshops, but I have decided to make an exception in the case of The Staircase Cat. My reason for making this exception is simply that I think this is a picture book worth reading and, if it is never reprinted and you ever come across it somewhere or can get it through Interlibrary Loan, by all means get it and read it.

The war in The Staircase Cat is not specifically called World War II, but it could be, in fact, it could really be about any war. This is because it is a story about the ways in which war, all wars, can disrupt and destroy the lives of ordinary people and their animals.

Oskar is an old cat living in the bombed out shell of an apartment house and now:

"There are ghosts in the house. The old cat could feel them and sometimes on moonless nights he could see them too. The ghosts of men and women and children who had once lived in the house, the ghosts of their cats and dogs, moved in and out of the deserted rooms. But there was no peace for them among the fallen plaster and broken glass."

The story is told by a third person omniscient narrator who takes the reader back to the days before ghosts populated Oskar’s world. It was a time when the apartment house had been a happy place and a very contented Oskar had lived with the caretaker and his family, sleeping in a cozy box behind the warm stove.

Then the caretaker’s daughter went away; and bombs began to fall. The house began to grow cold, people started to leave. More bombs fell and soon the building was in ruins and everyone was gone. Oskar stayed, living on what he could scavenge, managing to fare better than the abandoned dogs.

Eventually the bombs stopped. All around him, buildings are fixed up and people moved back in, but not where Oskar lives. Grown old now, Oskar lives among the ghosts of another time, having forgotten the cat joy of sitting in a lap, being stroked and loved. He has even forgotten his name.

Until one day at young man and woman come to the house. The young woman, of course, is the caretaker’s daughter and when she sees Oskar, she tells the man he looks just like Oskar, her old cat. When he hears his name, the cat remembers who he is and he remembers the woman, too, by her smell.

Carrying Oskar out of the building to take him home with her, the caretaker’s daughter poignantly observes “All those years, said the woman. “I can hardly believe it. All those years with the ghosts.”

The simplicity of the narration in The Staircase Cat is one of those things that makes this such a compelling story. Thompson uses straightforward declarative sentences, with simple vocabulary to describe how life changes as war comes and destroys everything thing in its path. And the use of an omniscient narrator allows Thompson to keep Oskar a cat; much the same way Robert Westall was able to keep Lord Gort a cat in Blitzcat, eliminating the need for any anthropomorphizing and giving the story a true sense of realism.

Colin Thompson often illustrates his own books, but for The Staircase Cat he collaborated with Anna Pignataro. Ms. Pignataro’s watercolor pictures, predominately in grays and oranges, are wonderfully rendered and truly capture the haunted feeling that permeates this book.

This book is recommended for everyone.
This book was borrowed through Interlibrary Loan from the Morningside Branch of the St. Lucie County Library System.

The Staircase Cat was
Shortlisted Picture Book of the Year Children’s Book Council of Australia in 1999 and
Shortlisted YABBA Children’s Choice Award in 2000.

For more information about author and illustrator see
Colin Thompson
Anna Pignataro

My post on Robert Westall's Blitzcat may be found at The Children's War

Warning - this book is a tearjerker. I read it sitting in the Rose Reading Room of the NYPL, a very dignified place (as you can see), among scholars, researchers and kids doing homework, with tears rolling down my cheeks.

Blitzcat by Robert Westall

Robert Westall’s novel Blitzcat is the story of a female black cat named Lord Gort* who travels across England during the war in 1940-41 in search of her special owner and of the people she meets along the way. It is based on the phenomenon of psi-trailing. This is the ability of animals to find their way back to their owners, even over thousands of miles when they have become separated from one another for some reason.

Lord Gort and her family have moved from Dover, Kent to Beaminister, Dorset because her owner Geoff Wensley, a pilot in the Royal Air Force (RAF), has been transferred there but is now flying missions in France. But Lord Gort hates her strange new living situation and she instinctively knows that her special person is far away in the west and she decides to find him: “Somewhere ahead, there was endless happiness again. And she knew how to get there.” (page 8)

On her journey to happiness, Lord Gort has many experiences. Her instincts help warn a lonely, disabled plane spotter in the Observer Corps when an enemy air attack comes. Later, she finds herself at a train station where she stays because the trainloads of soldiers returning from the evacuation of Dunkirk, believing black cats are lucky, feed her well for the chance to rub her back: “’Christ, look, a bloody black cat. That’s the first bit o’ luck I’ve seen since Abbeville…’ And suddenly they were reaching out, stepping on to the platform to touch the lucky black cat. “(Page 31)

But when the trainloads of soldiers stop after 4 June, Lord Gort ends up on a trainload of soldiers heading for Dover. Back in Dover, she senses that her real person is now far away towards the east (He has indeed been transferred.) Nevertheless, she stays there a while in the billet of a Sergeant, and again her instincts warn of an air attack. Eventually, she and the Sergeant get separated in Crewe, Cheshire while traveling to Scotland and the cat begins another journey back to Dover. On the way, she has a litter of kittens on a farm outside Coventry, where she witnesses the devastating bombing of Coventry on 14 November 1940.

When it is time for her to move on, one of her kittens follows. During a bitter cold snowstorm, they wind up in the barn of a suicidal woman whose husband has been killed in the war. Leaving her kitten with the woman, she resumes her search in the spring. En route, Lord Gort unknowingly get too close to a UXB, which goes off, causing her to temporarily lose her sense of smell, sight and hearing. Getting all but her hearing back, she continues on and lands at an RAF base, where she becomes a companion of a lonely rear-gunner named Tommy. Because of her deafness, she is able to fly many successful missions with him. The pilots believe she is good luck until she refuses to fly a plane, which crashes on takeoff. After that, they turn on her and try to get rid of her. She manages to sneak on a plane headed for Germany, but she and Tommy end up parachuting out of it over France. They eventually make it back to England, and Lord Gort continues her journey, making one more stop at the home of a NSPCA worker, where she has another litter of kittens. One day, she senses her real owner is near, towards the south-west in the direction of Dorset and she sets off again on a last journey.

This is only a bare-bones outline of Lord Gort’s adventures, and there is so much more to each person’s story, including that of her real owner and his family, giving the reader a well rounded picture of life during the war. Westall manages to successfully convey the sense of fear, loss and pathos war brings to people, as well as the tenacity and strength the people of Britain must have had in order to endure and carry on.

To his credit, Westall never wavers from keeping Lord Gort a cat that acts on her instincts and senses, and does not endow her with human qualities or abilities. It is one of the things that make Lord Gort so endearing. But this is definitely a YA novel because descriptions within the story can be a little raw at times, but it is definitely worth a read.

*Lord Gort (her owner thought she was a male kitten) was named for the real Lord John Gort, who was the Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Forces that ultimately ended up being evacuated from Dunkirk just before the fall of France.