The Classic Morpurgo Collection. Michael Morpurgo
He slept on the window ledge in the sun all the rest of that day. He’d been doing a lot of sleeping lately.
We had an unveiling ceremony outside the American Bar the next morning, and much to Lizziebeth’s delight, everyone seemed to like the sculpture as much as they loved Kaspar himself. He was there at the ceremony, but wandered off during the speeches. I watched him go, waving his tail as he went. It was the last I ever saw of him. He just disappeared. Everyone searched the hotel, over and over again, from the basement to the attic corridor. He was nowhere to be found.
It’s well enough known that old cats go off to die when they’re good and ready. I think, and Lizziebeth thinks, that’s what he must have done. We were sad, of course we were. He was the cat that had brought us together, had survived with us, and he was gone. But in a way, as I told Lizziebeth, trying to comfort her, he is not gone. He’s sitting there proudly outside the American Bar. You can go and see him for yourself, if you like. He’s still there, looking very pleased with himself, and so he should be. After all, he is Prince Kaspar Kandinsky, Prince of Cats, a Muscovite, a Londoner and a New Yorker, and as far as anyone knows, the only cat to survive the sinking of the Titanic.
And then…
…only a year or so after our visit to London, we received a letter from Mr Freddie.
Dear Johnny and Lizziebeth,
I’m writing to tell you of a strange happening. Several guests at the hotel have reported sighting a black cat wandering the corridors late at night. I took no notice at first, but it has happened time and again, and I thought you ought to know. And just yesterday, a lady staying in your rooms, the Countess Kandinsky’s rooms, reported seeing a reflection in the mirror of a grand lady in an ostrich-feathered hat, carrying a black cat in her arms. When she was offered the opportunity to be moved to another room, she said she’d rather stay, that they were kindly ghosts, like good companions. Mary and the others send love. Come and see us again one day, before too long.
Yours, Freddie
I’m a story detective. I hunt down clues because I need evidence to write my stories. So what was the evidence behind the writing of Kaspar?
A year ago I was asked to be Writer-in-Residence at the Savoy Hotel in London. This involved putting on some literary events and staying for three months at the Savoy. My wife Clare and I had a bed the size of Ireland, and breakfast every morning looking out over the Thames. Everyone in the hotel was very kind. We were treated like royalty – which was great!
Then one day, in the corridor next to the American Bar, I met Kaspar, the Savoy Cat. He was sitting there in a glass showcase – a sculpture of a huge black cat – very elegant, very superior. I made enquiries, as detectives do, and found out why he was there.
One day, almost a hundred years ago, thirteen men sat down to a dinner party at the Savoy. One of them scoffed loudly at the suggestion that thirteen might be an unlucky number, said it was so much tosh. Only a few weeks later, he was shot down in his office in Johannesburg, South Africa. Thereafter The Savoy decided that they would never again allow thirteen people to sit down together for dinner. They would always have a fourteenth chair, and sitting on the fourteenth chair, there would be a specially carved sculpture of a lucky black cat. He was known as Kaspar.
My first clue.
My second clue: I came down to breakfast one morning, and was walking down the red carpeted stairs into the River Restaurant, when I looked up and had a sudden sense of déjà vu. The whole decor and atmosphere reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the restaurant on the Titanic. I knew then my story would be about a cat called Kaspar, who would live at the Savoy and become the only cat to survive the sinking of the Titanic.
But it was the people who lived and worked at the Savoy who gave me my last and my most vital clue. I discovered that they came from every corner of the globe. And I soon discovered also that their lives were very different from the lives of the guests they looked after. It would have been very much like this, I thought, in 1912, at the time the Titanic went down.
My evidence was complete. A little dreamtime, to make some sense of all the clues, and I could begin my story, about how Kaspar was brought to the Savoy by a very famous diva – an opera singer, a Countess from Russia…You know the rest by now, unless you’ve read this postscript first – I’ll be very cross with you if you have!
MICHAEL MORPURGO
To Simon, Alison, Rose, Amy, Hazel and Otto
Contents
“Be Fast, Brighteyes, Be Very Fast”
Part of Patrick’s walk to school, to St Thomas’ Junior School on Porthcressa Road was along the canal, past the brown sauce factory which somehow smelled both sweet and sour at the same time. That walk along the canal where the barges chugged by, where the ducks dipped and drank, was the only part of going to school that Patrick looked forward to at all. There was so much he was dreading. He sat there on his bed and thought about the school day ahead of him, wishing he didn’t have to live through it. The radio was burbling downstairs as it always was, and his dad had burnt the toast, again.
Patrick thought of Mr Butterworth, his teacher and football coach, whose literacy homework – that stupid story about someone you meet standing in a shopping queue – he still hadn’t finished, and who this time was bound to make him stay in after lunch and finish it. That meant that the head teacher, Mrs Brightwell, would probably find him there, and so he’d be in double trouble. She was always on at Patrick about being untidy or running in the corridors, or daydreaming or using what she called ‘lazy words’, such as ‘cool’ or ‘wicked’, or worst of all, ‘whatever’.
If she ever heard anyone saying ‘whatever’ she’d practically explode, especially if you shrugged your shoulders at the same time. The trouble was that just at the moment and for no good reason, ‘whatever’ happened to be Patrick’s favourite word. He knew it irritated his mum and dad as well, knew how much Mrs Brightwell hated it, but the word would just pop out as if it had a mind of its own, and with it came a shrug. There was nothing he could do to stop himself, and of course all too often Mrs Brightwell would be right there, and she’d blow up. After it was over, everyone would turn round and laugh at him. That was what Patrick dreaded most about school, being laughed at.
He dreaded Jimmy Rington too, Jimbo to his