Dog Days and Cat Naps

by Gene Kemp

Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Gene Kemp was an English author known for children's books. Her first, The Pride of Tamworth Pig, appeared in 1972. She won the British Carnegie Medal for her school novel The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (1977).

Gene Kemp was born in Wigginton, Staffordshire in 1926. She grew up near Tamworth, Staffordshire, and went to Exeter University. She became a teacher and taught at St Sidwell's School in Exeter in the 1970s.

From 1972 she wrote stories for young readers about a pig named Tamworth, named after the town she grew up in. Kemp found inspiration for many of the characters in her books amongst the friends of her children, Chantal and Richard.

Her best known book is The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler, published by Faber's Children's Books in 1977. Set in the fictional Cricklepit School, it charts the pleasures and pains of friendship and growing up. There are several Cricklepit books, including Snaggletooth's Mystery, an alternative history of the school, and Gowie Corby Plays Chicken, set one year after The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler and referencing Tyke in several chapters.

Kemp wrote ghost stories and fantasy as well as realistic fiction, like Seriously Weird, which is told from the perspective of the sister of a young man with Asperger syndrome. She also dramatised some of her work, the most successful and well-known of these being Charlie Lewis Plays for Time, another Cricklepit story.

Gene Kemp was awarded an Honorary MA from Exeter University in 1984. She lived in Exeter and had three children – a daughter, Judith, from her first marriage to Norman Pattison, which ended in divorce, and another daughter, Chantal, and a son, Richard, from her second marriage, to Allan Kemp, who died in 1990. She had three grandchildren and two great-grandsons. Kemp died at the age of 88 on 4 January 2015.

Kemp won two awards for The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (1997): the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, for the year's best children's book by a British subject, and one from the Children's Rights Workshop.

She made the Smarties Prize shortlist four times, in (1981) for The Clock Tower Ghost, (1985) for Charlie Lewis Plays for Time, (1986) for Juniper and (1990) for Just Ferret.

Reviews

[Capn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Borrowed for free from Internet Archive

Illustrated by Carolyn Dinan

Contents:
The Grey Invader - 9
May Queen - 17
Miss Piggy - 27
Poor Arthur - 37
The Plagues - 44
Toothie and the Cat - 56
The Long Crawl - 62
Joe's Cat - 72
M13 and the Nine Days' Wonder - 83
Crasher - 99

Not all of these are about cats or dogs - in fact, a fair few are school stories (May Queen, The Long Crawl, and M13 and the Nine Days' Wonder) which have nothing at all to do with pets. I liked the first two of those so much, however, that I didn't really mind. Here's the run-down:

The Grey Invader is a war-time story about a boy's two cats (and chiefly, the very intelligent and loyal, black with white paws, chest and whiskers, Patsy) and an unknown blue-grey tom with green eyes, set amidst fear of German or Russian invasion in the Midlands (somewhere in sight of Lichfield Cathedral). Highlights are some details regarding rationing and chopping down trees for logs to prevent landing strips from being used by the enemy; parachute spotters; and old Mrs Telfer "flipping her lid" and running screaming through the village from invasion-panic in regular intervals. There's also a big thunderstorm. Mildly entertaining.

May Queen, 'told by Lizzie Barnes', relates the May Day festivities of her school, where she is an unwilling 'attendant' to the May Queen, a girl named Dawn with a 'perfect cupid's bow mouth'. The voice is great - reminds me of the other of Kemp's book that I have read (Juniper), and the dynamics funny. Superstition, jealousy, and (possibly) a nemeton/sacred grove... almost falls into Folk Horror Junior, my favourite sub-genre, but pulls out just in time. I enjoyed this one too, but there are no cats or dogs in it.

Miss Piggy is 'told by Julie Bond'. Miss Piggy is Julie's useless cat, named by her brother because the cat is the ugliest and stupiest cat he'd ever known. "It doesn't seem possible that a member of the animal family that includes the tiger and the panther could be such a coward." It also involves a gang of bullies, lead by one Merv Tucker, who attempt an armed (with attack dog) takeover the allotment hideout of Julie and her friends Yasmine and Jason. It's sort of an animal comedy of errors. Julie's sporting older brother (unnamed) steals the entire show, though. I think I love him. I would read an entire series about him, especially if it was written this way, through Julie's eyes.

Poor Arthur is told by 'Tom Kemp'. It features streaky, murderous ('patient, wicked') Dennis the cat, and a fiesty female gerbil named Chuchi. And another gerbil named Arthur. And some sexism. If I described this story and then told you I laughed aloud, you'd think me a psychopath. You'll have to read it, then - let me know if you laugh. Poor Arthur, though. (The narrator's sister's nickname is Bloggs... in 1983. Weird).

The Plagues, told by 'Simon Williams' (featuring sister Petra and yellow labrador Bonkers), is partially set on Dartmoor (specifically Helltor). I read this one first, because I'm big on ancient British monuments and anything whiffing of the magical or fantastical. Reading the stories in order would have been better, somehow - they were all pretty funny up until this one, and I think you'd read it 'wryly', if that makes sense, if you had come across it in the intended sequence. I won't spoil it entirely, but will say that if you climb Helltor, don't take rocks from the pool on top. It's not worth it.

Toothie and the Cat features a hermit and a rescued hellion of a black cat, who is as loyal as any dog.

Lizzie Barnes (the unhappy attendant to the May Queen) is back in The Long Crawl. Poor Lizzie, looking forward to winning the hundred metres and the high jump at the upcoming Sports Day sprains an ankle, and is further annoyed by her pretty-but-dim former May Queen friend, Dawn, who is hysterically clumsy and useless in sports and who is now having to fill in for Lizzie for their house. Oh my goodness - the emotions here! I can't believe it - I chuckled all the way through and then almost cried happy tears at the end. Not a dog or a cat in sight, though. I've got The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler in my to-read pile here, and I'm suddenly looking forward to it immensely. Gene Kemp is great - the voice of the characters..! It really is as if the characters had written these themselves. Seamless, I think. The small injustices, the emotions, the ambivalence... :)

Joe's Cat is a tragic story - not the usual sort of pet tragedy you'd expect - because it's Joe's father who suddenly dies in an overturned tractor accident.

"There were two Joes, he sometimes thought, the Joe that had been, and now, this one who stood outside himself and watched an helped as his mother, doing everything as carefully as ever, packed their furniture and all their things, and arranged for their successors at the cottage to have the animals, as there was none allowed in the city flat where they were going to live to be near his mother's work."

I mean, we had just opened with Joe and his love of cricket (and football, too), and how his dad played on the village's cricket team, how he played with his mates, and how he too would play on the village's cricket team when he was older. Then he finds a weak, starved kitten on the verge, and brings it home. And a few sentences later, the home is lost, and all their animals forfeit. I'm not sure what more to say about this, because almost anything would spoil it. Did Boots the cat ever exist?! A guardian angel of a cat?

M13 and the Nine Days' Wonder, told by X, who doesn't dare to give his name. Well, would you if you wrote something like this?
If you are at all squeamish by nature, leave out this story. You have been warned.

Mandy the Boot came in looking like a water buffalo deprived of its water hole, and said through her missing front tooth— she hasn't had it fixed yet since she was in that fight with Killer Wales last week, and lost the fight and the tooth — that owing to the fact that Slasher Ormeroyd had broken the school rules (and ours) about knives, our class would be the only one not going on the school trip next week. The school rule is don't bring knives to school, ours is don't get found out if you do.
Killer Wales looked up from his Lego at this bit of information and made one of his three noises. The first means he is happy. That doesn't happen very often. The second means he is not happy. And that doesn't happen very often. The third means he is angry and will duff up the nearest person if they don't watch out. This last happens nearly all the time and is how he came to have that scrap with Mandy the Boot. And it was the third noise he made just then, at the beginning of Monday morning, giving me the idea that it was not going to be an easy sort of week, not that ours often are. Not with M13.
Killer Wales is six foot two and growing nicely though it should take him till late teens to reach eight foot.

This has absolutely nothing to do with animals, unless teenagers count. One has the nickname 'Cat', and he's the boss... there's a Bronze Age burial, an exploding unexploded bomb from the war, and a motley crew of students including lovers, fighters, pickpockets and shoplifters, drug addicts (if I understood the slang correctly)...

Finally, we have Crasher, in which Meg and Tom of Birmingham recall their fostered foxhound puppy before he was famous as 'finest foxhound of the year' by people with very different accents to theirs. ;)

All in all, not a bad read at all. Starting to be a real Gene Kemp fan.

Free to borrow from Internet Archive.

[Sandie Bishop]

borrowed this from the school library years ago. One of the few books that the title stuck with me for years yet I cannot recall the story. would love to re-read it if I could ever find a copy