Cat's magic

by Margaret Greaves, Joanna Carey (Illustrator)

The powers of a magical cat transport Louise to Victorian times in which she meets and rescues some of her unfortunate ancestors

Genres: Time Travel, Childrens, Fantasy

157 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Born 1914. Margaret Greaves was educated at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, and taught English in schools and at St. Mary's College of Education, Cheltenham. She died in June 1995

Reviews

[Capn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure what I expected from this one. (Back cover says):

When Louise, an orphan, goes to live with her stern Aunt Harriet she is bored and unhappy. Then she meets Charlie, a local boy, who gives her a cat called Casca and life begins to change in the most mysterious and dramatic ways. As Louise finds herself able to travel back in time, the past and the present begin to get very muddled indeed!
This is a hard-to-put down and skilfil blend of fantasy and fiction

I expected from that a fun time-travel and cat-rich story about Louise and Charlie. Which it sort of was. There's Casca (NOT a gift from Charlie - that would throw a wrench right into the entire magical mechanism of this story), there is Charlie who is local and a boy, but there's as much or more of Flora from Victorian Weymouth, and an awful lot of Aunt Gladys, Aunt Harriet and Aunt Daisy... as Wodehouse said, It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof. Here are the opening lines:

As soon as I set eyes on my Aunt Harriet I knew I was doomed to a life of sorrow. Very well, I said to myself, if I am to be an abused heroine I will play my part with courage and dignity. I raised my head proudly, like Joan of Arc in prison. That had been one of the great moments of the film.
'Don't crane your neck like that, child," said Aunt Harriet unkindly. 'Like a horse over a hedge.'

Poor Louise Genevieve. She's an orphan.

'Louisa,' said Aunt Harriet after breakfast.
'Louise,' I told her. 'It's French.'
'My dear child, it's not your fault that you had a French mother. But your father was English. Louisa is more suitable. Now, it's time that you and I had a talk.'

Yeesh. Talk about a lack of boundaries. There's a reason why Harriet's a miserable old spinster.

'Really, Louisa, don't you know anything?! You don't want to put all the china in the bowl together. No wonder something gets broken!'
She was always telling me I didn't want to do something. It was the same when she asked me to beat the batter for her.
'The other hand, child. You don't want to do it like that.'
She was wrong. I did want to do it. Just like that.
'I'm left-handed,' I explained.
'Maybe. But you can't beat batter with your left hand. Use the other.'
'It gives left-handed people a stammer if they have to use the wrong hand,' I warned her. 'I read that somewhere.'
'That's only about writing. And don't argue over everything.'
So I used my right hand and a lot of batter splashed onto the table. Serve her right!
It was bad enough in the kitchen, but worse when she interfered with my own things. She came into my bedroom one day when I was looking through a pile of stories - those thin paper things that look like magazines. The same cleaner who lent me The Misfortunes of Millicent had given me some that she didn't want any more. My aunt picked some up.
'Good heavens, child, you don't want to read trash like that. Throw them away. Come on downstairs and I'll find you something worth reading. Like Sir Walter Scott. You'll enjoy Scott.'
She was wrong again. I did not enjoy Scott. There was a whole shelf of his novels in the dining room and to satisfy her I tried several. But they all began with long boring descriptions of scenery. And then at the end of the first chapter he'd say something like 'But this was all twenty years before my story began. Now I'll start again.' I went back to The Lost Heiress, which I hadn't thrown away. I'd hidden them all in my winter vests.

Thankfully, before we get an even worse Aunt to deal with, we are treated to some Ancient Egyptian magic, courtesy the goddess Bast herself, and all because Louise dares to rescue the sole remaining kitten that had alluded miserable groundkeeper Sid in his first round of drownings.

I don't want to spoil anything, but at this point of the story I was expecting some pretty wild things (and Louise's first jaunt through time is a good one), but very quickly, and for a big chunk of the book (pretty much the rest of it, really), it's an awful lot like The Amazing Mr Blunden (Victorian villains are different, as is the plot and setting, but there we are - child slavery and abuse and near starvation).

I liked The Amazing Mr Blunden, and I also really enjoyed this. But I don't think I was expecting a huge chunk of the narrative to have such content. I expected amazing adventures with friendly Charlie, and quite a lot more of Casca:

The kitten looked at me with a bland indifference as if we'd never met before. No other creature in the world can make you feel as unnecessary and unimportant as a cat can.

I was rather fond of him.

Quite a cute and magical cat story, and one Miss Siggs, Louise's teacher, might not have approved of:

'You're too intelligent to waste time on rubbish,' she said; but flattery got her nowhere. I bet she read rubbish herself at my age. It's more exciting.

OH, and you can borrow it not from the kindly cleaner at your former boarding school, but from OpenLibrary, for free.

[Rob Hopwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cat’s Magic by Margaret Greaves

The gist of this story is that Louise Genevieve Higgs, an orphan, has to go to live with her aunt in the country. They don’t get along with each other very well, and Louise wishes she was anywhere but on her aunt’s dilapidated farm. (This is a pretty standard scenario for a children’s timeslip story). When Louise saves a kitten from being drowned, the Egyptian Cat Goddess, Bast, rewards her with the ability to travel anywhere she wants. Since she is so long-lived, however, Bast’s view of time is not quite the same as that of ordinary mortals, and Louise ends up not only in different places but also in different times.

This children’s novel is very well written and the story is quite engaging, despite the strange time travel mechanism. At first, I was afraid that Louise might simply go for many unrelated jaunts into different periods of history (which is what happens in Time Cat by Lloyd Alexander, which I found rather tedious), but I need not have worried. Happily, after the first two experimental jaunts, Louise remains for most of the rest of the story in a seaside town in the Victorian era, where she finds a position as a servant in a boarding house. There are dishonest dealings afoot in this rundown hotel, though, and it is up to Louise and her fellow servant, Flora, to find a way to put things right, which they eventually do by enlisting help from the twentieth century.

There are some slight logical inconsistencies in the story which I think only adults would be likely to spot (for instance, how a person from the nineteenth century could take a test and acquire a driving license in the twentieth century without any documents for personal identification). I also think that since the goddess rewarded Louise for saving a cat, it would have been appropriate if the principal mission had also been related to felines in some way. Nevertheless, even though the story turned out to be about finding ancestors and thwarting the schemes of pretty stereotypical Victorian villains, it was still an original and enjoyable tale which I think would be appreciated by readers belonging to the target age group.

This book was first published in 1980, and has been out of print for quite some years. There are, however, secondhand copies available from Amazon, and it can be borrowed in electronic form from Internet Archive/Open Library.