All day long the baker's cat toils in the bakery and all night he is expected to catch the mice that run riot in the storeroom. If he doesn't catch any mice, the beastly baker tells him, he won't get any food. Too exhausted to chase after the cheery rodents, the baker's cat becomes thin and sad and weepy, until the mice take pity on him and together they concoct a clever plan.
Rosemary Elizabeth "Posy" Simmonds MBE is a British newspaper cartoonist and writer and illustrator of both children's books and graphic novels. She is best known for her long association with The Guardian, for which she has drawn the series Gemma Bovery (2000) and Tamara Drewe (2005–06), both later published as books. Her style gently satirises the English middle classes and in particular those of a literary bent. Both of the published books feature a "doomed heroine", much in the style of the 18th- and 19th-century gothic romantic novel, to which they often allude, but with an ironic, modernist slant.