The Big War: Blitzcat

In England black cats are respected as the bringers of good luck, not bad, and the feline heroine of Robert Westall's Blitzcat indeed brings good fortune to those struggling through the nearly hopeless early days of World War II in England.

Named "Lord Gort" after a British general, the cat searches coastal England during the desperate days after Dunkirk, seeking her owner Geoffrey, who is serving with the RAF. As Stukas and ME-109's strafe and bomb all around her, the cat pushes on, making her home briefly with a spotter with the Royal Observer Corps, a canteen operator providing food for exhausted soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk, an officer's wife providing a billet for troopers in her house, refugees fleeing the burning cathedral town of Coventry, a frightened young tail gunner shot down and rescued by the French Resistance, and a kindly NSPCA "cat-lady," who takes her and her kittens in until the cat makes her last trek to find Geoffrey, injured and grounded, to end her journey back home again.

Westall's use of the "Blitzcat's" wanderings is a literary device which offers a detailed and realistic look at the lives indelibly changed during the early Blitz years. But the cat, in her steadfast search, is also a metaphor for those Brits who held on to hope for the future through those terrible times. Living those days with Blitzcat is a great way to make the history of that time come alive to the reader.