Book Review: Blitzcat

Title: Blitzcat

Author: Robert Westall

Date: 1989

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-590-42771-7

Length: 230 pages

Quote: “Lord Gort’s a cat...The BEF was going to France, and everyone was talking about Lord Gort. So Geoff called her Lord Gort.”

Robert Westall claimed that there was a “real Lord Gort.” The cat’s adventures begin when she doesn’t want to be evacuated and tries to go home, prompting her humans to send a telegram of “false news, creating alarm and despondency” by asking neighbors to keep a look out for the missing cat, who happens to share the name of a military leader. That happens in the first six pages of Blitzcat.

After that Westall, who liked animals, gives this fictional cat one adventure after another. I suppose it’s possible that one cat could have had all these adventures. Real cats have similar ones. Westall had lived through the Blitz himself and written other stories about what England’s Greatest Generation went through, and here are some more, also having the ring of real survivors’ stories, from the point of view of a stray cat. Lord Gort (also known as Hawkins) irritates a widow out of what’s becoming unhealthy grief, helps refugees find shelter, finds a cat friend to help her nurse kittens and human friends to adopt the kittens, goes flying in a fighter plane, survives a crash in France, and finds her way back to England.

How credible is this story? Real cats and dogs have traced their humans through longer journeys. Then again, anyone who’s ever lost a pet can only wish it were true that dogs and cats were equipped with mysterious magnetic senses of where their humans are.

My experiences with cats suggest a different explanation of how pets do occasionally manage to track their humans for hundreds of miles, through flood and fire and, as in this story, war. Rather than postulating “psychic trailing,” I postulate blind luck. The animal and human miss each other. Things that may or may not be actual clues, distant scents, half-heard sounds, suggest guesses about where the missing friend might be. Some guesses are all wrong, and many animals die every year in hopeless searches for the humans or homes from which they’ve been separated. But once in a while the animal really is on the scent and can find its human. This explanation fits the outline of Blitzcat better than the “psychic trailing” theory Westall seems to favor. Lord Gort sets off in the general direction of home, following sounds and scents that lead to food when she’s hungry, sounds and scents that suggest home when she’s fed.

Beyond that she is, of course, an unusually clever cat. Unusual, but not impossible. The only thing she does that I’ve not seen a real cat do is go up in a bomber plane—and I have seen cats hop into cars and trucks with a clear expectation that the driver would take them where they wanted to go.

Toward the end there’s a suggestion that Westall had thought of a few more adventures and been advised to cut them out and end the story quickly, as it was long enough already.

Well...the stories people bother telling and writing are the ones that don’t happen every day. Blitzcat is one.

The final sequence in Blitzcat, about how arbitrary and unreasonable “humane” people can be when making decisions for other animals, is meant to be harrowing. I’ve seen petitions on Change.org indicating that similar insanities happen—every few months—even today. Nevertheless, trigger warnings: Lord Gort is so much smarter and nicer than the humans who decide her fate in the end, it’s disgusting.

What I physically have is actually the first Scholastic edition (the first pocket-sized U.S. reprint), which is not currently available from Amazon. What you see above is the currently available reprint, which is widely distributed and what you'll get for $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment, as discussed in the "Greeting" post. At least five more books of this size will fit into one $5 package.