Kaspar the Titanic Cat

Kaspar the Titanic Cat by Michael Morpurgo is a story for 9 year olds told by a London hotel bellboy who ends up in charge of a very superior cat.

What happens

Johnny Trott is fourteen and works at the Savoy. He carries luggage, polishes boots, opens doors and smiles at everyone whether he feels like it or not.

He was left on the steps of an orphanage in Islington as a baby. The hotel is all he's got.

Then Countess Kandinsky arrives from Moscow with a startling quantity of luggage and a cat howling in a basket.

The cat is Kaspar. Jet black from whiskers to paws, and thoroughly aware of how beautiful he is. The Countess won't have him called her cat, either. He's the Prince of Cats, and a prince belongs to nobody.

She gives Johnny a job. While she's at her opera rehearsals he's to feed Kaspar, talk to him and take him out twice a day.

What makes the book is Johnny's voice. He's perfectly polite to the guests and privately not very impressed by most of them. The head housekeeper gets called Skullface downstairs because she rattles with keys and rather looks the part. Johnny knows precisely how far he can push his luck with her, which is nowhere at all.

He's honest about the smiling, too. The doorman told him to smile and wag his tail like a puppy, so he does, and the tips are better for it.

The Countess is glorious. She tells Johnny that English people don't laugh or cry nearly enough and that this is a great mistake.

Now, what's coming. Something happens to the Countess while she is staying at the hotel, which is how Kaspar stops being hers and becomes Johnny's. And the ship is right there in the title, so the story ends up on board the Titanic, with everything that means.

If your reader would find that too much, don't start them here. If they've got curious about the Titanic and want a way in that isn't a wall of facts and diagrams, Johnny and the cat will take them there gently.

What to read next

There's another Morpurgo in the library about a boy nobody came back for. Little Foxes. Billy Bunch was left outside a police station in a box of flowers, and the thing he loves most is a family of fox cubs down by the canal.