Bogwoppit
Page 15
‘Ma! Ma! Our Gobbolino has a white sock! He has blue eyes! His coat is tabby, not black, and he wants to be a kitchen cat!’
The kitten’s cries brought her mother Grimalkin to the door of the cavern. Their mistress, the witch, was not far behind her, and in less time than it takes to tell they had knocked the unhappy Gobbolino head over heels, set him on his feet again, cuffed his ears, tweaked his tail, bounced him, bullied him, and so bewildered him that he could only stare stupidly at them, blinking his beautiful blue eyes as if he could not imagine what they were so angry about.
At last Grimalkin picked him up by the scruff of his neck and dropped him in the darkest, dampest corner of the cavern among the witch’s tame toads.
Gobbolino was afraid of the toads and shivered and shook all night.
2. Gobbolino is Left Alone
In the morning Gobbolino heard the witch talking things over with his mother.
‘I think we ought to apprentice the kittens very quickly,’ she said. ‘There is Sootica, who is eager to learn, and will make a clever little cat, while the sooner the nonsense is knocked out of her brother’s head the better.’
So when the moon rose round and full the witch and her cat mounted their broomstick with the two young kittens in a bag slung behind them, and sailed away over the mountains to apprentice them to other witches, for that is the way to train a witch’s cat.
They flew so fast, so fast, that little Gobbolino, peeping through a hole in the sack, saw the stars of the Milky Way flutter past him like a shower of diamonds – so fast that the bats they overtook seemed to lumber along like clumsy elephants.
It made him dizzy to look below him at the sleeping hills and rivers, the chasms and lakes, the watchful mountains and brooding cities. Little Sootica mewed for joy at their wild and giddy flight, but Gobbolino shivered at the bottom of the sack, while tears of terror dropped on his white front paw.
‘Oh, please, stop! Oh, please, please, please!’ he sobbed, but nobody paid any attention to him.
At last with a glorious swoop like the dive of a wild sea-bird, the witch and her broomstick came down on the Hurricane Mountains, where lived a hideous witch who agreed almost at once to take little Sootica into her cavern and train her as a witch’s cat.
The kitten was so overjoyed she could hardly stop to say goodbye to her little brother, she was so eager to begin learning how to turn people into toads and frogs and other disagreeable objects.
Gobbolino cried a little at parting with his playmate, but the witch quite refused to take him with his sister.
‘A witch’s cat with a white paw! Ho! ho! ho!’ she croaked. ‘You’ll never get rid of that one!’
So Gobbolino rode away on the broomstick once more, behind his mother Grimalkin and her mistress, and although they visited fifty or more caverns before the dawn broke over the Hurricane Mountains, not a witch would look twice at the kitten with the white paw and beautiful blue eyes.
So they flew home again and flung Gobbolino into the cavern among the toads, and there he stayed day after day, till one fine morning he woke up and found himself all alone.
The witch had gone and Grimalkin too, the cauldron, the book of spells, the toads, the foxes, the magic herbs, the brews, the broomstick, everything that had once made magic.
They had all flown away and deserted him for ever.
Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat
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First published by Hamish Hamilton Children’s Books 1978
Reissued in this edition 2015
Text copyright © Ursula Moray Williams, 1978
Illustrations copyright © Shirley Hughes, 1978
Illustrated by Shirley Hughes
The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-36137-6