Books at Bedtime: The Mousehole Cat
We have just returned home from a few days in Cornwall, very near Lands End, the south-westernmost tip of England. We took with us a favorite book, The Mousehole Cat. It is based on the story of the fisherman Tom Bawcock who risked his life to bring fish back to the village of Mousehole (pronounced ‘Mowzel’ in Cornish) when the fishing boats had all been trapped in the little harbor by a terrible storm. Antonia Barber’s wonderful retelling introduces Tom’s cat, Mowzer, who accompanies him and sings to the Storm Cat to calm him while Tom fishes. Nicola Bayley’s illustrations are simply gorgeous and the words and pictures together make this a book to be brought out again and again.
My boys were both very excited at the prospect of actually visiting Mousehole. We made an expedition of it by walking there along the coast from neighboring Lamorna and we stopped on the way to reread the story. It was a very fitting setting – and we had the pictures fresh in our mind when we arrived in the village to try and pick out the various landmarks, not to mention a very pretty “Mowser’s Cottage”.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:09 am
I think the Mousehole cat is very good and enjoyable it is not really a childrens book. I as a child enjoy classic stories and find the Mousehole cat very good although i think that the language is very hard and to write that must have been really easy at the time as they were using that language but now to read as the words aren’t really spoken anymore i think it is really hard.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Grace, it is lovely to hear from you and I’m really glad you’ve taken the time to comment on The Mousehole Cat. I agree with you that it’s not only for children – and it is good for adults to be reminded of how relevant traditional stories are to people of all ages. Ironically, it’s often only when we start reading the stories to our own children that we return to them as adults.
You make an interesting point too about how difficult it is sometimes to read dialects – but I also think this can add to the richness of reading a book aloud. What do you think?