The Great Sicilian Cat Rescue by Jennifer Pulling

Author:Jennifer Pulling [Jennifer Pulling]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784186555
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2015-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

I Have My Doubts

The scene is surreal. I’m standing in the classroom of a Sicilian school talking to the children about cats. I can hardly hear myself speak. Under the beady eye of their teachers, they may be well behaved but my appearance is treated like something of an entertainment. Hands flutter, they all want to speak at once.

‘Signora, I have two kittens I found in the street. One of them has something wrong with his eye. What should I do?’

‘I love my dog, Signora, but my parents don’t want him in the house.’

‘Signora! Signora! Listen, I want to be a vet when I grow up. I want to help all the animals. What must I do?’

Lovely, innocent children who have yet to come under their parents’ mistrust of animals, the general ignorance of these creatures as sentient beings. Over the course of that week I visited five schools. At one, where I had distributed fifty of my booklets on animal welfare, the children crowded round me.

‘Signora, please will you sign it?’

‘And mine, and mine!’

Talk about being a celebrity for five minutes.

These school visits were a welcome break from my second catch/neuter/return week in Letojanni, which I had found upsetting and difficult.

After my return from Rome to England, the summer of 2005 had been a busy one. Catsnip had taken over my life but it was time to concentrate on work. My play, End of Story, had been chosen as one of six to form a theatre trail during the Arundel Festival; now we went into rehearsal. The play dealt with the relationship between Harold Shipman and his wife, Primrose. I’d always been fascinated by the evil doctor and his apparent ease in murdering so many of his patients before he was found out. What intrigued me even more was the way Primrose supported him without question. What kind of woman can sit in court and suck sweets while her husband is on trial for mass murder? I had not only written the play but also cast myself in the part of Primrose and spent hours in charity shops, looking for suitable clothes. Primrose was not known for her sartorial elegance. As I am quite slim, I had to pad myself out to achieve her size. The play ends with news of Shipman’s suicide and my unearthly shriek of horror echoed round the disused prison cells, where we were performing.

While all this was going on, I had to juggle fundraising and planning Catsnip’s next trip.

‘Education is an important part of this work,’ Suzy Gale, my friend and cat lady, had told me. ‘Unless the local people understand the rationale for what we’re doing and respect animals, it’s a never-ending task.’

She was right and what better place to start than with young people?

‘Dogs Trust do a lot of educational material,’ Suzy added. ‘I’ll put you in touch with Clarissa Baldwin.’

Clarissa proved to be very helpful, sending me proofs of the publication the Trust was preparing for Romania. I planned a simple

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