Kaspar the Titanic Cat by Michael Morpurgo
We looked everywhere we could think of, asked again and again the same question. The last lingering hope left to us was that they might still be out there at sea in their lifeboat. The two of us went to the ship’s rail. But all the lifeboats we saw floating around the ship were already empty. We scanned the sea all around, searched the horizon. There was nothing. At that moment of utter despair we heard a yowling from behind us. We turned. They were there, all three of them, shrouded in blankets, only their faces showing. It was a strange and wonderful reunion for all of us. We stood there on the deck for many long minutes, our arms around one another. It was during those moments I really felt for the first time that I had in some way become one of them, one of the family.
Crowded in a cabin below with other survivors, we slept and told our stories and slept again. Lizziebeth and her mother owed their survival, they told us, to a small Japanese man who spoke no English and a brave French lady who fortunately spoke both Japanese and English and so could translate. Through her, the Japanese man made it quite clear to everyone that they should do what he was doing and row. If they rowed, they would keep warm, he said, and keeping warm could save their lives. So that’s what they did, taking turns all night long. Even Lizziebeth rowed. She sat on the French lady’s lap and rowed. Because of that wonderful man’s example, Mrs. Stanton said, not one of them had died of the cold in that lifeboat. His example and his cheerfulness had kept their spirits up all through the longest, coldest night of their lives, and when they reached the Carpathia, he was the last out of the lifeboat.
I knew, even as she was telling us, that it had to be Little Mitch. I went searching for him at once and found him after a while on his own, looking out over the railing at the empty sea. We greeted each other as old friends, as of course, after all we had lived through, we most certainly were. I was up on deck with Little Mitch a few days later as the Carpathia steamed slowly into New York Harbor. That was when we first set eyes on the Statue of Liberty. He turned to me with a big grin on his face and said just one word: “America!”
* * *
A New Life
That was how Kaspar and I came to America, as stowaways, as survivors from the Titanic. When we docked in New York, we came down the gangplank of the Carpathia together, the Stanton family and Kaspar and I. Mr. Stanton had “a discussion,” as he called it, with the immigration authorities, and as a consequence of this, I was allowed to go and stay with them in their house in Greenwich Village. From the very start I was treated as if I were one of them. I was told I should never again call them Mr. and Mrs. Stanton, no more “sir” or “madam.” It would be Robert and Ann from now on. I found this very difficult at first—old habits die hard—but it became ever more natural as the weeks passed.
But then Lizziebeth fell sick, very sick. The terrible cold of that night on the ocean had reached her lungs, and she’d caught pneumonia. The doctor, a taciturn man who did little to relieve our anxiety, came often to begin with. Kaspar stayed with her all through her illness, scarcely ever leaving her bed. All the rest of us would take turns sitting with her. Then one morning I came in and she was sitting up in bed, with Kaspar on her lap, and smiling at me. She was her sunny self again. But for some time afterward she still had to stay in her room and rest, which she didn’t care for at all, not one bit.
Lizziebeth claimed that I it had to be Kaspar who had brought luck to all of us. Because of Kaspar, she said, they had survived the night in the boat, and because of Kaspar, she had recovered from her pneumonia.
I had a big argument with her about that. Much as I loved Kaspar, I never much believed in superstitions. You might as well say, I told her, that it was Kaspar who had brought us bad luck in the first place, the worst luck, that maybe it was because Kaspar was on board that the Titanic had sunk in the first place. “Nonsense,” Lizziebeth retorted. “It was an iceberg, not Kaspar, that sank the Titanic!” I think I discovered then, if I hadn’t before, that I could never have an argument with Lizziebeth and expect to win, that one way or another she would always have the last word.
During Lizziebeth’s convalescence, when she still wasn’t allowed out of the house, I got to know Robert and Ann a great deal better. It took a while for me to feel completely at ease with them when we were alone, and I think they sensed it. They took it upon themselves to give me a good time, to show me New York. We visited the Statue of Liberty and the zoo, all of which made Lizziebeth very jealous, and once we went collecting horseshoe crab shells on a beach on Long Island. Best of all, I learned to ride with Ann in Central Park. She took me riding almost every day. I hadn’t been on a horse before, so I had a lot to learn, but Ann was full of encouragement. “You ride so well, Johnny,” she told me once, “as if you’d been born in the saddle. I’m very proud of you.” The truth is that I loved being with them whatever we were doing. I felt as if I were a son for the first time. Having a mother and father of my own was better than I had ever imagined it could be. I was having the time of my life.
In the evenings I’d be up in Lizziebeth’s room, playing with Kaspar if he was awake and learning how to play chess with Lizziebeth when he wasn’t. I liked chess, although I never managed to win a single game against her. As for Kaspar, he had the run of the place, as I did, and very soon occupied the piano in the drawing room and made it his own. Everyone in the house—Lizziebeth’s governess, the servants too—all simply adored him. Like me, he couldn’t have been happier. Only one cloud hung over me: the knowledge that sooner or later all these golden days would have to end, and I’d have to leave. How I dreaded that day.
One evening some months afterward I was called down into the drawing room to find the family all lined up in front of the fireplace. Lizziebeth was in her dressing gown. Kaspar was sitting on the piano bench watching me, his tail swishing. Lizziebeth was looking at me conspiratorially; clearly she knew something I didn’t. Her mother and father, on the other hand, were looking very serious and stiff, rather as they had been when I’d first seen them that time back in their rooms at the Savoy Hotel. This is it, I thought; this is when they tell me my time’s up, that I have to go back to London, to my job as a bellboy in the Savoy.
Robert cleared his throat. He was going to make some kind of speech. I prepared myself for the worst. “Johnny, the three of us have come to a decision,” he began. “You know how much we have enjoyed having you with us here as our guest. Lizziebeth has told us of your circumstances back home in England, that you have no family as such to go back to….” He hesitated, and that was when Ann spoke up.
“I guess what we’re trying to say, Johnny, is that after all that has happened, and knowing you now as well as we do, and what a fine young man you are, we would very much like you to consider not returning to London, but instead staying here and making your home with us in New York. We’d be really proud to have you live here as one of the family—if you’d like it, that is. What do you say?”
I remember Kaspar and Lizziebeth both looking up at me, waiting for me to say something. It took me a while—not to make up my mind, I did that instantly—but to get over my surprise and find my voice.
“Oh, come on, Johnny Trott, say yes, please,” Lizziebeth cried.
“Okay,” I replied; it was a new expression I’d picked up in New York. I was so overwhelmed that it was all I could bring myself to say. But it was enough. Everyone hugged me then, and we all cried a little, except Kaspar, who had sprung up onto the piano and was busy washing himself.
So by the greatest of good fortune I acquired a new life, a new home, and a new country. The Stantons sent me back to school, which at first I didn’t care for. I thought I’d finished with that. I’d never been much good at books and reading and all that. But Robert read stories to us in the evenings, and through him I came to like books a lot better than I had. Gradually school became much easier and sometimes even enjoyable. The other students teased me a bit at first on account of my London Cockney accent, and so to start with, I felt a bit alone. But s
I was to have gone off to college, to William and Mary in Virginia, where Robert himself had once been a student. I never got there. In Europe the First World War was raging, and my old country was fighting for her life. So when in 1917 America sent troops over to fight in France, I went with them. And whom did I find marching alongside me up to the front? Little Mitch. We just picked up where we’d left off all those years before on the Titanic, on the Carpathia, and were best friends from then on.
While I was at the front, I’d get letters every week from Lizziebeth, who was away at boarding school by then. I’d look forward to every one of them because I could hear her voice in her writing, see her face as I was reading her words, and that cheered me more than I can say, when all around me in France I saw nothing but horror and death. And with her letters Lizziebeth would sometimes send me little sketches, and once a beautiful drawing of Kaspar sitting there, looking at me, willing me to come home, it seemed. I kept it with me in my jacket pocket, along with a photograph of Lizziebeth and me by the seashore in Maine. Lizziebeth always said afterward, when the war was over, that it must have been the drawing of Kaspar that had kept me safe and brought me home. I’m not sure she was right about that, but she insisted on having it framed and put up in pride of place in the front hall. When no one’s looking, I do reach out and touch it sometimes. So I suppose that I must be just a little superstitious. But I’m not admitting that to her.
Right after the war Mitch came to work with me in Robert’s publishing business; he had become quite a family friend by now. We worked together in the packing room in the basement; Robert said we had to learn the business from the bottom upward. So we did, literally. For me, books became a part of my life. I didn’t just pack them; I read them voraciously, and very soon I began to write stories of my own. And while I was writing, Lizziebeth would be up in her attic studio, drawing or painting or sculpting, animals mostly. On our holidays in Maine we wouldn’t climb trees anymore or go diving off the dock; she’d sit on the rocks by the seashore with her sketchbook out, and I’d scribble away nearby, and Kaspar would wander between us to remind us he was there. We would often talk of the old days in London, of Mr. Freddie and Skullface and the great roof rescue. And more than once she said what fun it would be to go back to visit. But I didn’t think she was serious.
Then just before her seventeenth birthday she announced to us that she was too old now to be given birthday presents. Instead she was going to give us something, provided, she added, that we didn’t mind giving it away. None of us knew quite what to make of this, until she took us out into the front hall. And there it was. Sitting on the table, below the famous sketch she had sent to me in France during the war, was a magnificent sculpture of Kaspar, his neck arched, his tail curled around him. “I carved it out of ash wood,” she said, “and then I painted it jet black. And do you know what I want? I want to take it back to London and give it to the hotel where we stayed, where I first saw Kaspar and Johnny. I want it to be there forever. It’s where Kaspar belongs. Kaspar could come too. He may be old, but he’s fit as a fiddle. Well?” she said, beaming brightly at us. “When do we go?”
We went six months later, and Little Mitch came with us too. We wanted him to come, to show him where it had all happened, where the whole story had begun, a story he was part of, that had changed all our lives forever. I won’t pretend that any of us much enjoyed the crossing of the Atlantic. There were too many terrible memories, but we kept them to ourselves and never once mentioned the Titanic. In fact we had hardly ever mentioned the Titanic in all these years. It was what bound us inseparably and what distanced us from others who had not been there, but we had rarely spoken of it among ourselves. All together again on the wide Atlantic, we faced our fears and took strength from one another’s silence.
Mr. Freddie was there to greet us at the front door of the Savoy, and when we went inside, the staff was waiting to welcome us. Kaspar yowled from his basket as they all clapped us in. So I took him out to show everyone. He loved all the attention, and to tell the truth, so did I. Mary O’Connell was still there, head housekeeper now, instead of Skullface. She gave Ann a huge bunch of red roses and cried on my shoulder as she hugged me. As for the bellboy who took us up in the elevator, he was a Cockney lad, just like me, wearing the same uniform, with his cap worn at the same jaunty angle. He showed us into Countess Kandinsky’s old rooms, with windows looking out over the Thames down toward the Houses of Parliament. Kaspar made himself at home at once, resuming his place on the piano and proceeding to wash himself vigorously. He was as happy as I’d ever seen him.
He slept on the window ledge in the sun all the rest of that day. He’d been doing a lot of sleeping lately.
We had an unveiling ceremony outside the American Bar the next morning, and much to Lizziebeth’s delight, everyone seemed to like the sculpture as much as they loved Kaspar himself. He was there at the ceremony but wandered off during the speeches. I watched him go, waving his tail as he went. It was the last I ever saw of him. He just disappeared. Everyone searched the hotel, over and over again, from the basement to the attic corridor. He was nowhere to be found.
It’s well enough known that old cats go off to die when they’re good and ready. I think, and Lizziebeth thinks, that’s what he must have done. We were sad; of course we were. He was the cat that had brought us together, had survived with us, and he was gone. But in a way, as I told Lizziebeth, trying to comfort her, he is not gone. He’s sitting there proudly outside the American Bar. You can go see him for yourself, if you like. He’s still there, looking very pleased with himself, and so he should be. After all, he is Prince Kaspar Kandinsky, Prince of Cats, a Muscovite, a Londoner, and a New Yorker, and as far as anyone knows, the only cat to survive the sinking of the Titanic.
And then…
…only a year or so after our visit to London, we received a letter from Mr. Freddie:
Dear Johnny and Lizziebeth,
I’m writing to tell you of a strange happening. Several guests at the hotel have reported sighting a black cat wandering the corridors late at night. I took no notice at first, but it has happened time and again, and I thought you ought to know. And just yesterday, a lady staying in your rooms, the Countess Kandinsky’s rooms, reported seeing a reflection in the mirror of a grand lady in an ostrich-feathered hat, carrying a black cat in her arms. When she was offered the opportunity to be moved to another room, she said she’d rather stay, that they were kindly ghosts, like good companions. Mary and the others send love. Come and see us again one day, before too long.
Yours, Freddie
Postscript
* * *
I’m a story detective. I hunt down clues because I need evidence to write my stories. So what was the evidence behind the writing of Kaspar?
A year ago I was asked to be writer in residence at the Savoy Hotel in London. This involved putting on some literary events and staying for three months at the Savoy. My wife, Clare, and I had a bed the size of Ireland, and breakfast every morning looking out over the Thames. Everyone in the hotel was very kind. We were treated like royalty, which was great!
Then one day, in the corridor next to the American Bar, I met Kaspar, the Savoy Cat. He was sitting there in a glass showcase: a sculpture of a huge black cat, very elegant, very superior. I made inquiries, as detectives do, and found out why he was there.
One day, almost a hundred years ago, thirteen men sat down to a dinner party at the Savoy. One of them scoffed loudly at the suggestion that thirteen might be an unlucky number, said it was so much tosh. Only a few weeks later, he was shot down in his office in Johannesburg, South Africa. Thereafter the Savoy decided that it
My first clue.
My second clue: I came down to breakfast one morning and was walking down the red-carpeted stairs into the River Restaurant when I looked up and had a sudden sense of déjà vu. The whole decor and atmosphere reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the restaurant on the Titanic. I knew then my story would be about a cat called Kaspar, who would live at the Savoy and become the only cat to survive the sinking of the Titanic.
But it was the people who lived and worked at the Savoy who gave me my last and my most vital clue. I discovered that they came from every corner of the globe. And I soon discovered also that their lives were very different from the lives of the guests they looked after. It would have been very much like this, I thought, in 1912, at the time the Titanic went down.
My evidence was complete. A little dreamtime, to make some sense of all the clues, and I could begin my story, about how Kaspar was brought to the Savoy by a very famous diva, an opera singer, a countess from Russia…. You know the rest by now, unless you’ve read this postscript first; I’ll be very cross with you if you have!
MICHAEL MORPURGO
About the Author
* * *
MICHAEL MORPURGO is one of Britain’s best-loved children’s book writers. He has written more than one hundred books and has won the Smarties Book Prize, the Whitbread Award, and the Blue Peter Book Award for PRIVATE PEACEFUL. Michael was writer-in-residence at the Savoy Hotel from January to April 2007, and previously he was Great Britain’s Children’s Laureate from 2003 to 2005, a role that took him across the country to inspire a love of reading in children. You can visit him online at www.michaelmorpurgo.com.