Behind the Writing of A Coat of Cats
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I wrote the first draft of A Coat of Cats at 11 pm one August night in 1994 when I was supposed to be marking student papers. I’ll do anything to avoid marking. It was the end of winter in Adelaide and still cold. I was teaching a course called Writing for Children for the first time and we had been discussing picture books. For no particular reason, I remembered an old woman who used to hang around Times Square in New York City. She had a stand set up with photographs of about forty cats tacked on it. A sign above said, “Help me to feed my cats.” She had a bowl out for donations. She was asking for people passing by to help her to feed her family. Forty is a pretty big family. I always wondered whether she really had that many cats and, if so, why so many?

On that August night in Adelaide, the old woman and her cats crept into my mind and began to prowl around. What is it about cats and older people? What would it be like to live alone for years, with no one but your pets for company, and then suddenly be asked to leave them behind, as if they had never meant anything to you at all?

These are the notes that I scribbled down first: “Old lady with cats and no home – cold – almost freezes. She falls asleep. They come and circle round her, lie on her, warm her.” So my first feelings about the story had to do with the cats returning her love and saving her life, as she has saved theirs. People do need some sort of family, someone or something to care about. At the end of my book the old woman settles for two kittens in her new home. The rest of the cats all find other homes to share with people. Even a dog winds up with a cat.