A clowder of cats pussy-footed it in single file from an alleyway off Scotland Road, and the locals were naturally bemused by the sight.
Thickset Sam, the local butcher’s dog, who was all bark and no bite, snarled and howled at the surreal spectacle, but the felines didn’t even react; they just continued on their way northwards, each creature evidently gripped with hard determination as if some Pied Piper had bewitched them.
There were similar reports of migrant cats from Bootle, and only a few of those who witnessed the bizarre mass departure suspected that an evacuation was in progress because the felines had sensed an approaching calamity.
A Mrs Arthur told me how she had been seven years of age in 1941, and how she had started crying as she watched her own cat, Tiddlywink, join the stream of migrating moggies as they filed up the entries of Hopwood Street.
The girl sobbed for Tiddlywink to come back as her mother laughed at the funny scene.
There were sightings of the cat convoy along the Leeds Liverpool Canal as the legion of felines headed for the green suburbs, far away from the smoky purlieus of Scotland Road.
Frank Collins, who was a 12-year-old in 1941, clearly recalls seeing his tortoiseshell cat, Fred, as well as his neighbour’s cat, Snowy, walking with a dozen other cats in a column as they went northwards up Bootle’s Stuart Road, passing the Breeze Hill Reservoir.
“Kids shouted at them and some even threw stones at the cats, but the cats just hurried along in a straight row,” Frank remembers. “It was very odd.”
Frank is in his early 80s now, but he can recall how, after the infamous May Blitz, Fred and Snowy returned – to a Bootle bombed almost beyond recognition.
The same thing is said to have happened with the cats of Scotland Road – they returned after the north end of Liverpool had been decimated by the Luftwaffe.
Sam, the aforementioned butcher’s dog, was injured in the Blitz, but was treated by the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals and made a full recovery.
Tom Slemen on the Liverpool May Blitz cat exodus along Scotland Road.....
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