Expectation filled the air at Grasshopper Farm and everywhere there was a sense of impatience, just like the days before Christmas.
Prudence, the lady cat that usually lived in the cottage laundry had recently taken up residence in front of the open fireplace in Miss Diana’s writing room. She was due to have her first lot of kittens.
Miss Diana was particularly anxious; she constantly checked on Prudence and making sure that she was comfortable. It was a time of great excitement for everyone in the cottage and on the small farm that surrounded it. The new kittens were due any time.
Miss Diana was particularly anxious; she constantly checked on Prudence and making sure that she was comfortable. It was a time of great excitement for everyone in the cottage and on the small farm that surrounded it. The new kittens were due any time.
Inside her small home in the skirting board near the brick framework of the fireplace, Mother Mouse shook her head in disdain. To see Miss Diana fouster around after that pampered feline was really too much! As if having babies was an unusual event, why she had lost count of the amount baby mice she herself had produced, even though Mr. Mouse had been on travels for quite some time now.
‘ You’d think that no one had ever made a babe before!’ she sniffed whilst gazing out the arched doorway of her home. ‘Such a to- do about nothing,’ She lamented scornfully.
Then giving her mitts a last wipe on her gingham apron she went back to baking roly-poly for her children’s tea.
Miss Diana was finding it hard to concentrate, not that she was overly anxious, it was just that Prudence was very special to her and she was so excited. She kept glancing up from drafting her latest novel to make sure that Prudence was comfortable.
Diana Lambert was writing her third crime novel. She had been sharing her script with Prudence as it had progressed, and was up to a rather gruesome scene were Montana Blaze fearless lady detective, stumbles across a body of a young man with a knife plunged deeply in his side. Diana shook her head.
“ Prudence darling,” she said sorrowfully, “ I am so sorry but the next part of the story is a tad unpalatable and I feel that it would not be the best for you or your bundle, so I should probably just keep this part to myself. We wouldn’t want it to curdle your milk, after all.”
Prudence’s baleful expression changed and her green eyes flashed, their pupils a deep brown. Her ears seemed to prick up with indignation.
“ Curdle my milk! What rubbish!” she shifted her rather cumbersome bulk slightly as if to convey the strength of her feelings.
“You can’t possibly write your novel without my educated critique,” she meowed with an indignant toss of her feline head.
“At any rate it is so wrong to let me begin a novel and then to not let me into the actual crime.” Prudence explained, and began to stroke her whiskers with a white mitt.
Miss Diana smiled benevolently at her beloved cat and returned to the keyboard.
Tap! Tap! Tappity tap!
