Paws and Whiskers Read online

  ‘Think that’s funny, do ya?’ I say and she keeps pretending like she’s not smiling but she is. She turns away and picks up her bag.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, taking charge of things again. ‘We slept way too long. We gotta go.’

  BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE

  by Kate DiCamillo

  This is a lovely book, very moving and delicately moral. Opal and her dog Winn-Dixie make friends with all sorts of extraordinary and interesting characters, but my favourite is Miss Franny Block, who’s in charge of the Herman W. Block Memorial Library. When she was a little girl her father, who was very rich, said she could have anything she wanted for her birthday. Anything at all.

  What would you ask for? Miss Franny loves to read so she asks for a small library. She says, ‘I wanted a little house full of nothing but books and I wanted to share them, too. And I got my wish. My father built me this house, the very one we are sitting in now. And at a very young age I became a librarian.’

  I think that’s what I’d have wished for too. Miss Franny is ‘a very small, very old woman with short grey hair’ – and so am I now. And I have my own library of around fifteen thousand books, lovingly collected over many years.

  BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE

  My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice and two tomatoes, and I came back with a dog.

  This is what happened: I walked into the produce section of the Winn-Dixie grocery store to pick out my two tomatoes and I almost bumped right into the store manager. He was standing there all red-faced, screaming and waving his arms around.

  ‘Who let a dog in here?’ he kept on shouting. ‘Who let a dirty dog in here?’

  At first, I didn’t see a dog. There were just a lot of vegetables rolling around on the floor, tomatoes and onions and green peppers. And there was what seemed like a whole army of Winn-Dixie employees running around waving their arms just the same way the store manager was waving his.

  And then the dog came running around the corner. He was a big dog. And ugly. And he looked like he was having a real good time. His tongue was hanging out and he was wagging his tail. He skidded to a stop and smiled right at me. I had never before in my life seen a dog smile, but that is what he did. He pulled back his lips and showed me all his teeth. Then he wagged his tail so hard that he knocked some oranges off a display and they went rolling everywhere, mixing in with the tomatoes and onions and green peppers.

  The manager screamed, ‘Somebody grab that dog!’

  The dog went running over to the manager, wagging his tail and smiling. He stood up on his hind legs. You could tell that all he wanted to do was get face to face with the manager and thank him for the good time he was having in the produce department, but somehow he ended up knocking the manager over. And the manager must have been having a bad day because, lying there on the floor, right in front of everybody, he started to cry. The dog leaned over him, real concerned, and licked his face.

  ‘Please,’ said the manager, ‘somebody call the pound.’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ I hollered. ‘That’s my dog. Don’t call the pound.’

  All the Winn-Dixie employees turned around and looked at me, and I knew I had done something big. And maybe stupid, too. But I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t let that dog go to the pound.

  ‘Here, boy,’ I said.

  The dog stopped licking the manager’s face and put his ears up in the air and looked at me, like he was trying to remember where he knew me from.

  ‘Here, boy,’ I said again. And then I figured that the dog was probably just like everybody else in the world, that he would want to get called by a name, only I didn’t know what his name was, so I just said the first thing that came into my head. I said, ‘Here, Winn-Dixie.’

  And that dog came trotting over to me just like he had been doing it his whole life.

  The manager sat up and gave me a hard stare, like maybe I was making fun of him.

  ‘It’s his name,’ I said. ‘Honest.’

  The manager said, ‘Don’t you know not to bring a dog into a grocery store?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I told him. ‘He got in by mistake. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘Come on, Winn-Dixie,’ I said to the dog.

  I started walking and he followed along behind me as I went out of the produce department and down the cereal aisle and past all the cashiers and out the door.

  Once we were safe outside, I checked him over real careful and he didn’t look that good. He was big, but skinny; you could see his ribs. And there were bald patches all over him, places where he didn’t have any fur at all. Mostly, he looked like a big piece of old brown carpet that had been left out in the rain.

  ‘You’re a mess,’ I told him. ‘I bet you don’t belong to anybody.’

  He smiled at me. He did that thing again, where he pulled back his lips and showed me his teeth. He smiled so big that it made him sneeze. It was like he was saying, ‘I know I’m a mess. Isn’t it funny?’

  It’s hard not to immediately fall in love with a dog who has a good sense of humour.

  ‘Come on,’ I told him. ‘Let’s see what the preacher has to say about you.’

  And the two of us, me and Winn-Dixie, started walking home.

  THE WEREPUPPY

  by Jacqueline Wilson

  I wrote The Werepuppy over twenty years ago – one of my few books where the main character is a boy. Micky isn’t a very boyish boy. He’s very quiet and gentle, and loves drawing and colouring and making up his own Magic Land. He’s very wary of three things: his annoying sisters, horror films about werewolves, and dogs. He’s become so scared of dogs that his mum decides to get him a puppy. Micky is appalled at the idea – but he’s in for a surprise!

  I decided to have fun when I described the dogs at the dog shelter, basing them on real animals. I mentioned a Scottie called Jeannie – she belonged to a teacher friend of mine called Holly. I also wrote very fondly about a cream Labrador called Tumble. She belonged to my dear friend Peter. (She’d had a sister called Rough, though she’d always lived with someone else.)

  Peter and Tumble were inseparable. Tumble lolloped into the back of Peter’s car and went with him to work. She trotted along to the pub with Peter every evening and was allowed her own packet of crisps for supper. She could bite them open and wolf the contents down in less than a minute. It’s probably not the most sensible thing to feed your dog, but Tumble lived until she was an ancient old lady, serene and good natured till the end.

  Peter himself died three years ago, and I like to think that in some other world they are both still ambling down to the pub for whatever the afterlife sees fit to serve – a pint of nectar and a packet of ambrosia-flavoured crisps?

  THE WEREPUPPY

  ‘Please, Mum,’ Micky begged. ‘I can’t go in there!’

  Mum wouldn’t listen. She made Micky get out of the car.

  She knocked on the front door of the dogs’ home. The howling increased, and then there was a lot of barking too. Micky clung to Mum’s arm, and even Marigold took a step backwards. The door opened and a young freckled woman in jeans stood there smiling, surrounded by two barking Labradors, the colour of clotted cream, and a small black Scottie who kept diving through the Labradors’ legs.

  ‘Quiet, you silly dogs,’ the woman shouted. She saw Micky shrinking away and said quickly, ‘It’s OK, they’re all very friendly. They won’t bite. There’s no need to be frightened of them.’

  ‘I’m not frightened,’ said Marigold, squatting down to pet the Scottie, while the two Labradors sniffed and nuzzled. ‘Aren’t they lovely? What are their names? Shall we have the little Scottie dog, Mum? Although I like the big creamy dogs too. Oh look, this one’s smiling at me.’

  ‘That’s Tumble. And that’s her brother Rough.’

  ‘Oh great. We’re a sister and brother and we can have a sister dog and brother dog.’

  ‘No,