What children’s stories tell us about our values

The Mousehole Cat and a life of love and courage

I think a lot about my sacred values. I will write more about what I mean by this in a future post, but for now you can think of them as deep, orientating values, the things we want to define our lives. It isn’t always easy to know what is sacred to us in this sense, so I find it helps to pay attention to the stories that move me. The themes that draw us are a clue, because stories are such a key way we make and remake ourselves.

The philosopher Alastair Macintyre believed that it is only in becoming more aware of the narratives which shape us, and which we tell in our turn, that we can both understand ourselves and know how to act. We are, in his phrase, a “storied self”.

The kind of stories we are drawn to changes over a life time, but perhaps the truest hint of our deep values comes in the stories we loved as a child.

A few years ago, I was on holiday with a group, and over dinner I asked them about their favourite children’s stories. I am terrible at small talk. I get bored and distracted when we stay on people’s jobs and what they got up to at the weekend, so I have a stock of questions like these which accelerate actual human connection. Because none of them had heard of my favourite, I started retelling the story of The Mousehole Cat by Antonia Barber, a gloriously illustrated book set in a small Cornish fishing village.

The port of this village is so small that the gap in the sea walls looks like a mousehole, and from this the community takes its name. The central characters are retired fisherman Old Tom and his cat Mowzer, who live happily alone together after their respective offspring have left. They have a contented life by the warm range, feasting on stargazy pie and morgy broth, grilled fairmaids and fried launces and other fish based delicacies nobody has now heard of. Then “one terrible winter” the Great Storm Cat, a violent hurricane, blows up and disturbs their ordered, comfortable rhythms. It prowls the coast of Cornwall for weeks, keeping all the fishing boats in the little port. The village, reliant on their catch, begins to go hungry. Old Tom turns to his cat:

‘Mowzer, my handsome, it will soon be Christmas, and no man can stand by at Christmas and see the children starve. Someone must go fishing come what may, and I think it must be me.” It can’t be the young parents, he says, for their families need them, but his children are gone and his parents are dead, and only Mowzer would mourn him.

Mowzer doesn’t want to mourn him, she wants to go with him. And so the old man and his faithful cat set out into the storm, risking their lives to bring back food for their community. The Storm Cat, painted in glorious blues and greens, could have been portrayed as a two dimensional enemy to be defeated. Instead: 

“As she listened to his wailing, Mowzer felt a sudden strange sadness for him. How lonely he must be, she thought, endlessly hunting the men-mice in the deeps of darkness, and never returning to the rosy glow of a red-hot range. And her kind heart was moved to comfort him.” 

And so Mowzer sings her mournful cat song, and the Storm Cat becomes calm enough to allow them to snatch a haul of fish and head back through the high waves towards the tiny port.

“As they came in sight of home, a strange sight met their eyes. The whole village of Mousehole was shining with light and lanterns gleamed along both arms of the harbour.” When the people had woken at dawn and found no boat where Old Tom’s should be, “they knew he had gone out to find fish for them, or to perish on the deep water”.

As the boat edges into the safety of the Mousehole gap “a sudden breeze caught them, a tiny, playful cats paw, like a gesture of farewell.” Tom and Mowzer make it home, and the whole community feasts on “half a hundred stargazy pies”. 

The book ends in suitably mythic style, recounting how every year still folk come to Mousehole at Christmas, to see the community “lit up with a thousand lights, shining their message of hope and a safe haven to all those who pass in peril of the sea.”

As I told the story, I started crying in front of a group of recent acquaintances. I always cry when I read it. I am tearing up now, ridiculously, typing out these quotes. We are story telling, story-made creatures, and so often it is stories that bore-hole straight to the deeper things. Community, celebration, loving our enemies rather than treating them with contempt, being willing to risk our lives for our friends. A life that means something. On one level it is a book about a man and a cat going fishing, and on another it is a story about everything that I want my life to be marked by. 

It turns out (and I have no idea how unusual this is, as an aim) that I want to develop a strong ‘die for my friends’ instinct. It’s (again) partly ego, a tendency to show off. I want to be Old Tom, the guy from Armageddon who stays on the asteroid to save the planet, Harry Potter who walks into death to protect those he loves. I want to be brave enough not to save my own skin, for the sake of others, if my skin is required of me. I want, it turns out, to be a bit like Jesus, the lead in the deep mythic uber-narrative of self-sacrifice, and I am currently nothing of the sort. This story tells me that one of my values, at least aspirationally, is courage on behalf of others, and I am now paying more attention to how I develop that.

I wonder what children’s stories you loved, still love now? What was the one you asked to be read to you repeatedly, or you had a dog eared copy of you left on the shelf when you moved out? What might they be telling you about the kind of narrative world you long to live inside, the values you aspire to embody? Please do share in the comments or write to me directly. I’m always looking for recommendations, for myself as much as my kids, of meaningful stories of love and courage (and humour, and fallibility - Victorian morality tales hold no interest). I know how strongly the stories we hear and tell shape us. This is the start of an occasional series about children’s stories and the values they embody - who knows, yours may show up in it!

You can see The Mousehole Cat book online here, to get a sense of how beautiful it is, but I’d urge you to buy a copy if you can to support the creators. I give one to everyone who has a baby, in the hope that the tiny storied self, then too little to hold a book, will over time be shaped by this tale of love and courage.

What else I’m up to

• I interviewed shadow Labour minister Wes Streeting for the of the podcast I host, The Sacred, and it was covered in The Times and The Spectator. I was especially pleased with the last piece for acknowledging that it is possible to discuss even something as neuralgic and potentially painful as the relationship between sexuality and religion without throwing rocks at the people we disagree with.

Photo: Holly Auchincloss/Shutterstock