A Shirley Valentine affair ... with a cat

THE GREAT SICILIAN CAT RESCUE by Jennifer Pulling (John Blake £8.99)

FOR anyone who loves cats, a holiday in the Mediterranean can be a mixed blessing. Sunshine, beautiful scenery and delicious food and wine add up to an enticing prospect. However, it is difficult to surrender to the dolce vita when every street corner swarms with painfully thin, feral cats.

Resourceful, beguiling, always hungry and often unhealthy, these cats belong to no one and scavenge a living as best they can. They tug at the heartstrings of animal-loving British tourists, who wish they could do more to help.

But when Jennifer Pulling found a badly injured cat in a Sicilian street, she decided wishing wasn’t enough. A Brighton-based journalist and writer, Jennifer first visited the island in her 20s when she fell in love with a Sicilian man.

Her romance was soon over, but her passion for the island proved more enduring and, in 2002, she decided to make a six-week visit to Sicily.

Soon after her arrival, she discovered a small black-and-white cat with a shattered leg and put her writing plans on hold while she nursed Lizzie — as she named her — back to health.

When the injury was healed, she returned Lizzie to the street where she had found her. It was her first experience of dealing with a feral cat — but not her last.

As Jennifer released Lizzie from her basket, a woman introduced herself. Her name was Antonella and she was a gattara — one of a small network of kindly animal lovers who do their best to feed and nurture Sicily’s colonies of feral cats and protect them from the cruelty of less well-inclined humans, who view the felines as vermin and attempt to c ontrol t hei r numbers with poison.

Jennifer began to raise money to start her charity, Catsnip, a neutering and healthcare programme.

By the spring of 2003, she was ready to start work. Catsnip’s fame grew steadily and Jennifer began to receive i ncreasing numbers of emails from British tourists who were shocked by the animal suffering they saw and longed to help.

Occasionally, she felt exasperated by their wellmeaning gestures, wondering: ‘Was it really wise to take in a small feline when you knew you had to leave in a few days?’

But, sometimes, visitors’ concern turned into far more than a gesture. In July 2014, English tourists Sadie and Eddie were on holiday when a tabby kitten stumbled into their apartment. She was cheerful, affectionate and blind — the couple decided they couldn’t abandon her.

The logistics and expense of bringing her to the UK were immense, but the outcome — a contented cat with a loving home — was beyond price.

Jennifer’s encounter with Lizzie changed the course of her life.

Instead of the Sicilian book she originally planned, her memoir is an account of wrestling with the authorities, luring reluctant felines into humane traps and production-line neutering in makeshift operating theatres.

But the seduction of Sicily is too strong to ignore, and her book is richly embellished with historical detail and sensuous descriptions of delicious food and picturesque landscapes.

Thanks to Lizzie, the feral cats of Sicily have one very determined Englishwoman and her formidable network of gattare on their side.