Pyewacket – Rosemary Weir Free Audiobook

Written by Rosemary Weir
Read by Margret Pender
Format: MP3
Bitrate: Variable
Unabridged

The seven cats of Pig’s Lane make a truce with the rats and mice while they try to drive out their humans.

A classic of Children’s Literature, deserving of a great deal more recognition.

This recording was made originally by Mrs. Margret Pender, during her tenure as a teacher at the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind (RVIB) in Melbourne, Australia, in 1973. Despite the fact that it was recorded on a Sony desktop recorder with some motor noise, read in an empty classroom (not an ideal acoustic environment), and subject at times to a little background noise from adjacent rooms, it is surprisingly easy to which to listen. Also, this is, in my opinion, a superb performance, worthy of a professional reader. The characters are brought to life with care, and her enjoyment in the book is very clear. Had the recorder and environment been better, this easily could have been a professional narration.

Notes:
This recording was recovered from a cassette copy I made in the late ’70s. The only post-processing applied was azimuth and phase correction, courtesy of iZotope RC3 Advanced. Noise reduction was not performed; the result, when attempted, was unlistenable, even with iZotope’s algorithms, which by far are the best I’ve encountered. MP3 encoding was achieved using LAME 64bits version 3.99.5 (http://lame.sf.net): a tremendously better encoder than any Fraunhofer variant, using the old VBR algorithm (still better in my opinion); VBR quality 5; encoder quality 0 (highest).

Minor problems:

There appears to be something very slightly amiss with the beginning of chapter two (missing sentence?). Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of the book from which to reference, but something appears not quite right after the last sentence mentioning the spying rat. Also, Chapter eight is announced incorrectly as Chapter Six, a few occurrences of `cat’ and `rat’ get tangled here and there, and poor old Snowie suffers a momentary gender-change at one point. 😀 But they are very minor quibbles otherwise in a superb reading. Lastly: for some reason kwown best to my younger self, I managed to lose the opening announcement, meaning my copy starts with `Chapter One’. Why I did this is beyond comprehension, as usually I was very careful, even as a child, to ensure things were copied as faithfully as possible.

Sequel:

Recently, I learned that Rosemary Weir had written a sequel: _Pyewacket and Son_, something of which I wish I’d been aware at the time. Unfortunately, so far as I can discover, no audiobook of this exists. A pity.