How do they do it? Cats, I mean. The one creature in the world more selfish and self-centred than an author or a child, yet both adore them. I can see the point of dogs, who give you unstinting adoration, total loyalty and companionship. But cats? Cats?

Be that as it may, here are two more little masterpieces about felines. Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler are such an irresistible combination that when yet another picture book by them comes out I think, “Surely, they can’t have done it again?”

But they have. Tabby McTat is a busker’s cat, yowling along with old Fred. One day he meets a “gorgeously glossy and green-eyed cat” called Socks, falls in love and doesn’t notice that poor Fred has been robbed and injured. (Typical!) When Fred returns home, Tabby has vanished — into a safe, cosy world of fatherhood, taken in by Socks’s owners — a nice pair of kind old ladies. Happily downholstering the furniture, eating the Sunday roast as it cools, hiding the car keys and squashing newspapers, he has them firmly under his paw in no time.

Tabby, however, has one of those loving, loyal hearts that cat-lovers insist their pets possess (despite all evidence to the contrary). He feels guilty about his old busker, so, after Socks has safely given birth to their three kittens, he sets off to find him.

As always with Donaldson there is a little twist in the tale, told in irrepressible, irresistible rhyming couplets. Scheffler’s illustrations are even more colourful and charming than ever before, with the kind of detail and expressiveness that makes them lasting memories of buoyant optimism and joy. Absolutely purr-fect stuff.

But not, really, about cats as I know them. Now Philippa Pearce, of Tom’s Midnight Garden fame, knew all about dogs (in A Dog So Small), but she was also wise to cats. Mrs Cockle’s Cat returns to us out of the second golden age of children’s fiction (the Sixties), with an introduction by Frank Cottrell Boyce, and it is a gem from start to finish.

Mrs Cockle, a balloon seller, loves her cat, Peter, but her cat loves only fish. When times are hard and the fish supply goes, so does the cat. Poor Mrs Cockle is so miserable that she gets thinner and thinner and then — this is the leap of imagination that makes Pearce a poet as well as a great storyteller — she becomes so light that her balloons lift her up above the London clouds. “Beneath the clouds, London must be cold and wet and windy, but here the weather was perfect ... She practised little runs and jumps that, without any effort, carried her for yards at a time.

“She looked round and admired the changing cloud-scenery — the clouds that moved lazily and puffed themselves up into twisted, toppling mountains, or swirled away to leave mysterious caverns into which she peered, or even drew away altogether to leave gulfs and abysses.”

“This is a brilliant piece of writing,” Boyce observes, and it is not just as an exercise in imagination but also in conveying how depression can change to joy.

Many readers of this column are, I know, grandparents looking for books to read to grandchildren, yet few children’s books seem to take account of the important role that elderly people can play in the love of reading. This is one of the very best. It has the same old-fashioned, long-lasting magic as Mary Poppins; and it’s also absolutely accurate about the real nature of cats.

Tabby McTat (4+) by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler (Alison Green, £10.99; Buy this book)

Mrs Cockle’s Cat (5+) by Philippa Pearce (Jane Nissen, £6.99; Buy this book)

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