Kathy Leigh never knew her mother. Raised by her reserved father and loving aunt in 1950s' Blackpool, she has had a happy childhood. It is a time of glamour and excitement as families and individuals struggle to mend the bonds broken by the recent war. But then Kathy uncovers the shocking secret which threatens to blow the family apart and could take her far away from Blackpool and from everything she has ever known, all the way to America - if she is willing to take the chance.

It was the pathetic mews of a hungry mother cat, scrounging in a dumpster to feed her kittens that first caught Bob and Kathy Rude's attention. They found the hungry cat and several more hungry felines while helping out at the family restaurant one summer. The chance meeting between the hungry strays and two government computer programmers led to the creation of Rude Ranch Animal Rescue, one of the United States' hardest working No-Kill Animal Sanctuaries. Read on to meet these original Rude Cats and find what can go right and wrong when you try to help a few stray animals and inadvertently start an animal sanctuary.