by Peter Martin
For the next three months, several times per week we saw Perth at Elsted. She kept warm and we all felt as close to each other as we could in the circumstances. But secretly it was misery to us that she was not sharing our reincarnation in England, our growth into the pleasures of village life and the secrets of grove and green. From almost the start of our marriage, we had shared everything with her—except England. The grass had been wonderfully green all this winter, as it always is in England, but now it was growing again with the rising sap, smelling sweet and lush, while she languished in her cage. The snowdrops had come and gone, as had the crocuses and primroses. Now the daffodils were making their bold appearance and newborn lambs were frisking in the pastures. Much of the time during our visits with Perth she had her nose raised into the air, catching rousing scents of the earth that carried primeval messages. The breezes also brought sounds that she translated for herself. She knew what was going on out there in the coppices, by the trails up the Downs and along the streams that flowed down from them. Nature was stirring. At night there were less familiar sounds, haunting and appealing. But there was nothing for her to do but wait and dream the fantasies that were shaping in her mind.
Then one warm morning in March the triumphant day arrived. Perth had served her time and earned her freedom. Waking up trembling with excitement at six that Saturday morning, far too early since the kennel did not open until ten, we decided to drive there and wait by the entrance for three hours. We walked up and down in front of the entrance, waving to the kennel maids arriving for work who by then were all our good friends. They were almost as excited as we were.
“This is Perth’s big day!” one shouted as she strode in. “And yours, too!” she added. There was still more than an hour to go before they opened up, so we started up a foot-path that climbed the Downs. About three hundred feet up we emerged above the tree line, into the open, and were able to look down on the village and the kennel. The folds of the bluish hills stretched to the east and west. I decided to send Perth a message from above. In the old, familiar cry—the one I hurled at the Vermont wilderness thousands of times when I was looking for her—I shouted as loudly as I could in the direction of the kennel, “Here, Perth, we’re coming.” After a few shouts, back came her answer, a rapid explosion of barks and howls. “That’s right, dogge, coming, coming,” I yelled. She kept up her replies. I think she knew her time had come. With that we made our way down quickly and arrived at the kennel just as it was opening.
With a kennel maid we made straight for the kennel to let her out. “Perth, you’re out, you’re with us now, forever,” Cindy blurted out. Perth was calm, on her best behavior as if she were afraid they might put her back in the cage if she erupted too soon. In the office, we signed the papers, thanked the kennel maids who gathered around and were each in turn hugging Perth goodbye, and walked out with Perth most definitely not on a leash. She hopped into the car and we drove off.
About a mile up the lane, I stopped beside a large stretch of beautiful common land decked out with ferns, gorse, riots of springtime flowers and woodland. I opened the door. All I said was, “Time to run, Perth! Go!” We knew what she would do. She took a quick look at us and out she sprang. Almost before she touched the soft green turf her legs were pumping furiously. She sped off across the springy ground, heading nowhere in particular, just raging to stretch her legs and infuse her whole being with the physicality of the natural world. She was out of sight in seconds, but her yapping and howling as she tracked a paradise of new scents reached us for a long time afterward. Her sounds could be heard downwind from a couple of miles away. Over the next two hours as we sat in the car, we heard her giving the chase in the hills, in the deep reforestation of conifers, in the thick brown bracken surrounding a system of dew ponds in adjacent National Trust land—she was everywhere, it seemed. Then for long stretches we heard nothing. We waited.
“She’s free at last,” Cindy said, “the first time she has run loose in England. It must seem like a magic land to her.”
“Now life in England begins, for all of us.” I glanced at my watch. “If she ever comes back, that is.” Perth was seven years old, in the prime of her life. I felt I knew her as no other man could ever know his dog. She had to cleanse herself, get rid of six months of kennel smells. Whatever she was doing out there, it was her own instinctual form of communion with the spirits and genius of the landscape. It was her baptism. Our job was to trust her, and wait.
There was neither sight nor sound of her for hours. We had taken our own walks and napped on the grass and bracken. The afternoon was wearing on and we were anxious to get home for tea. It was getting dark. Still, we waited. At about five I looked out of the window of the car and suddenly there she was. I said nothing at first. I had never seen her looking so tired. She was caked in mud, scratched by brambles and thorns and covered by all manner of clinging vegetation. She could barely hold herself up but her eyes looked up to mine with a contentment we had not seen since Cazenovia days.
“Good dog,” was all Cindy said as I opened the door and Perth jumped wearily onto her lap. We drove off through the green twilight to Bury.
14
IT WAS NOT LONG BEFORE Bury villagers noticed that something had been added to the village, and they were not sure they liked it. As in Cazenovia, we could not bring ourselves to tie Perth up for any reason, at any time. We were nervous that this might damage our new friendships, but we felt we had no choice. It would be a breach of trust with Perth to put her on a rope. It would break the vow we swore to each other the day we bought her. More than that, though, we would be forcing her to be a different kind of dog. And what kind of reward would this be for her after six months behind bars? Part of the joy of moving to England was the thought of her running all over it. There we were in Bury surrounded by fields, hedgerows and hills teeming with all sorts of wildlife. She must be allowed to know it. But most of the villagers had dogs that they strictly controlled. One hardly ever saw a dog running loose. The only times, in fact, one saw dogs was when their owners walked them in the lanes and footpaths. We would have to see what happened.
On the Sunday morning after we brought Perth home, we drove up Bignor Hill, at the top of the chalky Downs, about seven hundred feet up. The lane takes you through several tiny villages and hamlets, turns left in Bignor at the Roman villa, and then continues steeply up a graveled track. As we climbed, Perth stretched her neck out of the window, straining to allow scents and other messages from the woods to pass through her twitching nostrils. She began to breathe heavily, almost frantically. I was reminded of the fateful day we blindfolded her on our way up that Vermont mountain to Agnes Roy Camp. This was a brighter, happier day. We were all together and we were going to stay that way. Her eyes were flashing and wide open. It was all we could do to keep her from jumping out.
Halfway up we let her out, and immediately she disappeared into the tangle of thicket. Not long afterward the silence was broken by a pounding of hoofs and Perth’s howls. Suddenly a deer shot out across the lane, followed by a rabbit a few yards behind and then Perth chasing both of them. They vanished just as quickly. Rather than wait for her we went on to the top where we parked and walked for several miles on a section of the Roman road from Chichester to London. Perth was nowhere in sight when we got back to the car, so we made our way down slowly, yelling for her as we usually did. Halfway down, out she leapt across the lane in front of us, followed by presumably the same rabbit and then presumably the same deer chasing them.
She rejoined us a few minutes later at the bottom. “What was all that about, you hound?” I asked her. She looked at me as if I should have known. It was a mystery we never solved, but it seemed an appropriately eccentric and symbolic start to her life in England. Who knew what went on out of our sight, in the tangled hideaways of those hills where for years to come she would scout and chase? We started hundreds of walks with her that we never finished together. She had a life of her own up there. She cou
ld easily run a hundred miles over a weekend. As far as we knew, she never caught a rabbit or harmed any other animal. Did she find mysterious, magical places where animals meet each other on equal terms, not hunting or hiding from each other? Was it these places that swallowed her up for hours on end? One thing was clear: Perth had found her Garden of Eden. Life could get no better than this.
As it turned out, the villagers did not worry about Perth as much as we thought they would. She trotted friskily into their gardens, but she never fouled them up or did any damage. Occasionally she howled her away across them after a rabbit, but gardeners are happy to have anything chase rabbits out of their gardens, or even kill them. Also, most of the time she preferred the open landscape of field and pasture. She could be gone a whole day. Many days she was content simply to stay in our garden and sun herself, stretched out on the grass. So she did not become infamous in Bury. People came to accept her as a fact of life, like one of the local village characters, of which Bury had many back then.
This is not to say there was not the occasional blow-up. One of the local young men, David Bream, the son of a carpenter who had lived his whole life in the village as his ancestors had for generations, and one of the local pub’s lager louts who was drunk as often as not, one day happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe it was Perth who was in the wrong place. There was something about him, his hot temper perhaps, that infuriated her. If she saw him in the lane she would take on the character of a wild dog and go at him with a frightening howl, the hair on her back standing on end. She would always stop short, sliding to a halt about five feet from him, but not before she had sobered him up a good deal and taken a few years off his life. Here was a bad seed, she must have felt. Nobody else ever provoked her this way. He did not deserve her hostility, but she thought he did.
Normally he swore at her in his native Sussex brogue and stumbled on. One summer morning, however, when I was in the front garden weeding while Perth was basking in the sunshine with her eyes half shut, he came sullenly by our front gate. He was perfectly sober and in no mood for pleasantries. He did not see us, but Perth saw him. She exploded, howling, bristling and stretching her neck as she lunged toward him. My heart missed a few beats. There was no time to call her back, not that it would have done any good. She pulled up short as usual but kept up her furious racket.
This time he had had enough. He grabbed a rock and with a torrent of foul language heaved it at her. He missed and only made her more furious.
“You mongrel bitch, shut your bloody mouth or I’ll take your head off.” He grabbed two more rocks as Perth danced around him tauntingly He threw them both and missed again. This gave me time finally to act. I loudly called Perth off and she retreated.
“You bad dog!” I yelled at her. “Go back in the garden and I’ll deal with you later.”
But I had seen enough to anger me. I had never seen anyone throw something at Perth. It was like someone throwing a rock at me. I stormed up to him. Staring into his face, I boomed, “You must be crazy, man. You could’ve killed her. If I were you, I’d think twice before you throw anything at my dog again!”
He looked at me threateningly. It was not until this moment that I noticed he was very big. The Black Dog and Duck pub, I later found out, used him as a bouncer, whose job it was to throw out anybody who had drunk too much and was a disturbance. His neck was massive, and though I was taller, his limbs were a lot thicker than mine and more muscular. I sensed danger and backed off. He glowered at me for a few seconds, then turned and walked down the lane.
A few seconds later he turned on his heels and shouted, “You ought to keep that bloody dog on a lead,” muttering a few more things I could not hear as he shook his fist at me.
“Perth, you can’t do that sort of thing here,” I said to her harshly back in the garden, “not if you want to be happy and free. Get hold of yourself and leave him alone.”
She looked at me, cowering, afraid I was going to strike her. She may never have heard me so angry at her before. She understood and never bothered David Bream again. The experience was an important moment in her life. After that, on the lanes and out among the public, as far as I know she never threatened anyone again. Nobody ever complained. I put it down to her survival instinct. She knew when to pull back from danger. Like that line on the road in Cazenovia that I had taught her not to cross for her own protection, this fracas on our quiet lane in Bury taught her not to step over into danger. Unless, that is, she felt enclosed or restricted. If that happened, to our cost we would discover again that she was unpredictable.
15
DAVID BREAM WAS NOT, IN FACT, a bad seed, but he was something of a black sheep in an ancient Bury family that within memory had always existed on the frayed edges of the community. All villages have had such marginal characters, the ones the villagers gossip over and like to malign, or exclude from the sociability of the village geography of cottages, lanes, greens, pubs and shops. There is something medieval in the identification of such people as troublemakers, scapegoats, the rotten apples in the barrel of half-conscious community superstitions. In the Bury village I have known they have never been deliberately shut out, but they remain on the edges. And Perth’s radar somehow picked up on the grudge against David Bream’s ancient lineage.
The David Breams of English villages are regrettably an endangered species. They are victims of the forces of prosperity, mobility and overpopulation. As people with money from towns and cities have bought their little pieces of rural bliss in villages, gobbling up and renovating ancient cottage after cottage, too often with little idea of living in the village except on weekends during the summer, middle-class dullness has replaced the memories and traditions of the old, native families who, with taxes and other costs, cannot afford to continue to live in their family homes. They wind up literally on the fringes of the village, in soulless modern houses subsidized by the local government, and other dwellings, replaced by commuters and the like who have not a clue about the village’s past. Nor do many of the newcomers care a fig about several hundred years of village history. Coming from the States, it was precisely the ancient character of Bury, and of countless other villages like it, that tugged at our imagination so powerfully. It was a shock for us to discover that there were many people who wanted pieces of Bury chiefly as a recreational escape from London, or as an investment, or for a suburban-type existence. They can have their cocktail parties, neglect the traditional village shop by driving to the nearest supermarket for the week’s groceries and respectably keep the parish church going, but many seem blithely oblivious to the rich traditions that resonate throughout lane, cottage, field and river.
Perth, if you think about it, was tuned in to that resonating past in Bury more than most. She knew nothing of modern affluence. All she cared about was the landscape embracing the village as it had existed for generations. She knew the layout of the village better than anyone except the disappearing old-timers. From her travels in and around the village she felt the antique rhythms of the place, the effects of the seasons on the land, the movements of animals, the sounds of everything. She could even detect in David Bream a perturbed spirit from the past, dislocated and virtually uprooted in the present.
No wonder it is, then, that such native villagers often walked around with chips on their shoulders. They were losing their world. You could find them in the evening sequestered at the Black Dog and Duck, whiling away the hours in chatter. I grew to appreciate David over the years, and he actually came to be fond of Perth.
There were other natives who were still in the village when we began our lives there but who have since died or moved. When the writer John Galsworthy carried on a squire’s existence in Bury in the 1920s, writing his famous books on the top floor of a large rambling country house next to the village shop, he assembled a retinue of servants, gardeners and chauffeurs, most of whose families had lived in the village for generations. Galsworthy died forty years before we arrive
d in Bury, but his servants were still there, willing to reminisce.
Then there were the old village cricketers, like Frank Barnett, for decades the village postman who made his deliveries by bicycle, logging many miles over the hilly countryside. He was a great batsman and could have played for the county had he had the money. He was one of those grouchy locals who never fitted in, even into the old ways that have now vanished. We liked him, though, and he loved Perth. He never minded her sniffing around his large vegetable patch. He was eighty-five when we first met him. His wife was seriously ill and they were childless. He dwelled in one of the loveliest of the old flint, thatched cottages across the lane from the parish church, seven hundred years old in fact, but he lived in poverty, subsisting mostly on the huge number of potatoes, leeks and carrots he grew every summer.
When his wife died several months after we got to know him, the lawyers informed him that over the last fifty years she had secretly salted away in the local bank huge sums of money. He was suddenly rich. One of the first things he did with his newfound wealth was take a holiday in Blackpool. He also bought a refrigerator and strip lighting for his kitchen. Otherwise, his money disappeared among his nieces and nephews.