A Dog Called Perth

by Peter Martin

  It seems Frank Barnett did not entirely trust his wife, because for decades he himself had tucked away in his garden shed hundreds of gold sovereigns of mint condition in little leather pouches. Many of them dated from the late nineteenth century. When Cindy, Perth and I were sitting with him in his dingy kitchen one day after his wife’s death, he pulled out one of these pouches and gave a sovereign to each of us. We still have Perth’s. It is a talisman.

  He stroked Perth and said, “That’ll remember me to ye. The wife could ne’er abide dogs. Never had ‘un. Don’t ye spend it all sudden-like,” he told her. She leaned against his leg affectionately.

  He died the following year and was buried beside a towering yew tree in the churchyard across the lane, but not before I interviewed him about Bury history and got it all on tape. In the background you can hear Perth howling loudly at something while Frank speaks in his gravelly, hollowish, almost inaudible tones, so that on the tape she seems to be transfigured into an ageless Bury phantom merged with Frank’s chronicle, a disembodied howl from the past.

  Two or three of those old Bury families struggle on in Bury today but nobody pays them much attention. They are part of the village’s threatened collective memory. On a brighter note, however, the village, confronted with the rapidly receding traces of its history, is now at the eleventh hour stepping up to preserve whatever light on the past it can before it vanishes forever.

  16

  IMPERCEPTIBLY, CINDY AND I grew toward the decision to spend the rest of our lives in England. She luxuriated in the glow of English rural pastimes and village life, and Perth had claimed her own widening territory as a type of divine right. Perth’s world now ranged from the village to include miles along the top of the Downs, innumerable commons scattered about in the hilly ground at the feet of the Downs and several farms and villages. She went wherever she wished, whenever she wished, often returning haggard, ragged and scratched. Once she arrived home with her belly hugely swollen and dragging on the ground. An adder—England’s only poisonous snake—had bitten her in one of those sandy, scrubby commons, but this was only a temporary interruption. The swelling disappeared in a couple of days and then she was off running again. The only part of the landscape without any appeal to her was the coastal plain south of the Downs. There she felt that the spirits were absent.

  In the spring and summer of our second year, two major events occurred, both affecting Perth as much as Cindy and me. Cindy was pregnant and in August would give birth to a boy named Andrew. And because of that, we decided to move from our rented cottage to one at the upper end of the village, opposite the Black Dog and Duck, where we live to this day. We bought it for a song because it needed a lot of work, but it was a dream, from the start almost mythical in our imagination.

  We were told that Appletree Cottage was four hundred years old, but it turned out to be almost six hundred. It was built as a peasant’s manor cottage, connected with the eleventh-century Bury Manor down by the river. Constructed with the mellow, honey-colored greensand stone that lies eighteen inches below ground in that part of the village, it was originally a medieval open-hall cottage. Its interior was simply a single large room reaching up to crude rafters on top of which a pile of thatch was laid and tied. The peasants who lived in it in the fifteenth century lit their fires in the center of the room and allowed the smoke to blow out between the rafters and walls. It was their hearth. They cooked over it and sat around it with their children as, late into the evening, the dying embers cast shadows on the rough-hewn, unplastered walls. They bedded down for the night on the dirt floor, near the fire. As often as not, they shared the space with various animals, not only companionable pets like Perth but chickens, geese, sheep and other farmyard beasts. It was a rough, dark, cold, hungry, smelly life, not the idyllic rural existence often portrayed in English literature and painting. And much of the time the family was exhausted down to the marrow of their bones.

  Sometime in the sixteenth century a beamed ceiling was introduced into the room, creating two bedrooms upstairs separated with some massive beams unmistakably taken from some derelict ship’s timbers. At the same time, a chimney was built at the end of the building with a large inglenook downstairs to go with it, a fireplace supported by another huge eight-foot wooden beam that stretches across the top of it. Hundreds of years of nails and spikes embedded in the antique wood are still visible. The inglenook is large enough to accommodate two or three people in it to cook, bake bread, or just sit. There is a brick-lined oven carved out of the thick walls to the side. With these improvements, therefore, life for our ancient predecessors in the cottage was suddenly warmer and more private. In the seventeenth century another section was added onto the end of the house, a room downstairs and one upstairs. The cottage stayed that way until the twentieth century, when after World War II a tiled wing was added onto the back for a kitchen and bathroom.

  Seen from the lane, the cottage with its lovely stone walls and heavy covering of thatched reed screamed to us to buy it. But the view from the front did not prepare us for what was at the back. On the first day we went up to speak to Mrs. Holmes about buying the place, it took my breath away when I walked around the side of the cottage into the one-acre garden. The garden was magical but the view was visionary, poetic. On the other side of the two hundred feet of hedge and riot of daffodils along the edge of the garden unfolded field after field of springing wheat and barley, knitted together by endless hedgerows and falling away north and east down to the River Arun. Past the river were wild wetlands, overlooking which was perched the romantic, fairytale twelfth-century Amberley Castle, the equal of anything you could find in Tuscany. And farther in the distance were the Downs and thick woodland. Perth, Cindy and I were joined in a revelation as our eyes traveled over the complex beauty of hundreds of acres across a panorama of 180 degrees. Man, woman and dog felt the influence of spring. Cindy’s arm swept the horizon gracefully. It seemed that the whole earth lay before us, a gift from God. It was as if we had dropped down from heaven. It was a final resting place. The garden was our terrace, the stage from which we looked out on the world. There was no going back.

  My first thought was, “Perth can trot on out through that gap in the hedge and never have to stop for anything, not for roads, cars, houses or people.” It was like a huge landscape garden, an endless playground for her of green, mist and sparkling waters. She could come and go in perfect safety. Just as I was thinking that, Perth pushed her way through the hedge and into the fields. She stopped and quietly looked out to the horizon as she took in the view and the lay of the land.

  She then turned to us as if to say, “You must buy this. I want to live the rest of my life here.” Then she lay down in the sun on the grass, her head turned toward the view.

  We walked into the cottage to speak to Mrs. Holmes. She was eighty-five and the cottage reeked vilely of fish that she was cooking for her cat. The carpets were threadbare, the walls needed plastering, it was cold and damp, and the kitchen was in a miserable state. The stairway to the bedroom upstairs was like a ladder. The cottage was so bleak that when Auntie Kath came down from Surrey and saw it a few weeks after we had bought it, she said urgently, “I think you’d better cut your losses and sell it.” The bathroom was shabby. Its crowning features were an old discolored bathtub and a toilet that seemed at odds with the human anatomy. One flushed it with one of those old chains pulled from above.

  But the old part of the house was unspoiled and unchanged, as it had been for hundreds of years. It was like a time capsule. Since it was built, nearly six hundred years of human history had passed. Shakespeare had written his plays. The Italian Renaissance had come and gone. Genghis Khan and Peter the Great had created empires and passed into oblivion. Many cataclysmic wars had been fought in which millions were butchered. Within those thick stone walls, however, virtually nothing had happened. Only humble people with humble histories had lived and died there. Nobody had told their stories and nobody ever will Ex
cept for a thick meat hook on one of the beams, stains in the woodwork and a few bent iron spikes where centuries of clothes and other possessions had hung, there was nothing to tell us about their hopes, defeats, victories, tragedies, loves and hates. The ill-lit rooms were, as the poet Keats put it, witnesses of “silence and slow time.” Only the residents’ ghosts remained to make us wonder how many acts of violence, murders, beatings and infanticides may have occurred there; how many lovers embraced there; how many children dreamed of the infinite world outside the murky windows as they were dangled on their elders’ knees.

  “You came just in time,” Mrs. Holmes said. “I was about to write to the actor Richard Widmark to offer Appletree Cottage to him. He’s wanted it for years, ever since he acted part of a film here. But if you want it you can have it.” She had taken a liking to us.

  She named a price and we accepted on the spot. Two months later we had moved in. She moved to the nearby town of Arundel while we began plastering, painting, cementing the floors, laying out carpets, putting in a new stairway, repairing the plumbing and electricity and improving the heating. Otherwise, we did nothing to change the structure and feeling of the place. We saw ourselves as temporary caretakers in the long saga of its life. It became a way of life. Everyone has a dream home in mind. Apple-tree Cottage was our waking dream.

  There was also a good omen. As the cottage is at the upper end of the village, for centuries its inhabitants have drawn their water from an eighty-foot-deep village well just on the other side of the hedge, next to Bury Hollow, the deep lane over which the cottage hangs somewhat precariously. The well was a major engineering project when it was dug and lined with stone several hundred years ago. All villagers had the right to use it. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, when water was piped into most of the cottages at that top end of the village, the well fell into disuse, although the seven feet of water eighty feet down remained as pure as ever and could have supplied the whole village even then. But there is an ancient statute that if no villager used the well for twenty-nine years it could be enclosed within the boundaries of the nearest cottage, Appletree Cottage, and become a permanent part of that property. And that is what happened, so that when we bought it the well had long been inside our hedge.

  The problem was that the owners of the cottage had neglected the well and allowed the wooden well sweep to rot and disappear. Nobody had told us about the well, and we failed even to notice it when we moved in because it was concealed by vegetation. There was barely a sign of it on the ground except for several pieces of perishing wood that covered its opening, four feet across. These planks would not support a dog, much less a person who had the ill luck to stray into the vegetation and tread on it.

  From the first hour we moved in, of course, Perth had been sticking her nose into everything, so she must have stepped onto this rotten wood several times. Nothing happened, but surely eventually she would have fallen in and drowned if a shy farmer down the lane who had grown up in the village, as had several generations of his family before him, had not secretly stolen into the front garden in the dead of night. Without telling us, he replaced the rotten wood with a thick plank of sound oak. He has a deep well on his farm, too, and later we discovered that ten years earlier his son had fallen into it and been killed. The moment he heard that a new family was moving in he took it upon himself to cover our well. He also cleared away the growth, exposing the well to full view. We saw it the next morning and knew that some village genie had done this. The farmer, who later became a dear friend, was thinking of children we might have, not Perth. But it was Perth whom he saved, who surely would have plummeted to her death in a day or two, unnoticed and undiscovered. I had never trained her to stay clear of deep wells.

  In June, while the builders were sprucing the place up, we decided to squeeze in a holiday in the Scottish Highlands as a nostalgic return to the country that gave Perth her name. There was time for it before the birth of our baby We drove up into the western Highlands and settled into a youth hostel on the River Dee amid the Grampian Mountains, a one-room stone cottage with a slate roof. A more deserted hostel cannot be imagined. We saw nobody. There was no electricity so we had to cook everything over an open fire, and at night we lit candles. There was no inside toilet either. The beds were thin mattresses up in a loft which we ascended by ladder. Since Perth insisted on sleeping with us, I had to carry her up the ladder. There we were, next to a rushing river of the purest water, surrounded by rocky and green mountains, with no human sounds to hear except our own. We meant to stay for one week, but the weather was fabulous and we stretched it to two.

  Rising high in the Grampians, the River Dee flows swiftly to the east in a succession of rapids, pools and arching bends through lush pastures and rich forests. Sheep were everywhere. The river by the hostel was shallow, rapid and freezing. But in the sunshine we persuaded ourselves to jump in. The water rushed down over the rocks and Perth swam strongly against the current. She climbed onto rocky ledges and positioned herself so the water could fall in a noisy torrent on her head and back. The three of us took long, lonely hikes in the forests and across the sides of mountains, through some of the wildest landscape of gorse and heather I had ever seen in Britain. But for entire days Perth was on her own. We never knew where she was, although once on our own climbs we did run into her near the top of one of the peaks. She smelled clean and pure. Her eyes were as clear as the sky. At night she lay motionless with fatigue, her eyes rolling and muscles twitching in sleep.

  We all knew these days were precious, a last adventure together when it was just the three of us. Soon we would be four and Perth sensed it. At times she seemed to sulk, her ears held low and eyes looking hurt. She perked up when she was on the move, but around us she looked as if she was trying to understand what seemed different. It may have been our conversation, for we were full of talk about the baby with a tone and attitude that were unfamiliar to her. I think we talked less often to her and more often to each other. She felt a bit neglected, on the margin. Alert dogs who are spiritually attuned to their masters and mistresses can pick up the slightest hints of changes. For most of her life, Perth had been able to sense when I was troubled, afraid, unhappy or angry, even if I never said anything. At such times she could be as comforting as a wife or sister. Now, however, the change in the air was more basic and far-reaching, and she knew it.

  Did she fear we were about to leave her again for months, worried she would land back in a kennel? Did it occur to her that she should run away when she had the chance? The Scottish Highlands were at her feet. She could be gone and never again have her life darkened by the threat of kennel walls and cages. She had had her fill of them. But how could she leave us, whom she loved? She was our soul-sister. With the sounds of the rushing waters filling the nights, she drew closer to us than usual.

  17

  WHEN ANDREW WAS BORN in August, Perth at last knew what had been worrying her. Everything was perfect for her at Appletree Cottage until then. The sunny days, peaceful village, comfortable garden, mysterious cottage and exquisite landscape beckoning on the other side of the hedge were for her absolute contentment. The three of us had moved in quickly and settled into the most wonderful way of life any of us had ever known, an idyll if ever there was one. While Perth slipped away for a morning of running and searching, Cindy and I had our routine, one that we would repeat year after year: reading and writing in the morning, lunches of cheeses and summer salads and fruits, afternoon walks on the Downs or along the river, afternoon tea on the rolling smooth-shaven lawn, a later dinner, more reading, and then bed with the French door of our bedroom wide open letting in the sounds, smells and dim twilight views of the countryside all around us. Perth generally spent the mornings on the run, but after lunch she stayed the rest of the day with us. The rural and domestic stability of our lives was precious.

  Then it ended for us all. The baby’s arrival was not quiet. He made his presence felt from the start and we wer
e all thrown off balance, especially Perth who regarded him at first as an odd-looking intruder. And he did look a sight with almost no hair and a round Mr. Magoo face. For several weeks he refused to sleep peacefully. Perth always slept with us in the room next to Andrew’s, so she got an unwelcome earful of his crying. Her escape from the baby’s outbursts was to dive into dark, muffled safety under our covers. There she would wait until the emergency was over. After a few weeks she took these interruptions more in her stride, but she disliked our get-ting in and out of bed so many times. So did we, but all we could do was wait and hope that Andrew would soon find his own peaceful rhythms and join the three of us in ours.

  During the day everything was similarly turned upside down. Hardly anything except our meals happened in the way and at the time they used to. There was a lot of scurrying around, seeing to this and that emergency, getting something for the baby, cleaning and feeding the baby, walking the baby, holding the baby. Just when we had settled down in the garden to relax with a book and a pot of tea, Andrew would cry out that he needed something.

  Perth had never known anything like it in our family. In the mornings she escaped for hours through the hedge. She usually made for the river first. Down there in late summer and early autumn, the lush green banks teemed with ducks, geese, swans, many kinds of rodents and rabbits to keep her interest. She worked her way several miles up and down the river, sniffing into thousands of mysterious holes. At the deep bottom of many of them busy little “households” of wildlife as in The Wind in the Willows carried on without being in the least disturbed by her. But she could smell the warm, furry beasts down there, and she passed from hole to hole hoping someday to see where these enticing odors were coming from. Then she would launch herself into the fields, now just stubble after the harvests, and make her way into the hills. At times she did not return until late afternoon, sometimes not until the evening, dirty, panting and thirsty.