Alma Cogan
Page 8
I take my walk at the same time every day and see the same soaps, chat shows, quizzes, and somnambulistic sporting occasions – the electric green of field and pitch and billiard table lending a pleasant aquarium air to the stolid, moteless rooms – through the windows I pass on the way.
Now and again the talking hairdo on the screen doing continuity or selling double-glazing or miming the meaning of ‘Easter’ or ‘sandwich’ to an animated machine operative from Chorley (whose prize of a weekend in Jersey or bench-top dishwasher hangs in the balance) is one I once shared a bill with at the Chiswick Empire or the Tivoli, Hull.
People can say all they want about the so-called totalitarianism of the totally pleasant personality. It has all contributed to the sense of physical well-being and security I have known in my time here.
Steer clear of the rivalries, feuds, tensions, and petty vendettas, as I have managed to do, and the atmosphere is dull and soporific, admittedly, but also unthreatening, undemanding and benign.
I quickly acquired the habit of leaving the doors unlocked when I went out. (Although, for a time, I went through a routine of checking the many hiding-places in the cottage, humming a happy tune, when I got back.) I only lock up at nights in the winter.
At least that was true until some months ago, when something happened that I am taking as the sign (for which I have sensed myself becoming increasingly receptive; my radar for a long time has been silently sweeping the sky) that my time out of time may be reaching the end of its natural span.
Something you hear said occasionally is: ‘the only thing wrong with Cleve is having to look at Coombe.’ What they mean is the toothpaste-coloured bungalows looming out of the dark ilex trees, with their breeze-block barbecue pits and canopied outdoor loungers.
Cleve, by contrast, is mostly weathered natural stone-biscuit brown, sky grey – and lichen-covered tiles. One of the few postwar houses on this side is the first house beyond the slipway at the end of the quay; I pass under its picture-window and plastic teardrop chandelier walking along the river bottom on my way to the shops.
The people who live there used to be regular weekenders but, since the summer, have become permanents. She is stocky, long-suffering, capable; he is the sort of man who tucks the short end of his tie into his shirt and wears crackling diamond-patterned socks with a track-suit and trainers (this is guesswork – I’ve never been close enough to find out).
Even at a distance, though, he seems to bristle with repressed fury and self-hate. It comes off him like static. He kicks out at the debris trapped in the seaweed, slams car doors, changes colour like a traffic-light, and glowers. His neck is in a neck-brace, probably as a result of this pent-up rage. Sometimes the light catches the perspiration standing on the satiny neoprene rim of it in a way that makes it look as if it is beginning to melt.
There is a sign on the heavy gate on the road side of their house, aimed at scaring off burglars. It features a picture of a Dobermann and the slogan: ‘Go Ahead. Make His Day.’ But there is no dog. He is a dog-hater. (There’s a lot of them about.)
The river at low-tide is a popular place for exercising dogs, for obvious reasons. They can swim and chase sticks and do what they have to do, then the tide comes and handily sluices it away.
The couple in the house near the slipway have always kept a particularly unsightly sign in their kitchen window, where no dog-walker can miss it: a line-drawing of a dog squatting to take a dump with a broad red diagonal through it. (They seem to have a fetich about laminated signs and badges: the rear window of their car is spattered with stick-ons from stately homes and safari parks, in addition to one advertising another pointless untruth – ‘Child aboard – keep your distance’.)
Recently, though, a home-made effort went up, close to where they park their car on the far end of the quay by the slipway: ‘Please do NOT allow your dog to defecate in front of this house. Or please TAKE THE FAECES HOME WITH YOU’.
The contrast between the drawing-room language – ‘defecate’, ‘faeces’, the reiterated ‘please’ – and the crazy underlining and piece of old board on which the words were chalked, seemed evidence of a personality coming apart at the seams.
*
My last walk of the day is one of the parts of the day that I most look forward to. Taking the flashlight and walking along the river last thing has become one of my unshakeable rituals.
On the darkest nights, when there is no moon (it’s a connection I’ve only made since I’ve been here), it reminds me of being backstage in the time before I was due on, just out of sight of the audience, which I always found a companionable place to be.
It’s where every day was headed. The relief to have arrived, plus the condition of total black-out – the only light was the light bleeding from the stage – was conducive to a kind of careless intimacy that I knew nowhere else in my life.
If somebody had to do a quick change, they came off and did it where they stood. Chorines were constantly flinging off one piece of flim-flam and throwing on another. Behind the flats were steaming heaps of towels, tights, athletic supports, brassières, dressing-gowns.
It was a refuge that was always available. A settled environment. Somewhere to retreat to out of the light.
A thing I learned early on was never to play a theatre blind. You had to know where the exits, pillars, balconies, bars and, most of all, where the lavatories were located if you wanted to avoid being thrown by stray blobs of darkness moving in the dark during your turn, like elements of the dark reordering themselves.
When you go out on stage, go out smiling, look at your audience, start at the top balcony, captivate your audience, look at them and smile, then take your eyes down to the bottom balcony, look from one side to the other, and go into your number.
If it’s a night when the tide is out far enough for me to walk most of the way to where the causeway links the villages, I can see the scales of the illuminated silver cross throwing scrims of light into the street below it, giving the steep street the appearance of a stream negotiating stones and other small obstacles on the way to emptying itself in the river.
A blurry blue light comes from windows on both banks in rooms where people are watching television in the dark. If this had been earlier in my life, the probability is that I could have told you, almost to the minute, what they were watching.
I carried television and radio times in my head without even thinking. Gazing into windows as we came into strange towns, I could take the elongated shadows playing across curtains and ceilings and instinctively convert them into familiar faces and settings.
The dark has never held the usual terrors for me. On the contrary, I’m happy when night comes. I welcome it.
Recently, though, I have felt their eyes on me. Felt sure I was being watched. I’ve seen shadows moving behind their bedroom window in the dark.
A few weeks ago, playing the beam a few feet ahead of me as usual as I went, I lit up a series of symbols drawn on the quay in fresh white chalk.
There was a diamond, a circle and a triangle, all geometrically precise and aligned, and in the centre of each was a turd.
Directly above the circle was a chalked square and the words – there was nothing hurried in the writing; the opposite, in fact – ‘Next pile of filth?’
*
I checked the cupboard under the stairs (one pair of naval binoculars, six jigsaw puzzles, several suitcases, one horsehair shoe-brush, the coin-box for the phone), the pantry and the cave-like dressing-room off the bedroom where I sleep, when I came in, feeling what I would describe as both thrill and dread.
Many nights now I lie awake far into the night, straining to catch some wrong note in the creaking of the rafters, an off-chord in the cooling of the pipes or something unresolved in the noises the fire makes as it prepares to fall in on itself.
Five
There are, I would guess, several hundred pictures of me in existence somewhere, frozen into my glamourpuss-with-pooch pose.
The dog would invariably be decked out in the slinky, boudoir-coloured leads and junk gem-encrusted collars that were gifts from the fans and therefore compulsory in public. (Freshly boiled bricks of lights, sheep lungs and cow udder were also deposited at the stage door daily in certain towns in the north. They came wrapped in newspapers, occasionally with damp, smudgy pictures of me uppermost, and always with hearty messages – ‘Have a grand week!’ ‘Shall be in every night!’ – inscribed along the margins.)
For fifties lensmen, the alignment of a small dog and a female bosom seemed to add up to the kind of dumb-bunny cheesecake with overtones of the forbidden that was their stock in trade. A champagne bottle (full or empty), a champagne glass (ditto), a large motorcar (a turquoise-blue Armstrong Siddeley in my case, then in later days an MGA roadster, neither of which I learned to drive) and scarlet sting-look lips (‘Hot it up, darling!’) were also regarded as indispensable for the same reason.
I suspect it’s these pictures that ——— —— and his cronies have in mind when they rhubarb on about iconicity and retro imagery and the ‘solid, uncomplicated, talismanic Englishness’ (that is, counterfeit Americanness) of the immediate post-war years that I’m supposed to represent.
(I would lay dollars to donuts on him having one or two choice examples pinned to the bulletin board in his office this minute, along with xeroxes of ‘outrageous’ front pages from the Sun, storyboards, jacket laminates, wads of computer print-out and festive-looking flow charts showing projects in development/in production /on hold.)
What they’re really saying – which is okay – is that I was a cliché.
Now, as I’ve explained, I have become that other cliché with a dog in it: the old dog with the old dog trotting off on her daily constitutional.
Almost from the day I started travelling, I travelled with a dog as a companion. I can measure my life out now in miniature Pinschers.
There is nothing intrinsically Come Dancing or frou-frou about the breed. The miniature is a perfectly scaled-down version of the full-size Dobermann. Head wedge-shaped. Coat smooth, short, hard, thick and close lying. Tail docked at the first or second joint and appearing to be a continuation of the spine without material drop. Colour black, brown or blue. Markings red rust in colour, sharply defined, appearing above each eye, on the muzzle, throat and forechest, on all legs and feet and below tail. Eyes showing intelligence and firmness of character. Temperament bold and alert. Form compact and tough. Gait light and elastic.
I was given my first Pinscher by the founding members at an early fan-club gathering, and have stayed loyal to the breed ever since. As soon as one starts to show signs of being about to check out, I am in touch with Mrs Wood, the breeder, to enquire about a replacement.
In theory, Dawn Wood and I should meet about once every twelve years. In practice, because of accidents and various health complications resulting in animals going belly-up before their time, the intervals between our meetings have sometimes been shorter.
They have never been so short, though, that we have failed to register the physical changes that have overtaken us both in the interim. We were in our early twenties when we first met; now were coming up to sixty and conscious of the fact that, if not the next dog, then the one after, will in all probability represent the last transaction.
This gives our encounters a poignancy of which I think neither of us is unaware. I notice the spread of melanin blotches across her hands, the painful torsion of the veins behind her knees, the fact that the loose flesh of her upper arms now reminds me of the skirting around a hovercraft, and that her hair is a more emphatic colour than it was (she looks younger when she lets some grey show through).
She takes on board the fact that the three-string necklace of creases round my throat has been etched deeper and that the thread-veins on my cheeks have grown more entangled; she sees that the fine skin around my eyes is growing tired and that the whites of the eyes are not a good colour, but of course both of us say nothing.
We rarely go very deeply into the latest cause of death: there isn’t much to say if it’s because of the heart packing up or one of the cancers (colon, bowel), which has generally been the case.
There was one occasion when I did go weepy on her, after a dog had died prematurely and in a particularly unpleasant way. And there was a period some years ago when there were problems in the family with a teenage daughter and she unburdened herself to me.
I held her hand under the buttony gaze of the Pinscher portraits on the walls. She said she felt she could talk to me more easily now I no longer cropped up on the television all that often. I detected a note of reproach in this (it’s a wild world) as well as some satisfaction that things were beginning to even out.
After that we became more reserved and formal. Our encounters have always followed an established pattern. Once the standard pleasantries have been disposed of (our eyes gliding over the latest ravages, our voices resolutely up), we are drawn by the smell of simmering bones and bagged biscuit meal to the kitchen, and from there to the outhouse beyond the kitchen where the puppies are whelped.
What would you call a smell so evocative that it has come to seem somehow fused with your existence, an indelible part of your life? One for which you can develop an irrational yearning and that you often find yourself trying (uselessly) to imagine? A smell for which you feel a kind of nostalgia even while you’re in its presence? Proustian? (Only if you were really pushed.) Primal?
You can smell the smell before the door to the outbuilding in Mrs Wood’s garden is unlatched – it out-smells the tarred weatherboard of the walls, the tubbed midget-pines making a path to it, and the leaf-rot which oozes underfoot in autumn.
The ingredients are simple, if unreproducible: milk from, for example, Smoky Ghost Sovereign Lady (that is, the mother – pet-name ‘Tara’); paraffin from the heaters; urine and creamy crap soaked into the shredded newsprint covering the timber floor; the tang of surgical spirit; the oiliness of glycerine; the nubby rubber of hot water bottles.
At three weeks, the puppies are still sexless and blind and squirm in a heap together like something under a laboratory microscope. They are as undifferentiated as oranges or melons. Choosing between them involves the same level of choice as a waltz along the produce aisles at the supermarket.
Or it would if Mrs Wood, with an unerring instinct for what I’m after, hadn’t already chosen for me. After very few minutes she’ll rummage with one hand among the gummed eyes and satiny pelts and leg buds and, having found what she’s seeking (a businesslike inspection under the tail for confirmation), set it in my palm like a sack of chocolate dollars, the pay-off in some secret and ancient ceremony in which we are participating. ‘Your new Psyche … Look out for each other.’ Always these words.
Just as I have stuck to male dogs for no other reason than that is what the first one was, so I have gone on using the name which the dog that started all this was given by the fans.
‘Psyche’ was the dog in the 1950s radio comedy, A Life of Bliss. He was played by the birdcall specialist, Percy Edwards, a portly, classic countryman figure, in twills and knitted waistcoat, whom I saw frequently during broadcasts from the Paris Cinema in Lower Regent Street, anxiously waiting to come in with his high-pitched whines and welcoming yelps and the other reaction noises they relied on to bring Psyche alive for the listening audience.
Although there was very little commercial exploitation of the character, on the strength of his radio life as a dog, Percy rose to second-billing on the number-two tours (the Palace Attercliffe, Her Majesty’s Barrow, the Hippodrome Aldershot) where his impersonations of burning buildings, trains in tunnels and gale-fo
rce winds also went down very well.
Choosing a new Psyche is part one of the process. Taking possession is part two. In the glory days this was very simple: Mrs Wood would drive up from her home in Surrey and deliver the dog to the flat, where my mother would have prepared by burying the carpets and all the upholstery under copies of the Mirror and the Daily Sketch.
This service stopped some years ago, however. It’s an indication of how the balance of our relationship has shifted that I now have to meet Mrs Wood at the services close to the Leatherhead exit of the A3, which is literally halfway.
The first time we rendezvoused there, this was a Gingham Kitchen, with everything gingham-patterned – tablecloths, staff uniforms, beakers and plates (the chequered close-weave sealed between layers of moulded plastic, which reminded me of some shoes I once had with tropical fish suspended in the chunky perspex of the heel). The friend who drove me there had a ‘lobsteak’, which poisoned his insides and put him out of action for five days, while we were waiting.
By our second (and latest) link-up, the same place had become a Happy Eater. Everything was the same – the breathy noise of the power-brakes on the heavy goods vehicles, the whacked-out trees, the trampled lawns, the slashing rain in the tungsten downlighters. Only the signage and corporate coding were different.
Mrs Wood got out of her car and placed the travelling-case with the puppy in it on an outdoor table with fibreglass figures of the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit and other Wonderland characters seated around it, as the fat tomato logo winked and litter hurled itself vertically into the sky and the commuter traffic on the overhead ramps threw refracted technicolour splashes showering down onto the traffic on the lower levels.
Psyche flicked his hot tongue in and out of my nostrils all the way into London, a habit which he has never lost.
Writers on the pops have always talked about the ‘Hey Doris’ effect of reaching out to their readers. I am a fund of doggy ‘Hey Doris’ facts and trivia.