by Julian Clary
In the rougher inner-city adventure playgrounds, the children were more interested in pinching the props and chucking things at us than sitting quietly watching the entertainment. I still shudder when I drive down the Wandsworth Road and remember ‘the riot’ we were at the centre of in a nearby park. Who knows why they went on the turn so violently, but as soon as we started the show we were showered with empty cans and ripe insults. And missiles and abuse weren’t enough for these little blighters. We had to abandon the show when they charged at us like wildebeest. We chucked the set and props into the van as best we could, sticks and bricks raining down on us, and screeched our way out of there still in costume, thespian refugees fleeing from hostile infant territory. Emergency joints had to be rolled to calm us all down.
GETTING A DOG wasn’t a particularly sensible thing to do at this point in my life, and I made sure I didn’t tell my parents about it until after the event. But once I’d had the thought, it became an imperative need and I had felt myself being led, helplessly, towards my unknown companion.
I got Fanny (before we knew she was a Wonder Dog) from the South London Dog Rescue Society. This wasn’t a dog’s home in the Battersea sense, but an organisation with a list of dogs in need of a home. When I telephoned them, there were only two on the list, both residing in a disreputable pet shop in Eltham. The first dog was grey and sad and lanky. Next to him, housed in a rabbit hutch, was Fanny. She was the last of a litter of mongrels, now four months old, and the shop owner doubted anyone would ever want her. She saw me and threw herself at the wire mesh, desperate, ecstatic. Once I had opened the door there was no going back. What was I doing?
I shook my head with disapproval as I carried Fanny home. I didn’t imagine she had it in her to make my fortune and teach me the art of unconditional love. If I’d walked away, overwhelmed with the unfeasibility of practical day-to-day living with a dog in tow, then my life would have been very different, I’m sure. Maybe, as my mother imagined for me, I’d have whiled away the years in some small provincial arts centre. I might have settled down with a charity worker, grown imaginative vegetables in my modest country garden and eventually emigrated to Nova Scotia. In fact, I’ve made it sound so attractive I rather wish things had turned out that way. Is it too late? Who can say? But getting Fanny was a life-changing moment. I didn’t realise at the time, of course. One rarely does.
LYNDA THE LANDLADY had decided to go around the world for a year and left me and Cathy to look after her cat, Samson, and the flat. Once I got home with Fanny, I looked at her and accepted the inevitable with an amused shrug. It would all work out. I’d see to it she had a nice life.
Fanny was overexcited for several days. She wasn’t house-trained and whizzed round in circles in the kitchen. Floor, chair, table, window, bean bag and floor again. Simultaneously she would gently urinate, thus creating a Catherine wheel of dog wee. She was extremely anxious at all times, and would cower at a casually raised hand, and run for cover at the jingle of keys. She would only sleep under the duvet with me, head on pillow, curved back pressed against my stomach. This didn’t change for most of her life. She would grudgingly sleep at my feet on top of the duvet if there was a gentleman caller involved, but once the hanky panky had run its course she’d slide slowly up towards me. She seemed to be of the belief that if she moved slowly enough, no one would notice. If instructed to go to her basket, she would go, lie down and then instantly begin a painfully slow mime of a dog getting up. Once upright she’d begin to slowly glide in my direction, eyes half closed, as if battling towards me through a wind tunnel.
Several are they who’ve reached across for a morning encore only to encounter a hairy six-nippled stomach and a whiff of mongrel. She was very discerning about all the visitors. Positively contemptuous of most, she tolerated some and reserved a deferential coyness with those who were special. She always knew. She’d see them leave, the ones she liked, then watch the door or give me a knowing look. With others she’d refuse even to open her eyes until they’d left. Then I’d get the ‘Shame on you!’ treatment. (In the fullness of time she was able to assess an audience with the same casual ease. I swear she distinctly rolled her eyes when we played Bangor University, then gave me a look that said, ‘You’re wasting your time, but carry on if you want to.’ I remember that gig. The landlady had locked me out of the B&B because it was gone eleven at night when I got back. I explained that I’d been working and hadn’t gone on stage till ten o’clock. She muttered in Welsh as she took the safety chain off the front door and allowed me to scurry upstairs to my dreary room. She was still talking about me in dark unintelligible tones the next morning at breakfast. The other Welsh people looked at me as if I’d been out all night whoring.)
When she was about seven months old, Fanny came on heat. Flushed with sexual desire, she approached dogs backwards in the park. Word got round that there was an easy young lass begging for it in Greenwich Park and the dogs came from miles around. I picked her up and hurried home, salivating horny hounds yelping and jumping at my elbows. Back at Hardy Road I barricaded the cat-flap as smaller canines attempted entry. They stayed out there all night, howling and leaving snail-trails of ardour on the pavement. The next day we retreated to Swindon where a sensible walled garden kept them at bay. The next morning my father got up early for work. Hearing him shuffle downstairs in his slippers to make the tea, Fanny sniffed at my door to go and greet him. He let her out for an early morning wee and took my mother’s cuppa upstairs. When I got up later and asked where the dog was, he couldn’t remember her coming back in . . .
We called her for a few minutes before she came wriggling through a previously unnoticed gap, covered in mud and in a state of some excitement. In the distance a hefty black Labrador went on his way, panting. ‘Maybe it was just a game of rough and tumble,’ said my father hopefully. ‘I think not,’ said my mother. ‘I know that look in the eye.’
As an expectant father I was devoted, spending my dole money on prime cuts of meat and rubbing Fanny’s back. She got fatter and fatter, waddling about the place wheezing, like an inflatable barrel. The vet had a feel round, said she was too young to be a mother really, but it was too late now and as far as he could tell there were two puppies in there and it wouldn’t be long.
The next day she only managed a few dozen yards of her walk before turning back for home, looking worried. I woke up in the night to hear Fanny panting noisily. She was squatting just off the floor in the large cardboard box I’d got for her. She was much calmer than I was. Cathy the nurse woke up and took over, doing her profession proud. After a crescendo of panting and quivering haunches and a human-like scream, the first puppy shot out, a large, stumpy, shiny black baguette. Fanny rolled it round with her muzzle, breaking the birth sack and licking the puppy’s chest to make it breathe. When that was done she resumed the position and started panting again. Ten minutes later, after another heart-rending scream, the other puppy was born. We watched as she tried to start it breathing, but as it seemed to be taking a while Cathy took over and Fanny looked on. She parted the sack with a perfectly manicured nail and gently rubbed the chest. Eventually it gave a gasp and Fanny took over again.
Exhausted and exhilarated, Cathy and I sat back and reached for a post-natal Benson and Hedges. Fanny began panting once more and we watched to see if it was the afterbirth, but it was a third puppy, soon followed by a fourth. They were all quite burly-looking. All black, although one had a white paw and another a mongrel-like ‘V’ of white on its chest. Three girls and a boy. We named them Molly, Margaret, Harriet and Wesley.
The afterbirth, when it finally came, was Fanny’s reward and she wolfed it down the second it appeared. We averted our eyes and let nature take its course.
After we’d cleaned up the box and settled the child-bride and her embarrassment down on a clean towel, Fanny looked very pleased with herself. She was quite matronly with them, turning them, nudging them, checking and counting them like a baker checking a row of f
reshly baked scones.
I got a taxi home rather late the next night from the Ship and Whale, where I’d been wetting the puppies’ heads, as it were. The driver was rather dishy in a rough South London sort of way, driving with his legs spread impressively wide. I boldly asked him if he’d like to come in for a cup of tea.
‘I’m not being funny, mate,’ he said, ‘but you sound like you’re gay.’
‘So?’
‘So when you say, “Come in for a cup of tea”, I think you mean something else.’
‘So are you coming in or not?’
Once inside he said, ‘Forget about the tea. Where’s the bedroom?’ I led the way, pulling him by his already unbuckled trouser belt. Afterwards, as he lay naked on my bed smoking an Embassy, I lifted the puppies out of their box and laid them on his tattooed chest.
With four hungry muzzles to feed, Fanny’s appetite took on new dimensions. Within a few days the pups’ nuzzling became more demanding. Seeing the rate at which the goodness was being sucked out of her, I felt the need to feed the poor girl constantly. I lived off baked potatoes while the nursing mother feasted on rump and sirloin.
To begin with, the four puppies lay there blindly waving paws about and gently attaching themselves to an available nipple when the opportunity arose. After two or three days this process became more enthusiastic and urgent. By the time they were two weeks old, they head-butted their mother into submission, gorging on her breasts voraciously.
They grew and grew, big wide heads, manic bleary puppy eyes with psycho stares. At three weeks they were a danger to the public. I noticed that Fanny started to avoid them. The devil’s spawn were up and marching about by now, as muscular and menacing as a Lewisham posse of teenage ne’er-do-wells. They might bite, they might abuse, they might defecate. Who could predict?
We barricaded them in the bedroom in the interests of domesticity, but every couple of hours Fanny would steel herself and enter the arena. By this time she didn’t need to lie down to feed them, far from it. She would stand, back arched like a scared cat, and the four hungry delinquents attacked. Sometimes she could hardly get through the door. I used to go in with her and talk her through it, but sometimes I couldn’t bear to watch. Her eyes would quiver and half close with the pain, her rubbery dog lips distort and spasm. These huge, demented feeding machines were eating Fanny alive.
I tried to relieve their demands on Fanny by feeding them powdered puppy milk and solid food as soon as they were old enough. Needless to say, this had a dramatic effect on their faeces. Until then (as is traditional in the dog world, apparently), Fanny had cleared up after them. With a clean pad of old newspapers and a towel changed twice a day, the new family was no trouble. We all slept in the same room. Fanny would leave our marital bed every few hours for the ordeal of feeding the monsters, and apart from the odd snuffle and squeak there was nothing to worry about. Put the little darlings on tinned puppy food, however, and you’re suddenly in the black hole of Calcutta. My room became a sewer. I retched at the sight and scent of them.
It was an awful thing to admit but we both loathed the puppies.
As they grew, they became more thuggish. Wesley, the boy, was the worst. I first saw him slap his mother when he was four weeks old. I subsequently observed bullying, aggressive confrontations, numerable incidents of juvenile sociopathy and even attempted sexual assault. He was a bad ’un and there were no two ways about it. Harriet, on the other hand, had a lovely manner about her, at least during the 20 minutes or so that her appetite was sated. Cheery and adventurous, for the most part. Molly and Margaret I don’t remember much about. It was nice of them to turn up. It was amazing how cool I felt towards them and how much I regretted their arrival.
My mind wandered and I started to think about finding homes for the little darlings. After all, they couldn’t stay at home with Fanny and me for ever. They had their own lives to lead. There was a big, exciting world out there, and the sooner they went off to explore it, the better. It was a bit like having unsavoury relatives to stay: we’d be polite and ensure they had enough to eat and somewhere to sleep, but whenever they were ready for the off, just let us know . . .
I put the word out and stuck a card on the noticeboard at Tesco’s at Westcombe Park. A charming family responded to the ad, came for a viewing and earmarked Harriet. I said she’d cost £5. The set designer from the Covent Garden Community Centre came and chose Molly. The ticket collector at Westcombe Park said his friend at the next station down the line, Maze Hill, wanted a male puppy, so he was promised Wesley. As for Margaret, I can’t remember. Anyway, I knew they all had good homes waiting for them.
At four weeks the puppies couldn’t be contained in my bedroom any longer. I called my parents and probably exaggerated the story a bit. I remember my father came to pick us up within hours, bless him, appearing on my doorstep with a worried expression, half-expecting canine Triffids to be entwined around my every limb.
In Swindon we made the garage into the nursery, or Detention Centre, as it came to be known. They were allowed into the garden each afternoon for several hours’ association. By now they were a formidable pack. Fanny looked on with distaste as they ripped up the lawn, gnawed at shrubs and showed scant regard for the dignity of the rotary washing line.
Wesley once attacked my 18-month-old niece, Sandy, who was wandering about innocently. He ripped her pink frilly dress and made her cry.
I decided they had to go. Some would say six weeks is too early, but not for Fanny and me.
Off they all went one afternoon within a couple of hours. Fanny didn’t so much as glance after them. She gave me look of relief, as if a bad smell attributed to her had finally dissipated and normal service could be resumed. We never heard a word about any of them again. Eventually I stopped scanning the local paper, fearful that Wesley or his sisters had eaten a baby, attacked a pensioner or ripped the face off a postman.
Although still less than a year old, Fanny had a worldly wise air about her now. She hadn’t informed me yet, but she had set her sights on a showbiz life.
UNEMPLOYED AGAIN, I went along to see Andy Cunningham do his ventriloquist act, ‘Magritte, the Mind-reading Rat’, at a vegetarian restaurant in Highgate called the Earth Exchange. They had cabaret there every Monday night. There was no stage. You just stood in the fireplace and did your turn. You only got paid about £5, but a dinner of brown rice and lentils was yours for the asking. Andy suggested I revive Gillian Pie-Face from the Winter Draws On! show. He had a word with Kim, who ran the night, and the next week I did the ‘try-out’ spot. Ms Pie-Face, as the name suggests, wasn’t a serious attempt at female impersonation. She wore a black kaftan, plimsolls, a string of wooden beads and a messy blonde wig. Gillian was an agony aunt, here, she explained, ‘to comfort the sick of spirit, the broken-hearted and the world weary.’ I had written most of it with a talented young writer called Chris Stagg.
Stave off that nervous breakdown,
Wipe away that tear,
Shun that emotional crisis
Gillian Pie-Face is here!
I’ve leapt off the page to deal with my public on a one-to-one basis, to get to grips with your problems as no agony aunt has done before, to bathe your wounds with my very own sponge of sympathy . . . and to plug my new book, Look Before You Leap, Methuen Press, £7.50 hardback only. Now, before I start the serious business of the evening, namely solving the many and varied little upsets many of you may be harbouring, I’d like to, if I may, read a specimen from my book, The Milk of Human Kindness, Faber and Faber Press, £11.99, hardback only. [Opens book.] Ah, yes, here we are . . . it’s from Head-in-the-Oven, of Thornton Heath.
Dear Gillian,
I am beside myself. Six months ago my wife and six children were killed in a plane crash. I cannot tell you how guilty I feel as it was my first time piloting a plane. How we were all looking forward to it, Margery, I and the little ones. I have even turned to God in my despair and often I ask him: ‘Why oh why, God, was
there only the one parachute? Will I ever overcome my grief?
Head-in-the-Oven, of Thornton Heath.
And my advice to him was:
Dear Head-in-the-Oven,
Some people need something to be depressed about, and go out of their way to find it. Try to get out more and don’t wait for people to come to you. They won’t. Not if they’ve got any sense.
The conclusion of the act was the laying-on of hands. ‘An uncanny gift I’ve only recently discovered in my possession.’ After a few moments attempting to cure a man in the audience, she said, ‘It’s no good. I’m going to have to plunge you into darkness.’ The kaftan was then thrown over the seated punter, his head at groin level. The effect was of the hapless punter performing oral sex on me behind a curtain. ‘Ah, that’s better!’ said Gillian. ‘I can feel the goodness flowing from my tips . . .’
I was familiar with the material and it didn’t go too badly. Kim booked me for the next week and told me of other possible gigs, at the Crown and Castle in Dalston, the Hemingford Arms in Islington and the Pindar of Wakefield in Kings Cross. The alternative cabaret circuit was in its infancy, mostly small rooms above pubs. Three or four acts and a compère performed in front of their friends and a few supply-teacher types, then split the proceedings among themselves. I phoned round and got a few more try-out spots.