Paw Tracks

by Denis O'Connor

  The companionship of Monty caused an awakening in me which opened a multitude of opportunities for joyous living. We went everywhere together except to school and church. At four o’clock every weekday afternoon Monty would be waiting for me at the school gates. We had great fun together romping in the fields and by the banks of the River Tyne. We would run wildly as if we had wings on our feet and Monty would leap at my legs to knock me over and we would wrestle together like bear cubs at play. I fashioned sticks for him from fallen branches with my clasp knife, a gift from my Uncle John who was a scout master, and when I tossed them high and away he would race with all the energy in him to catch and retrieve them. One day my grandmother gave me sixpence after running an errand for her and I bought two threepenny bags of chips with batter bits. Monty and I ran up to the Summer Hill Field and ate our chips there. I chuckled as I watched my dog chewing the chips and crunching the batter with such obvious relish. Living with Monty felt good – he was the best thing that had ever happened in my life. Nothing I had felt before compared to being with him. For the first time in a long time I was suffused with happiness.

  I remember, all too clearly, a Friday near the end of July. The sun was shining as school finished for the holidays. I had lots of plans for the carefree weeks ahead when Monty and I could be together all the time. As the caretaker opened the huge gates to allow the children out I expected to see Monty waiting for me as usual. I was really looking forward to seeing him and I was in high spirits. Only, he wasn’t there. I ran out in the street and looked everywhere for him but there was no sign of him. I called his name several times but he didn’t appear.

  Oh well, I thought, perhaps he got locked in the yard and my mother wasn’t there to let him go because he certainly knew the time I finished school and was always prompt. I burst into the backyard, calling his name, but he was nowhere to be seen. My mother was busy at the kitchen bench preparing vegetables for dinner and in response to my eager questions she did not turn to face me and simply said, ‘He must have gone out earlier.’

  Just to make sure he wasn’t in the house I ran upstairs and looked in my bedroom. No Monty. I ran out into the street and began a desperate search for him, anywhere and everywhere. It is strange how the mind works when you’ve lost something because you look in the most unlikely places. And so it was in my search for Monty. It seemed as if he had disappeared from the face of the earth. Eventually I borrowed a bike from a girl who lived down the street and I extended the hunt ever wider. I looked for him until it grew dark and I could hardly see, by which time it was very late. When I returned home my mother and sisters were in bed and there was just my father waiting for me. I was severely told off for being out so late but, strangely, he didn’t beat me. I hastened to bed hungry, but also worried and frightened at what might have happened to my dog.

  For three weeks I looked everywhere for him. I even checked the police station and the Dog and Cat’s Rescue Shelter in Scotswood. Monty could just not be found. I could not believe how totally he had vanished and thought that he must have been stolen. This belief comforted me because I was sure that one day I would find him again. I was sure that we would immediately recognize each other and all would be well.

  Then one day I was talking about Monty to my sixteen-year-old cousin Billy. Even though he was much older than me, he often came to see me. He had shown me how to spin a cricket ball and said he would teach me how to play billiards when I was older. He turned to me and told me to forget about Monty.

  ‘Stop wasting your time looking for him, he’s long gone,’ he said. ‘You’ll never find him. Your dad thought you were spending too much time with him, missing church services and wasting your time with a dog and so he took him to the vet’s and had him put to death.’

  As the significance of Billy’s words penetrated my brain I started whirling around in a macabre dance of denial and horror. There and then I suffered a sudden and severe attack of agony and distress. I began to tremble with the trauma of realizing that my Monty had been taken from me and executed for nothing but the whim of a cruel man. The pain was unbearable. I felt like I had been broken into pieces and that life would never be the same again.

  Sheer terror took hold of me and I fled. I didn’t know where I was running to – I just ran and my mind subconsciously directed me to the only place where I could find refuge and peace. It had started to rain heavily and by the time I reached the outskirts of Axwell Park Woods I was in a state of collapse and drenched to the bone. I sought and found oblivion and collapsed into the undergrowth between trees and dense bushes. I wanted to die. The pouring rain chilled me into an icy sleep that would have been terminal had it not been for the chance intervention of a young golden retriever, called Goldie, who sniffed me out in the darkness. Her wild howls and frantic barking at my plight alarmed all the householders in the neighbouring parkland and brought help running towards me. Later, it seemed to me quite amazing that I been brought near to death by the loss of my dog, Monty, but my life was in turn saved by the intervention of another dog that I had never seen before.

  I was rushed to the local hospital at Whickham where a severe condition of hyperthermia developed into a raging fever, which was followed by double pneumonia. The medical prognosis was doubtful that I would live another forty-eight hours but the staff did all they could to save me. They found my name and address sewn into the back of my shirt and the police informed my parents. On hearing of my condition my mother fainted. My father, ever the zealot, informed the church and the parish priest, Father Kennedy, drove to the hospital and administered the last rites over my semi-conscious body.

  Twenty-four hours later I awoke with the hospital ward bathed in summer sunshine. Days passed in a blur as I made slow but sure progress towards recovery. At the end of my second week in hospital I received a letter from my mother full of loving concern and enclosing a silver chain with a medal of Saint Jude, the patron saint of hopeless cases, which she asked me to wear. My grandmother then made a surprise visit. She hugged me and we both wept a little. She had brought me some jam sandwiches and a small packet of digestive biscuits. My Aunt Mary Ann, her sister, had also given me a present of a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate which she had been given by one of the airmen at the NAAFI where she worked. We were still in the depths of the war that had blistered its way across the whole of Europe, so food was scarce and luxuries almost impossible to come by.

  My Nanna, for that was the particular name I called my grandmother at times of special intimacy, had two items of good news to tell me. The first was that my father, although he was in a reserve occupation, had been called up to serve in the Fleet Air Arm, the aircraft section of the Royal Navy, and was to leave immediately. The second was that it had been decided, between herself and my mother, that when I left hospital I should go to live with her until it was ‘all got over’. Both these news items delighted me and released me from the fear of what would happen to me when I returned home. Too soon my Nanna had to leave and, since she had to travel on three different buses to get home to Blaydon-on-Tyne, I was overwhelmed by realizing the effort she had made to visit me. From my grandmother I learned the power of love and compassion; from my father I learned the potency of hate and bigotry.

  Life in hospital continued to improve with the arrival of a parcel from my mother and grandmother. It contained a rice cake, which I later shared with the other boys on the ward, and a new pair of pyjamas plus a red, rough cotton dressing gown. Now I could move around the hospital without having to wear an institutional white gown. I could play with some of the other children who were at the recovery stage like me. I knew that my grandmother regularly bought clothing from an Indian man, a Sikh, who travelled around the streets with a huge suitcase containing items for sale.

  Before I left hospital the medical staff removed my tonsils as a remedial measure. After the operation I awoke with a burning thirst that no amount of water could assuage. I longed for a drink of sparkling lemonade which my grandmother a
lways kept in stone bottles, cooling in the pantry. I thought cold, fizzy lemonade was the most desirable, thirst-quenching drink ever, particularly on hot summer days or when you had just had your tonsils out. But for the moment I had to be content with cold tap water

  At night I sometimes met up with Monty again in my dreams and relived happy moments of our time spent together. However, on awakening the reality of his death would cause me to weep into my pillow. I worried about how he must have felt at being taken away from me. When he became aware of what was happening to him, did he blame me for abandoning him? I agonized over how he must have felt and pined for him anew. After a time I was able to reconcile my thoughts about the event by the realization that bad things happen to good and innocent people and animals, too. I started to mature a little and I grew stronger, especially psychologically. I sensed that I would have to exercise great caution about openly revealing my affection for any animal pet whenever my father was around – if and when he ever came back from the Navy, which I hoped would never happen.

  During those weeks in hospital I started to think about the chain of events in the first eight years of my life that had made me who I was – a troubled young boy who just couldn’t seem to stop being at odds with the life around him.

  BACK TO THE BEGINNING

  It was my mother that I loved the most of my parents. Once my sisters arrived on the scene she had less time for me. The disadvantages of this was that I found it increasingly difficult to get her attention since the girls were very clingy, a characteristic which they bore even into adulthood. But I did have some exceptionally happy memories of the early times in my life when I could be alone with my mother. I recall many times before the age of five when my mother would sing to me when I was ill or just unable to get to sleep. She sang many different lullabies and melodies but the one I remember most cogently was the hymn ‘I’ll sing a hymn to Mary’. Strange are the ways of the mind, I realize, because whenever I am alone and feel out of sorts or sick, I can quite involuntarily hear in my head the sweet voice of my mother singing that hymn. After my sisters were born, I may have lost some of her attention but there were advantages too. While my mother was kept so busy attending to the demands of the girls, I had the freedom to spend time on my own and to wander freely. Once I learned the value of independence and freedom to roam I was in my element.

  When my eldest sister Brenda was born it was late summer and my mother would take her in her pram, with me at her side, to places of serene natural beauty. We would go to the fields by the River Tyne where there was a small park and at other times we found a place in Blaydon Cemetery to sit and enjoy the tranquillity amongst the mature trees and flower beds adjacent to the weathered grave stones. Having become familiar with these places on walks in the company of my mother, I felt free to visit them on my own. Graveyards provide excellent sanctuaries for wildlife and it was this feature that drew me back there quietly to watch and study the birds that nested in the old trees. It was in such surroundings that I first caught a glimpse of a great spotted woodpecker hammering away with his beak working like a drill at an old oak tree. Song birds, thrushes, finches and blackbirds would nest there in abundance, along with many other birds that I could not at that stage identify. Several times I saw red squirrels and by careful observation found where one of them nested in a tree cavity. It was in the cemetery that I learned the skills necessary for observing wildlife, and also how to be stealthy in movement and clever at hiding. These skills were not only handy for studying wildlife: the Warden did not like little boys prowling around his graveyard so it was best to avoid him.

  As a very young boy, my relationship with my mother might have been close, but, while lying in my hospital bed, I realized that the seeds of disharmony with my father had been present from the very beginning. When I was three, five years before Monty all too briefly brought joy to my life, our black cat, Sooty, had two kittens, which I adored. After a few days my father gathered the tiny kittens up and led me into the backyard. He forced me to watch in great anguish as, with a stick of firewood, he held the little creatures down in a pail of water until they drowned. As I witnessed through my tears the little bubbles of air coming from the kittens’ mouths I started to grasp that my father was satisfying something in himself by doing this. In later years I identified his cruelty to animals, as well as to myself and my mother, as gratifying a sense of power. The kittens and Monty were the victims but I was the real target of his vile actions. He held the reasons for his hatred close to his chest, and only once I became an adult would I truly understand the toxic effect that his secret had on my life.

  It was a Friday in early May when at long last, having recovered from double pneumonia, I was discharged from hospital. My ever resourceful grandmother had enlisted the help of a friend, the headman in the delivery department of Blaydon Post Office where she worked as a cleaner, to collect me from Whickham hospital. So it was that shortly after eleven o’clock, when all postal deliveries in the area had been completed, a large red post office van arrived at the hospital entrance, delivered some mail, picked me up and conveyed me to my beloved Nanna’s house by the railway lines. I sat among the parcels and bags of letters with a brown paper package wrapped in string containing my few belongings. It was like I was a special item of mail that had been misplaced but was now being delivered to the correct address.

  My grandmother’s house always exuded a special air of warmth. In most weathers there would be a coal fire lit, whatever the temperature, mainly to convey feelings of comfort and bonhomie but also as a means of drying the day’s washing, which would often be hung over lengths of wood suspended from the ceiling by retractable cords. It was a happy home and it always gave me pleasure to be there. The house was decorated with antique furnishings that had been handed down through the family over many years. There was an old rocking chair of elaborately carved dark oak wood. It had cushioned arms and was among my favourite places to sit. The Victorian framed prints such as the Monarch of the Glen, the large hand-painted vases and the grey and blue chaise longue, which rested against the back wall of the sitting room, all served to give the house the ambience of an elegant bygone age.

  Staying here, while recouping my health and spirits, was such a contrast to the spartan conditions under which I lived at home. My grandmother taught me how to make a cup of tea, how to fry an egg and the best way to make a rice pudding. She had time and patience for me and I thrived under her care. Best of all for an eager young mind, there was an extensive library of books that belonged to her brother, who was away working as a pastor for the Church Army. Uncle John was an educated man. He was also very generous to me and bought me toys. My father hated him and sometimes made my mother advertise ‘Toys for sale’ in the local paper in order to sell the toy cars, lead soldiers, a fort and a Meccano set my uncle had given me. This upset me greatly but there was nothing I could do about it.

  All the great classics of literature adorned my Nanna’s shelves: books by Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Hardy and Elizabeth Gaskell, as well as contemporary popular authors such as John Buchan and Catherine Cookson. I would never even have seen these books as a child if it wasn’t for Uncle John’s library. Faced with this multitude of literary treasures my mind raced with ecstasy and through long afternoons of reading I laid the basis for my future education. It was a priceless opportunity. Fortunately, my poor state of health enabled me to indulge a hunger for learning that my religious elementary schooling had not only failed to arouse but had discouraged as being dangerous and ungodly. Thus stimulated, my mind now awakened to new possibilities. I was learning how to think and, more importantly, how to think for myself without the gratuitous imposition of authoritative sanctions. I remember it as a special time in my life. That first night after getting out of hospital, lying in a big, luxurious bed with a lumpy mattress, I recalled the earlier times in my life when I had slept in this large, friendly old house under the care of my grandmother’s love
.

  During the times that I spent living at my grandmother’s house I often had occasion to visit her sister, my Aunt Mary Ann, who was married to Joe, a miner. Uncle Joe had worked in the mines since he was twelve years old under primitive and harsh conditions. Many are the stories he told me of the back-breaking and dangerous working conditions that he and his fellow miners endured. One tragic story of the death of a miner in the 1920s sticks in my mind. The miner, a man who lived in the same row of pitman’s cottages as Uncle Joe, had died in an underground rockfall. He was brought to the surface and his body placed on a cart. There were no ambulances or paramedics available in those days so one of the workmates of the dead man volunteered to take his body back to the pitman’s cottage and inform his wife. The body was placed on a cart and covered with a tarpaulin, while the men returned to work. When the shift ended, at about 3 a.m., the workmate and my Uncle Joe wheeled the body to the dead man’s home. Hammering on the door, he awakened the man’s wife who opened the upstairs window and looked out. The friend of the dead man was embarrassed and, lacking any social graces, simply did not know how to tell her the tragic news. In the end he blurted out to her, ‘Hey, guess who’s died!’

  My uncle would laugh at the black humour of this situation when he was relating the story, and remark that it was just part and parcel of the uncaring attitude caused by the hard conditions in which pitmen lived. Following a death, no compensation was available from the mine-owners except the man’s unpaid wages up to the time of his death; his widow and family would have to vacate the cottage, which was owned by the mining company. ‘Those are the conditions under which we worked, my lad, and not much has changed,’ my Uncle Joe told me. ‘So you take a mind of that and study hard at school to make something of yourself and stay clear of the mines.’