by Tom Cox
‘Lick my bellstick!’ said Shipley.
‘Mewew,’ said Roscoe, punching him in the face.
‘Sweaty furbollocks!’ said Shipley.
‘Mewew,’ said Roscoe, chasing him across the garden until he cowered under a salix bush.
‘I kissed a squirrel while it was pissing and I liked it,’ said Shipley.
‘Mewew,’ said Roscoe, knocking him sideways into one of the yew trees, in the process waking The Bear, who as always looked startled to still be alive.
Shipley was easily the most doglike of the four cats: he was yappy, liked to rush up to new people who arrived at my house and greet them, followed me around a lot and was oddly happy on his back, gently air-flailing his paws like a spaniel I’d seen at the vet while I waited for one of Roscoe’s appointments. But in other ways he could never be doglike. If you tried to discipline Shipley, he’d just tell you in no uncertain terms to make love and travel, or begin insouciantly cleaning his bottom. I could craft an argument that he was all the dog I needed in my life. I had never craved a relationship with a pet based on you being so stroppy to the pet that the pet learned to respect you and not act up around you. But that was dogs all over. Like horses, they also had an innate sense of when somebody was feeling especially unstroppy and tended to like to take advantage of it. While walking in the immediate post-dusk light not far from home around the time Roscoe started going outside again I met an Irish wolfhound called Ted who provided a good example of this. Ted – who I didn’t know was called Ted at the time and who seemed more formidable for this fact – had seen me across a field and bounded ahead of his owner, cornering me gruffly by a kissing gate. As he barked and growled at my face, I got the very definite impression that kissing wasn’t on his agenda. ‘I’m sorry!’ said Ted’s owner, jogging breathlessly up just in time to stop Ted biting both my legs off cleanly at the knee. ‘Don’t worry. Honestly, he’s a big softie usually.’ He introduced himself as Ollie and we got chatting. I told him about Roscoe. Ollie told me that Ted too had recently undergone a large and costly surgical procedure, after swallowing a large stick which tore open the lining of his stomach. ‘I’ve got to be careful now in case he does it again,’ said Ollie. ‘We can’t go through woodland any more, which makes our walks quite difficult.’ Ted was now looking up at me in a far more friendly way, and with my new knowledge of his proclivities, I tried to put his earlier threatening behaviour down to a simple case of mistaken identity, prompted by the dark, my largely brown attire and the fact that I am quite thin. But on another level, I knew that Ted knew. He had sensed it from a hundred yards away, across a nocturnal field: I was a person who was nervous around dogs.
But I had a dog in my life who liked me, whose small twangy presence I missed and who I’d been neglecting for quite a long time. It had now been over two months since I’d walked Billy. I’d had my reasons, and I knew Susie understood them. I was also sure Billy’s canine radar would pick up on my newly raw nerve endings. But by continuing not to walk my part-time black dog I would surely be doing myself a disservice: performing a version on myself of what I’d have been doing to Roscoe had I kept her indoors forever after her operation. At the beginning of March I arranged for Susie to drop Billy off at my house and plotted a new walking route on my OS map: an ambitious one which would take us all the way to Dartmoor from my front door, before turning back a couple of miles to the south-west, where I’d deliver Billy back to Susie’s cottage. I could hear Billy’s excited yips from many yards away, and I hurried out to check Roscoe wasn’t around and to warn Shipley of the poodle’s arrival.
‘Get back inside, Shipley,’ I said.
‘Thirty-seven boobs!’ said Shipley.
‘Come on, or you’re going to regret this,’ I said. ‘You know the two of you tend to clash.’
‘I’m giving up wanking!’ said Shipley.
‘Go on!’ I said. ‘Quick!’
‘Total eclipse of my arse,’ said Shipley, skulking off.
Humid Glass Palaces of Dreams
I met Billy and Susie by the gate, and in time-honoured fashion Billy instantly began to pogo up and down almost the entire length of me. ‘I’m sorry, he smells slightly of lamb,’ said Susie. ‘He stole some yesterday.’ I appraised my estranged woollen companion. He was still Billy, and I was still the person he followed eagerly up hills and along cliff tops without a hint of intellectual enquiry as to why it was happening. We said goodbye to Susie and headed out through little copses, newly intoxicating with the first little flush of wild garlic, then along a narrow logging road where all the trees looked like they’d been in a war, before entering soft patchwork farmland where pylons marched in intimidating robot lines towards the coast. A disturbing dystopian hum in the sky battled with a soundless utopian one in the earth. The hedgerows on the paths and lanes were filling up with primrose, yarrow and lady’s smock. I made a quick stop at a small, hidden nursery, in whose greenhouses cheeky blackbirds whizzed through the air, expertly negotiating Australian tree ferns and hanging baskets stuffed with crocus and tulip bulbs. The huge greenhouses in this unassuming place which you’d not guess was there from the road save for its sign sent me into rapture each time I entered them, gave me wild and unrealistic fantasies of my green-fingered destiny. Humid glass palaces of dreams. Lofty unthinkable expansions of the greenhouses of the young, horticulturally ambitious grandparents of the 1960s.
We continued towards Buckfastleigh, where the moor sort of starts, but doesn’t. Gates seemed stiff with winter’s neglect. One of last autumn’s hay bales lay wedged in the fence to the left of one: a downhill runaway yet to be rescued. The fence was strong and had succeeded in halting its descent but splintered and bent in the process. I spent hours leaping from and on hay bales as a kid. One summer my dad worked on a farm and stacked them. Unless they’ve been in close contact with them people underestimate their staggering heft. In 2012 one rolled down a hill a few lanes away from here and crushed the passing van of the former cellist from the band ELO, killing him instantly.
You wouldn’t know this in-between land exists, looking up towards the moor from a few miles south on the top of the hill above my house: small routes that don’t lead anywhere commercial, where nature smells busy. Because it’s always there, hovering at the edge of your vision, and its character continues to define the ground beneath it for miles, Dartmoor seems closer to where I live than it is. It’s in fact around twelve miles to get to a part that’s high and tussocky and rough enough to call moor. My aim today was simply to reach that bit, nothing more; merely to touch it in the way you touch the end wall of a swimming pool before turning to do the next length.
Knowing Billy’s penchant for winding up creatures from other species, including me, I’d learned not to let him off the lead if there was even the slightest possibilty that some livestock might be around, but as we left a field via a sheep-rubbed stile to join a steep rocky holloway, I set him free. Almost instantly he spotted two pheasants and shot off at a fair, scrappy clip. I gave chase then slipped on the steep sharp rocks beneath my feet, bumping down the hill on my back a few yards and scraping a chunk of skin off the region on and around my elbow. I walk so much these days that I tend to average two or three falls a year. Being philosophical, I reasoned that it had been about time I’d got one of them out the way.
The hills here, on either side of the A38, are less hills, more imperious, bolshie organic emerald walls. At the bottom of the holloway I reattached Billy to his lead and we joined a lane then crossed the dual carriageway and climbed the steep path to the ruin of Buckfastleigh church, which can be seen from the main road poking its head up out of the trees atop a steep bluff, as if watching avidly for trouble. The gradient from the main road below is so steep that it made the conflagration that engulfed the church in 1992 absolute hell to put out, the fire engines having to pump water uphill in a vain attempt to save it. This was the second fire allegedly started by Devil worshippers to wreck the church, following another i
n 1849, and it finished the place off, leaving its open-air vestry a haven for crows, bats and ghosts. The most ominous crows and bats are generally not recognised as individuals, but the most infamous of the ghosts is Richard Cabell, an evil seventeenth-century squire who is supposed to leave his tomb every year on the anniversary of his death and ride across the moor with his pack of Devil hounds. At other times the hounds circle his grave, shrieking in a blood-curdling fashion, and it’s said that if you walk around the tomb seven times backwards, Cabell – or worse, even his master the Devil himself – will bite your fingers: more or less the opposite of the alleged effect of doing the same around the yew at Stoke Gabriel. It was hearing the story of Cabell in 1901 that prompted Arthur Conan Doyle to exclaim, ‘I am totally having that!’ or words to that effect, then proceed to write The Hound of the Baskervilles. An electrician called Max told me about the caves under here, which stretch for almost three miles beneath the A38 and contain a freak stalagmite-stalactite which resembles a figure in seventeenth-century clothes and is known locally as the Little Man. Arguably even more unsettling than any of this is the pagoda-like building on top of Cabell’s tomb, which was erected by locals to ‘trap in’ Cabell’s evil spirit. Its concrete heaviness and incongruity are scary in a mundane way. A bat might reject the structure on the grounds that it found it too chillingly bland. If you were being kind, you might compare it to one of the less imaginative small-town toilet blocks of the 1960s. I realise its purpose is purely supernatural-functional, but I do wonder if someone could not have gone to the effort to add a couple of nice picture windows or a bit of wisteria?
In scary patches of countryside such as this, which were frequent on our walks, Billy performed a useful function, having a not dissimilar effect to the one a song from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack might have on a night alone in a haunted manor house. There are an inordinate number of crows gathering here, and I don’t like that mortsafe on that grave over there, you found yourself thinking, then, Oh! It’s all OK! Look! Billy is here, bouncing up and down like a small haberdashery Space Hopper with teeth! As a black dog, he was a let-down to the mythology of his tribe. You’d be hard pushed to see the church in more frivolous circumstances than at lunchtime on a bright spring afternoon like this one, directly after rain, accompanied by an animal like him. All the same, I still got an inner chill from the place. I did not want to stay around it for too long.
The gradient increased severely on the last part of our hike, and I was conscious of the skin missing from my arm after my fall in the holloway, but I couldn’t stop now. I had set out to touch the moor and that is what I was going to do. On the lane near Wallaford Down, Billy found a good stick, one of the crumbly lichen-pimpled ones you get on the tarmac on and near the moor after a storm. As he grinned up at me with it in his mouth he could easily have been saying, ‘I am so high right now, man, on being a dog.’ But I was about to be his buzzkill. At the standing stone below Gripper’s Hill, near a similarly ancient-looking standing sheep, we turned for Susie’s cottage at Deancombe, a place with its own black dog legend, concerning a seventeenth-century weaver called Thomas Knowles, whose workaholic ghost terrorised his sons until the local vicar threw churchyard earth in his face and turned him into a canine. Thirty minutes later, when I dropped Billy off, he looked genuinely hurt, and even after almost fourteen miles I was left feeling like I’d wussed out. I did genuinely wuss out not long after that, walking into the centre of Buckfastleigh and doing something I’d never done before during a walk: I asked a taxi to take me home. I was looking forward to seeing Roscoe and feeling the contrast of her grudging, hard-earned respect after the unconditional sort I’d been receiving from Billy for the last few hours, but she wasn’t around when I got in.
I reminded myself that this was a good thing and ran a bath. I glanced at myself in the bathroom mirror: I appeared tired but had an outdoor brightness around my eyes. A long walk could so often be a strange, exhausting form of rest. I enjoyed lowering my aching muscles into the hot water, though. Afterwards, with considerable relish, I went to retrieve the pair of fresh pyjama bottoms I’d left to warm on a radiator at the start of the day. I located them on the floor, flecked with tiny black and white hairs, a couple of tiny leaves and some dried mud. But that was OK. There would always be other pyjama bottoms. The world was positively overrun with them.
10
DAWN OF THE DAD
My late paternal granddad Ted was an almost constantly grinning man with a moustache, glasses and a large scar which ran across most of the entirely bald dome of his head. Right from when I was very small I’d known that he’d been injured in the Second World War, but it wasn’t until later that I asked about the scar’s exact origin. ‘NO, HE DIDN’T GET IT WHILE HE WAS FIGHTING,’ my dad told me. ‘TED DIDN’T DO ANY FIGHTING. HE WAS MENDING A PLANE AND WAS IN THE WAY WHEN THE PROPELLER STARTED GOING AND IT CLONKED HIM ONE.’
Maybe there was a point when my dad addressed his dad as ‘Dad’ but I only ever heard him call him ‘TED’ or ‘TEDWARD’. To me this says as much about Ted’s extreme Tedness as it does about the jocular relationship the two of them shared. In my memory Ted is preserved as a human teddy bear: cuddly, circle-faced, dopey, entirely guileless and often found in the woods. But teddy bears are not built to survive alone. In my grandma Joyce my granddad found his complementary opposite: stern and fearful, a woman who once called the police on her own son for putting pennies on a train track close to their house. Joyce’s role was to reduce Ted’s head injuries to a minimum, remind him not to post his house keys in the letter box at the end of the road or leave loaves of bread on the roof of the car prior to journeys, and, during visits to heavily mirrored buildings, stop him from spending too much time apologising profusely to other moustachioed men with scarred bald heads for blocking their path. Ted’s – arguably more significant – role was to shake Joyce out of her naturally pessimistic state of mind with a succession of dancing classes, neighbourhood bonfires, fancy-dress balls, caravan holidays and walking expeditions to the Peak District.
The council house where Joyce and Ted lived for almost their entire married life was on the western edge of Nottinghamshire, close to the Derbyshire border, where a large portion of my family have resided for the best part of the last century and where our lives have been flavoured by a bucolic yearning for our taller, more attractive neighbouring county. My grandparents were part of a new generation of ramblers who went to the Derbyshire part of the Peak District in the 1950s and 1960s as a weekend escape from their factory jobs, freed by the greater access to the countryside opened by the Kinder Scout Trespass in 1932. ‘MARVELLOUS!’ my granddad would say upon rounding a corner and getting a view of Dovedale or Milldale or Chatsworth. ‘JUST MARVELLOUS.’ Ted was one of that last tribe of men who managed to make driving through Britain at weekends a hobby without being a speed junkie or petrolhead. When Shell and their contemporaries put together countryside guidebooks aimed at touring motorists after the Second World War, my grandparents were the kind of people they were thinking of. But when my dad was a kid the area where they lived was still fairly rural itself too – enough to be a fertile foraging ground to satisfy my granddad’s wood obsession. One day in the mid-fifties word spread around the neighbourhood that the big oak tree at Tommy Thompson’s farm had come down in the storm, and my granddad and his dad – also named Ted – immediately grabbed a two-man crosscut saw and headed up there. The bus stop you waited at to get the number 32 into town was beside a pen containing a neighbouring farm’s large and angry bull. The high-rise flats at Balloon Woods, a quarter of a mile away, had yet to be built, and my dad and his gang, led by his older cousin Flob, made dens and fires in the woods and put coins on the train track, hiding nearby and cheering as trains wooshed by and squished the bronze flat. Venturing further into the wilderness in the direction of Trowell, he and another kid from the same council estate, Jim Spurgeon, found what they thought was an abandoned house but which, when they entered it
, contained a Gypsy family dressed in rags. ‘I WAS REALLY SCARED, BUT I SHOWED THEM MY KNIFE AND THEY WERE REALLY IMPRESSED,’ my dad told me.
On a summer’s day early in the second decade of this century, many years since I’d last visited this area, I met my dad in the Co-op car park around a mile from my grandparents’ old house. ‘I’M NOT WALKING WITH YOU IF YOU WEAR THAT,’ my dad said, pointing to the straw hat on my head, a prized item of headwear I’d purchased from a car boot sale in Lincolnshire for three pounds. After that we said hello and began to walk south in the direction of Wollaton Park. My dad pointed to a 1980s housing estate on our left named after a famous ice-skating duo where, for a very brief time more than twenty years ago, my parents rented a two-bed semi. ‘THAT WAS ALL WASTE GROUND OVER THERE IN THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES,’ he said as we turned into the estate. He pointed to some houses on our right. ‘THE CANAL USED TO BE THERE, BUT IF I WENT AND PLAYED NEAR IT I COULDN’T TELL YOUR GRANDMA BECAUSE SHE SAID I’D GET POLIO. WHEN THEY DRAINED IT THE O’DOHERTYS TOOK LOADS OF TENCH, BREAM AND PERCH HOME AND PUT THEM IN THEIR BATH. SEE THAT MANHOLE COVER? THEY WOULD HAVE HAD THAT OFF IN SECONDS JUST TO SEE WHAT WAS UNDERNEATH. WHY DO PEOPLE HAVE PERSONALISED REGISTRATION PLATES? WHEN THEY DRIVE PAST ME I ALWAYS WAVE AT THEM SO THEY KNOW I RECOGNISE THEIR IMPORTANCE AS PEOPLE. JIM SPURGEON WAS VERY ADVANCED FOR HIS AGE. AT OUR SCHOOL WE DIDN’T HAVE SEX EDUCATION. WE HAD HIM INSTEAD. HE TOLD ME HAVING AN ORGASM WAS LIKE HAVING A HUNDRED CHRISTMASES AT ONCE.’
When my dad starts talking about his childhood, all you can do is quickly hitch your trailer to the back of the juggernaut and hope that some of it – maybe, say, a wheel and the number plate – is still in one piece by the end. Except, technically, there is no end. When my mum or I ask my dad to stop telling a story we generally do so not because we aren’t interested in the story but because we know that if we don’t, the story will just segue into another story, and another, and eventually the whole history of the universe will be told through the prism of Jeff Spurgeon, the O’Dohertys, Joyce, Ted, the less salubrious end of Wollaton and the Bilborough estate. My mum likens the way he talks to the way a man with two brains might talk, or someone acting as a translator for his own words, but translating in an odd, rarely sensical way that in fact creates a mild form of oral abstract art. I grew up with the tendency to speak in the slightly hushed, reticent voice of my mum’s side of the family, which constituted a genetic development against the odds, since both sides of my dad’s family were unusually loud. When my mum and dad first got together in the 1960s and they and Joyce and Ted drove to Derbyshire for a weekend walk, the noise would frequently get too much for my mum, and she would have to tell them she had a headache and needed to be silent for a while in the hope that they might be too. During Christmas 1985 Joyce talked at my nan so much that my nan had to excuse herself to visit the toilet, where she quietly vomited. At Ted’s funeral my dad chose not to employ a vicar and took charge of the ceremony himself. Had he not been told it was time to stop, I got the sense the eulogy could have gone on indefinitely and might still even be taking place right now, fifteen entire years later. During my dad’s speech, which praised Ted’s boundless good nature, gardening skills and enthusiasm, my grandma shouted, ‘I can’t hear you!’ at my dad, which, in its way, felt just as fitting an addition to the day as the decision to play Bing Crosby’s ‘Accentuate the Positive’ when the coffin disappeared. I have no recollection of my granddad saying a negative word against anyone during the entire twenty-seven years that I knew him. I’m sure he wouldn’t have had any criticism of my dad’s eulogy and would have thought the length and volume of it just marvellous.