“Shut him in the van, Sergeant,” said the officer, “and we’ll start again.”
“I’d like to break its bleeding little neck,” said the sergeant. “Another second and . . .”
The dog now lay limp and relaxed, looking from one to the other. The officer smiled down at him. The dog wagged his tail agreeably, but was handed over to the sergeant, who clamped a hand hard around his jaw, pressing his ribcage so hard that he twisted in silent pain. The officer scratched behind one ear. “Gently with him,” he said. “He doesn’t know what it’s all about.” He lit a pipe and leaned against the sandbags, an elderly untidy man, with a vague sweet face, his spectacles mended on one side with adhesive tape, his crumpled uniform terminating in a pair of plaid bedroom slippers. The soldier, viciously clamping the jaw under his hand, walked back to the van, opened the door, and threw his burden into the back; then, because he was still a very shaken man, he picked up a wrench and threw it after for good measure.
The dog crouched in the back as the door banged shut. Gradually his confidence returned and he jumped over into the driving seat. He lay across the seat with head on paws to wait, his eyes and ears alert. Nearly two hours later, he heard the sound of returning rubbersoled footsteps, and jumped into the back again, pressing himself against the side of the truck, his nose at the bottom of the crack where the door would open. He gathered himself as the handle turned, and was clear of the truck a second later, running madly up the street to freedom.
He wandered on, limping and thirsty, in the hazy dustladen sunshine. When the streets were blocked by fire engines and ambulances, he picked a passage between clumping boots that sometimes kicked him out of their urgent way, past the great heaving coils from water hydrants, through clouds of smoke, up empty streets where walls trembled above him, through choking acrid smells, and smells of death and vileness.
There was only one place he knew, and he returned to it, to the sheltering marble wing above the tombstone. And here a crazed lonely woman, wandering through the churchyard, saw him and comforted herself for a while with his reality, sitting on the grass, stroking the cold marble feathers above, and murmuring in an incomprehensible torrent to the small silent audience that paid her its grave undivided attention. A motley pack of dogs swept past in slavering courtship of a young, bewildered yet excited greyhound; trailing a leather strap from her wide collar she leaped onto a flat tombstone to snarl ritually at the most persistent of her followers, a mangy collie cur. The woman screamed at them in a flood of obscenities and the little dog fled from her to join the pack. Hours later, his ardor cooled after being set upon two or three times, he returned to his now deserted guardian angel to lick his wounds, a lip bitten through and a tattered ear.
He was there still when the nightmare started up again soon after dark, and when the first screaming hurtled down at him from the pulsing darkness he pressed back into his refuge, shuddering convulsively, until at last the noise and terror drove him to the madness of the night. This time he did not always run alone; there were other dogs that ran in terror-stricken circles too, their known world gone, instinctively packing together. Once a runaway horse came thundering up a narrow cobbled street, an old gray cart horse, galloping heavily, its flying mane and tail gallant in the unearthly orange light, one opaque white eye fixed steadily ahead, the other rolling wildly. The little dog broke away from the pack as though drawn irresistibly, to run ahead, as he had once run before another old gray horse who had drawn a caravan, and who had lain kicking between the shafts until a stranger soldier had silenced the screaming with a merciful bullet. There had been a red glare, a crackling of flames, unmoving bodies that sunlit afternoon in France too; perhaps it was this that drove the little dog to his madness in the nights of bombing.
He ran with unseeing eyes before the feathered hooves striking sparks from the cobbles, until at last they thundered up a street blocked with fire engines, and there the horse wheeled, its heavy quarters skidding in the soaked debris, and it was brought down to its knees. A fireman seized the reins and encouraged it back to its feet, and it stood trembling, head flung back wildly, the nostrils dilated red to the red night sky. But what to do with an old spent horse with broken knees when there was a burning human agony and every pair of hands needed — the man led the animal beyond the writhing hoses and fire engines until he came to a house with a garage attached. The dog trotted along behind. The garage was empty; the man tethered the horse to a workbench and ran out. The dog stretched his forepaws up to the chest of the horse, almost as though from custom; at the first touch of the light paws the horse shied clumsily, then stood, shuddering. The dog wagged his tail, and at last the horse lowered its head, whickering softly. The dog jumped onto the bench and curled up. Gradually the horse quietened, only backing clumsily and jerking its head back to the limits of the frayed tether when the bombs sounded almost directly overhead. They spent the rest of the night there.
The scrap merchant traced the runaway early next morning, and led it off down the smoldering street, followed for a while by the dog. The little procession threaded its way through the glass-strewn haze of an exhausted town that lay in a momentary respite under the calm mockery of an early morning sun that spun rainbows out of the fire hose jets and illumined the black billowing smoke with soft rosy pink. Ambulances, fire engines, rescue units and mobile canteens edged past them; men shouted angrily at them to get out of the way. They plodded on, the dog’s head low as the horse’s, close to its dragging hooves, until they reached the scrapyard at last, and there the man led the horse into its stable. But when the dog would have followed, he drove him off and closed the half-door. The dog drank from a trough, then limped out into the road again where he stood indecisively for a minute or two before making his way back.
It seemed that Man was entirely preoccupied with his immediate survival and salvage and as yet his compassion could encompass only the humans of his shattered world. Often the mere animal offense of being concerned only with their own business of survival brought about the equally primitive reaction of the hand reaching for the nearest missile, or the toe of a boot finding its mark. That a hungry scavenging dog would feed on the overturned contents of a meat safe while ten yards away lay the body of the one who had planned to cook those contents offended by its very reasonableness; that rats should emerge sleek and prosperous from the same cellars where man now sought refuge, or a spider painstakingly spin a web across his newly blown-in windows — all such behavior had somehow become a terrible violation. The uncaring abstraction of tied dogs, the fluttering of mounting sparrows — these too were such unendurable desecrations that even the exultant nocturnal scream of a copulating cat could seem more noisome than a descending bomb.
The little dog, after some bitter experiences, was well aware of all this; although he must have hungered for human company in his lonely terror, he learned to keep his distance from it. He stayed roughly around the same area during those days, foraging in dustbins or the wreckage of shops and houses. He was mainly attracted by the heavy rescue crews working round the clock to free survivors trapped under the debris of collapsed houses, for the reward of what had lain beneath the wreckage that first morning when he had dug with the black Labrador had apparently given much pleasure to man. Perhaps in the expectation of further approbation he would often try to join in other digging operations; but always he was driven away by angry voices, sometimes more forcibly and painfully by thrown bricks from those who interpreted his diligence as a morbid desecration; sometimes he tried to remove mountains of rubble by himself, knowing certainly that beneath it lay the living reward that man sought elsewhere, but pointing out its presence in vain.
In the late afternoon of the third day, cowed and slinking now with furtive wary eyes, he wandered farther afield to a residential area on the outskirts of the town, and there, rifling through the already well-rifled contents of a dustbin blown into the orchard adjoining a large garden, he paused, one paw lifted, sniffing the air, his
ears upright. He limped through the garden, following some scent or sound, until he came to a building at the bottom of the garden, a coach house converted into a garage. The windows were blown in and most of the roof down, but the walls still stood sturdily. To the right of the closed double doors was the original stable door, half open, and the little dog, after hesitating for a moment, edged in warily.
The interior was a tangled mass of beams, lathes and slates, and he approached it with much caution low to the ground, his nose still working busily. Where a small inverted V of access to the pile had been formed by two beams he paused, his tail moving fast, ears cocked and head to one side, whining excitedly. Now he inserted his head into the V, his slight body followed, and like a wraith he infiltrated the narrow tunnel. It widened out after a few yards to a small clearing, the roof formed by a jumble of precariously balanced timbers. An arm protruded from below, lying along a length of board, and as the dog crawled towards it the fingers opened and closed as though beckoning.
Delighted with his find, he licked the hand, then wagged his tail when a weak muffled voice from below responded to his action. Questing around for access he tried to tunnel down through a mass of plaster board to which remnants of paper and yellowed magazine pictures of horses still adhered. As he dug, the vibration loosened part of the delicate spillikin construction of the pile, and from somewhere above there was a groaning shift of weight followed by a heavy resettlement of timbers, then a small avalanche of plaster. The immediate V remained above, but the little entrance tunnel was now gone. The dog yelped as a heavy board pinned one paw; he pulled desperately, the yelping changing to a higher pitch with the pain. The paw tore free at last; whimpering, he fell to licking his mangled toes.
The weak disembodied voice below whispered for a while, then grew silent, but the hand still moved wearily as though in search, until at last the fingers found and closed upon the other paw, tracing the pads and nails, circling the delicate hocks. He licked the fingers perfunctorily and returned his attention to the injured paw. A glimmer of light high up in the tangled pile slowly faded as darkness fell. The bleeding stanched at last, exhausted with pain and hunger, he laid his head on the other paw, his muzzle resting lightly on the hand. The fingers moved out and up past the matted hair on the crown of his head, then to the sensitive hollow behind his ears. Sometimes the arm was withdrawn for a while, but the voice continued, sometimes speaking, sometimes singing; sometimes it called out high and continuously, when he would whine or lick the hand as though in response to a call.
Gradually he and the hand grew weaker, both lying listlessly for hours at a stretch. By the evening of the second day the hand had gone and the voice was long silent. He could no longer lift his head, and his eyes were blind and sealed with a yellow discharge. He lay without movement, as though waiting the end with patient resignation, only the occasional flick of one ear to sudden creaks above betraying the will to live.
On the late morning of the third day he raised his head and momentarily freed the other ear — then suddenly he pushed back on one foreleg to his haunches and broke into a high wild barking.
Chapter 10
ALICE TREMORNE had been trapped for two nights and days when the dog found her. She had been alone in the house as Miss Carpenter, her companion help, was away on a week’s holiday, and the daily help had left soon after putting the evening meal in the oven. After listening to the nine o’clock news, restless and so bored with her own company that she had even cleared away the supper dishes for the first time in her life, Mrs. Tremorne suddenly thought of sloe gin. At the beginning of the war she had put up several bottles. They should be pleasantly aged by now, maturing in the inspection pit of the garage, a place which she had found, after much trial and error, maintained an excellent temperature for her homemade wines. She would tell Janet Carpenter to fetch a sample bottle when she returned . . .
But the more she thought about the sloe gin, the more she wanted to try it now; how very inconsiderate of the woman not to have foreseen this wish. Why should she have to wait five days before it was realized? She could not. She would not. She would fetch some herself — she would show Carpenter she was not indispensable. It would be interesting to see how the Elderberry ’38 was faring too. Wincing, but still majestic, Mrs. Tremorne rose stiffly to her feet.
Taking a small torch, a fur wrap, and her stick from the hall cupboard, she shuffled slowly down the path to the garage, grimly enjoying the outing, savoring each detail of the hazards of steps and path to relate to Carpenter in due course. She hoped she would be able to manipulate the bottles, for her hands as well as her legs were stiff and swollen with arthritis. Anticipating difficulty, she had put two small bottles and a funnel in the string bag over her arm so that at least she could transfer some of the contents in the garage itself.
Where the cobbles had been taken up from the stable yard, the surface had been paved; very easy to negotiate, even for an elderly woman who normally never set foot outside without her companion’s arm being available. But when she opened the garage door and shone the light around, she realized that she had forgotten the fitted boards covering the pit. She would have to remove the ones over the steps. Her knees twinged at the thought. But Mrs. Tremorne was not one to turn back from her determined course; somehow she managed to lever up enough boards. Puffing and panting, giddy with the effort, cursing Carpenter, she now realized that it would be sheer foolhardiness to attempt the cement steps of the pit without a handrail. She decided to investigate instead the deep cupboard in which the matured bottles of Elderberry, Ginger and Black Currant wines were kept, under the stairs leading to the loft.
Outside the sirens wailed, such a normal event almost every evening since the war had begun that she took no notice. She unlocked the door, closing it carefully behind her before switching on the light. The neat rows of labeled bottles filled her orderly soul with pleasure — dating back, to let me see when — she adjusted her pince-nez and bent closer. It was at this precise moment that she realized the sirens had heralded business this time; the anti-aircraft defenses ringing the town burst out into an excited crackling, and now the great thudding of the naval guns from the dockyard joined in. Above all this was another seldom heard but unmistakable noise, a very unpleasant noise indeed, with the spaced finality of its dreadful thuds rattling her bottles and sending the suspended light bulb into a crazy flickering dance: those unspeakable Germans were actually having the effrontery to bomb Plymouth.
Mrs. Tremorne switched off the light, and reopened the cupboard door. The open garage door now framed a bright orange sky across which searchlight fingers moved, and a garden illuminated as clearly as a stage setting. A flare floated down towards the paddock beyond, and as she watched, her fascination changed to irritation as the bright unearthly glow revealed unseemly mounds of fresh molehills on her lawn. There was a sudden clanging as fragments of metal rained down on the path, an unpleasant pattering on the roof above. She found herself longing for the comfortable haven of her armchair in the shelter of the cellar stairs of the house, three comforting floors and the concrete stairs overhead.
Then her world was filled with a rushing screaming noise like an express train coming straight at her. Arthritis and all, Mrs. Tremorne dropped to the floor and lay flat, her head buried in her arms. The stone floor rocked, she felt as though all air were being sucked out of her body, her head exploding, then her body became strangely weightless. Without in any way feeling conscious of her passage across the garage, she had been neatly picked up and as neatly deposited on the straw on top of her own bottles at the bottom of the pit. At the same time, almost as though she had activated some lever, the roof collapsed, the first beams to fall straddling the pit, and so supporting the remainder that fell in crazy order on top. Terribly shaken, her head spinning, her eardrums thudding, Mrs. Tremorne lay on her straw mattress and wondered if this was the end. Before she could find out, she dropped off into unconsciousness.
When she came to s
ome hours later, lying there with her arms by her sides, in thick black silence, she thought that she was in her coffin, additional proof being that when she spoke up indignantly to say that there had been some mistake, she heard no words. She resigned herself, with black fury, to eternal rest.
After a while, she became conscious of sharp things boring through the straw, like fakirs’ nails into her back, and memory returned; the tops of her wine bottles. She lifted her arms then each leg cautiously in turn; everything worked. She felt herself carefully, but could not find even a scratch; her shoes had been blown off, but she still clutched the torch in one hand, the string bag was still over her arm, the medicine bottles were intact inside. After much painful effort, she managed to get to her feet, resting her elbows on a cleared space at floor level. She saw now that there were occasional chinks of red light in the otherwise impenetrable mass over her. She swept the beam of the light around the roof of her prison and saw that even if she had had the strength to remove some of the obstruction, the balance was so delicately conserved that she might well loosen a key support and bring the whole jumble crashing down. She would have to resign herself to waiting. Conserving her light, her strength. Thank goodness, even though the night was not cold, she had put on her cape. It irritated her very much that she had no one except herself to blame for her predicament, this unnerving silence — only those dreadful Germans, and she concentrated all her hate on them.
She did not know when the All Clear sounded at last in the early morning; she did not even know if it was day or night, only that she was now very cold and ached in every bone. She shouted and shouted, not knowing that her voice had become a whisper, and tears of fury and weakness furrowed down her dusty cheeks. Falling silent at last from sheer exhaustion, she realized that the A.R.P. post at the corner of the street, where the listed occupants of all the houses around were kept, would probably check the house only. Knowing that Miss Carpenter was away — one of the wardens was her cousin — and finding no evidence of Mrs. Tremorne (if only she had not been so altruistic with that supper tray . . .), they would assume that she had gone out for the evening. They would never think of looking in the garage, for everyone knew that she was unable to get around without assistance. But the daily woman would come at nine o’clock, Mrs. Tremorne reassured herself; she would know, she would come searching. . . .
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