On the morning of the third day, Myrle said, “I'm going to try to make my mind quite empty and see what comes into it. Don't say anything.” And she shut her eyes. After a minute she said, “She's in the Little Ground.”
The Little Ground was a two-acre piece of grass at the bottom of the farm, seldom frequented by dogs. I was skeptical but luckily said nothing. For as we walked across it, there, right in the middle, was a freshly dug rabbit bury and coming from it a familiar squeaking.
It wasn't even a proper hole, just a deeper than usual version of the nest burrow, or “stop,” that an outlying doe makes to have her kittens in; and by lying flat and reaching in to the full extent of my arm, I could just grab hold of Anna's tail. I pulled her out, plastered in earth, and on our knees as though to give thanks for this safe delivery, we prepared to greet her. She gave herself a shake and, without a glance at us, went straight back down.
The story of Susie's entombment is much more horrific, but then the story of Susie's life consists of a series of incidents each one of which would have killed a lesser dog. Keats may have been half in love with easeful death, but Susie went the whole hog, head over heels. She began at a tender age. A French bulldog of my mother's took one look at her, picked her up by the neck, and shook her like a rat. Bulldogs lock on, and by the time Susie was rescued, the bite had pierced the salivary gland. This in due course festered, and the sepsis looked likely to put an early end to her. However to the surprise of the vet, she survived this first and, had we known it, comparatively minor brush with the last enemy.
All her subsequent attempts upon her own life took place at Woodlands Farm. Not long after we moved in, Susie sampled a different kind of poisoning. This time it was strychnine. How or where she came upon the bait that I suppose someone had put down for foxes we didn't know, but the vet knew what it was.
“I'm afraid there's no hope for her,” he said. Foolish man, he learned better as time went on.
The next two clashes were with motor vehicles. Ken the builder drove up the yard one morning, and as he swung onto the concrete apron outside the dairy, Susie ran out of the door and under the van.
“Oh my God, the wheel went right over her, I felt the bump!”
Don't worry, Ken, I should have said. It'd take more than a potty little ten-hundredweight to do her in. And sure enough, she didn't seem to have turned a hair, let alone broken a bone, but simply growled with her customary surliness and went about her business. But that must have given her ideas, for the next car she tackled, quite soon afterwards, was a really big one, going fast, on the main road.
A friend who was staying had strolled down to the bottom of the drive with the dogs when suddenly to her horror Susie dashed (cat perhaps?) straight across the road and under a speeding car. But there was no battered body left behind. Instead, fifty yards farther on, just before the car disappeared from sight around the bend, out from beneath the chassis tumbled one small dog.
I can only suppose she must somehow have been caught up in the track rods, and this time it must have given her a little bit of a fright because she ran home with her tail between her legs. She was a bit sore, a bruise or two perhaps, and snarled more than usual for a couple of days.
On Boxing Day 1950, Susie went missing. The search party found nothing, and darkness fell with no sign of her. Anna's longest disappearance had been in fine summer weather, but now there was a bitterly cold spell with a biting east wind. On the whole we hoped she had gone to ground somewhere. At least she would be warmer down below.
At first this seemed the most likely explanation, since it was the thing she was keenest to do and had so often done. The alternatives were that she had been stolen — pretty unlikely: it would have had to be a bold dog thief with stout gloves — or, more probably, run over by car or train. Two sides of Woodlands Farm carried this hazard, for the main Bristol to Chipping Sodbury road ran along its eastern edge and the Paddington to South and West Wales line along its southern.
But though we hunted and rooted and poked about in every conceivable spot, and lay and listened long at every known hole in the ground, the year turned and 1951 came in with Susie lost to us at last.
Myrle said, “I think you've got to resign yourself to the fact that your dog has almost certainly been killed.”
All the dogs were “our” dogs, but the rest gave fealty to Myrle as food provider, trainer, and someone who could be guaranteed to treat them with patience and understanding. However, my intolerant shouting and cursing at any show of disobedience seemed to appeal to Susie's cross-grained nature. Not that she ever had any soft answer to turn away my wrath: she simply snarled; but she must have sympathized with my quirkiness, because she followed me everywhere about the farm. At plowing, especially, she would trot all day long up the bed of each new-turned furrow, exactly a yard behind the tail of the plow, waiting at the headland for the lift and turn and drop, and then back again down the other side of the “land.”
“Well, I suppose she's had a pretty good run for her money. But I shan't half miss her, bad-tempered little swine.”
“I mean, we've looked everywhere, haven't we? We've been to the police station. We've asked everybody round about. And if she's been run over, we'd surely have found her.”
“Yes. The most likely thing really is that she tangled with a badger or badgers in the set in the Wood. After all, what does she weigh, twelve pounds? A big boar badger might go thirty pounds or more. And think of those jaws.”
“But we couldn't hear anything at the set, could we?”
“Exactly.”
By the time that a whole week, of unrelenting freezing temperatures, had gone by since Susie's disappearance, we had resigned ourselves to the certainty that she was a goner. We should have known better. Early on the morning of Wednesday 3 January, I opened the back door on my way out to milk, and there in the gray light was a creature half crawling, half walking up the yard.
Not even such a masochist as Susie could voluntarily have reduced herself to the state that she was in, her eyes right back in her head, her mouth full of earth and bits of wood, her rough black-and-white coat matted with dirt and her own dung. Probably she'd become wedged, perhaps between tree roots, somewhere deep enough for the air temperature to be bearable, and had literally had to wait to become thin enough to break free.
Any normal dog would have died of dehydration. As it was, she seemed at her last gasp. But it wasn't her last, by a long chalk. By the end of that day she was back in good growling form. And a couple of days afterwards you wouldn't have known that anything untoward had happened.
At the beginning of April that year Susie fell in love. Now five years old, she had up to this time defied all my efforts, and they were assiduous, to breed from her. Time and again she was taken to eminently suitable little working terrier dogs. Nowadays it's the fashion to call them Jack Russells after the famous nineteenth-century sporting parson (though in fact he kept all shapes and sizes right up to Airedales), but Susie wasn't interested in any aspect of them. All they got for their pains were snaps and snarls. And once we even tried her with one of our dachshunds in a desperate effort to breed puppies of some sort from her, but Susie flew at him and he left the room in gentlemanly embarrassment, his long nose much out of joint.
So by that spring we had relaxed any normal vigilance during her season, confident that she was her own best contraceptive. No suitor now, we knew, would try that long-preserved virginity. Enter Boy Dugdale.
This animal, a newcomer to the district, had been seen about the farm often enough to merit a name; and one glance at this dog left no doubt that here was a satyr of the first order. Partly it showed in his constantly aggressive marking, the cocked leg held so high that you wondered how he kept his balance, and in his strong, confident scratching of the grass with his hind feet. Partly it was his uncanny ability to appear suddenly out of nowhere, deaf to threats and always just beyond missile-throwing range; and to jump walls that seemed much too high and s
queeze through or under impossibly small places. No prison could hold him, you felt sure, nor was there — and he was later to prove this — any fortress that he could not storm.
But chiefly it was his general appearance that showed Boy Dugdale's licentiousness. A large, hairy mongrel terrier, long-legged and always moving, it seemed, on tiptoe, he was short-coupled (this is to say, his hind feet seemed much too near to his forefeet) and carried a tail that curled so far over his back as almost to touch what little neck he had. Before all, his face wore by some accident a permanent voyeur's leer, one side of the mouth drawn up to expose teeth and tongue, giving an overall expression of uncontrollable lust. Under our now lax surveillance, there was nothing to prevent his meeting Susie.
“There's that horrible Boy Dugdale again. Where's Susie?”
“Oh she's around somewhere. I shouldn't worry.” “She is five, you know. Not a good age for having a first litter.”
“Susie get herself lined? You joke. Anyway he's much too tall to manage, and she won't let him near her.”
But he wasn't, and she did.
This hideous blend of Robin Hood, Houdini, Lothario, and Priapus was Susie's true love come at last, and by the time I'd finished breakfast the knot was tied. Out in the paddock beyond the Dutch barn, they stood back to back, Dugdale having overcome the disparity in size by the judicious use of rising ground.
Susie faced me with a smug smile while her anchored swain, fearful of retribution, grimaced more odiously than ever over his shoulder. The die cast, I left them in peace, a course of inaction that led Dugdale to infer my approval of the match, so that within the twenty-four hours he made assurance not double but treble sure.
So, at the end of the first day in June, Susie once more put her life in jeopardy. She sentenced herself to hard labor, and in the box beside our bed, there was nothing to show for it but her evident distress. The vet came in the small hours. This particular one was a large man with a stutter and a comfortable bedside manner, literally, as he sat upon it to do his work.
Myrle fortified him and herself with tea and gin alternately. I slept, my usual response to trying situations like travel in an aircraft or the birth of my children. I woke to find that the vet had delivered two very large, very dead puppies.
“I can't f-f-f-feel any more. I think the b-b-b-bitch should be okay now.”
“Oh sure, she'll be okay.”
“I'll go home and get f-f-f-forty winks and look b-back later.”
By the time he returned with the announcement that d-dawn had b-bust and with the ends of striped pajamas peeping shyly beneath his trouser turn-ups, Susie had given birth to a small brown-and-white bitch puppy, the one and only child of her long life. We called her Semolina and in due course gave her to Gladwyn.
Semolina was so thickly covered in hair that you hardly knew which way she was going, and I'm not at all sure that she knew, such a silly, excitable creature she was. But in time she produced a nice sensible litter from which we had one back, a much loved person called Dido, eventually to be killed by a badger.
Dido in her life was as equable as her grandmother had been cantankerous, and she in turn carried on the line. Father had one of Dido's daughters, Jilly by name, who lived to the age of nineteen (multiply that by seven!), and doubtless today there are many remaining descendants of Susie's only dalliance.
Boy Dugdale did appear once more, but this time after bigger game. Tina, the first of our Great Danes, was at the height of her season, and for absolute safety I shut her for the night in an unused chicken house in the orchard. The door was stout and locked, the small high windows, hinged on their upper edges and opening outwards, were each secured with a turn button.
When I went to let Tina out in the morning, I could see through the glass that Dugdale stood beside her, his head on a level with her elbow, his face a mask of unrequited desire. Beneath one of the windows the turn button had been turned. Somehow he had stood upon his hind legs on top of the nest boxes that projected outside the house and reached up with one conjurer's paw to turn the catch. Somehow he must then have nosed the window far enough open for him to wriggle and scrabble and lever and haul himself up and through it, only to find that he had set his sights too high. I unlocked the door and out he rushed.
One last contemptuous cock of the leg against an apple tree, one final backward leer, and away over the hill he went on his unending quest. Perhaps he brooded on what must have been the totally novel experience of failure. Perhaps he simply took his insatiable libido to fresh fields. But we never saw Boy Dugdale again.
In the years that followed, the tenor of Susie's life became quite placid. In 1954 it is true, she suffered a minor mishap when, thinking she looked off-color, I took her rectal temperature, only to lose my grip on the end of the thermometer, which promptly disappeared inside her. Gingerly I drove her to the surgery for the vet to recover it.
“N-not b-b-b-broken,” he said, “and n-normal.”
And in December 1959 she threatened us briefly with the nightmare of nine years before. But she'd only been ratting, for a modest thirty-six hours, under Dugdale's chicken house.
It was in May of 1960, when rising fourteen years old, but active and crotchety as ever, that she finally bit off more than she could chew by pitting herself against the Paddington to Fishguard express. The police rang me after she'd been missing for two days.
“You lost a small black-and-white terrier?” “Yes.”
“They've just rung up from the Stoke Gifford Depot. One of their maintenance men spotted it by the side of the line, above your farm. They've buried it, they said, made a proper grave. Perhaps you'd like to pop down to the depot and identify it?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
I didn't want to see her all broken, of course, but I had to know. And when I'd removed the cross that some kindly railwayman had made from two scraps of wood, and opened up the little mound of clinker and rubble at the edge of the sidings, there she was all right. I always believe — it's the most likely explanation — that she was hunting a fox over the top of the embankment and, being by now rather deaf, did not in her excitement hear the train.
But even all those hundreds of tons of thundering metal had not reduced her, as I so feared, to some pitiful pulp. She had only a bloody nose.
Chapter 11
PLEASURE AND PURSUITS
Friday 27 October
To Beagle Ball. Bed 5 A.M.
Saturday 28 October
Very ill. Early bed.
Youth may be a stuff that will not endure, but luckily nobody thinks much about that at the time. We were pretty pleased with life, the sort of life we had both always wanted to lead, the kind of work we had always wanted to do. And after work, there was play.
One pleasure was the pub crawl.
“Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think.”
A pint of best bitter cost ten old pennies and the Breathalyzer was a score of years away. Capstan, Gold Flake, Senior Service — three bob for twenty, and we sucked the smoke deep into our lungs without any governmental warning.
There was a crowd of us, much of an age, noisy certainly, foolish probably, happy to drink a bit too much beer on occasion and enjoy one another's company. We were not earnest and intense, we did not wish to set the world to rights. It hurt to think about the immediate past, and we weren't prepared to start fretting about the future.
Myrle and her sister, Pam, were privileged to be driven by me on one such outing. A dozen or more of us had graced with our loud presence the Star, the Rose & Crown, and the Fleur de Lys. Now, last in the convoy of cars, I drove our dung-splattered Land Rover through the narrow winding lanes, next stop the Cross Hands.
Under my masterful hands the steering wheel spun like a dancer, the gears meshed effortlessly, the powerful engine roared. What matter that the others had a head start on us?
The heroes of boyhood possessed me, and it was Captain G. E. T. Eyston's fearless f
oot that thrust the accelerator pedal flat against the floor. Why worry that the road was shiny with recent rain? Segrave would steer through the skid, or Campbell control it. As for the curves and the corners, all were subdued and subjugated, nay, positively straightened out, as with deft unerring touch Tazio Nuvolari swung the mighty Maserati onward, ever onward. On his lips a song, his steady eyes raked the road ahead.
“For God's sake!” said Pam.
And Myrle, “Please stop and let me drive.”
“Why, in Heaven's name?”
“You're going to have us all in the ditch.”
Silly frightened girls! “For God's sake” indeed! There was a veritable god at the wheel, a deus intra machina!
Suddenly, inexplicably, the approaching left-hand bend became sharper. Like a coiling snake, it seemed to move and tighten upon itself, and before you could say “Enzio Ferrari,” the offside wheels of the Land Rover slid over the grass verge and settled with a giant splash into the deepest of ditches. I stalled the engine. Only the sweet song of running water broke the silence.
In turn we made the forty-five-degree climb out of the nearside door. Last away, as the captain of the ship must always be, I turned to survey her listing and settling, her upperworks leaning tiredly against a stout hedge, the flood tide bubbling beneath her starboard gunwales.
“Go and find a telephone,” said Myrle, tight-lipped.
When the rescuers came, back from the Cross Hands, it was not with a whimper but a bang. Up the lane from their cars they marched, bearing trays with glasses and bottles at the ready to fortify the castaways, and many hands made light work of righting the stricken craft. Into the ditch they merrily splashed, and perching happily in the thorn hedge, they flipped the Land Rover upright and popped it back upon the road like a Dinky toy. And away we all went with the empties.
Chewing the Cud Page 9