‘That woman was mad, wasn’t she?’ I said.
Trezza nodded and carried on inhaling.
‘Are all dog breeders like that?’
‘A little bit, yes,’ she replied. ‘But she was…’ Trezza exhaled enormously while searching for the mot juste ‘…she was unique.’
‘What d’you think of the dogs, though?’ I said. They’d seemed pretty nice to me.
‘Lovely,’ said Trezza, ‘Very sweet. Quite normal, considering.’
Following the viewing we stopped over at Fawlty Towers, Reading, in order that we could watch Stoke City the next day. Stoke played one of Icelandic manager Gudjon Thordarson’s late-period 5-3-2 away formation experiments – a system that might well have been devised by Manuel – and lost the match, throwing away their last slim chance of automatic promotion in the process. A sorry situation, but one I was well used to.
Back in Norwich we phoned the lady and said that, if it was all right with her, we’d really like a puppy. She assured us that we were top of the list of suitable parents. We broke out the champagne. The price agreed was six hundred pounds.
Though we were invited back for ongoing viewings of the bitch during her pregnancy, we considered this above and beyond the call of duty, and, as it turned out, we never did acquire an animal from this source because the mother delivered only one pup in a difficult Caesarean operation. Her owner could not bear the thought of it living as far afield as Norfolk, and I think we understood.
There was a further false start involving a visit to a Vizsla breeder in the South Downs. This woman was also idiosyncratic in that she had fourteen dogs of her own which carpeted her kitchen wall-to-wall. Half were Vizslas and half were Labradors. She impressed me by addressing them all individually when, to my untrained eye, each set of seven looked very much alike. She had a litter of eight for us to see, and if we didn’t fancy any of them there was another lot coming along straight after that from another of the thirteen bitches in the kitchen. The pups we were taken to look at were kept in a special whelping shed in the grounds of the farmhouse. They were a few weeks old, and for the same six hundred (Vizsla price-fixing appeared to be organised by an effective cartel) we could take our pick and collect in a few weeks’ time. We selected a dog, the one that had the nicest ears and the most in the way of personality, we admired all the certificates and rosettes on the kitchen wall, and, as we took our leave, the next client exchanged parking spaces with us. She was a young woman driving a new Porsche.
The word ‘Wiemaraner’ had come up in the breeder’s kitchen. Wiemaraners are those rather beautiful soft grey dogs that are fetishised by the art photographer William Wegman, and often appear in television adverts. They became a yuppie accessory in the Nineties and something of that image has stuck (I have yet to meet a Wiemaraner owner who has managed to lower themselves far enough to speak to me). The arrival of the young woman in the new Porsche made me wonder whether Vizslas might be about to become the new Wiemaraners. Still, that wouldn’t be my problem, because I live in Norfolk where owning a gundog is an obvious and natural thing to do, not in South Kensington, where it isn’t.
On the drive back from Sussex, I began to do sums in my head along the lines of eight times 600 equals roughly five grand a litter, five grand times 14 dogs equals £70,000 even if they’re only in season once a year – when in fact they’re in season twice a year – so, if all goes well, you can call that £140,000 per annum, gross. Like most writers, I waste a huge amount of mental energy considering more profitable ways of spending my life.
In the middle of this mental arithmetic, an argument began in my left ear concerning the overloading of my time-table. I had sprung the visit to the breeder on Trezza as a surprise bonus after some activity we’d been doing in the capital, for which I had also given inadequate warning.
Suddenly, from nowhere, I found myself on the receiving end of an extended lecture about how I had no time for puppy training and all the rest that went with it, did I, and that the poor dog would never be out of the kennels, would it, or was the plan that she looked after it while I continued with my lifestyle regardless – football matches, games of squash, race meetings and so on – not to say all the activities I’d arranged without any consultation and then forgotten to mention. We concluded the discussion in a Little Chef where I sat unhappily listening to more of these facts concerning time and motion, all of which were true. I am not fond of true facts about myself when I have a bee in my bonnet and have decided I am going to do something.
On a television screen in the corner, Tim Henman was losing a tennis match. Outside it was beginning to trickle the warm, claustrophobic rain of summer. The covers were dragged over Wimbledon’s centre court as Henman made his exit. Sporting events are the easiest way for me to mark time. This is how I can calculate that six months elapsed before I felt it was time for another crack at the subject.
***
Trezza had let the matter rest, it was me who was agitating. I would flick The Giant Book of the Dog occasionally in the spirit of provocation, but still nothing was said. And then one day I had the obvious lateral thought: what was needed was not a Vizsla puppy or a puppy of any other sort. Rather, instead, we should seek out a mature animal. I decided that a pensioned-off greyhound would be perfect.
The retired racer, I had learned, from a conversation I’d had with a fellow dog walker while I was out with Mingus, does not require too much in the way of exercise. After the life it has known, it is more than delighted not to have been shot by the barbarian who has previously ‘cared’ for it, and is content to restrict itself to an easy stroll once or twice a day. For the rest of the time it is happy to mind its own business and lie in the comfort of an old blanket doing absolutely bugger all.
I had come up with a scheme, and I rehearsed my case: a greyhound would allow the new owner an opportunity to take some fresh air once a day while appreciating the changing scenes of nature, a subject about which she actually gives a fig. Otherwise she can continue to enjoy a quiet life at home while her partner is who-knows-where doing who-knows-what, but whatever it is, at least he will not be abandoning his puppy-training duties.
From his point of view, a greyhound is something of a thoroughbred: It is only over recent years that I have come to really love horse racing, and by extension, racehorses. They are a new but consuming passion. I form attachments to them, sometimes I video a race where I haven’t even placed a bet just for the pleasure of seeing, say, Azertyuiop and Moscow Flyer – the two fastest chasers around at the time – do battle over two miles and a dozen fences. On those fabulous occasions where I’ve taken the bookies to the cleaners I rewind the final fences or furlongs and re-watch the finish. But, unless I move into Vizsla breeding, I can’t see myself owning a racehorse.
There’s no way I’m going to get into greyhound racing either: first, I know next to nothing about it, but, second, I know enough about sport to take an informed guess that the dogs is not something you ought to consider dabbling with in mid-life. The pros will identify you as a clueless amateur in less time than it takes the hare to complete a circuit; it’s odds on you’ll be bankrupt faster than you can tear up a betting slip.
Additionally, the little I do know about dog racing leads me to the view that it is an activity involving a sizeable number of persons who are not very nice. I have popped into a bookies once in a while to monitor the performance of my considered investment in the 2.35 at Folkestone and found myself in the company of the weekday gamblers, those stalwarts who bet on race after race after race. The dogs go off somewhere around the country every five minutes and, as they do, men gamble and smoke while fixed on television screens.
They seldom celebrate a success (because they are always chasing losses, of course) and with the dogs you will only ever hear the animal referred to by number, never by name, except when it gets called a piece of shit, or worse, simply because it has cost someone another fiver.
It’s pretty distasteful. As far a
s animals go, I’m a sentimentalist and, as far as horse racing goes, there’s a lot of that about – it’s one of the few sports in which, at the track at least, you can see a loser welcomed back home with as much affection and appreciation as a winner. So here is the ulterior motive in the new scheme: owning a retired greyhound will allow me a stake in a surrogate racehorse whose every run will be virtual, who will always win, who will delight the crowd as he makes all up to the post, adding another victory to his great unbeaten sequence.
This part I don’t mention to Trezza. The rest of the ‘plan’ I sell without too much resistance.
***
There are three greyhounds at the NCDL rescue centre when we visit on the winter’s afternoon. They live together in a single pen, but two are spoken for and the third is away being seen by a vet. They live along a bright corridor, together with many other dogs in many other pens. Here I learn something about Trezza: she had a specialised lunatic streak. She wants to take them all home with her.
I was much more circumspect as I regarded the assortment of desperados banged up doing porridge. The scars, half-tails, missing ears and sometimes missing legs, told their own stories. And you could certainly see how some of them had been abandoned, too – you’d put your hand down and they’d have a go at biting it off even through the reinforced glass of the pen. But, alongside the hard cases and the lifers, there were also the pensioners, the wallflowers, the abandoned débutantes; and alongside these were the aristocrats fallen on hard times, the pedigree for which you’d normally expect to hand over the six hundred quid.
It was a pair of Deerhounds to which Trezza gravitated. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she said. I wasn’t prepared to go along with this, for while they may or may not have been attractive animals, their pre-eminent characteristic was their height. No doubt The Giant Book of the Dog would say they were first-class pets who were superb with children, and no doubt for a certain sort of child they would be worth trying out for a donkey ride. I made no reply concerning the question of beauty, I simply pointed to a little sign which said that, in a perfect world, you would need a paddock or a small field in which to keep them as they had previously belonged to a gamekeeper, and had lived the outdoor life. At home we have a side passage with a bit at the back. The best you could say for this area is that it is a yard.
We were about to leave, having failed to agree on the ideal candidate, when one of the women who worked at the centre approached. She had been observing us and the animals beside which we had lingered longest and she asked if it was a hound we were particularly looking for. We considered this question and said yes, we supposed we probably were.
‘I’ve got a very deserving case in the back,’ she said. ‘He’s four months old. Would you consider a lurcher puppy?’
Notwithstanding the dispute at the Little Chef, it was one of those situations where you cannot say, ‘No.’ No, I do not think we would consider a lurcher puppy. What sort of callous bastards would come out with that? We sat on seats in the foyer waiting for the deserving case to arrive.
His entrance was sudden. He came from a side door pulling the woman along behind him. How he managed this I could only guess. If Giacometti made a sculpture of a new-born deer, this animal could easily have been his model. His coat was predominantly black with off-set fawn highlights down the fronts of his legs and the back of his tail, as well as on either side of his nose, under his chin, and along his chest.
The effect of all this chiaroscuro was to make him look like his own shadow. His face was equine with fawn eyebrows. His tail was ridiculous, longer than his body. He scrambled onto my lap and gave my face a wash before jumping over to provide the same service for Trezza.
‘What’s his name?’ we asked.
‘Ernie,’ said the woman. ‘Cute, isn’t he? Would you like to take him for a walk?’
The light dusting of snow was frosting over, so Ernie was issued with an extra-small dog-jacket in order that he could cope with being outside. We were given a plastic bag in case he had any ‘little accidents’, and together we set off down the lane. Ernie did not seem to be very experienced at going for a walk. He would head in any direction; sideways, backwards, onwards, it was all the same to him. His pronounced legginess made him very gangly; he was something of an expert at getting tangled up in the lead. The NCDL woman had said that the vet had thought he might have rickets when he first arrived, which was a couple of months earlier, but that once he’d been put on a high protein diet he seemed all right in this specific respect. With the way he walked, though – as if he’d never really tried it before – it must have been difficult to tell.
Ernie had been delivered to Snetterton in the dog wardens’ van; they had found him in Thetford Forest. He was reckoned to be about eight weeks of age then (not much older than those Vizsla puppies we had visited) and was lucky to have survived at all: it was November when he was picked up – a month when the weather is not ideal for a puppy to be out and about taking care of itself, particularly one built along his supermodel lines.
Not far into our walk Ernie paused and took a dump which could have been nominated for Most Stinking in East Anglia and was not pleasant in appearance either.
‘That’s a bit much, coming from a boy of his size,’ I said. ‘Fuck me, what will they be like when he grows up?’
‘They’ll be fine,’ Trezza replied. The way she said this, I could tell that she had unilaterally over-ruled her objections to puppy ownership.
We walked on a little further until Ernie began to look nervously over his shoulder as the smells and sounds of the rescue centre receded. He concentrated more now on pulling backwards than he did sideways or onwards. It was getting colder and dusk was falling so we turned him round, not least to assuage his evident fears. He caught himself up in the lead many more times on the way back, tripping me more than once; at the gates of the centre I picked him up to return him into the care of the woman by hand.
This was in order that I might not look like the sort of rank outsider who was incapable of taking a puppy for a walk without flattening him. As I made to pass him over he squirmed back towards me. I took him and tried tickling his ears but he squirmed towards my face in order to resume the job of giving me a wash.
‘Are you interested?’ the woman said. We had discussed this matter as we retraced our steps.
‘Yes,’ Trezza replied, ‘We are.’
THE NOBLE LURCHER
After we’d driven back home I fished out The Giant Book of the Dog and searched for lurcher in the index. The lurcher was not an animal that had been on my short list before the Vizsla-hunt began, and it had not been on my long list either. In truth, I had no idea what a lurcher was.
I found the details in a classification at the end of the formal breed-by-breed headings; this section was for Rare Breeds. The lurcher was listed in the Rare Breed subsection: Unclassified. A vaguely (but only vaguely) Ernie-like animal was pictured next to the description. The picture was captioned:
The lurcher may have originated in Ireland. It is
an excellent poacher’s dog, able to run down prey
swiftly and silently.
Useful, I thought. Those copses and meadows I had visited with Mingus must be full of rabbits. I imagined us coming home with our quarry tied up in a bag slung over my shoulder, ready to be cooked with wine and onions and garlic.
The lurcher was third-last in the Unclassifieds, ahead of the New Guinea Singing Dog, but behind the Dingo. I felt this was unfair. The general description given was shorter than for the full pedigrees, too, a bit throwaway, further diminishing the standing of this distinguished animal. I shook my head, though I could see there was a certain appropriateness in all of this. From the few words that were written, I discovered that the lurcher was thought to have come into being because at one time in England only those of noble blood were permitted to own a greyhound. To get round this rule a greyhound-cross was developed as ‘an efficient poaching dog for a commoner to ke
ep.’
If we had found the animal for us – and we had – I had certainly found the animal for me. I had already solved the mystery of Ernie’s early life by combining the words, ‘Thetford Forest,’ ‘poacher,’ and ‘rickets,’ to come up with the hypothesis that he had been slung out as the runt of a traveller’s litter. (Still, at least they didn’t park him on the fast lane of the M11.) And now here was The Giant Book of the Dog – available for a fiver in the bargain bin at B&Q, and evidently not to be trusted (the lurcher, needless to say, makes a faithful and affectionate family pet) – relegating the status of my Ernie to commoner, indeed.
I thrive on having something to resent. The grim circumstances of Ernie’s beginnings combined with the marginal status accorded to his kind (and their keepers) provided adequate fuel to keep me nicely chippy. It could only be a matter of time before I was looking at a Vizsla owner through the eyes of the inverted snob.
ANYTHING BUT ERNIE
A number of criteria had to be satisfied before we were allowed to become Ernie’s owners. A date was arranged in order that an NCDL staff member could visit us to establish that our garden was secure; they are understandably anxious not to encourage any quick returns among the animals they release. I installed fencing panels at the back of our yard where before there had only been bushes. This dealt with security, but it didn’t make the place look any bigger, nor did it make it a garden. We were worried that we might not be allowed to take Ernie at all; we had been deliberately vague when certain questions were put to us at the rescue centre – we had allowed the impression to be formed that our property had some sort of adjoining land.
During the pre-homecoming period we visited Ernie twice more. On each occasion he was delighted to see us, though I don’t think he knew who we were, we were just humans. At this time it seemed to me that it seemed to him that humans were a good thing – they allowed him a break in his routine, they fed him treats, not to mention the fact that they gave him the chance to escape from his kennel mate, Martin. Martin was also a lurcher pup, this one a more typical brindle collie-cross, and a born pugilist.
Walking Ollie Page 3