Sarama and Her Children

by Bibek Debroy

  Anna Sewell’s (1820–78) Black Beauty is about a horse. Right towards the beginning, Black Beauty receives some advice from his mother. And in that advice, we find, ‘She told me the better I behaved, the better I should be treated, and that it was wisest always to do my best to please my master; “but,” said she, “there are a great many kinds of men; there are good, thoughtful men like our master, that any horse may be proud to serve; but there are bad, cruel men, who never ought to have a horse or dog to call their own.”’ Elsewhere, ‘But all boys are not cruel. I have seen some as fond of their pony or donkey as if it had been a favorite dog, and the little creatures have worked away as cheerfully and willingly for their young drivers as I work for Jerry.’ Or take Louisa May Alcott (1832–88), not usually identified with dogs. But do not forget Dan’s dog Don in Jo’s Boys. ‘“It’s the hot weather, perhaps. But I sometimes think he’s pining for Dan. Dogs do, you know, and the poor fellow has been low in his mind ever since the boys went. Maybe something has happened to Dan. Don howled last night and can’t rest. I’ve heard of such things,” answered Rob thoughtfully.’ And dogs have an even more important role in Under the Lilacs.

  He certainly did; for, though much larger and dirtier than the well-washed China dog, this live one had the same tassel at the end of his tail, ruffles of hair round his ankles, and a body shaven behind and curly before. His eyes, however, were yellow, instead of glassy black, like the other’s; his red nose worked as he cocked it up, as if smelling for more cakes, in the most impudent manner; and never, during the three years he had stood on the parlor mantel-piece, had the China poodle done the surprising feats with which this mysterious dog now proceeded to astonish the little girls almost out of their wits. First he sat up, put his forepaws together, and begged prettily; then he suddenly flung his hind-legs into the air, and walked about with great ease. Hardly had they recovered from this shock, when the hind-legs came down, the fore-legs went up, and he paraded in a soldierly manner to and fro, like a sentinel on guard. But the crowning performance was when he took his tail in his mouth and waltzed down the walk, over the prostrate dolls, to the gate and back again, barely escaping a general upset of the ravaged table.

  Even Jane Austen’s (1775–1817) Mansfield Park has Lady Bertram with a pug as a lapdog and no Bertram family scene is complete without the dog.

  Moving on to Thomas Hardy (1848–1928), how can one forget Gabriel Oak’s dogs in Far from the Madding Crowd?

  Gabriel had two dogs. George, the elder, exhibited an ebony-tipped nose, surrounded by a narrow margin of pink flesh, and a coat marked in random splotches approximating in colour to white and slaty grey; but the grey, after years of sun and rain, had been scorched and washed out of the more prominent locks, leaving them of a reddish-brown, as if the blue component of the grey had faded, like the indigo from the same kind of colour in Turner’s pictures. In substance it had originally been hair, but long contact with sheep seemed to be turning it by degrees into wool of a poor quality and staple. This dog had originally belonged to a shepherd of inferior morals and dreadful temper, and the result was that George knew the exact degrees of condemnation signified by cursing and swearing of all descriptions better than the wickedest old man in the neighbourhood. Long experience had so precisely taught the animal the difference between such exclamations as ‘Come in!’ and ‘D—— ye, come in!’ that he knew to a hair’s breadth the rate of trotting back from the ewes’ tails that each call involved, if a staggerer with the sheep crook was to be escaped. Though old, he was clever and trustworthy still. The young dog, George’s son, might possibly have been the image of his mother, for there was not much resemblance between him and George. He was learning the sheep-keeping business, so as to follow on at the flock when the other should die, but had got no further than the rudiments as yet—still finding an insuperable difficulty in distinguishing between doing a thing well enough and doing it too well. So earnest and yet so wrong-headed was this young dog (he had no name in particular, and answered with perfect readiness to any pleasant interjection), that if sent behind the flock to help them on, he did it so thoroughly that he would have chased them across the whole county with the greatest pleasure if not called off or reminded when to stop by the example of old George. Thus much for the dogs.

  There are dogs in H.G. Wells’s (1866–1946) The Island of Dr Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. From the chapter on hunting of the invisible man, we have, ‘“Dogs,” said Kemp. “Get dogs. They don’t see him, but they wind him. Get dogs.”’ Dogs are mentioned in Margaret Mitchell’s (1900–49) Gone with the Wind. John Wilkes’s house was so ruined that not a dog barked and ‘Scarlett felt that if he (Pork) had been a dog he would have had his muzzle in her lap and whined for a kind hand upon his head.’

  Moving on to the twentieth century, Jack London, Zane Grey, J.M. Barrie (Nana in Peter Pan), John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley), E.B. White, James Herriot, James Thurber, James Herbert and Virginia Woolf have all given us dogs to remember. In Pearl Buck’s novels, there are passing references to dogs. In The Mother, ‘Even the yellow farmyard dog came near with confidence. He had been sitting in hope under the table, but the man kicked him, and he slunk out and caught deftly the bits of rice the mother threw at him once or twice.’ Or in Dragon Seed, ‘And so it was done throughout that whole region, and the village dogs grew fat on entrails and offal.’ O. Henry wrote a short story titled, “Memoirs of a Yellow Dog”. Not to forget Jerome K. Jerome’s Montmorency in Three Men in a Boat or Jim Corbett’s Robin, always with Corbett before he went to ‘the happy hunting grounds’. In Man-eaters of Kumaon, Jim Corbett had an entire chapter on Robin. ‘I have told you the story, and while I have been telling it Robin—the biggest-hearted and the most faithful friend man ever had—has gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds, where I know I shall find him waiting for me.’ The Mixer, Jack and Toto and dogs that appear in assorted Wodehouse novels.

  The dog also became a child’s companion—Toto travelled with Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Richmal Crompton’s William Brown possessed a dog and one cannot imagine any of Enid Blyton’s child characters without a dog in tow. Fatty had Buster and we had ‘The Five Find-Outers and Dog’. The Secret Seven had Scamper. As is only to be expected, while Buster and Scamper were dogs with breeds, William Brown’s Jumble was a pure mongrel. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn brings in the association of dogs with death. ‘I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die.’ In Beatrix Potter’s “Jemima Puddle-Duck”, the duck is rescued from a fox by a collie-dog named Kep. Children’s books, like Mabel Marlowe’s The Slipper, Rowland Johns’ Every Dog its Day and Ouida’s Bimbi, routinely feature dogs. There is a contemporary Finnish author named Paivi Romppainen who specializes in dog stories.

  There is a hilarious passage in Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. The Durrell family has gone to the Greek island of Corfu and the family dog, Roger has gone along. ‘Mother, looking like a tiny, harassed missionary in an uprising, was dragged unwillingly to the nearest lamp-post by an exuberant Roger.’ Then Roger had to be taken into the cab. ‘He had never been in such a vehicle, and treated it with suspicion. Eventually we had to lift him bodily and hurl him inside, yelping frantically, and then pile in breathlessly after him and hold him down.’ But then came the stray dogs. ‘Then we rattled past an alley-way in which four scruffy mongrels were lying in the sun. Roger stiffened, glared at them and let forth a torrent of deep barks. The mongrels were immediately galvanized into activity, and they sped after the cab, yapping vociferously. Our pose was irretrievably shattered, for it took two people to restrain the raving Roger, while the rest of us leaned out of the cab and made wild gestures with magazines and books at the pursuing horde. This only had the effect of exciting them still further, and at each alley-way we passed their numbers increased, until by the time we were rolling down the
main thoroughfare of the town there were some twenty-four dogs swirling about our wheels, almost hysterical with anger.’ There are more hilarious incidents when other dogs, especially Dodo, join the family.

  And one should not forget Goofy, Pluto, Scooby-Doo, Snoopy, Marmaduke, Snowy, Astro, Dogmatix (the environmentalist) or K-9. Ivan Pavlov’s dogs are remembered in a monument at the Institute of Experimental Medicine in Leningrad (St Petersburg) and Pavlov once said that dogs ‘made man what he is’. Rin Tin Tin, Laika and Lassie are no less famous. As is Nipper from the HMV logo. Or the somewhat earlier Toby in Punch and Judy shows. And the unnamed hound of the Baskervilles. And the also unnamed dog which did nothing in the night in The Adventure of Silver Blazes, unlike the dog in Agatha Christie’s Elephants Can Remember, which had a major role to play in the detection of the crime. Although Daphne Du Maurier’s The Scapegoat is not a mystery story, a dog named Cesar plays a similar role in the case of an impersonation. Even if family members are taken in, a dog knows who is his true master and who is not. In the Poirot mystery Dumb Witness, the dog is the only witness to a murder. In The Nemean Lion, Poirot is asked to investigate the disappearance of a Pekingese dog and dogs occur in several of the Agatha Christie mysteries. ‘Poirot was shaken; shaken and embittered. Miss Lemon, the efficient Miss Lemon, had let him down! A Pekinese dog. A Pekinese dog!’ Incidentally, Agatha Christie herself owned several dogs and was fond of them. In her autobiography, this is her reaction on receiving the gift of a puppy on her fifth birthday. ‘I have a dog … a dog … It’s a dog of my own … my very own dog … It’s a Yorkshire terrier … my dog … my very own dog …’ There is Stephen King’s Cujo. The Flintstones cannot function without a family dog either, although that dog happens to be a baby dinosaur. And there are assorted dogs with vital roles in the Babe series of films. Or 101 Dalmatians.

  To get back to Silver Blazes: ‘Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’ ‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’ ‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’ ‘That was the curious incident.’ Sherlock Holmes also used Toby the Spaniel as a detective. ‘Toby proved to be an ugly, long-haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher, brown and white in color, with a very clumsy, waddling gait’ (The Sign of Four). Dog-detectives have also featured in Susan Conant’s Holly Winter mysteries, Mary Labatt (Paul the Poodle), Laurien Berenson, Ann Campbell (Claudius is a cross between a German shepherd and a husky) and Melissa Cleary (Jake is a retired police dog). Even Columbo owns a Basset hound.

  There are several proverbs or sayings that involve dogs. A man’s best friend is his dog. A house is not a home without a dog. A barking dog never bites. Let sleeping dogs lie. Dog in a manger, dog-eared. Tail wagging the dog. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Dogs may bark, but the caravan rolls on. It is raining cats and dogs, which in turn reflects a period when dogs (and cats) had moved from barns to within houses and used to sleep on rafters, falling down when it rained. Dog does not eat dog.

  Let’s end this chapter with some nursery rhymes that have dogs in them. Notice that some dogs are owned (like Tom Tinker’s dog or Old Mother Hubbard’s), some are used for hunting, but some seem to be strays, as in “Hark, hark, the dogs do bark”. And in “The House that Jack Built”, there is also the dog that worried the cat.

  1. A man went hunting at Reigate,

  And wished to leap over a high gate;

  Says the owner, ‘Go round,

  With your gun and your hound,

  For you never shall leap over my gate.’

  2. Bow, wow, wow,

  Whose dog art thou?

  Little Tom Tinker’s dog,

  Bow, wow, wow.

  3. Ding-dingle-dousie,

  The dog’s a’ fleas.

  Dingle-dingle-dousie,

  Be crouse ay, be crouse ay;

  Dingle-dingle-dousie,

  Ye’se hae a brose o’ pease.

  Dingle, dingle, doosey,

  The cat’s in the well;

  The dog’s away to Belingen,

  To buy the bairn a bell.

  Higgledty, pigglety, pop!

  The dog has eaten the mop;

  The pig’s in a hurry,

  The cat’s in a flurry,

  Higglety, pigglety, pop!

  4. Hey diddle, diddle,

  The cat and the fiddle,

  The cow jumped over the moon;

  The little dog laughed

  To see such craft,

  And the dish ran away with the spoon.

  5. Hoddley, poddley, puddles and fogs,

  Cats are to marry poodle dogs;

  Cats in blue jackets and dogs in red hats,

  What will become of the mice and the rats?

  6. I sent a letter to my love

  And on the way I dropped it,

  A little puppy picked it up

  And put it in his pocket.

  It isn’t you, it isn’t you,

  But it is you.

  7. Oh where, oh where has my little dog gone?

  Oh where, oh where can he be?

  With his ears cut short and his tail cut long,

  Oh where, oh where is he?

  8. Old Mother Hubbard

  Went to the cupboard

  To fetch her poor dog a bone;

  But when she came there

  The cupboard was bare

  And so the poor dog had none.

  She went to the baker’s

  To buy him some bread;

  But when she came back

  The poor dog was dead.

  She went to the undertaker’s

  To buy him a coffin;

  But when she came back

  The poor dog was laughing.

  She went to the fruiterer’s

  To buy him some fruit;

  But when she came back

  He was playing the flute.

  She went to the tailor’s

  To buy him a coat;

  But when she came back

  He was riding a goat.

  She went to the hatter’s

  To buy him a hat;

  But when she came back

  He was feeding the cat.

  She went to the barber’s

  To buy him a wig;

  But when she came back

  He was dancing a jig.

  She went to the cobbler’s

  To buy him some shoes;

  But when she came back

  He was reading the news.

  She went to the seamstress

  To buy him some linen;

  But when she came back

  The dog was a-spinning.

  She went to the hosier’s

  To buy him some hose;

  But when she came back

  He was dressed in his clothes.

  The dame made a curtsey,

  The dog made a bow;

  The dame said, Your servant,

  The dog said, Bow-wow.

  9. Mother Shuttle

  Lived in a coal-scuttle

  Along with her dog and her cat;

  What they ate I can’t tell,

  But ’tis known very well

  That not one of the party was fat.

  Old Mother Shuttle

  Scoured out her coal-scuttle,

  And washed both her dog and her cat;

  The cat scratched her nose,

  So they came to hard blows,

  And who was the gainer by that?

  10. Poor Dog Bright

  Ran off with all his might,

  Because the cat was after him—

  Poor Dog Bright!

  Poor Cat Fright

  Ran off with all her might,

  Because the dog was after her—

  Poor Cat Fright!

  11. Pussy sits beside the fire,

  How can she be fair?

  In comes the little Dog,

  Pussy, are you there?

  So, so, Mistress Pussy,

  Pray how do you
do?

  Thank you, thank you, little dog,

  I’m very well just now.

  12. Ride away, ride away,

  Johnny shall ride,

  He shall have a pussy cat

  Tied to one side;

  He shall have a little dog

  Tied to the other,

  And Johnny shall ride

  To see his grandmother.

  13. The little black dog ran round the house,

  And set the bull a roaring,

  And drove the monkey in the boat,

  Who set the oars a rowing,

  And scared the cock upon the rock,

  Who cracked his throat with crowing.

  14. There was a king met a king

  In a narrow lane;

  Said the king to the king,

  Where have you been?

  I have been a hunting

  The buck and the doe.

  Will you lend me your dog?

  Yes, I will do so;

  Call upon him, call upon him.

  What is his name?

  I have told you twice

  And won’t tell you again.

  15. There was a man, and his name was Dob,

  And he had a wife, and her name was Mob,

  And he had a dog, and he called it Cob,

  And she had a cat, called Chitterabob.

  Cob, says Dob,

  Chitterabob, says Mob,

  Cob was Dob’s dog,

  Chitterabob Mob’s cat.

  16. There was an old woman, as I’ve heard tell,

  She went to the market her eggs for to sell;

  She went to the market all on a market day,

  And she fell asleep on the king’s highway.

  There came by a peddler whose name was Stout,

  He cut her petticoats all round about;

  He cut her petticoats up to the knees,

  Which made the old woman to shiver and freeze.

  When this little woman first did wake,

  She began to shiver and she began to shake,

  She began to wonder and she began to cry,

  ’Oh! deary, deary me, this is none of I!’

  ‘But if it be I, as I do hope it be,

  I’ve a little dog at home, and he’ll know me;