Nobbut a Lad

by Alan Titchmarsh

  On a good day there would be a crayfish or two lurking beneath smooth boulders in the shallows, but crayfish took bravery to catch. You’d have to lift the rock and then quickly slide your hand underneath it, scrabbling around to see if one of them was hiding there. You might get a nip for your trouble, but it was worth it to see the grey-brown miniature lobster pirouetting at the bottom of your jam jar, desperate to find a way out.

  I’d stand my jam jar and its inmate on the rich, green grassy bank at the water’s edge, and lie down full length so that my eyes were level with those of the creature itself. Then I’d stare at it, telling myself that I should remember exactly what it looked like if I were to consider myself a proper naturalist like Peter Scott.

  In an especially earnest mood, I’d have a notebook with me and jot down my findings – the colour of the fish, the number of fins, its approximate length and any other interesting features. It wasn’t that I thought they would be of any assistance to the advancement of science, but such conscientiousness made me feel that hoiking the little blighters out of their home and risking their untimely deaths would not be totally wasted if it led to my increased knowledge.

  On other days the observation of things less scientific would get the better of me. The glinting of the sun on the surface of the water and the millions of stars that flashed and disappeared in an instant. The shape of a ripple. How could anybody possibly paint a picture of a river when it moved so quickly? And what was the biggest rock that could be hurled into the middle of the stream to make that deep-throated ‘ker-plunk’ with an after-splash that could reach six feet into the air?

  The bottle of pop would be kept cool by immersion in the shallows, and no matter how hard I tried, it and the jam sandwiches would never last until dinnertime. Lunch was something that posh people had; we had breakfast, dinner and tea.

  By half past twelve I’d be hungry, and would wend my way home to see if there was anything else to eat. The fish, after the first few disastrous attempts to keep them alive in a bigger jar in the backyard, were tipped gently back into the water, and the embryo naturalist returned home once more to satisfy his appetite for food rather than information.

  Looking back on these lazy days, they seem impossibly Arcadian. As if I was enveloped in some Christopher Robin idyll. But then I was, though I never knew it at the time.

  But all that changed when Cindy arrived. She had long, blonde hair, deep-blue eyes and as great a passion for the outdoors as I did. She was a corgi, cairn and border-terrier cross-breed, and she gave me any excuse I needed to escape the house and go out into the world.

  Wharfedale is not as chocolate-box pretty in its lower reaches as Wensleydale or Swaledale, and not so famous either. But it’s a good dale, a working dale, with light industry as well as agriculture doing its best to make up for the fortune that wool used to bring it. And there are houses. Lots of houses. People like living here and the ‘heather spa’, as the Victorians called it, has grown rapidly over the last fifty years.

  There are still plenty of sheep here. This is not arable land. There are no prairies of corn, just pale-green undulating fields, hungry-looking, and bordered by drystone walls, often with a few strands of rusty wire stretched between old posts along the top edge, the better to stop the sheep from escaping. They speckle most of the fields that surround the town on all sides, and amble across the heather and bracken of the moors, getting in the way of cars when they scatter across the moorland roads. They have black faces, and shaggy grey coats, seemingly whatever the time of year. I suppose they must be sheared, but most of the time they seem overdressed and in need of a wash. Sometimes the odd one will make its way down Cowpasture Road and into the town, but only if it’s nimble-footed.

  ‘Get out of it, yer daft bugger!’ was a frequently heard cry in childhood, before the cattle grids came.

  For the first twenty years of my life, apart from one week’s holiday a year in Blackpool, church-choir trips to Morecambe or the Lakes and a scout trip to London, I hardly ventured out of this valley. To travel far from the Wharfe made me nervous. I didn’t feel especially unambitious, but to my way of thinking, if you lived in a place that you liked, and which seemed to offer all that you needed, what was the point in looking further afield? News didn’t happen where we were. It hardly even happened in Leeds. It happened in London, which might as well have been another country. My country was this one. The one I could see from the Cow and Calf. Big enough and varied enough for anyone. Well, big enough for me. For the time being.

  The Lone Ranger and Cindy

  The Evanses had a basenji. Jane Evans used to boast about it. ‘It’s the only dog in the world that doesn’t bark.’

  ‘It bloody bites, though,’ muttered Dokey Gell, eyeing it up warily. And it did. It was a snappy beggar. And the trouble was, you couldn’t hear it coming. You could tell which kids lived in our street by their identity marks – the bites on their legs.

  Philomena Forrest had Laddie, a perky little terrier the colour of toffee, with sticky-up ears and a beard, and the rather shady family at the top of the street had a brown-and-white springer spaniel that was as scary as they were. It was completely bonkers. You could see it, some mornings, chasing its tail in the middle of the road – round and round in circles until the milkman eased it out of the path of his van with a well-placed boot and it would run off yelping and cower under a laurel bush for half an hour before coming out and starting the game all over again.

  Our first foray into dog ownership had not gone well. When I was around two years old, my parents bought a blue-roan cocker spaniel they called Brock. Within the year he fell victim to hard pad, and after sitting up with him all night as he tried to climb the walls of the front room, my mother took him to the vet and sat with him as he was put to sleep. The experience so upset her that she vowed never to have another dog. A cat would be better.

  Unfortunately the kitten that was chosen turned out to be feral. It climbed the curtains and tore at the furniture. When it started tearing at my parents, my father decided enough was enough and drowned it in a bucket of water. My mother said that he was never the same again. Not with cats, anyway.

  But eventually Mum must have overcome her grief as far as dogs were concerned, because one snowy Saturday morning in the winter of 1958, we walked to Ben Rhydding to go and choose a puppy.

  The litter of corgi, cairn and border-terrier cross-breeds numbered around ten. All of them were smooth-haired, except for one: the one that refused to come and be looked at. She was a bitch, and far too intent on digging a burrow in the snow in the back garden to report for inspection and be sized up.

  We looked at them all, and my mother and I (my sister being too small to be capable of making any decision, except when she needed to eat) tried to choose just one. It was difficult. They were all much the same except for the one with the long, blonde hair whose wagging tail was now the only thing visible for inspection. And there wasn’t much of that. It had been docked, and looked like a hyperactive hamster.

  Finally Mum decided that we would put them all in a line – or as much of a line as ten eight-week-old pups can be put in – and then call them. The one that came towards us first would be the one we took home.

  The owner hauled the long-haired pup out of the snow and lined her up with the others as best she could.

  ‘Go on, then, call them,’ instructed my mother.

  I crouched down, patted my knees and called. Not one of them moved. I called again. Nothing. The pups just stared at me, bewildered and confused. And then the long-haired digger in the snow cocked her head on one side, took one tentative step towards me and sealed her fate.

  Why we called her something as twee as Cindy I don’t know. It was short for Cinderella. Perhaps we’d been to the panto at Leeds Grand or Bradford Alhambra that year. But for the next fifteen years the family activities seemed to revolve around her.

  She was a spirited dog, short in the leg, but big on courage. Not snappy, but with a
decent bark on her to frighten away unwanted callers when my mother was at home alone, and, boy, could she run. She could swim, too. We’d take her down to the river, throw in a stick, and with one of us on the opposite bank we could get her to swim across and back again time after time. It was a miracle, bearing in mind the length of her legs – six inches at most.

  Sometimes the current would take her perilously close to the Crum Wheel, a whirlpool in the bend of the river close to the woods, and about which fearful stories were told of men who’d lost their lives in its treacherous grip. In all my years there, the most serious loss was that of a small plastic boat that waltzed round in a circle for half an hour before eventually being washed downstream. Cindy did not become one of its casualties.

  But our best times were up on the moors. There, in summer, the two of us would bowl downhill through the bracken seeing who could run the fastest. She would always win, and when I fell head over heels over some boulder and landed with a soft thump on the springy earth among the fern fronds, she’d retrace her steps to find me, licking my face to facilitate a full recovery.

  She was never fed titbits from the table, but she was taught to sit and beg for a biscuit, which you could hold until you said, ‘All right,’ and she would take it neatly from your fingers without ever the feel of teeth on flesh.

  Her musical attributes were discovered by accident. One Christmas I found a Hohner mouth organ in my stocking. I took it out of the box and began to play it – running up and down the scale, sucking air in and blowing it out to make the different chords. Cindy lifted her head and howled to the music. Short howls, then long ones, closing her eyes and losing herself in some kind of canine ecstasy that only the mouth organ could induce. My sister’s piano playing never had the same effect on her.

  Now and again she would have what Mum called ‘one of her dos’. She would lose all feeling in her back legs and would try to walk forwards while her rear end careered this way and that trying to follow her. It was disturbing when it first happened. I suppose it was some kind of fit. But if you held her and stroked her, murmuring soothing words, it would pass, and within a few minutes she’d be what Mum called ‘as right as ninepence’.

  Then there were her lumps. They’d grow here and there. Small, knobbly things underneath the skin of her stomach. The vet seemed unwilling to do anything about them, and they never seemed to trouble her, even if, when a new one appeared every couple of years, we all got a bit concerned. She never did. Concern was not a part of her make-up.

  The two of us would go off regularly to the fields down by the river, or to Middleton Woods, but the moors were her favourite place. If she could find a rabbit hole, she would dig happily for hours, and when she showed signs of becoming bored, a quick poke of the soil with your foot a short way back from the entrance would send her into a frenzy of burrowing once more. She was, rather fittingly for a gardener’s dog, a born digger.

  But there were occasional disasters. Cindy was never one to roam, but her short legs did make her difficult to find among the bracken. Usually you could spot her precise location by the quivering of the fronds overhead, but on one occasion I lost her completely. I called and called, but there was no sign.

  I leaped on to the top of a boulder that rose like the back of a hippo three feet into the air above the bracken to get a better view, but the light was fading. It wouldn’t be dark for hours yet, but heavy clouds were bowling over the top of the moor. It would be raining before long.

  With panic rising inside me, as much at the probable reaction of my mother as the loss of the dog, I wandered slowly downhill, calling all the while, ‘Cindy! Come on, girl! Cindy …’

  To no avail. Nothing, no movement at all, except that of a startled sheep, which leaped bleating from the bracken and frightened me half to death.

  I tried to work out a plausible lie. That the dog had spotted something and run off after it, and that try as I might I could not catch up with her. But I knew it wouldn’t wash. The dog had gone, that much was clear, but it wasn’t my fault. Except that it was. I should have been watching her. And I was being the Lone Ranger at the time, galloping on my horse along the gully known as Rocky Valley, which was the nearest we had to the set of a Hollywood Western on Ilkley Moor. The path was of white silver-sand, and the boulders that towered up on either side of it were a dead ringer for a canyon or a gulch. Whatever a gulch was. I knew it was something you cut people off at, and Rocky Valley looked suitable.

  I was wearing my black leather gloves – well, not mine, but those of an elderly aunt who had come to my mother with a box of clothes that were too small for her. They fitted me, and they were thin riding-style gloves with no lining that looked just like the ones the Lone Ranger wore when he handled his silver bullets. My silver bullet was the metal end that had broken off one of Grandad’s old walking sticks, and I used to keep it in my pocket, then take it out and roll it round between my leather-gloved fingers murmuring, ‘A silver bullet, the only kind the Lone Ranger uses. The lucky silver bullet.’

  I took the gloves off and stuffed them in my pocket with the silver bullet, hiding the evidence of my wayward mind.

  I ran at first, while I had the energy. Along the path beside the reservoir. Ahead of me, I could see a small, dark figure. As I came closer, I could see that it was a nun. I ran past her and she called out, ‘Excuse me?’

  Reluctantly I turned back to face her.

  ‘Would you be awfully kind,’ she asked, ‘and fetch me the cushion from that seat back there?’ She pointed up the path – a good hundred yards back – then turned once more to me with a kindly look on her face. I was already late. I nodded, and bolted back up the rough track to the long bench where a black silk cushion rested, forgotten in the nun’s haste to be back for prayers at the convent on the edge of the moor.

  ‘Bless you. That’s so kind,’ she murmured as I handed over the cushion, bowed, which is what I thought you probably had to do to nuns, and then ran on still searching for the missing dog.

  I ran down Cowpasture Road and over the railway bridge, my lungs burning, and the pain of a stitch biting into my side. There was no time now to dawdle and wait for the enveloping smoke from one of the engines that would roar underneath, though I’d have been grateful for the time that might have helped me cook up a better story.

  Along the edge of Railway Road and down Nelson Road. The tears were not far away now. What if she had been run over? What if she were on her way to Addingham? What if … It didn’t bear thinking about … What if someone had pinched her? No. She was a mongrel. Nothing special. But she was friendly, and good-looking, and …

  I was not sure what worried me more – the loss of the dog or the prospect of the whalebone hairbrush landing on my bum. It wasn’t used often, but tonight, as sure as could be, would be one of them. My father’s voice would be raised, then he’d send me up to bed and follow me with the hairbrush. My palms began to sweat as I rounded the corner from the front of the street to the back. I had a sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach. I squeezed the empty dog lead as if somehow, magically, it might bring her back.

  I reached the yard and took a deep breath. I would tell them exactly what had happened; I would be totally honest about it and explain how sorry I was, and that the nun had delayed me, and that if they wanted, I would go back up to the moor with a torch and look for her, but that as she was such a small dog, it had been very difficult to watch her all the time with the bracken being long and all that, and I didn’t mind going without my tea and my pocket money for the next month, and … then I saw the back doorstep.

  Cindy was sitting there looking up at the handle. She turned and saw me, then wagged her tail and bounded up to me, licking my legs and making those excited ‘Where have you been?’ noises that dogs make.

  I fell on her neck with relief, and then the back door opened. I looked up. It was my dad.

  ‘You’re a bit late. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Up on the moors with the dog.
’

  ‘Well, you’d better get washed quickly. Your tea’s ready.’

  ‘Righto.’

  The dog walked to her basket and took a long drink from her bowl.

  I washed my hands and sat up at the table.

  ‘Was it nice up there?’ asked Mum, cocking her head in the direction of the moors.

  ‘Yes. Fine.’ I felt for the gloves in my pocket. They were not there. I’d lost them among the bracken. All that remained was the silver bullet. The lucky silver bullet. That must have been what did the trick.

  I ate my tea at the same time that the nun was probably saying her prayers.

  Beyond Otley, Wharfedale becomes more industrial as you edge towards Leeds and Bradford. I went to day-release classes in Shipley on the outskirts of Bradford for my City and Guilds in horticulture, and the bus journey seemed to take for ever. Bradford, we never visited when I was a child. ‘It’s a bit rough,’ said my mother confidentially. Leeds, we would go to on special shopping trips maybe two or three times a year, when Mum needed a new hat or Dad needed a suit. But they seldom ventured beyond the comfort of Schofields. I remember Mum looking wistfully at a shining navy-blue pram when we were in there once. It had gleaming swan-necked chrome handles and new leather suspension straps. It was a Silver Cross – the finest in the land and made locally in Guiseley. ‘There’s a special deal in here,’ she said. ‘If you buy your pram in Schofields and tell them what day the baby’s due, you get the pram for free if it turns up on the right day.’ I suppose the deal was negated in the case of a Caesarian section. And, anyway, it was of academic interest now: Kath and I turned out to be the full brood.

  Company