Every nerve and fibre of her being raged against her fate, the cruelty of leaving that she was powerless to avert. She put her palms up against the gate and Rex started barking and pushing at it, thinking she was coming in. Her mother dragged her away and pushed her into the back seat of the taxi on to Fatima’s lap. The rest got in and Muhammad banged the car doors shut. She twisted round, kneeling to look out of the back window.
Another explosion. The taxi, which had seen better days, revved loudly and started to move off. But through the back window, a terrible sight, which only she could see, Rex had somehow got out, was standing in the middle of the road. He was still and silent, staring after their retreating car, his tail stiff, his ears pointing forward.
With utter clarity, the little girl saw in that moment that he knew what she knew, that they would never meet again.
The prose is every bit as spare and urgent as Alan Furst’s, and this is, if anything, an even more poignant passage because it is a true story. Ghada Karmi’s snapshot memory also brings home the blood-draining sense of impotence that accompanies moments of great disaster. The dog–human relationship is based on a deal: in return for all the love they lavish on us, we will look after them when the chips are down. But when the tide of history overwhelms us, we humans welsh on the deal. We never find out what happened to Rex, but he is often in our minds as we read the pages that follow.
Discovering that I was losing my job as a presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme was not quite on a par with the Axis invasion of Greece or the Naqba, the Disaster, as Palestinians call the events described by Ghada Karmi, but it was a bit of a blow in the Stourton household. And, in retrospect, I am surprised by the amount of time I spent thinking about the dog in the emotional period that followed. Grim, big thoughts (of the ‘I’ve passed my peak, from now it’s all down-hill to death’ variety) jostled with much more trivial concerns about canine care: what would happen to Kudu, I wondered, if I had to get a proper job with normal hours? Who would walk him? What if I got a new job that did not pay well enough for me to afford a dog-walker?
Kudu’s response was that very doggy worried look, eyebrows arched in an expression of distressed puzzlement. ‘I don’t know what the problem is,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘but I am most frightfully sorry about it, whatever it is … Now, can we put that to one side and go for a walk?’
Jerome K. Jerome – of Three Men in a Boat fame – has this very good description of the way pets respond to upset owners:
When we bury our face in our hands and wish we had never been born, they don’t sit up very straight, and observe that we have brought it all upon ourselves. They don’t even hope it will be a warning to us.
But they come up softly and shove their heads against us. If it is a dog, he looks up at you with his big true eyes, and says with them, ‘Well, you’ve always got me, you know. We’ll go through the world together, and always stand by each other, won’t we?’
He is very imprudent, a dog is. He never makes it his business to inquire whether you are in the right or in the wrong, never bothers as to whether you are going up or down on life’s ladder, never asks whether you are rich or poor, silly or wise, a saint or a sinner. Come luck or misfortune, good repute or bad, honour or shame, he is going to stick with you, to comfort you, guard you and give his life for you, if need be … You are his pal, that is enough for him.
It all rings very true – even if it is a little sentimental. But what if, like Ghada Karmi, you cannot fulfil your side of the bargain? The Kudu Project was designed for a Today programme lifestyle, and I had signed that blood document promising my wife that he would be my responsibility.
In the event the dog column turned Kudu into part of the solution to my professional dilemmas rather than part of the problem: there was no need to feel guilty about the indulgence of our daily walks once they could, loosely, be defined as research. And, like Alan Furst’s Melissa and Ghada Karmi’s Rex, Kudu became a literary device.
Except, of course, that he is not a character in a book. He is an individual and very much alive. And that, I very quickly discovered, is what makes writing about him such a pleasure.
The next column is an example of one of those occasions when I set out to use him as a vehicle for describing something else – and then found that he pushed his snout into the copy by the sheer force of his personality. I was exchanging dog emails with one of our neighbours – another convert to dog-ownership in her middle years – and she told me about the stretch of Suffolk coast where she had rented a cottage. It sounded such an intriguing place that I readily accepted the invitation for a picnic and a walk. Writing about Kudu just seemed a good excuse for going somewhere nice and calling it work.
Covehithe proved as beautiful and numinous as promised, and we had a wonderful walk along the sand. But I remember it as a walk with dogs, not just a walk. There were children there too – and very jolly companions they were – but the dogs defined the day. I might have taken to regarding Kudu as a literary device, but no one had told him about that, so he, of course, continued to act according to his independently minded doggy lights. And the way dogs react to things subtly colours our own experiences.
As the young man at the end of the second column in this chapter discovered, they can also surprise and even change you.
Kudu and his new friend have no sense of history
8 August 2009
The blue waters of the Ionian Sea beckoned. Fingering the tickets, I felt guilty about the Dog: surely he, too, deserved a summer holiday.
It was only a day-trip, and the waters off Suffolk’s coast were roiling black, to the eye as thick as tar, but what a walk we had. It is tempting to keep the secret to myself, but this odd slice of our country is resilient against the modern world. A 1930s visitor remarked it ‘ambles along at least a century behind the rest of England’.
After two hours in a hot car Kudu showed no aesthetic interest in the gaunt remains of St Andrew’s Church in Covehithe. The graveyard is wild and open, an irresistible invitation to run free, and I am ashamed to admit that I allowed casual canine desecration of several ancient gravestones. But the melancholy oddness of these ruins is a powerful distraction.
Covehithe was a flourishing port during Suffolk’s medieval heyday. Its merchants showed off by giving money for church building (Suffolk was called ‘sele’ or ‘holy’ on account of its churches); St Andrew’s was huge, flaunting six pairs of Gothic windows and a tower tall enough to serve sailors as a landmark. Today there is next to nothing left: no port, no town, and almost no church. Oddest of all is the tiny, hut-like chapel erected in what was once the nave of the great church – one church built inside another, like Russian dolls.
What happened? The dogs – our dog host was a Norfolk Terrier called Alfie, charming in every way, apart from his addiction to horse manure – were more interested in driving history forward than understanding it. Beyond the church there was a path between a field growing some neat but uninspiring East Anglian crop and a low cliff giving on to the beach. As soon as Alfie hit the sand he began to dig, and Kudu copied him. Coastal erosion is one of the reasons for Covehithe’s decline – it swallowed the harbour and then the houses; the dogs were determined to make their contribution.
Covehithe’s story is a quirky mix of money and faith. The Reformation killed its herring trade, because Protestantism abolished the seventy days of abstinence (which meant eating fish instead of meat) observed in the Old Religion. In the 1640s it received a visit from William ‘Smasher’ Dowsing, a Taliban-like Puritan charged with the ‘destruction of monuments of idolatry and superstition’. Dowsing recorded his acts of iconoclasm with great glee in a journal: at Covehithe church he ‘brake down 200 pictures’.
Daniel Defoe, visiting this coast in the early eighteenth century, was inspired to write of ‘the fate of things, by which we see that towns, kings, countries, persons have all their elevation, their medium, their declination and even their destruction in the womb
of time and the course of nature’. But what are we to make of that tiny chapel, still standing like a defiant gesture amid this desolation of dead dreams?
The beach, stretching all the way to Sizewell, is the kind of landscape one might, in a lazy moment, describe as ‘unchanging’. In fact, it has been changing for centuries – and as if to make the point, a bat-like bomber from a nearby airfield made languid circles above us.
But doggy habits never change. Our human hostess was indulgent of Alfie’s frantic digging. He is, she pointed out, a terrier (from terra, the Latin for earth), designed by humans for precisely this purpose. She conceded it makes him an awkward gardening companion, but how can we blame his atavism?
Kudu’s genetic memory was stirred by the wide mere that runs along the beach and is now designated a bird sanctuary. He was in the water like a flash, looking for wildfowl to flush and retrieve. He failed, of course, but – never mind Alfie’s manure habit – he stank happily all the way home.
Dogs are not mad – it’s the owners who need a shrink
22 August 2009
I have been surprised by the authors who have owned up to dog-curiosity since this column began. In Jermyn Street – the smart shirt place where one still sees pedigree pooches in the shops with titled ladies on their leads – I was approached by a well-known novelist.
Her brother, while breaking up a long relationship, had become concerned about the impact on the family dog, and had taken him to a canine psychiatrist. The shrink told him: ‘The dog is fine – but you are in need of professional help.’
In the sixteenth century, long before mad dogs went out in the midday sun with Englishmen, the phrase ‘mad dog’ meant ‘strong ale’. On American campuses it was slang for the hallucinogen PCP. And it has since become a verb in American prisons: if you ‘mad dog’ a fellow inmate you are eyeballing him. All sorts of odd characters – a Canadian wrestler, a fictional mercenary and a New York talk-show host – have used the ‘Mad Dog’ sobriquet.
‘Dog’s gone mad’ is a frequent call in Kudu’s household. If someone says, ‘Go-go-go,’ and he dashes down the garden, someone else will shout, ‘Dog’s gone mad.’ The same cry goes up when he turns dervish approaching his favourite pond on Wimbledon Common.
His reactions are entirely logical. The go-go-going is to encourage his pursuit of foxes, and he understands the words so well that even if we whisper them he takes off. He enjoys swimming where he can see the bottom as he walks in, so the Wimbledon pond is preferable to Battersea’s formal lake, and the dervish act is natural excitement.
Dogs are grounded and sane; the madness is ours.
The New York writer Reggie Nadelson and I have been corresponding about a dog for her detective hero, Artie Cohen, in her next book (Artie suffered a terrible personal loss in the last one, Londongrad, and Reggie thinks a dog might settle him down). I have argued the case for a Springer (I have seen them sniffing for explosives in Afghanistan, and they are perfect police pets), but there is the cultural question of whether a Manhattan dog would need to be lippy – not the Kudu character at all.
Reggie is now dog-obsessed (‘on the cusp of dogging’, in her words, but I have explained that that is not a nice thing to say over here). She is Jewish, and has sent me details of an agency offering ‘Bark Mitzvahs’. ‘When outfitting your dog for his Bark Mitzvah,’ says the website, ‘bear two things in mind: your dog’s tolerance for wearing clothes, and your guests’ tolerance for seeing dogs in religious garb.’ They offer yarmulkes and prayer shawls for dogs, and a ‘multi-coloured Star of David dog bandanna’, which will ‘come in handy for years to come’.
Another well-known woman writer (yes, that is three in this column alone) told me that when she interviewed the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Avebury (he of Orpington by-election fame, for those with long political memories), he declared his intention to leave his body to the abandoned dogs of Battersea Dogs Home, so we can certainly match America in eccentricity.
But there was news this week of a nastier kind of dog-related madness in Britain: our trees (thousands of them, it seems) are being destroyed by what are known as ‘weapon dogs’ – the owners encourage them to hang from branches to strengthen their jaws. The struggling saplings in the small park where Kudu gets his afternoon walks bear dreadful scars from this habit.
In the queue at Clapham Tesco my wife and stepdaughter found themselves next to a stereotypical ‘weapon dog’ owner – but his young Rottweiler was appealingly cuddly and apparently uncorrupted by the tree-biting mentality. They cooed over the puppy until the young man gave way to a smile, enquired after Kudu, and engaged in general dog chat – redeemed for a moment by dog-silliness from dog-related madness.
Snarls all round in a park full of passion
5 September 2009
I have alienated the dog-walkers of Clapham Common: a courteous lady took me gently to task for representing it as a place of fighting-dogs and rough trade. ‘We are not all thugs here,’ she said. ‘We have dogs called Breughel, Rousseau, Shakespeare and’ – she indicated a fine-looking Lab – ‘Dibley, the lady vicar’s dog.’
This week’s views may alienate not just my Clapham companions but every bitch-owner in the land. I am plunging into the choppy waters of canine sexual politics.
Kudu, out with my wife in Clapham at the weekend, fixed obsessively on an Alsatian. She was held on a lead by a respectable-looking man, who responded to Kudu’s attentions by hitting him with a newspaper (it looked like a Saturday Telegraph, putting Kudu in the undignified position of being beaten with his own photograph).
As my wife led him away, she enquired of the Alsatian’s owner whether the bitch was on heat. ‘None of your business,’ he snarled, in a most un-Telegraph-reader-like way.
Clapham Common is not a place to pick a fight – especially not with a man ready to use a broadsheet as an offensive weapon. But was it really not her business that he had brought a sexual detonator into the powder keg of a park full of potentially lustful dogs?
A moral conundrum lies at the heart of managing walkies for bitches on heat.
The nub emerged from another difficult exchange – with a young woman enjoying the common accoutred with toddler, Dachshund, picnic and Filipina maid. As Kudu sniffed up in his friendly way, the maid whipped up the Dachshund and held it above her head. Kudu kept leaping at the little dog, despite my forcefully growled instructions.
‘She’s on heat, I’m afraid,’ said the young woman.
Thrown by Kudu’s disobedience, I replied, more sharply than I should have done: ‘In that case she shouldn’t really be out.’
‘By that token, nor should he if he’s not neutered,’ came the reply.
Preposterous logic, surely?
But it has an uncomfortable echo of the argument about dress regularly advanced by my daughter: she believes she should be able to wear whatever she wants without taking responsibility for its impact on men. When I point out that we live in Stockwell rather than Utopia, and suggest a little less leg on a Saturday night, I am accused of sexist piggery.
Male dogs are like sports cars. To enjoy them you have to take pleasure in their flashier qualities – good road handling in wet conditions, a facility for throwing up maximum mud from puddles, and purely theatrical throaty noises. But, like the driver of a fast car, the dog-owner must be absolutely in command – no knocking over children, no foraging in picnics, or paws on white trousers, and absolutely no aggression.
I can now control Kudu in most situations (yes, it was unfortunate when he peed on that over-dressed Pekinese, but there we are). But I do not believe I could train him to be calm with a bitch on heat – the difference, surely, between a dog and a man. We know of a country Springer whose first bride arrived on a quad bike; he now becomes frenzied whenever he hears one.
So – I offer this nervously and after deep reflection – when owners take bitches into public places in their season, they have primary responsibility for the behaviour of other dogs, and
should not brandish their newspapers at Spaniels.
But I can also offer them help. In Sweden the neutering and spaying of dogs used to be outlawed (as an infringement of doggy rights), so bitch-owners give them a contraceptive injection like the pill. I know of one Spaniel owner who uses it here; she faced fierce resistance from vets, but she is medically trained and insists the modest health risks are a small price to pay for the freedom her bitch enjoys courtesy of her ‘chemical burqa’.
This piece provoked exactly the kind of vociferous and varied response I had hoped for. I was accused of sexism (‘This is such a male article’) and irresponsibility, and there was something of a hue and cry for Kudu’s castration (the very thought makes me wince and cross my legs). But there was also heavy website traffic in support of my polemic. The offering I most enjoyed – for its pithy irascibility – was: ‘When your bitch is on heat you should be responsible enough to keep it away from dogs and not frequent places like Clapham Common, where there is ample sexual activity from humans to keep anyone disgusted.’
At three months into my columnist’s life, I was beginning to stretch my legs and march with a swagger – even risking a little experimentation with the form. One week I gave the space to a piece by Kudu himself.
Writing in the persona of your dog is a delicate business, and it is all too easy to overstep the mark. If you asked me whether I know my dog well, I would, of course, say yes, but in truth the characteristics I can identify with anything close to objective certainty are relatively few. He is certainly affectionate (but even aggressive dogs can be affectionate towards their owners), and he seems sensitive to human illness or distress. He is gregarious to the point of social promiscuity, and un-aggressive to the point of wimpishness. I suspect – though this is just a theory – that he has the sort of sunny nature that often goes with good looks: if everyone is always pleased to see you it is bound to incline you towards a benign view of the world.
Diary of a Dog-walker Page 3
