by Danny Baker
I never had any more trouble with Twiz after that – at least, not in terms of the power struggle. He was to have plenty of other adventures with us though. One day we came home and on unlocking the front door were alarmed to find he wasn’t doing his normal ‘Welcome back!’ dance in the hall. Indeed, he wasn’t anywhere to be seen, although we could hear a noise from the front room like a ceiling fan having a fight with a series of shower curtains. This description wasn’t too far from the actuality: on dashing in to find out the cause, we discovered Twizzle had become completely entangled in the white plastic blinds in the lounge windows. He was hanging in mid-air, his head looking toward us through the slats, one paw poking out further down and both back legs wrapped up in the string you raised and lowered the things with. I got the blame for this, having left the front-room door open when we went out.
‘You know he’ll try and get anyone who knocks,’ said Wendy huffily as she set about the difficult task of freeing our imprisoned pet as he wriggled and swayed high up in the window. ‘He must have gone to jump through these blinds and got all mixed up. Struggling made it worse for him – he could have hung himself!’
In fact it would be another two years before he succeeded in hanging himself, in what I count as one of the greatest metaphysical events of recent times.
Twizzle was not quite the undisputed leader of the lunatic animal fraternity in our neighbourhood. There was one other challenger for this crown, a more traditionally built mad dog called, of course, Rambo. This solidly built pitbull terrier lived in a junkyard close to the back of our house. The people who operated the business also owned the alley that led up to it and this long thin lane separated the row of back gardens in our street from those in adjacent Trundley’s Road. It was in this narrow thoroughfare, littered with old fridges, car parts and pallet boards, that Rambo was allowed to roam, noisily taunting all his pampered domesticated peers who bordered the park in comfort.
Although Rambo’s home turf was directly behind our high garden fence, it was further sealed off and hidden from view by a long row of strategically planted trees, so even though you couldn’t escape Rambo’s incessant barking, he could only ever be glimpsed if you took the trouble to walk around to the gates of his scrap-metal kingdom.
Twizzle had never actually seen Rambo, but he certainly knew he was there. Alone among all the dogs in the area he would argue long and loud with his unseen bête noire, standing right at the far reaches of his own turf to the rear of our place, while on the other side of the thin tree line Rambo replied in kind. It was a tremendous racket and two or three times a day either Wendy or myself would have to physically bundle Twiz back indoors as he fought to continue his squabble to the last breath. One day, Twizzle – who, temper notwithstanding, was a supremely intelligent dog – spotted a way to break the verbal deadlock and have this thing out once and for all. Though he had many times thrown himself at the back fence in an effort to break clean through it, the old railway sleepers that shored up the bulwark showed no signs of giving way just yet. So Twiz, weighing the thing up and looking at the problem from all angles, came to the conclusion that he would have to go over the barrier, through a small gap in the trees that he judged sufficient to see him through. This would be no mean feat for a medium-sized dog, and would require he add several inches to his previous personal best: the wall around the allotments in Blackhorse Road (a feat prompted by the sudden appearance of a squirrel).
I have no idea whether Twizzle made any early abortive attempts at clearing the obstacle standing between him and his rendezvous with Rambo, because all I saw was the successful one. Walking out into the garden to cut some mint for a jug of Pimm’s I was preparing, I was just in time to see his rampant old rear end, elevated some eight feet in the air, disappearing into the thicket above the fence. Screaming his name, I bolted back through the house. The reason for this was the only access to the yard beyond was to go almost fully around the block to the large metal gate at the end of the lane that led to the scrap piles. Tearing along our street, shrieking ‘Twizzle!’ to the utter bafflement of any non-locals passing by, I felt utterly sickened as I mentally prepared myself for the awful violence I would have to deal with when arriving at the point of battle. I had no doubt whatsoever that a dreadful bloody fight would be in progress, because both dogs had been fantastically vocal that day, right up to the moment I had set out on my mint-hunting expedition.
As I raced towards the yard, I was relieved to see the gate was already open. Fearing the worst, I rounded the corner into the alley.
I was stopped in my tracks almost immediately. There was Rambo, standing in the sun regarding the passage of a passing beetle, but not a sign of my dog. Far from appearing as if he’d been wreaking bloody carnage, the pitbull seemed remarkably calm and content. Had he eaten Twiz whole? I knew that in Looney Tunes cartoons – from whose lore I have drawn the majority of my life lessons – anytime Butch the bulldog swallowed Sylvester the cat, the act would be signified by a few inches of Sylvester’s tail hanging from the corner of his mouth. I saw no such evidence around Rambo’s jaws. In fact, the entire scene was one of utter beatific peace, broken only by the gentle hiss of CFC gasses escaping from abandoned fridge freezers.
‘Do you want something, mate?’ came a gruff call from outside the hut in the scrap yard.
‘My dog,’ I called back, my thoughts a little fractured by the unexpected twist. ‘He flew over the fence and now I can’t see him.’
‘What – this fence?’ the latter-day Steptoe asked, advancing on me. ‘No dog has come over that fence, mate. Rambo would have murdered it, I promise ya . . .’
What on earth had happened? Two further scenarios entered my reasoning. One: Twizzle had landed, hit the ground running and, seeing the size of his opponent, had carried on running straight out the gate. Two: He hadn’t landed, having somehow sailed across the alley, clear through an open window on the other side.
I had just begun to say, ‘Well, I definitely saw him leave our airspace . . .’ when I heard a slight rustling and there, several yards ahead, I glimpsed patches of chocolate brown amid the dappled green branches of a tree. It was Twizzle, dangling downwards, stuck fast and helpless, trapped by the neck and back legs just as he had been in the living-room blinds. The surface of the alley in which we were gathered was about three feet lower than the level of the gardens and what may have looked like the base of a tree’s boughs from our side was revealed as merely the middle of its limbs on the other. Twizzle had partially made it through what appeared to be a gap before becoming hopelessly snagged as he began his rapid descent. Rambo must have been elsewhere when Twiz arrived in the branches. I suspect, not gifted with a brilliant brain, he figured any Twizzle-like smells he caught a whiff of were completely normal. Twizzle, on the other hand, being a clever hound, had recognized he was temporarily at a disadvantage and decided to blend in with his surroundings until the cavalry arrived.
‘Mate,’ I said with extreme caution to the oncoming junk man, ‘mate. Grab your dog. Don’t make a fuss – just take him away.’ I measured my words as if each one were a stick of wet dynamite.
‘Why should I?’ he answered aggressively and I sighed, reflecting that there is a certain type of bloke who can feel disrespected by a baby’s gurgle.
‘Mate, please,’ I urged him while trying to remain motionless.
‘He’s harmless – he won’t hurt ya!’ continued the tattooed salvager, still not grasping my urgency.
‘Mate, I’ll give you a tenner if you just get your dog by the collar,’ I now implored.
‘Come here, Rambo!’ he yelled, and grabbed the studded band at the animal’s bulging neck as if his life depended on it.
I walked past the dumbfounded duo and stood beneath the tree where Twizzle was imprisoned. He rolled his eyes toward me and licked a nervous lip. People who have never owned dogs don’t know how canines can register embarrassment every bit as clearly as humans, but they can, and here was an excellent e
xample of it. Underneath his sleek brown fur, Twizzle’s face was as red as a beetroot – as any face would be if it found itself wedged halfway up a tree in broad daylight.
As I reached up to bend back some of the limbs that pinned him, Twizzle suddenly began to thrash about. This in turn alerted Rambo that, far from this being just another idyllic day at the junkyard, he was in the middle of some sort of air raid. Pulling clear of his owner’s iron grip, the pitbull began leaping at Twiz, who was still trapped but strategically occupying the high ground.
The next ten seconds exactly resembled one of those huge dust clouds that Andy Capp used to disappear behind whenever he had a punch-up at the pub. By the time the man managed to wrestle Rambo away again and I had stopped frantically attempting to push Twiz back through the hole out of which he had recently arrived, people were leaning out of upstairs windows all around to see what that ungodly row had been. Dragging his enraged beast to the workman’s hut for safety, the scrap man advised me in no uncertain terms that I should ‘keep my fucking dog in the house’ in future. As I at last managed to extricate Twizzle from the tree, I resolved that while that might be impossible I would definitely get one of the brothers-in-law to heighten the fence that divided the bitter foes. This was done a few days later while Twizzle looked on with great interest. What we didn’t know was that his brilliant mind was already working on Plan B.
Like all great strategies, its genius lay in its total simplicity. Now that the option of going over the fence had been ruled out, Twizzle saw that the only alternative open to him was to go under. Waiting for overcast days when he could be sure that neither Wendy or I would be spending much time outdoors, Twizzle, I see now, created his tunnel in a series of shifts disguised by whining at the back door to nip out for a wee. Perhaps tunnel is too elaborate a word, but he did burrow quite a cavity at the base of the fence and soon was able to squeeze his head and shoulders under it. It was his impetuousness upon discovering that he could do this that led to his downfall. Had he taken away six inches more earth from the floor of his excavation he might have been able to pop up in Rambo’s alley as if sprung from a trap, but the sheer excitement of suddenly being able to see the enemy got the better of him and Twiz started attracting attention as soon as his muddy nose broke through on the far side. Like a maniac, lost in a crazed red mist, he now attempted to take on this monster of an adversary with just his head sticking up through the earth.
This time I was only alerted to the fact that the persistent old bastard had once again invaded sovereign soil by the awful sound of a vicious fight in progress. Running to the garden to confirm my worst fears, I was startled to see that a good deal of my dog was, in fact, still in our garden. His sturdy back quarters were facing toward me, the legs beneath making repeated attempts to gain fresh purchase, causing his whole rump to rise wildly in the air. What was happening on the other side I shuddered to think. Grabbing him by the haunches, I yanked him back through the hole. The bout had not gone well. Despite some impressive bobbing and weaving, accompanied by a rapid offensive from his own, not insubstantial, jaws, Rambo had clearly landed quite a few telling blows. The revulsion I felt as I looked at Twizzle’s bloodied cheeks was only offset by the fact his wide eyes and happy panting told me that I had just interrupted the most fun he’d had in ages. I got the feeling that, had I applied grease to his cuts and sent him back through the opening for round two, he couldn’t have appreciated it more. In taking on the reigning Deptford champ without the use of his arms and legs, Twiz called to mind the insane black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who refuses to stop fighting even when all his limbs have been hacked off. His actions had been horrifying, disgusting and downright wrong, and yet it was impossible not to feel a scintilla of admiration for a creature so recklessly determined to follow his dream. It was a goal that, on his next attempt at settling scores with the enemy without, would see him attain an almost God-like status whenever I sit with other dog owners who like to tell tales of unique canine characters they have known.
Following the episode in the tree we had raised our fence higher. After the episode with the tunnel we had laid paving stones along the back. We tried to anticipate where Twizzle would move next and saw that we had a weakness either side with the relatively low fences that separated us from our aged neighbours, Ethel Jones and Maud Birch. These two wonderful old ladies were our very good friends. Both in their late seventies, they had lived in Scawen Road since they were little girls. Maud used to tell us what a high reputation the street had when she was younger:
‘Before we moved here, we lived up by the high street,’ she would tell us as we sat by the fire in her kitchen. ‘And if my mother ever took us into the park or we had to walk along the road here, we had to wear our best clothes and spotless gloves. It always was a beautiful square. Then in the war a mine got dropped on the far side one night and blew down a lot of the houses and the whitewash factory that stood over the back. That’s why the Grinstead Road side is just open ground these days.’
Maud’s memories of the area took up many a Sunday afternoon after I would take her in the extra dinner that Wendy always prepared. One tale concerned the chilling moment the terrifying reality of the Blitz first intruded on the lives of those who lived in the street.
‘It was a late afternoon,’ Maude began in the clear but hoarse tones this fiercely house-proud widow delivered all her tales. ‘My Bob was home on leave for some reason, but he’d gone to the big pub that used to be over on Evelyn Street – it kept a monkey, that pub, and that was a big attraction then. Any rate, the sirens had gone but at that point we hadn’t really had any what you might call big raids and so we’d got to ignore them a bit. All us women were in Deptford Park, which had become an allotment and had big barrage balloons tethered in it – you can’t imagine such a thing now. So we decided to stay, because nine times out of ten nothing happened. But this time some planes did come over and they started dropping these bombs – but not like you see on telly, more like thin cylinders that burst into flames but didn’t blow up or anything. So we all ran indoors, but it didn’t last long and when we come out there were little fires going everywhere. So we all got out these stirrup pimps that they’d issued that you were supposed to use on any blazes before they got too bad. Some of the trees were on fire and a few of the roofs near Hicks Street too, but the main damage seemed to be over at the warehouses and docks across by the river.
‘So there we all were – having a bit of a laugh about it, if truth be told, because we’d all heard it said that these bombs could bring your house down when really it was just starting these fires, so we was all a bit relieved. Then back comes my Bob and his mates and said we all better get down the shelters quick. He looked really pale, I remember that. Well, we all said he should get a bucket and give us a hand, but then he told us what it was all about. These fires were just the markers, he said, there to point out the targets for the heavy bombers coming behind. It was getting dark then and as we looked about we could see all the places where these flames were starting to get a hold. “Everybody in!” he said. “This thing ain’t even started yet.”
‘Well, we all gathered our stuff and started for the shelters. Nobody was saying a word any more. And that night was the first night of the Blitz. We’d never known anything like it. The pub he had been in came down like a pack of cards. All the blokes who’d stayed inside got killed. Even the poor little monkey. Nobody knew what to expect, see . . .’
As the logs in her fireplace spat and crackled, Maud would fall silent and sit staring off into the distance. I stayed quiet too. There was nothing anyone from my generation could add to that.
Ethel Jones on the other side was of a similar age to Maud, but the peculiar thing was that the two women did not get on at all. When forced to acknowledge each other – we always invited them both to the parties we seemed to continually host – they would only ever say a clipped ‘Mrs Birch’ and ‘Miss Jones’ when holding their stilted conversatio
ns across their teacups. Neither of them had any children; Ethel, because she had stayed at home with her mother until late in life, and Maude because, as she once gloriously told Wendy and I with a grimace, ‘My Bob was never very good in that department.’
Fortunately, keeping these two frosty old gals from actually being neighbours was our house and, germane to Twizzle’s story, our garden. Because we were friends with E&M, the fences between us were not very high and topped with a simple trellis that allowed us to see and chat to each other on sunny days. It was through the obvious weakness this amiable arrangement offered that we now believed Twizzle would launch his next invasion of Rambo’s turf.
Ethel’s side was clear favourite, given that her back wall adjoined the junk yard at a height Twiz could easily clear with three paws tied behind his back. So, after explaining the situation to the old ladies, we decided to bolster defences on either side by a few feet, though not so high that our yard would start to resemble some sort of canine Stalag.
Now comes just about the most extraordinary tale any dog owner has ever recounted to a cynical public. In the short interim between the hole-digging and the new barriers going up, we took to restricting Twizzle so that he only had the freedom of a short passageway that ran outside our back door and along the length of the rear of the premises. This was a space about twenty feet long by four feet wide, with another fence along Ethel’s boundary we judged high enough to thwart even a runner in the Grand National. At the end of this passage was the garden itself. A tall narrow gate fashioned from curlicue wrought iron marked where the alleyway ended and our garden began. This gate, topped as it was by a small brickwork arc, coupled with the fence, firmly denied Twiz access to his Eden beyond. He was, at last, penned in.
It took him about an hour to figure out that, while he couldn’t jump over this latest enclosure, he was able to look over it. With a mixture of wonder, admiration and outright hysteria, I discovered him hanging over the top of the fence, its upper edge wedged beneath what I suppose we must call his armpits, surveying the world from his suspended perch. From the other side it must have looked as if he was ten feet tall and leaning over for a natter. The only drawback for Twiz was that, once in place, he couldn’t get down again and so at regular intervals I would have to go out to the passageway, stand on a box and unhook him.
