Tea and Dog Biscuits

by Hawkins, Barrie

  ‘I’ll call my son in then,’ said Mrs Duvalier. ‘No doubt you’ll want to meet him and he’ll want to meet Roxy as well. He’s waiting in the car. I’ll go and give him a wave.’

  At the front door she paused and turned to me. ‘It’s so good for your health to have a dog, isn’t it?’ ‘It certainly is,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll make my son exercise more, so it’ll be good for him. He’s seventy, you know.’

  Mrs Duvalier and her son, Julian, arranged to collect Roxy on the following Saturday morning. She jumped without hesitation up onto the cream leather seats of the big, black Daimler, a rather grander form of transport than the small, rusty car she had been pushed out of onto the bypass. I nodded to myself with pleasure. Roxy had gone up in the world.

  As Mrs Duvalier was about to get into the car, her rather formal, businesslike manner suddenly dropped away. She leant forward and spoke in my ear, conspiratorially.

  ‘I’ve been to four or five places, you know – and none of them would give me a dog. They didn’t say why, but I knew.’ She straightened up and fixed me with a look. ‘I’ll prove them wrong,’ she said. ‘And you and Dorothy right.’

  Then she took hold of my hand and pressed something into it.

  ‘A Longevity Stone,’ she said. ‘The local people where we lived in South America said anyone who slept with it under their pillow would enjoy long life. There are two in that little bag, one for each of you.’

  ‘Oh. Thank you.’ My surprise must have shown on my face.

  ‘I’m going to put one under Roxy’s blanket in her bed. Then she and I will both have one.’

  Grey-muzzled Roxy enjoyed another six years of life on her own country estate in deepest Norfolk.

  I’ve still got my stone under my pillow.

  We had only one left. Dear, dear Friend.

  ‘Do you think he’s putting on weight?’ we would ask each other every day. The trips to the vet weren’t so frequent now and the scales there usually showed an increase of a kilo or two, except for one week when we had a bad experience, the scales showing a sudden drop until we realised he had only three legs on the platform. He was putting on weight, the sores were clearing and the patches of bare skin were disappearing. He was taking an interest in the world and, most tellingly of all, if you held up his lead, he got up, went to the door and began wagging his tail.

  ‘I think this dog gets younger every day,’ said Dorothy.

  I’d been thinking the same.

  ‘Do you still think he’s about ten, Melissa?’ I had asked on our last visit.

  ‘Ten?’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘Did I say that?’ She took hold of his head and had a look at his teeth. ‘Give his teeth a clean,’ she said, ‘and I think he’ll be six or seven.’

  Just one to home was my thought as I waved goodbye to Mrs Duvalier and Roxy, watching the car disappear from sight – and then a sudden realisation caused me to skip down the drive. I had a whole Saturday afternoon free! No phone calls to make, no trip to the vet, no prospective owners to meet, no pen to clear out – whatever would I do with myself?

  ‘Why don’t you take Friend for a walk?’ suggested Dorothy.

  I stared at her. ‘I do that every day!’

  ‘He’s much fitter now,’ she said. ‘You could give him a really good walk – take him somewhere different. It could be the best walk he’s ever had.’

  My lack of enthusiasm must have registered on my face. So she cranked up my motivation. ‘You could go to the old aerodrome – we still haven’t explored all of it.’ I suspect that my face now lit up at the prospect. Later I reflected on how skilful my wife was at managing me.

  ‘And you could ring Bob Kerry,’ she said. ‘See if he’s free to come with you – he said he would love to go the next time you went.’

  So that Saturday afternoon a part-time student of local history, a young American serviceman stationed in England and a recovering German Shepherd named after a Japanese dog went exploring on a World War Two aerodrome.

  The day Bob and his pal had erected their kennel and run for us I had left them to go off to my local history class. My casual remark that local history was my hobby had brought building operations to a halt. Bob’s grandfather, he told me, who came from Arkansas, had been stationed in Norfolk during World War Two, and had also spent some time at an aerodrome quite close to where we lived – was it possible that it was the one where we walk the dogs?

  I had warned Bob that there wasn’t much to see now. But when we walked there he shared my sense of wonder and sense of history. This wasjust one of dozens of airfields that had covered East Anglia in World War Two, most of which had now disappeared, often under housing estates. The land for this aerodrome had been requisitioned by the War Department then returned in peacetime to agricultural purposes. But some of the runway had been preserved to provide a hard surface for farm vehicles and a few of the old buildings were still used by the farmers for storage.

  It was a flat landscape and you could walk far enough to put three or four fields between you and any human habitation. Where engines had roared into life to lift giant aircraft into the sky, rabbits now played and scurried about. Every now and then a rabbit would pop out from the crop and Friend would set off in halfhearted pursuit.

  ‘He’s not really hungry any more, is he?’ said Bob. ‘He doesn’t look too bothered about catching it.’

  But then all the times I’ve walked at that aerodrome with our orphans, not one of them has ever caught a bunny – thank goodness.

  We had a rest on some bales of straw we came across in an old corrugated shed, whose timber frame leaned eastward, telling us the direction from which the wind usually came on that old aerodrome. As we sat there looking across at the lonely landscape, no human being in sight or sound, I couldn’t help but picture what had been there before. I had read some of the books about the forgotten airfields of World War Two, written by enthusiasts, and had seen some of the surviving photos in the county archives. Now as I looked across at the fields of winter wheat, for a moment I could hear again the drone of the engines as the planes returned from their mission, as they were counted back in.

  It was the first of several walks that Bob and I and one of our orphans had at the old aerodrome. And it was the first of our exploratory trips to other of the historic airfields of East Anglia. One or two had been carefully preserved with watchtower and relics; finding others was a trek through farmland to a few crumbling remnants of concrete.

  Bob must have taken scores of photographs and he took them home with him. He wrote to me that the photos and talking of his stay in England had an unexpected result. For the first time his grandfather talked about his time in the services, the missions he had flown and the pals he had lost.

  ‘Our visits to the old aerodrome had a big impact on me, Barrie,’ Bob wrote. ‘I could reach out and touch the past. There is a danger that we think everything begins when we are born. But we are just part of a continuing story.’

  After his return home Bob and his wife had two children. He sent me a photo of two smiling toddlers. ‘I hope one day they will come and visit England,’ he wrote in his letter sending the pictures, ‘and that they will also hear the sound of those returning aircraft.’

  I stretched out my legs until I could feel the heat from the fire on my toes. My strenuous walk at the aerodrome with Bob and Friend had left me feeling lazy and content with the world. I had a whole free Sunday to look forward to. Our open fire always soothed me: the warmth, the glowing and the sounds of the crackling of the logs from the little wood at the end of our garden. I curled up my toes and closed my eyes.

  It was then, of course, that the phone rang.

  I took a deep breath but I had to answer it in case it was a dog in need of help. The phone had become my master.

  I could hear the despair in the woman’s voice.

  ‘My neighbour has a dog. I’ve lived here for eight years and I’ve never seen him take it out. I don’t mean
take it out for a walk – I mean take it out of the pen it lives in. It’s got a kennel and they feed it, but that’s all they do with it.’

  ‘You mean it’s not been let out of the pen for eight years?’ I said.

  Dorothy had come out into the hall. She paused as she overheard the shocked tone in my voice. I looked at her and shook my head in disbelief.

  She switched the phone on to loudspeaker.

  ‘Hello, are you there?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My friend says it’s a German Shepherd, although it doesn’t look like one to me. It’s a lovely looking dog. It’s got a really long coat, I’ve never seen anything like it, some of its real ginger and the rest of it’s like dark chocolate.’ She paused for breath.

  Where was all this leading?

  ‘Every morning when I get up I go to draw back the curtains in my bedroom and I see this pen with this dog in it. I look away now as I pull back the curtains, but that doesn’t help really – I know the dog is there. I start every day worrying about that dog. Please, can you help me?’

  ‘But what can I—’

  ‘The dog warden can’t do anything about it because he says it’s got food and shelter. I understand that, but it’s got no life!’

  ‘Have—’

  ‘I told the man one day I would report him to the RSPCA. My husband told me not to get involved. It didn’t matter because the man just ignored me.’

  ‘Have you—’

  ‘Someone says his daughter gets on to him about it.’ There was finally a pause. I think my caller had run out of breath for a moment.

  ‘Have you considered talking to him about the possibility of rehoming the dog?’

  ‘Oh yes. I went out to him this afternoon when he was getting in his car. He says I can have the dog. If I bring it to you, will you take it?’

  I pursed my lips. At last we were there. It looked as if we wouldn’t be down to just one orphan for very long.

  ‘We can take him on Monday, if that suits you,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t I bring him tomorrow, Sunday?’

  Having made arrangements with Mrs Cadbury I put the phone down. As I did so, it rang again, making me jump.

  Not another dog?

  I grabbed it up. ‘Hello!’

  ‘Could I speak to Dorothy, please?’

  ‘Who’s calling?’

  ‘Irma. I’m a friend of Dorothy’s from work.’

  I gave such a big sigh of relief the caller must have heard it. ‘Dorothy!’ I called her back. ‘It’s for you!’

  I chucked down the phone and went back to my fire. Soon I was in that happy state where the head begins to nod.

  Dorothy came back into the living room. My eyes were closed but I sensed she had sat down opposite me. I opened one eye.

  ‘That was Irma. She works in accounts.’

  Fascinating, I thought.

  ‘She’s got a tiny terrier…’

  Where’s this leading? Don’t tell me they want us to take a tiny terrier? I opened the other eye.

  ‘She and her husband were taking it for a walk this afternoon and they heard a whining. They were in a field somewhere and they couldn’t make out where this noise was coming from.’

  She suddenly stood up, went across the room, picked up a box of tissues. ‘It was a dog. At the bottom of a deep ditch that luckily was nearly dry. She says it was just standing there. She thinks it’s a young Lurcher of some sort, but it’s very thin, even for a Lurcher.’ Dorothy had her back to me while she was talking.

  ‘Have they any idea how it got there?’

  ‘Complete mystery. It was just standing in the water, apparently, nearly up to its chest. The only thing they can think of is that there had been illegal hare coursers round there in the morning and her husband says that sometimes if the dog’s no good they just leave it behind. That it might have been chucked in the ditch.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t it just get out of the ditch?’

  ‘I don’t know. It may have been too frightened.’ Dorothy turned round. She looked so miserable. ‘Her husband got down into the ditch and it just let him pick it up.’

  ‘We’ll take it,’ I said. ‘At least it won’t be with illegal hare coursers any more. And it’s a young dog so it’s got its life ahead of it yet.’

  ‘Yes. But this one that Mrs Cadbury is bringing us… Year after year in a pen. That’s what we do to people to punish them – lock them up in solitary confinement. And even if we can rehome him, he hasn’t got his life ahead of him.’

  Her face was a picture of misery. We looked at one another but I couldn’t think of anything encouraging to say. So I said what I usually did when we were both demoralised. ‘Shall I make us a cup of tea?’

  The phone was ringing again.

  ‘I thought people went out on a Saturday night,’ I said to Dorothy.

  ‘Obviously not all of them,’ she said. ‘Some of them stay in and ring us.’

  I sighed deeply and picked up the phone. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Oh Barrie – it’s Cecilia!’

  She always said it in such a dramatic tone of voice – as if she were making some earth-shattering announcement such as ‘Oh Barrie – I’ve won the lottery!’

  I narrowed my eyes. A telephone call from Cecilia could mean only one thing.

  ‘Oh Barrie – you’ll never believe what’s happened. Some people were out for a walk this afternoon with their dog and they found a dog.’

  Wait a minute – this sounds familiar.

  ‘They don’t know how long he was there. He’s thin and he looks so miserable. Oh, and he’s gorgeous. They found him in a field. He’d been tied up to a hedge.’

  Tied to a hedge? Not the same people and the same dog, then.

  ‘What breed is it Cecilia?’

  ‘Well… he’s brown, and he’s quite a big dog so there might be a tiny bit of German Shepherd in him.’

  Her voice had slowed from its high-speed, excited pace. She was thinking. She was thinking what possible characteristics of this dog she could describe that might make me think that one of his ancestors at some point in the distant past had been a German Shepherd.

  ‘It’s all right, Cecilia,’ I said. ‘We’ll take him.’

  ‘Oh would you, Barrie! I didn’t like to ask you. But you know I only help littlies usually.’

  ‘It’s no problem, Cecilia,’ I said. After all, what else would I do with my Sunday if I didn’t take in three dogs?’

  Unexpected

  In the years to come I was to experience many first meetings with dogs which aroused strong emotions. Sometimes the first sight of the dog would disgust me. How could human beings could do this to them? Often, a few minutes with the animal and I would be shaking my head with sorrow. Sometimes it was anger. Sometimes frustration. Sometimes sadness for both the dog and the caring owner who by force of circumstances could no longer keep it.

  In this case it was astonishment.

  It wasn’t just that someone could confine a dog for years, not just because they could condemn a dog to a life of isolation – what I could not understand, what amazed me and was beyond my understanding, was how Oscar had coped.

  It had been several minutes since Mrs Cadbury had let him out of her car. We couldn’t risk three dogs arriving together and had spaced them out over the day. Mrs Cadbury had said she was an early riser and would be with us as soon as she could get the dog away from ‘that horrible man’ who ‘usually spends Sunday morning polishing his car when he should be walking the dog’.

  Dorothy and I had listened while she had told us what she had seen over the years and what she had learnt from her neighbour that morning. I had been worried at first that, unaccustomed to freedom, Oscar would try to run off – but he stood beside the car as if reluctant to leave it. For several moments he just gazed at the ground. Then slowly he moved his eyes around to take in the scene. Then he lowered his head and gently shook it. Still he did not move away from the car. I went across
to the lawn, bent down and called to him. He moved his head slowly to look at me but that was all. Every few moments he would blink.

  It was as if he had just woken up.

  I went back to Dorothy. ‘Perhaps he just doesn’t know what to do after all these years,’ I said. ‘He might have lost his confidence. Another dog might help – show him what to do. Shall I go and get Friend?’

  Dorothy had been gazing at the dog, deep in thought. She turned to me. ‘You can try it,’ she said, but her tone of voice did not sound as if she was convinced.

  I fetched Friend and he trotted happily over to Oscar. With his long legs Oscar towered over Friend and it struck me how spindly Friend still looked in spite of his weight gain.

  ‘I’ve realised what a striking dog he is,’ said Mrs Cadbury. ‘He is a German Shepherd, is he? They don’t look like that normally, do they?’

  ‘I think he may be a cross,’ said Dorothy. ‘He’s fine-boned for a Shepherd and very tall, but he’s got a Shepherd’s ears.’

  That bloomin’ man says he’s a pedigree,’ said Mrs Cadbury. ‘He bought him from a breeder for his son’s birthday but he soon lost interest in the dog – kids do, don’t they. They used to have a rabbit as well – they never looked after that.’

  ‘And you say he’s been shut in the pen eight years,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘No – I’ve seen him in there ever since I’ve lived there and that’s eight years. The man said he lived in the house until he was six months and then they put him in the pen.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ said Dorothy. ‘However long has the dog been in the pen?’

  ‘The man’s son worked it out from his birthday, he’s been in there eleven years and two months.’

  I felt the need to stroke a dog and knelt down to run my hand slowly along Friend’s side.