On our second visit we shared some time in the common room with Martin and his new owner-to-be, and for a while Martin treated Ernie to the rough stuff. But, though Ernie was the embodiment of slightness (there seemed to be even less of him now than the first time we saw him), he did not take it lying down. His main technique was to shadow box, but occasionally he’d use his superior agility to go in over the top and sink his teeth into his tormentor’s neck. As a tough, he looked about as convincing as a sparrow, but as a dog he seemed more than capable of looking after himself.
Inspection day arrived. By now we were certain that Ernie was our boy (the follow-up visits only served to increase our initial affection for him). We grew anxious that our place would fail the test, that we would not be allowed to bring him home. ‘You can have a baby without going through this sort of scrutiny,’ we were neurotically saying, to anyone who might be interested.
Our yard has a single French window opening onto it from the dining-room, and folding patio doors which open onto it from a lean-to at the rear. We propped all these back, as well as opening all of the rest of the doors in the house as well, to try to create the illusion that what you had here was a huge space for a dog to frolic in. Just before the inspector was due to arrive, we put the coffee on, like estate agents advise. The woman came in, smiled at us, talked about the weather, ticked the box saying the garden was secure, and that was that. The whole thing was a formality (though she did nod in a significant way, saying that not everyone bothers to make the follow-up visits to the rescue centre).
She spent the rest of the time wondering which piece of furniture Ernie would choose to wreck first. She looked sadly at the dining chairs and even more sadly at a leather sofa. Other than that she talked enthusiastically about her own dogs, of which there were five, the most recent of which was a foxhound that had managed to make its way from Liverpool to Kings Lynn (she knew its provenance by the tattoo it had in its ear.)
‘I’d have them all if I could,’ she said, meaning that she’d take the entire contents of the dogs’ home back to her place.
‘Yes, me, too, so would I,’ Trezza replied, as the coffee was poured. I shut my ears to all this cracked talk.
Jack, my son, who was fourteen, came along to Snetterton to collect the new arrival. Jack had already been out with us on one of the visits. There was a cartoon aspect to Ernie – when he pricked his ears, which he did all the time, his eyebrows shot up. In this way he often looked startled, and bat-like. His Martin-fighting technique, which he interrupted with his wash-your-face routine, and his general Bambi-ness, together with the bat-like countenance, all led Jack to the view that Ernie was excellent. We paid the compulsory £75 contribution and some extra fees to do with insurance, and Ernie said goodbye to all his friends amongst the staff who seemed genuinely sad to see him go. He’d been neutered during the period we’d been waiting for the all clear (an NCDL stipulation), and one of the young girls who worked there had said that even the vet had been sorry to perform the operation, the implication being that he had good potential as a dad (or at stud, as we dog owners say). We took him across the carpark on his regulation-issue yellow and black NCDL lead and matching collar. (The NCDL has been re-named the Dogs Trust, incidentally – I much prefer the older title with its militant essence and its barmy note of ‘Freedom For Tooting’. The leads and collars are still yellow and black, though, and some people keep them for ever, as a code for identifying each other.)
Trezza had filled the back seats of the car with quilts and rugs and blankets for the journey back to Norwich. They’d told us Ernie was a good traveller, in the sense that he wasn’t car sick, and they were right, he didn’t throw up; neither did he use any of the quilts, rugs or blankets, choosing instead to remain safe on Jack’s lap where he sat looking very, very worried, as if he was too nervous to puke.
***
When I was a young boy in the early Seventies the comedian Benny Hill released a novelty song (the musical equivalent of a shih tzu with ribbons in its hair poking out of a bimbo’s handbag). Hill’s novelty song achieved the distinction of becoming a chart-topping number one hit single. As someone once said, ‘Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the taste of the British Public.’
Hill’s record was a tale about a milkman who is thwarted in love by a bread roundsman. The milkman’s name, and the title of the song, was Ernie. The chorus went: ‘Ernie [backing singer echo, Ernie], And he drove the fastest milkcart in the west.’
I had been singing and whistling this tune, complete with the backing singer echo, at regular intervals ever since we had been introduced to our new pet. The circumstances of his arrival at the Snetterton dogs’ home, one of the unnumbered, meant that his name had been given to him by the staff from their stock of off-the-shelf dog names. We were not satisfied with it. For one it didn't suit his personality, and for two my singing of the execrable song was driving the missus round the bend and was not good for my own mental health either. To avoid any extra confusion for the poor animal in his already confused young life, we searched for a substitute name that sounded similar. I was all for Bjarni, after one of my favourite football players. Trezza said I would feel differently once Bjarni had transferred from Stoke City to Sampdoria, and that additionally there was no way she was shouting that in the park.
And so, after various other unsuitable footballer’s names had been eliminated, along with other unsuitable sporting names (Me: ‘Desert Orchid’? Trezza: ‘NO’), or even the names that were unconnected with any significant sport, names that were good names, but not appropriate for him – Monty, for example – Trezza came up with the idea of calling him after a famous orphan, what with him being an orphan himself and all.
I’ve heard that there’s a musical called Oliver! If by any chance the production features a ‘number’ that goes: ‘Ollie [backing singer echo, Ollie], And he asked for more gruel, the little pest,’ I remain unaware of it because I loathe musicals (compilations of novelty songs) more than almost anything in the world. Therefore I won’t be seen singing and whistling an off-key version of any such unspeakable ditty.
The re-christened pup
WALKING OLLIE
On arriving at his new home, the re-christened pup ran about the place looking worried (he could run and look worried at the same time). After a good bit of this running and worrying, he took a flying leap into a bed in the corner of the lounge that had been prepared for his arrival.
The bed was a nest of rugs finished with a sheepskin throw. He sat on the throw, and the worried look remained, but he settled a little as we hand-fed him slices of sausage, warm chicken breast, and cubes of thick bacon, tempted him to play with cuddly toys with squeakers, and generally made a fuss of him.
The story should end here, really, and end happily ever after, too, with Ollie breaking his teeth in on the furniture while becoming ever more relaxed and content and less worried-looking. That’s how I thought it would be. Though I knew, in the abstract way, that there was work to be done, I thought that living with Ollie would be the same as bringing up a child, only a lot easier. I imagined that he would turn out like Mingus, that after our walks together he would sit in the kitchen observing and sniffing, and that soon enough he would love and respect me even without the price of half a pork pie, because I would be his Master and he would be my Faithful Companion.
But Ollie is a rescue dog. As you talk to more and more dog owners, certain truths dawn on you and they dawn on you fast. The main truth, of which there are many sub-truths, is that rescue dogs are always problematical and deranged in the head. You get to hear plenty about the multiple manifestations of the derangements that exist because rescuers are amongst the most verbose of owners. Rescuers will purge at the drop of a hat; it’s a form of therapy. Their accounts are by no means easy to follow either, because rescue dogs often have stories to tell that are even more complicated and convoluted than those you hear on Jerry Springer.
And, of course, the animal it
self cannot talk, so something is always lost in translation. Dogs have to be spoken for, that is their chief lack, and I think they know it. Some of them may want to be human, some of them certainly don’t, but given the chance I think they’d all speak up from time to time. They supply a certain, and sometimes urgent, amount of information through body language and eye contact of course, but the rest we are obliged to make up, flesh out and elaborate into a Hollywood-style production. The outcome of all this is that many dogs are anthropomorphised: ‘She’s a bit down today, I can tell by her aura.’
Sometimes I get caught up in such an involved narrative at the beginning of our walk, that it’s half an hour before we even get started. In the first few months of Ollie, my irritation at the waste of jogging opportunities that these conversations represented went out of the window, as I was forced to evolve a new concept of myself in relation to time. Even at the beginning, when things were relatively normal, I could find that I had been out in nature for ten hours in a single week – an incursion greater than a day’s work.
My first thoughts were along the lines of compensatory shifts in the evenings, in order to preserve the concept of the payroll, the working week/weekend divide which is in any event difficult to maintain when you are a writer because there is so much on offer in the way of distraction, displacement, and messing about. But evening shifts could not be made to fit as there is sport to be played and watched, there are soaps, there may be socialising, drinking, and there is always idling to be taken into account once six o’clock has arrived. As time went on, and dog-creep started to erode time that should have been designated for these other activities, I made the adjustment that was easiest to make. I cut down on soaps.
Sometimes I went to bed early in order to be up earlier to get the walk out of the way, but our best walking areas are far enough from home to necessitate a drive – early morning traffic doesn’t help, coffee bars beckon – there seemed to be no real gain there. So, in short, I assimilated this new time spent dog-walking as best I could: I simply wrote it off.
On top of the specific erosion of time, there were dog-creep adjustments that affected our life together: we took fewer weekend breaks (because kennelling seems cruel), did less in the way of going to the pub for the early drink, because we’re busy (walking the dog), and experienced a drastic cut-back in eating out. But then, what sort of restaurant would want us? Post-Ollie, unless it’s a really special occasion, I seldom bother with clean clothes. They only get immediately re-coated in dog hair and stuff, there’s no point. Much less is there anything to be said for ironing them. Instead I keep my ‘wardrobe’ in a heap on a chest under the bedroom window, and wear it over and over again as each item comes back to the top of the pile on a rotation system which means I only need to use the washing machine about once a quarter.
As the first flush of Ollie-owning began to go awry and I took my own therapy from other dog walkers, I got to hear many tales of failed cases. It was helpful; seeing and hearing about animals who had behaviour syndromes to rival those that were developing in my own case gave me some perspective. Often I never even saw the dog in question because it had been returned to a rescue centre – a consequence of its unmanageability, cracked habits, insanities and neuroses. In many instances the person telling the story would be walking a different, replacement animal, with different difficulties.
The biggest single problem is destruction – there are many dogs out there who are into it in a big way, who will be guaranteed to smash the place up as soon as a back is turned. I heard of dogs who simply would not never stop barking (that would drive me insane). I heard of dogs who shook their heads violently so that drool was constantly flying about and sticking to the ceiling. Repulsive. I heard of dogs who had been perfectly peaceable until one day they caught sight of an animal which, on the face of things, was just like any other dog they’d encountered before, but to which they had taken a sudden dislike, and of how they had attacked, and drawn blood and caused damage. And then how they had done it again. And being muzzled sent them into a frenzy. So they had to be put down.
Once or twice I heard the same story related to attacks on people, and on one occasion I heard about a dog that had turned on its owners and really terrified them (this one wasn’t even a rescue). I heard of dogs who, if they were left alone for five minutes, would develop a routine that began with simple crying and howling, then before anyone knew it they’d be digging up the floorboards while spraying pee and poo about the place in a full-scale dirty protest.
Why do people put up with this? They are not all rescue owners, so sometimes the answer is because six hundred quid (or more) has been shelled out, and the purchaser is trying to make some sort of sense out of that investment; sometimes it is because the owner is a saint, and sometimes they don’t put up with it: this is the way in which certain animals are recycled through the rescue centres, those lifers and hard cases I had already seen.
Then there were the dogs who went missing, for days on end, who could never ever be allowed off the lead with any confidence. I met a man in a deserted pine forest one Thursday afternoon who had such an animal reined in close. He told me he’d let it off once this one time years back, and that it had disappeared; two weeks later someone had found it in their back garden, fifteen miles away. His wife had been frantic. So now he didn’t let the animal loose at all, ever, it was too risky, see. The dog didn’t like him really, he said. It only responded to his wife (it was a low, unprepossessing mutt too, not that this counts a jot once a bond has been made). His wife had to cajole the dog to go out with him at all, it wouldn’t follow him to the front door or anything, whereas it perked up no end if it saw her gathering together her outdoor clothes. He shook his head at this, though he appeared to harbour the animal no resentment; he just seemed sad.
You expect dogs to be frightened on Bonfire Night, but then I heard of dogs who were frightened of rain, of umbrellas, of wheelbarrows, and of shopping bags. Ollie has Shopping Bag Syndrome. Wind is a constant worry, it may come from anywhere, unannounced – a flapping shopping bag is the wind made solid. Flies upset him, especially if they circle a lightshade. Emergency vehicles sounding sirens freak him out – though fireworks, in fact, make no impact. Coats hanging on the backs of doors spook him most of all. I think they must remind him of a nasty man, as, in time, I came to do.
Complete novice and incompetent dog-handler that I was, like a new parent I was determined to do it all without any outside assistance, safe in the knowledge that everything I was doing was right, and for the best.
There was still snow – it was still winter, late January – when Ollie arrived, so we bought him the smallest waxed, sheepskin-lined dog jacket we could find. Even this was a bit too big, and when we fastened it on he was quick to attack it because of the limitations it imposed on his walking technique. It was me who wanted to get him house-trained as soon as possible (my tolerance for coming downstairs in the morning to a pissy, shitty stench is low) so it was me who took him for a tour round the block last thing at night in the hope that he would do his business, and that this would see him through until morning. He didn’t much care for these excursions, and here, I think, was the seed of where we started to go wrong.
During our very first walk together, back at Snetterton, I suppose he had thought (does a dog think? I don’t know; they are certainly capable of looking thoughtful) that he was having to do this stupid thing just this once, that the humans would see how hopeless he was at it, and that it wouldn’t happen again. As it became a regular activity, he began to dread it. He pulled, he tried to run, he flinched, he backed up, he practically reared. He cowered against the front walls of houses, his tail so far in between his legs that it touched his chest. We got into such tangles that he would end up half-throttling himself with the lead. None of this was good; I may have known nothing, but I knew that. I had heard of puppy training classes and socialisation groups and soon I would be taking him along to these, or so I planned. I attem
pted to prepare him for the idea by tugging the lead back a little when he was pulling the most and saying, ‘Heel,’ frequently and repeatedly.
Our house is situated amongst main roads and not far from the train station. Ollie went into this nighttime world coatless (it was worn twice; aside from cramping his style, the sight of it became a signal to him that bad things were about to happen) – ergo he was not warm; in addition there was frightening traffic, the sound of moving trains, hoots from the trains that came from nowhere like wind does; and to top it all there was the idiot man repeatedly making a sound that meant nothing to him whatsoever (even now I think Ollie understands very few words, and that if he could speak it would be in some arcane Egyptian-Romany dialect). And, just to put the tin lid on all the bad karma, he was repeatedly having his throat hoiked at.
So far as Ollie was concerned, the whole night-time-walk concept was a disaster. It took him out of the comfort of a bed in the warm and dry, where he could snuggle into his sheepskin throw with his head down and his paws wrapped over the front of his nose, raising one or the other of his eyebrows and looking worried. I can see this now.
Back then I simply thought that he’d soon get used to it, that a dog – any dog – would naturally opt for a walk at any time of the day or night, because for a dog getting out of the house and into the activity of sniffing around street lamps and gate posts is the absolute business. Any dog. This was my prime miscalculation. Like saying, ‘Any human’, it’s a generalisation that doesn’t work. Some humans like going for a walk and some don’t, and some like going for a walk sometimes, but not at other times. They are not all the same, this is the point.
Walking Ollie Page 4
