Low life
Dog days
Jeremy Clarke
Inormally get the Sun or the Mirror. I prefer the pictures and the adverts in the tabloids to those in the broadsheets. But last week, without anything to read on a train held up by floods, and anything being better than nothing, I asked the lady sitting opposite if I could have a quick gander at her Guardian. In it, I came across an elegy by Donna Tartt for the Mississippi writer Willie Morris, recently dead.
It was a long piece by tabloid standards. There was acres of it. And the stand-first, 'My friend, my mentor, my inspiration', made me feel slightly nauseous. But it was either that or the Victorian brick wall I'd been looking at for the last quarter of an hour and I plunged in. I read it, reread it, read it again, and when the lady opposite fortuitously went to the bog, I tore it out, folded it up and shoved it in my pocket.
He loved dogs, this Morris bloke, reported Tartt, even to the point of being sentimental about them. His favourite line of Shakespeare was Lear grumbling about his dogs: 'The little dogs and all,ffray, Blanche and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me,' He liked the way Shakespeare gave resonant names even to little dogs. The only picture adorning his bachelor home, said Tartt, was an unframed photograph, on an otherwise bare mantlepiece, of his terrier, Skip, who had been dead for 30 years.
Reading this the first time round, 1 stopped here and looked at the wall. These were striking details. At first I was contemptuous. Fancy being that sentimental about dogs, great or small. Then I remembered I had a dog once, a hairy black terrier bitch, that was, I swear, completely in love with me.
I hunted rabbits with her and her mother for about five years. We worked as a team, and hunted mainly in cliff-top gorse. I was the spotter; her mother, Bo, a compact, modest, bloodthirsty soul, was the flusherouter; and lovelorn Tip was the catch dog. Our roles were not exclusive, though. All three of us lent a hand with the actual killing. But whereas Bo's eyes would glaze over with murderous bloodlust after about three, Tip executed her rabbits almost absent-mindedly. All her passion, it appeared, was reserved for myself.
I think Tip thought I was her father. After she was born, I got into the habit, when I came back from the pub, of climbing into the pen with her, her sister and her mum and lying with them, all night sometimes. After she was weaned, she decided she had to be with me every minute of the day. I was her sweetheart, her raison d'être, the light of her life. This very femininelooking terrier with long eyelashes would even follow me into the lavatory if she could and sit and worship me with her mournful eyes while I sat and strained. I didn't like it. It was a bloody nuisance. And on top of that she was a slinker. She knew she got on my nerves but still she'd slink after me. But, like it or not, Tip had a phenomenal talent, in spite of her soppy nature, for knowing which way a rabbit was going to go and intercepting it adroitly in the undergrowth. When I pinned up the team sheet prior to a rabbiting outing, she was always on it.
Afterwards, climbing the hill through the village on the way home again, Bo would be covered in her own blood (her undocked ears and tail ripped by thorns), virtually unrecognisable as a species of dog, and choking up fur balls. While effete lovelorn lapdog Tip, not a hair out of place, would sit in the road and plead with her eyes to be picked up and carried the rest of the way.
I gave her away in the end, to an elderly Evangelical Christian lady who wheeled her to mid-week prayer meetings in a wicker shopping-trolley. Tip pined away (according to this lady) and died after six months of this new life, in spite of numerous visits to the vet and having hands laid on her by a deacon with a ministry of healing. I don't miss her. She was only a dog. I could see, though, how Willie Morris, who looks like a tender-hearted old teddy bear in the photo, might have celebrated a close relationship with a terrier by having its photograph on his mantlepiece for 30 years.
I'd not heard of Willie Morris, but Tartt's elegy made me want to love Morris as much as she did herself. His writing wasn't mentioned, however. He might have been a writer of dog-care manuals for all I know. I read the piece three times and the train was still beside the brick wall. After I'd given her her paper back, the lady opposite flicked through it again in case there was anything she'd missed. If she noticed I'd ripped two pages out, she didn't mention it. I picked up the Mirror again and read the horoscopes.
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