Chewing the Cud (14 page)

All her subsequent attempts upon her own life took place at Woodlands Farm. Not long after we moved in,
Susie sampled a different kind of poisoning. This time it was strychnine. How or where she came upon the bait that I suppose someone had put down for foxes we didn't know, but the vet knew what it was.

“I'm afraid there's no hope for her,” he said. Foolish man, he learned better as time went on.

The next two clashes were with motor vehicles. Ken the builder drove up the yard one morning, and as he swung onto the concrete apron outside the dairy, Susie ran out of the door and under the van.

“Oh my God, the wheel went right over her, I felt the bump!”

Don't worry, Ken, I should have said. It'd take more than a potty little ten-hundredweight to do her in. And sure enough, she didn't seem to have turned a hair, let alone broken a bone, but simply growled with her customary surliness and went about her business. But that must have given her ideas, for the next car she tackled, quite soon afterwards, was a really big one, going fast, on the main road.

A friend who was staying had strolled down to the bottom of the drive with the dogs when suddenly to her horror Susie dashed (cat perhaps?) straight across the road and under a speeding car. But there was no battered body left behind. Instead, fifty yards farther on, just before the
car disappeared from sight around the bend, out from beneath the chassis tumbled one small dog.

I can only suppose she must somehow have been caught up in the track rods, and this time it must have given her a little bit of a fright because she ran home with her tail between her legs. She was a bit sore, a bruise or two perhaps, and snarled more than usual for a couple of days.

On Boxing Day 1950, Susie went missing. The search party found nothing, and darkness fell with no sign of her. Anna's longest disappearance had been in fine summer weather, but now there was a bitterly cold spell with a biting east wind. On the whole we hoped she had gone to ground somewhere. At least she would be warmer down below.

At first this seemed the most likely explanation, since it was the thing she was keenest to do and had so often done. The alternatives were that she had been stolen — pretty unlikely: it would have had to be a bold dog thief with stout gloves — or, more probably, run over by car or train. Two sides of Woodlands Farm carried this hazard, for the main Bristol to Chipping Sodbury road ran along its eastern edge and the Paddington to South and West Wales line along its southern.

But though we hunted and rooted and poked about in every conceivable spot, and lay and listened long at every
known hole in the ground, the year turned and 1951 came in with Susie lost to us at last.

Myrle said, “I think you've got to resign yourself to the fact that your dog has almost certainly been killed.”

All the dogs were “our” dogs, but the rest gave fealty to Myrle as food provider, trainer, and someone who could be guaranteed to treat them with patience and understanding. However, my intolerant shouting and cursing at any show of disobedience seemed to appeal to Susie's cross-grained nature. Not that she ever had any soft answer to turn away my wrath: she simply snarled; but she must have sympathized with my quirkiness, because she followed me everywhere about the farm. At plowing, especially, she would trot all day long up the bed of each new-turned furrow, exactly a yard behind the tail of the plow, waiting at the headland for the lift and turn and drop, and then back again down the other side of the “land.”

“Well, I suppose she's had a pretty good run for her money. But I shan't half miss her, bad-tempered little swine.”

“I mean, we've looked everywhere, haven't we? We've been to the police station. We've asked everybody round about. And if she's been run over, we'd surely have found her.”

“Yes. The most likely thing really is that she tangled with a badger or badgers in the set in the Wood. After all, what does she weigh, twelve pounds? A big boar badger might go thirty pounds or more. And think of those jaws.”

“But we couldn't hear anything at the set, could we?”

“Exactly.”

By the time that a whole week, of unrelenting freezing temperatures, had gone by since Susie's disappearance, we had resigned ourselves to the certainty that she was a goner. We should have known better. Early on the morning of Wednesday 3 January, I opened the back door on my way out to milk, and there in the gray light was a creature half crawling, half walking up the yard.

Not even such a masochist as Susie could voluntarily have reduced herself to the state that she was in, her eyes right back in her head, her mouth full of earth and bits of wood, her rough black-and-white coat matted with dirt and her own dung. Probably she'd become wedged, perhaps between tree roots, somewhere deep enough for the air temperature to be bearable, and had literally had to wait to become thin enough to break free.

Any normal dog would have died of dehydration. As it was, she seemed at her last gasp. But it wasn't her last, by a long chalk. By the end of that day she was back in good growling form. And a couple of days afterwards
you wouldn't have known that anything untoward had happened.

At the beginning of April that year Susie fell in love. Now five years old, she had up to this time defied all my efforts, and they were assiduous, to breed from her. Time and again she was taken to eminently suitable little working terrier dogs. Nowadays it's the fashion to call them Jack Russells after the famous nineteenth-century sporting parson (though in fact he kept all shapes and sizes right up to Airedales), but Susie wasn't interested in any aspect of them. All they got for their pains were snaps and snarls. And once we even tried her with one of our dachshunds in a desperate effort to breed puppies of some sort from her, but Susie flew at him and he left the room in gentlemanly embarrassment, his long nose much out of joint.

So by that spring we had relaxed any normal vigilance during her season, confident that she was her own best contraceptive. No suitor now, we knew, would try that long-preserved virginity. Enter Boy Dugdale.

This animal, a newcomer to the district, had been seen about the farm often enough to merit a name; and one glance at this dog left no doubt that here was a satyr of the first order. Partly it showed in his constantly aggressive marking, the cocked leg held so high that you wondered how he kept his balance, and in his strong, confident scratching of the grass with his hind feet. Partly it was his uncanny ability to appear suddenly out of nowhere, deaf to threats and always just beyond missile-throwing range; and to jump walls that seemed much too high and squeeze through or under impossibly small places. No prison could hold him, you felt sure, nor was there — and he was later to prove this — any fortress that he could not storm.

But chiefly it was his general appearance that showed Boy Dugdale's licentiousness. A large, hairy mongrel terrier, long-legged and always moving, it seemed, on tiptoe, he was short-coupled (this is to say, his hind feet seemed much too near to his forefeet) and carried a tail that curled so far over his back as almost to touch what little neck he had. Before all, his face wore by some accident a permanent voyeur's leer, one side of the mouth drawn up to expose teeth and tongue, giving an overall expression of uncontrollable lust. Under our now lax surveillance, there was nothing to prevent his meeting Susie.

“There's that horrible Boy Dugdale again. Where's Susie?”

“Oh she's around somewhere. I shouldn't worry.” “She is five, you know. Not a good age for having a first litter.”

“Susie get herself lined? You joke. Anyway he's much too tall to manage, and she won't let him near her.”

But he wasn't, and she did.

This hideous blend of Robin Hood, Houdini, Lothario, and Priapus was Susie's true love come at last, and by the time I'd finished breakfast the knot was tied. Out in the paddock beyond the Dutch barn, they stood back to back, Dugdale having overcome the disparity in size by the judicious use of rising ground.

Susie faced me with a smug smile while her anchored swain, fearful of retribution, grimaced more odiously than ever over his shoulder. The die cast, I left them in peace, a course of inaction that led Dugdale to infer my approval of the match, so that within the twenty-four hours he made assurance not double but treble sure.

So, at the end of the first day in June, Susie once more put her life in jeopardy. She sentenced herself to hard labor, and in the box beside our bed, there was nothing to show for it but her evident distress. The vet came in the small hours. This particular one was a large man with a
stutter and a comfortable bedside manner, literally, as he sat upon it to do his work.

Myrle fortified him and herself with tea and gin alternately. I slept, my usual response to trying situations like travel in an aircraft or the birth of my children. I woke to find that the vet had delivered two very large, very dead puppies.

“I can't f-f-f-feel any more. I think the b-b-b-bitch should be okay now.”

“Oh sure, she'll be okay.”

“I'll go home and get f-f-f-forty winks and look b-back later.”

By the time he returned with the announcement that d-dawn had b-bust and with the ends of striped pajamas peeping shyly beneath his trouser turn-ups, Susie had given birth to a small brown-and-white bitch puppy, the one and only child of her long life. We called her Semolina and in due course gave her to Gladwyn.

Semolina was so thickly covered in hair that you hardly knew which way she was going, and I'm not at all sure that she knew, such a silly, excitable creature she was. But in time she produced a nice sensible litter from which we had one back, a much loved person called Dido, eventually to be killed by a badger.

Dido in her life was as equable as her grandmother had
been cantankerous, and she in turn carried on the line. Father had one of Dido's daughters, Jilly by name, who lived to the age of nineteen (multiply that by seven!), and doubtless today there are many remaining descendants of Susie's only dalliance.

Boy Dugdale did appear once more, but this time after bigger game. Tina, the first of our Great Danes, was at the height of her season, and for absolute safety I shut her for the night in an unused chicken house in the orchard. The door was stout and locked, the small high windows, hinged on their upper edges and opening outwards, were each secured with a turn button.

When I went to let Tina out in the morning, I could see through the glass that Dugdale stood beside her, his head on a level with her elbow, his face a mask of unrequited desire. Beneath one of the windows the turn button had been turned. Somehow he had stood upon his hind legs on top of the nest boxes that projected outside the house and reached up with one conjurer's paw to turn the catch. Somehow he must then have nosed the window far enough open for him to wriggle and scrabble and lever and haul himself up and through it, only to find that he had set his sights too high. I unlocked the door and out he rushed.

One last contemptuous cock of the leg against an apple
tree, one final backward leer, and away over the hill he went on his unending quest. Perhaps he brooded on what must have been the totally novel experience of failure. Perhaps he simply took his insatiable libido to fresh fields. But we never saw Boy Dugdale again.

In the years that followed, the tenor of Susie's life became quite placid. In 1954 it is true, she suffered a minor mishap when, thinking she looked off-color, I took her rectal temperature, only to lose my grip on the end of the thermometer, which promptly disappeared inside her. Gingerly I drove her to the surgery for the vet to recover it.

“N-not b-b-b-broken,” he said, “and n-normal.”

And in December 1959 she threatened us briefly with the nightmare of nine years before. But she'd only been ratting, for a modest thirty-six hours, under Dugdale's chicken house.

It was in May of 1960, when rising fourteen years old, but active and crotchety as ever, that she finally bit off more than she could chew by pitting herself against the Paddington to Fishguard express. The police rang me after she'd been missing for two days.