Paws and Whiskers (20 page)

We also had two pugs, a brother and sister. He, Hoagy, was black, and Nellie was fawn, the colour that most pugs are. Their hair felt different: hers was coarser than his, which was very soft, like cashmere.

I have never known such stupid creatures. They were absolutely untrainable. Whatever we tried to teach them to do, whether to sit, to come to us, to stand still, all they would do when we called was turn and look at us blankly, and then carry on with whatever they were doing.

But they bore out what I’ve noticed about human siblings: just because they were born to the same mother and father, that didn’t mean that they were similar in character. Hoagy was languid (idle, frankly) and perfectly genial. He would roll over on his back and allow himself to be tickled with no fear or hesitation. Nellie was the exact opposite. I don’t think she ever rolled over on her back in her entire life. What she thought was going to happen if she did, I don’t like to speculate, but she would squirm and wriggle and do anything to get away. You could feel a sort of nervous tension in all her muscles when you picked her up, whereas Hoagy would lie in your arms with no more animation than a beanbag.

We loved them all, of course, and did our best to keep them healthy. However, Hoagy got fatter and fatter, and we couldn’t work out why. Finally we saw him crawling back under the fence from the next door garden, and realized that he’d been visiting the students who lived there. When we asked them about
it, they said, ‘Yes, he’s a great eater. He’ll eat anything except Marmite.’ They must have been feeding him for months.

The only thing that makes living with a dog less than an ideal relationship is that their lives are so much shorter than ours, and we have to arrange for their deaths when they get old and ill. That’s almost too painful to be borne, but we have to do it.

We haven’t got a dog at the moment, and I have to say that life is a lot easier: we can go away at a moment’s notice without having to find somewhere for the dog to stay. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we had another dog one day.

Philip Pullman

PEKINGESE

Years ago, on my sixteenth birthday, I was given five pounds to buy a Persian kitten. Most girls pine for an animal of their own but, even as a little child, for me the longing was not just for an animal but for an extraordinary animal; I would have loved a unicorn rather than a pony, if there had really been unicorns, or a salamander, or a kylin – that mythical monster with the head of a lion and the body of a dragon – if I had known about them, but a Persian kitten was the nearest my dear family could come to fulfilling this unusual wish.

In the pet shop there was a rusty old bird-cage and in it sat a puppy, small, square, black with cream
paws and vest; he was of a kind I had not seen before, but his eyes, that took up most of his face, looked at me compellingly. I bought him, my five pounds was accepted as a down-payment with a pledge of half a crown a week from my allowance for a year.

I am sure now that the shopkeeper did not expect me to come back as, in pekingese parlance, this puppy was flawed; for one thing his lower jaw protruded, a fault the Chinese call ‘earth covers heaven’, so that he was worth precisely nothing – to anybody else; but I am glad now that I met every one of those Saturday morning extortions so that my lifetime of pekingese – I have had more than twenty – was founded on fidelity, however slight. I called the puppy Piers because it was the most aristocratic name I could think of.

In those days, though I had an ignoramus’s love of things Chinese, poetry, ceramics and paintings, I knew nothing of the dynasties and their emperors and empresses; of palace cities and paeony-terraced ten-mile-wide gardens; of eunuchs and concubines; of the silk caravan route or of opium clippers. I knew practically nothing either of Queen Victoria and Court life at Windsor, Balmoral and Buckingham Palace; of treaties and wars and, if I had, would not have dreamed of connecting them with pekingese. I only knew Piers but my instinct was right – no matter
how flawed, Piers by origin was aristocratic – more, he was Imperial.

It may seem absurd to link a race of small dogs with two vast empires, one Western, the other Far Eastern and, in particular, with the two powerful women who, in the nineteenth century, ruled over them, but no one can follow the story of the pekingese without some knowledge of these two utterly different and distant worlds.

The Chinese regarded Westerners as vandals and there is certainly something unthinking and prejudiced in the image of this blithe and historic breed we have conjured up and, sadly, often made fact: that of rich ladies’ lapdogs, pampered and delicate, dressed in coats, bad-tempered, even snappy, wheezing, snoring and so adipose they can only waddle. If they have been distorted into this, the fault lies with the owner, not with the dog. True, elderly people buy them believing they need little exercise – which is wrong; most pekingese detest laps, are even wary of fondling, are only bad-tempered through being made liverish from too many tidbits. It is true, too, that they snore, but that is because of what man, through the ages, has done to their noses, and the snores are usually only a soporific snuffle. As for waddling! Pekingese can race, even hurdle; they retrieve, swim and are more hardy
than many a big dog, walking in any weather; sometimes in snow or deluging rain my pekingese have been the only dogs out in the woods or on the hills.

Most of us dog-owners are ordinary people and so most pekingese nowadays have to settle not for palaces, but for an ordinary humdrum life, but they still treat it in a lordly way. Piers, for instance, soon became a well-known character in our Sussex town. ‘In quod again’, a policeman would come to our door and say, and I would have to go to the police station and redeem Piers with a fine of five shillings. The trouble was that while I was away at school he was bored and so would slip out; and kind people, seeing a small pekingese wandering alone, thought he was lost. By no means: a bus ran from a stop near our then house up to the Downs; one morning I caught it with Piers, meaning to take him for a walk on the rolling green hills – it should have been a chariot or imperial cart or, at least, a car, but for us it had to be a bus. ‘That your dog, Miss?’ asked the conductor. ‘Well, I guess you owe the Corporation at least five pounds.’ It seems that Piers caught the bus in the morning, took himself off to the front seat on the top – buses were open-topped then – alighted at the terminus at the foot of the Downs and went rabbitting and, at the right time, caught the bus home. I had
long been puzzled by the earth on his paws and ruff.

He became my shadow, mourning if I went anywhere without him, making a carnival of joy of my return; alert to every word I said, sensitive to every mood, but after twenty halcyon months we went back to India and I had to leave him. I never saw him again.

Rumer Godden

MIMI’S DAY

Our cat, Mimi, who was always known as Meems, lived with us from 1990 to 2004. She was a tabby cat with one white shoulder, and my husband described her perfectly as the kind of creature you can imagine with a handbag in the crook of her arm. She was elegant and beautiful, like very many cats, but had about her an air of femininity and sweetness that was quite unusual. The fierceness sometimes associated with tabby cats was completely missing from her looks and her character. She was the very opposite of a hunter. She’d crouch on the step and look in a meaningful way at squirrels racing past her nose without ever chasing any of them. She never once
in fourteen years brought in a mouse or a bird, for which we were very grateful. Some people said the reason she never hunted was because we spoiled her rotten, but I don’t believe that . . . I think the hunting instinct is something a cat either has or doesn’t. Still, it’s true she was pampered. She had dry food and wet food and water out for her pleasure every day. She was never left in a cattery, and indeed for the time we had her, my husband and I took separate holidays so that Meems wouldn’t have to be on her own, even for one night. We thought of her as one of the family and loved her very much. When she died, of an illness that we could no longer get treatment for, we were bereft. I kept seeing her out of the corner of my eye in every part of the house for a very long time. We think of her often and remember her with delight and pleasure. She was a loving and lap-sitting cat, and not one of the standoffish kind. I’m really pleased to think that people will be able to read about her now. Here’s a poem I wrote about her.