A Dog's Life (10 page)

‘Oh, sod it all’: I first heard Jane utter that mild obscenity not long after Geoffrey’s death in November 1985. She was desolate with grief, and only kept on working out of a sense of duty and responsibility. In his last weeks, Geoffrey was attended to by a professional nurse, whom he shouted at one day in his frustration. He hated being old and hated the idea of dying even more. The nurse answered him back, telling him what a rude and ungrateful so-and-so he was. He was won over instantly, to such an extent that Jane accused him of falling in love with her. Jane and the nurse accompanied him on his final outing to a local church, to listen to a recital of Haydn piano sonatas. Geoffrey wasn’t especially musical, but he adored Haydn’s warm-heartedness and mischief.

There were generous tributes to Geoffrey in the press, the most touching by the poet Peter Reading in
The Times Literary Supplement
:

I read him on Ben Nicholson and a painter I’d hitherto regarded as a clumsy eccentric – Samuel Palmer (whose pictures have seemed magical to me ever since). I was first and permanently attracted to the poems of William Barnes by Grigson’s enthusiastic commentary on them. His topographical and historical guides had the same quality of pointing out something good one had somehow missed. His accounts of flora and fauna were knowledgeable and not poetically twee. His reviews amused me greatly; exposing humbuggery, spotting talent, valuing sense, zapping bunkum. They were healthy, good fun to read (though the dissected probably didn’t relish them), and the attendant whines of ‘cruelty’ from the anti-vivisection lot were entertaining. In this desultory way many of us learned from Grigson.

The cries of ‘cruelty’ can still be heard, albeit faintly. He merits a couple of snotty references from Ian Hamilton in the posthumously published
Against Oblivion
, and is glibly and brusquely dismissed as ‘that notorious scourge’ by Selina Hastings in her biography of Rosamond Lehmann. The ‘scourge’ had the temerity to question the poetic talent of Cecil Day-Lewis, and to find it severely wanting. Hastings is content to record that the other critics – none of them named – disagreed.

I shall always regard my friend Geoffrey Grigson as a rescuer and discoverer. You only have to look at his anthologies to be made aware of the depth and range of his reading. He loved to grub in the Bodleian Library or the British Museum in the hope of rescuing some deserving poet (frequently the author of a solitary, deserving poem) from an ill-deserved obscurity.

In his grubbing days, he chanced on William Diaper, George Darley, and Samuel Daniel, who wrote:

O blessed letters that combine in one
All ages past, and make one live with all,
By you do we confer with who are gone,
And the dead living unto councell call:
By you th’unborne shall have communion
Of what we feele, and what doth us befall…

(Geoffrey shared Coleridge’s admiration for those lines, which he loved to quote.)

For me, Grigson the enthusiast is at his most beguiling in the collection of essays
Poems and Poets
, in which he celebrates such wonders as Whitman’s ‘Memories of President Lincoln’ and Christopher Smart’s ‘A Song to David’ in language that is finely sensitive to what makes each poem peculiar and wonderful. An observation like the following is a world away from the criticism that is practised by his despised professors of literature. He quotes these lines from the fifty-second stanza of Smart’s masterpiece:

The grass the polyanthus cheques;
And polished porphyry reflects,
By the descending rill…

and then observes: ‘Anyone who knows, by good luck, the limestone country of Raby, and of Staindrop Moor alongside, and Teesdale, will at once see the flower and the rock and the waterfall in a characteristic conjunction which Smart must have known in his County Durham days, the limestone so finely polished by centuries of the descending rill, protruding from grass chequered with the lilac umbrels, by the thousand, of the Birdseye Primrose.’

Geoffrey, whose beloved older brothers were slaughtered in the Great War, was never ‘half in love with easeful death’. Extinction was the nastiest of his enemies. He loved a letter by William Cowper, written in 1790, ‘after madness and preliminaries of vengeance and hell’: ‘The consideration of my short continuance here, which was once grateful to me, now fills me with regret. I would like to live and live always.’

Well, he couldn’t, and nobody can. Geoffrey wrote many poems, and I fear that many of them will be forgotten. Yet there is a single poem, set down in his last years, that ought to endure in anthologies. It is short, and elegiac, and – to my ears – beautiful:

You are young, you two, in loving:
Why should you wonder what endearments
Old whisper still to old in bed,
Or what the one left will say and say,
Aloud, when nobody overhears, to the one
Who irremediably is dead?

Jane said, ‘Oh, sod it all’, and said it again and again, often with a laugh, when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. In those final five years of our deepening friendship, we talked on the phone every evening at six, mentioning books that Geoffrey would have relished dissecting – all overpraised, most now mouldering away – and exchanging recipes. The supply of socks for Circe showed no signs of running out.

In the spring of 1989, I went with Jane on an eating tour of the Highlands of Scotland. One day we came across something memorably daft – ‘daft’ was one of her favourite words, which she spoke with the flat ‘a’ of her native Sunderland. It was a notice outside a hotel which read:

ROOMS
LESS GOOD
– £12
SLIGHTLY BETTER
– £16
BEST
– £30

The sight of it inspired her to laughter. Her laugh was like a hoot, rising and rising in volume, and there were times when I thought it would never stop. It was a wonderful noise she made – warm, generous, unconstrained. It was the
SLIGHTLY BETTER
– £16 that inspired her now. I waited for Jane’s hooting to cease, as curious passers-by stared in amazement. In that same small town, we went in search of a cotton shirt which I wanted to buy. The assistant in the men’s clothing shop told us, ‘Ye’ll nae get a cotton shirt here. Try the tobacconist across the street.’ The tobacconist indeed sold shirts, but not cotton ones – ‘There’s no call.’ It was typical of Jane that she kept her laughter in check until we were outside. ‘There’s no call,’ she repeated, and we both had hysterics for the second time.

I remember, too, that we stopped to have a picnic by Loch Ness. The monster was otherwise engaged, but an unidentifiable seabird compensated for his or her absence. It ate bread, cheese and salami on the bonnet of the car. Jane smiled, and said of the husband who had left her desolate, ‘Geoffrey would have recognized the bird in an instant.’ She opened a bottle of alcohol-free white wine someone had given her. ‘What do you think?’ she asked after we had taken a sip. Before I could reply, she said, ‘It’s disgusting, isn’t it? Let’s have the real thing.’ So we did.

Later that year, I cooked lunch for Jane and Bryan Robertson, with whom she had been in love thirty years earlier in Cambridge. It was the happiest of reunions, with Bryan in unstoppable form as they exchanged memories and gossip. The pioneering curator and restorer of the Whitechapel Gallery in the 1950s and 60s – who had rescued Turner and Stubbs from disregard and neglect, and brought Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko to the attention of the British – was hooting as heartily as Jane that day. Jane said afterwards that she had loved Bryan for his rare intelligence, for his enthusiasm, and for a quality he shared with Geoffrey – a deep, deep knowledge of books, paintings and poems that fashion had overtaken and overlooked. And when Bryan died – on 18 November 2002 – at the end of a gruesome illness, borne with much good humour and concern for his friends – I thought of Jane’s high regard for him, and his glowing affection for her.

At Jane’s memorial service, in the spring of 1990, I was privileged to read a poem by Geoffrey that had never been published. It was a love poem, addressed to his young bride, which Jane carried in her bag wherever she went. She needed no written confirmation of his love, which was demonstrated by look and touch, but it must have comforted her when her husband, mentor and lover was no more.

That evening, Circe played with Geoffrey’s socks as usual, and for many subsequent evenings.

It was their unhealthy white fatness we noticed first. Their bellies preceded them into the park as they arrived with an assortment of dogs – a sprightly Alsatian; an artistically trimmed poodle, with a black pompom on each shaved leg; a fluffy Sealyham, and a docile Dobermann, whose interest in Circe – even when she wasn’t in season – was always startlingly evident. They often held hands, like young lovers, when they weren’t munching copious hamburgers.

She was small and broad. He loomed above her, his vast gut barely contained within a grubby white T-shirt. She invariably wore a tracksuit and trainers; he a black leather jacket and baggy jeans. Her hair was dank, his sleekly greased. They doted on each other and on the pets in their charge, who obeyed their every quiet command.

They were married, we learned, and had been unemployed for a long time. But now they were doing all right, walking and looking after the dogs that belonged to the rich professional people who lived in Chiswick. They loved their work and were well paid for it, in cash. We could see that the dogs liked their minders, for whom they were naturally and immediately obedient.

The couple’s favourite topic of conversation, apart from the superiority of dumb animals, was crime. In actual fact, they didn’t converse, but rather indulged in a dual monologue. They harangued us with their opinions on the causes of, and the cure for, murder and rape and burglary. We were subjected to the predictable views of a tabloid editorialist – hanging should be restored; a life sentence should mean a sentence for life, not ten or twenty years; thugs should receive a taste of their own punishment; black or Indian offenders should be deported. Theirs was a catalogue of unwavering imperatives.

(I suspect that a few of the more sedate dog owners secretly agreed with them, but would never have given their thoughts such crude or such public expression.)

Everyone felt relieved when the pair stopped coming to the park. Were they on holiday, perhaps? Had they found steady employment? There was no more talk of hanging and flogging and instant deportation. The everyday routine of inconsequential chat and harmless gossip was gradually re-established.

I came home one morning with the untired Circe and settled down to read the newspaper. I had a shock in store as I opened it. There, on the third page, was a photograph of the couple. Alongside it was a story that was all too depressingly familiar. It seemed they had a son, no more than a toddler, whom they had tortured, starved and beaten. His emaciated body was covered in cigarette burns. The boy had been taken from them, but had died in hospital.

On the morning they were due to stand trial, the husband threw himself from the roof of a multi-storey car park in Hammersmith. Death was instantaneous.

In the park the next day we talked in muted tones about the two dog minders. Someone had seen a picture of the child, and it had made her weep with pity and anger. Someone else wondered if the newly widowed wife had changed her mind on the subject of bringing criminals to justice.

‘Have you ever thought of having her mated?’

The question was put to me by an amiable stallholder in Hammersmith market – the owner of a genuine collie, not a quasi-collie like mine.

‘They’d have beautiful puppies.’

I hadn’t thought of having Circe mated, but now – looking at the handsome animal spread out by the fruit-and-vegetable stall – I began to consider it a possibility.

I had weathered Circe’s first season by walking her very early in the morning and only taking her out when I was certain there were no dogs in the street. Even so, and in spite of my cautiousness, a determined sleuth picked up her scent and trailed it back to the house, where he let out a noise pitched between howling and barking, which Circe then started to accompany with anguished yelps. Sensing that the neighbours would soon be complaining, I filled a bucket with water and aimed it at the unprepossessing hound, who retreated, still giving voice to his frustration. He got the message that his attentions were not desired – by me, at any rate – when I doused him thoroughly with the third bucketful. He slunk off. I waited by the gate for ten minutes or more, but he did not return.

He reappeared in the morning, hopeful and silent. My presence signalled water to him, and he went away, for ever.

When Circe’s second season came along, I wondered if I was being rational. I remembered what it was like caring for and training a single puppy, and trembled at the prospect of rearing three, four, five or even six of them, beautiful or not. I had struck a bargain with the stallholder that I would keep one of the puppies and he could have the rest of the litter.

We arranged that his dog and my bitch should meet in Ravenscourt Park on Thursday afternoon. The animals duly met, with Circe making obvious overtures. The thoroughbred regarded her coquettish behaviour with disdain. He turned his back on her. She indicated with startling clarity exactly what she wanted of him, and he wandered off. He chased a squirrel, and then a pigeon, and then he lay on the grass, his eyes on his bewildered master. Circe barked and barked to no avail, for the dog was not to be roused.