Diary of a Dog-walker (3 page)

The sniff-centric world-view can make him forget himself, and he has, I fear, been known to lift a leg on a fellow dog-walker's boots. I once watched impotently as, running ahead, his nose locked on to the shoes of Battersea's most celebrated walker, Lady Thatcher.

But there is a fine political instinct in that solid-chocolate head: at the
moment critique
the leg uncocked, and she gave him a gracious smile.

The day Jim Naughtie and I broke all the rules

11 July 2009

A cardinal rule of broadcasting is never to run: if you arrive breathless in the studio it is impossible to recover. Another is that two presenters should never talk together: the listeners hate it. And if you raise your voice – there are exceptions to this – you have probably lost control.

Dog-walking is different. My
Today
colleague
James Naughtie and I took to Richmond Park on the hottest afternoon of the heatwave. The park is the capital's giant lung (far and away London's largest open space), and you breathe more easily within its gates. Even after days of pitiless sun those majestic aspects – with their oaks and deer – looked temptingly lush.

The Spaniels took off. Jim's Tess – a ten-year-old Cocker of usually dignified demeanour – spotted a picnic, and the snout was among the sandwiches. My Kudu sprinted to an oak to defecate – a yard from an elderly lady enjoying her book in the shade. The crimes, satisfyingly symmetrical in a curious way, were simultaneous, and Jim and I broke all those broadcasting rules at once as we restored decorum.

Jim made his confession: in South Africa recently he ate a steak from the Kudu antelope. Mrs Naughtie, he reported, had shown greater scruple, and declined the dish out of respect for the Dog. I salute her sensitivity.

To the dogs, Richmond offered smells of real country. To me this royal park smells of power; the ghosts of Tudors and Stuarts hunt here, and from Henry's Mound you can look down on Westminster. We fell to talking about dogs and politics.

Richard Nixon hated the fact that one of his most famous speeches became identified with the family Spaniel. Running for the vice-presidency in 1952, he
faced accusations of financial impropriety. He responded with a television address that saved his place on the Republican ticket.

After a robust defence of his family's ‘modest' lifestyle, he owned up to one gift from a political well-wisher. ‘You know what it was?' he asked. ‘It was a little Cocker Spaniel dog in a crate … Black-and-white spotted. And our little girl – Tricia, the six-year-old – named it Checkers. And, you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now that, regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it.'

That became known as ‘the Checkers Speech'. Nixon complained it was ‘as though the mention of my dog was the only thing that saved my political career'. Bad news for Spaniel lovers like me: if it had not been for Checkers, there might never have been a Watergate.

Jim loves American politics; I am fascinated by the French version. I offered an example of the superiority of French culture: the most perceptive biography of the late President François Mitterrand is
Le Gros Secret
, attributed to his Labrador Baltique.

Baltique listened as her master quizzed Helmut Kohl about a sauerkraut recipe that might be rich enough to send Margaret Thatcher to sleep at an EU summit (my memory is that it was usually Mitterrand who succumbed to snoozing at these events, but
there we go). We learn that Mitterrand bugged Baltique's toys and sent her to drop them in the offices of those he suspected of disloyalty. And hours of presidential time were spent in training her to pee on Edouard Balladur's Savile Row trousers.

Le Gros Secret
now costs more than it did when I bought it new in 1995; I suspect its appeal lies beyond the taste of oddballs like me, who are nerdy about modern French politics. Baltique's desolation as she watches her master decay and die makes her drama, not the president's, the real story. It is a book about the way we hope dogs feel about us.

On my return from a recent trip abroad, Kudu greeted me with his muzzle buried between his paws, quivering as if emotion had overcome him. Small wonder we anthropomorphize.

A pooch knows who's master and commander

25 July 2009

‘I think your dog is lovely,' said my neighbour, at a Devon dinner party. ‘Your wife seems very nice too.'

Kudu had distinguished himself with good behaviour, and was looking magnificent stretched luxuriously on a Turkey rug; it took a beat before I realized I was being teased. Then it was like the moment I opened the fourth cigarette packet in a
single day – it was during the siege of Sarajevo, so things were stressful – and understood that I had to get a grip on my addiction: time to take stock of the Dog Habit.

My Church is stern about the proper relationship between humans and animals. ‘By a most just ordinance of the Creator,' wrote St Augustine, ‘both their life and their death are subject to our own use.' Thomas Aquinas proposed the concept of a hierarchy of creation, in which humans sit above animals and are therefore entitled to use them as they see fit.

This sort of stuff has given Catholicism a reputation for heartless speciesism, but the sound common sense behind it was brought home to me the morning after my sobering Devon dinner.

Walking in the Blackdown Hills, our host lost his way as we tried to cut back towards the village of Kentisbeare. ‘Better put the dogs on a lead,' he suggested, as we approached a farmyard. It was a smart move. The farmer yelled as only an angry farmer can, berating us for straying from the footpath. We listened patiently, apologized unreservedly, and then pointed out, by way of mitigation, that the dogs were under control. Angry farmer became calmer, conceded the point and, still grumbling a bit, allowed us to proceed on our way.

The dogs did not want to be put on leads at that point: it was an intoxicatingly fresh morning, and
Kudu strained at his throughout the exchange. We were using them entirely for our own end: the negotiation of a peaceful passage.

Dogs are incredibly valuable tools in this regard. Walking with a dog always improves the quality of my interaction with other people, and I feel confident about my right to ‘use' Kudu as a social asset in this way. When a small child wants to stroke him I make the Dog sit for a while; valuable dog time is lost, but the sum of human happiness is increased. Kudu does not especially enjoy this, but he accepts it.

But the Thomist approach to dog-walking is unfashionable. I chaired a Radio 4 lecture by Professor Peter Singer, the intellectual father of the Animal Rights Movement, and it was an unnerving experience: he is a charming and persuasive man, who can lead you into accepting monstrous propositions.

Singer believes that sentience, not reason, is the key to rights; to discriminate against a dog – which can feel pleasure and pain – is like discriminating because of skin colour. He argues that a disabled human may be less intelligent than an animal, and that infanticide is not the same as murder because a newborn lacks consciousness. The logic is that it may be more reasonable to ‘put down' a sick child than a dog.

My answer is the story of Elinor Goodman's Pointers.

The distinguished political commentator – a Battersea Park regular – described the death of her elder dog, Ash. A blanket was laid out on the lawn, and Ash was given a piece of chicken while the vet went about his business. All this was watched by the younger Beagle, Florrie, from the french windows.

Once the body had been taken away, Florrie bounded out and began scrabbling in the death-blanket. Elinor assumed this was a doggy farewell to a friend and companion. But Florrie was simply looking for the chicken.

I like to think that my wife would react differently to my own demise. In the end a dog – even the Dog – is just a dog. And very happy like that they are.

2

An Imprudent Affection

‘THUS IT WAS
Melissa who figured it out, sensed it, before he did. Zannis must have dozed because, just after dawn, she growled, a subdued, speculative sort of growl –
what's this?
And Zannis woke up.

‘Melissa? What goes on?'

She stood at the window,
out there
, turned her head and stared at him as he unwound himself from the snarled bedding. What had caught her attention, he realized, were voices, coming from below, on Santaroza Lane. Agitated, fearful voices. Somebody across the street had a window open and the radio on. It wasn't music – Zannis couldn't make out the words but he could hear the tone of voice, pitched low and grim.'

The spy-writer Alan Furst has the hero's dog announce the invasion of Greece by the Italians in 1940, a pivotal moment in his book
Spies of the Balkans
. I am a huge Furst fan: his prose has the stark clarity of a black-and-white photo (he is also clearly a dog-lover) and the way he uses Melissa here is characteristic of the subtlety that allows him to pack so much into his relatively short thrillers.

We meet her early in the book: she is a mountain dog, ‘a big girl, eighty pounds, with a thick soft black-and-white coat and a smooth face, long muzzle and beautiful eyes', with strongly developed guard-dog instincts. Her daily routine goes like this: ‘Queen of the street, she started her morning by walking him [Zannis, the hero] a few blocks towards the office, to a point where, instinct told her, he was no longer in danger of being attacked by wolves. Next she returned home to protect the local kids on their way to school, then accompanied the postman on his rounds. That done, she would guard the chicken coop in a neighbour's courtyard, head resting on massive paws.'

Zannis takes her to dinner with his mother once a week, and she emerges as a central figure in the easy-going pre-war life he enjoys as a policeman in the Greek port of Salonika. So, by giving her centre stage at the moment of high drama when the war arrives at Zannis's front door, Furst gently reminds us of everything his hero has to lose.

The Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi pulls off the same trick in her memoir
In Search of Fatima
. Her dog Rex is held up as a kind of symbol of the life she enjoyed as the child of a
professional Palestinian family in the Jerusalem of the mid-1940s, when the British ruled Palestine under a UN mandate. Believing firmly in British might and British good faith, the family are slow to accept the growing evidence that a Jewish state is inevitable. Living happily and comfortably, they are reluctant to believe that their lives could be disrupted by violence and war. When they are finally forced to accept reality, by the war of 1948, it is almost too late:

‘Ghada! Come on, come on, please!' Rex inside the iron garden gate, she outside. The house with its empty veranda shuttered and closed, secretive and already mysterious, as if they had never lived there and it had never been their home. The fruit trees in the garden stark against the morning sky.

Every nerve and fibre of her being raged against her fate, the
cruelty
of leaving that she was powerless to avert. She put her palms up against the gate and Rex started barking and pushing at it, thinking she was coming in. Her mother dragged her away and pushed her into the back seat of the taxi on to Fatima's lap. The rest got in and Muhammad banged the car doors shut. She twisted round, kneeling to look out of the back window.

Another explosion. The taxi, which had seen better days, revved loudly and started to move off. But through the back window, a terrible sight, which only she could see, Rex had somehow got out, was
standing in the middle of the road. He was still and silent, staring after their retreating car, his tail stiff, his ears pointing forward.

With utter clarity, the little girl saw in that moment that he knew what she knew, that they would never meet again.

The prose is every bit as spare and urgent as Alan Furst's, and this is, if anything, an even more poignant passage because it is a true story. Ghada Karmi's snapshot memory also brings home the blood-draining sense of impotence that accompanies moments of great disaster. The dog–human relationship is based on a deal: in return for all the love they lavish on us, we will look after them when the chips are down. But when the tide of history overwhelms us, we humans welsh on the deal. We never find out what happened to Rex, but he is often in our minds as we read the pages that follow.

Discovering that I was losing my job as a presenter of Radio 4's
Today
programme was not quite on a par with the Axis invasion of Greece or the Naqba, the Disaster, as Palestinians call the events described by Ghada Karmi, but it was a bit of a blow in the Stourton household. And, in retrospect, I am surprised by the amount of time I spent thinking about the dog in the emotional period that followed. Grim, big thoughts (of the ‘I've passed my peak, from now it's all down-hill to death' variety) jostled with much more trivial concerns about canine care: what would happen to Kudu, I wondered, if I had to get a proper job with normal hours? Who would
walk him? What if I got a new job that did not pay well enough for me to afford a dog-walker?