My Dog Tulip (14 page)

How well did I do for them? The considerate question has now a specious look. How I did for them was of less urgency then than how I did for myself. That all the donees were kind people, of that I was confident, and that was the best for them that I did. It was much. It was little. For kindness is not enough, of course. Indeed, kindness can kill. Looking beyond their kindness I comforted myself with the reflection that since many of them were local residents I should be able to keep an eye on them and exercise, perhaps, some supervision over the welfare of their charges. All but one. Him, in my haste, I quite betrayed. For my list, which had once seemed so safe, ran out before the litter was wholly assigned, and I gave the last puppy to a shopkeeper friend who offered to find him a home. He was sold over the counter. To whom? I never discovered. What happened to him? I do not know.

In fact I did in the end what I had meant not to do, I cast them to fortune. It was, after all, I told myself, their inescapable fate. I had flown too high. They were mongrels and must take a mongrel's chance; in any case what assurance could there be that if I had done differently for them I should have done better? Health and happiness cannot be secured, and the only way to avoid the onus of responsibility for the lives of animals is never to traffic in them at all. Two of them died quite soon; one was run over in the dangerous road in which I had carelessly permitted him to live; the other developed “fits” and was “put to sleep.” I remember this latter specially well. She haunts me at times. She was the fattest and cosiest of the four bitches, always licking my hands and face with her tiny tongue in a quick responsive way. And she was the first to leave. Warm though the weather was, she shivered in my arms, I remember, as I carried her away from her brothers and sisters to the small Wandsworth council flat that was to be her future home. I placed her on the parlor table and she remained there, quite motionless except for the continual shivering, while the young female part of the family who were now her owners exclaimed how “sweet” she was. She had a slight disfigurement, I recollect, a tiny cyst in the corner of one eye.

I saw her a number of times afterwards. She seemed happy and devoted to her owners, they to her. A year of life was all she had. Encountered one day without her they told me she was dead, she had taken to having “fits” and they had had her “put to sleep.” She was perfectly all right otherwise, they admitted when I questioned them; in fact the vet had asked them why they wished to destroy so healthy looking a young bitch; but on account of the “fits” they had insisted; they had thought it kinder to her and best for everyone else to have her “put to sleep.” I did not trouble them further. What was the use? I only wished they had consulted me first. Dogs have “fits” from all sorts of causes, mostly ascertainable and remediable, often as simple as wrong-feeding or worms, and need care and attention not sentence of death. Tulip herself has-occasional “fits,” three or four a year. Never satisfactorily diagnosed by the many vets who have examined her and are necessarily handicapped by not seeing her in the throes, they have recurred now for so long, over a period of six years, that I have come to regard them as idiosyncratic. She loses the use of her hind legs and, temporarily paralyzed, falls about the flat, or crouches, taut and trembling, with her fore-paws clenched, dribbling from the mouth. Distressing to watch, these cramps or seizures last, at most, for only half an hour and leave her with no ill-effect at all; while she is “suffering” (dogs make a lot of fuss about nothing) she likes to be kissed and fondled. Warm compresses beneath the tail seem also to afford her pleasure if not relief; they were recommended by a vet who diagnosed an anal spasm. But people are often frightened of their pets, and “fits” excite only panic fear; the spectre of rabies rears its ugly, and long obsolete, head; the wife or kids may get bitten, and the unfortunate animal is forthwith “put to sleep”—a hypocritical euphemism that always disgusts me.

Of the rest of Tulip's progeny three were presently handed on, sold perhaps, by applicants who had begged most earnestly for them. I never saw them more. The impulse to follow up their small destinies soon weakened. Better not to know. The owner of one said it had been too difficult to house-train; the owner of another, an Irish laborer, spun a long story to account for its disappearance. Unable to keep it himself because it gnawed the legs of the furniture, he had given it to a friend in the Army. It was now the regimental mascot, beloved by all and having a wonderful time. I asked the name of the regiment. He became vague. In any case it had gone overseas, he said. It may have been true, and the animal had been his to dispose of as he wished: but how he had begged for it! A feeling of sickness overcame me. The place was poky, poor and full of children, no place for a dog, let alone a large one, which all Tulip's puppies promised to be, and it was, of course, a measure of the improvidence of the tenant, as of so many other people into whose hands I, no less improvidently, committed these animal lives, that he should particularly have wanted a large dog, a dog like Tulip, when he had not the circumstances to keep one—and could not even wait for it to grow. But perhaps the little creature had died, trodden on by one of his numerous children, and he was unwilling to admit it.

The remaining two, both bitches, stayed in Putney to grow up within a stone's throw of my flat and each other. Yet they were fated never again to meet. One of them I myself saw only once in all the years that followed, and that was when I called to enquire how she did. She inhabited a dark basement flat with a small backyard; the flat and the yard may be said to have composed her world. Her young owner, his sister and crippled father doted upon her, of course, but owing to the nature of their employment and the inflexibility of their social custom it was inconvenient for them to take her out until late in the evening when, at summer sun-down or in winter darkness, she rambled the streets for half-an-hour or so on the lead. It was not inconvenient for her young owner to have a Sunday mid-day pint in a pub I myself visited, but he never had his bitch with him. I always had mine. He gave of his animal always the cheerfulest accounts; it was only rather bleak and uncanny never to see her too. Many a time I urged him to bring her there to meet her mother and me. But, though promising to do so, he did not. He belonged to that conventional Sunday-best type of working-class person who cannot bear to be seen even carrying a parcel or doing anything that might attract attention to himself. She was an affectionate, pretty creature, very timid, he said. Small wonder. Was she happy? I suppose she was happy. She had, after all, fulfilled a dog's most urgent need, she had managed to bestow her heart, and upon steady people whose dull, uneventful lives required the consolation of what she had to give. She was not mated. I doubt if she encountered many other dogs, they were probably indoors by the time she got out. So was I. In all my constant promenades in the district with Tulip at all hours of the day over the years we never met her once. Not once.

Very different was the fortune of the other bitch, one of the naughty ones who used to plague me so. She became a proper street dog, a canine
gamine
, and I met her frequently. No doubt, like her neighboring sister, she seldom saw grass, except the sparse and sooty blades that push up here and there in our towns, for putting the freedom of a walk in a dog's way seemed to her busy owners more reasonable than taking it out themselves; but though rarely venturing far she got round and about, became quite a “person” in her street, hobnobbed with other dogs and eventually had a family of her own. More than any of the others in Tulip's litter she was her father's child; he bequeathed her all he had, his long and mottled coat and his odd pale-blue eye. But Tulip stamped her image also upon each of her children, and gave even to this one her silvery legs, one upstanding ear and, upon the brown-eyed side, her recognizable and touching profile. The creature was a grotesque; but she was a darling, a slim, fawning, gushing bitch. She never forgot us. Sighting us from afar, she would come bounding lightly along in a gracious yet diffident way, her feathery tail between her legs, to welcome us into her mean street. In front of her mother, she would positively swoon, collapsing in the road at her feet and rolling over onto her back. But Tulip would have none of her. Did she even recognize her? I could not be sure. If she did, she regarded her and her public demonstrations with a severe and perhaps jealous disapproval, and would push past or skirt round her with a growl, the fur rising a little on her neck and rump. This charming ugly duckling survived four years. She had been out of condition for some time, a dietary deficiency disease, for her owners had stubbornly rejected my advice, until confirmed by a vet, to continue to feed her the raw meat on which she had been weaned; “raw meat makes dogs savage,” they maintained. Then she had a growth in the throat, said to be cancer. At last she could not swallow even water and had to be destroyed.

Tulip went through her confinement without turning a hair, almost without losing one. Another bitch in my district, an Airedale, who was brought to bed at about the same time, shed most of the hair on her back and presented a wretched, moth-eaten appearance. But the only hair Tulip lost was a small round patch on the underside of her tail, near the root. This came away because for a couple of months after her delivery she exuded from the womb a sticky pink jelly in considerable quantities (dismissed by Miss Canvey as a normal after-birth event). Besides dropping about on the carpets, it matted up the hair on that part of her tail which came in contact with the vulva. By the time I was able to groom her again much soap-and-water was required to disperse the clot, and the stifled hair came away with it, leaving a bald patch. But it soon grew again; and then, with her coat as glossy as ever, her figure as slim and her ways as skittish, no one could have guessed that she had recently been the mother of eight. But
I
did not emerge from the experience so unscathed. A number of serious mental notes had been taken on the way, all adding up to the same conclusion: never again! Opinion, expert and inexpert, in the dog world fully supported this decision. It was good for a bitch—so spoke the general voice—to have one litter in her life, and one was enough. What was meant by “good"
[3]
and whom was envisaged by “enough” I could not discover; but it was an opinion that suited me now. I had done my duty by Tulip; I had enabled her to have the full life it had always been my intention to give her; she had experienced sex and utilized her creative organs and maternal instincts; I need never have all that worry and trouble again.

[1]
A theory regarded by later veterinary opinion as fanciful.

[2]
The year was 1948.

[3]
In his recent book
Marriage
, Mr Kenneth Walker writes: “There is no evidence that physical harm results from sexual continence. If any injury is inflicted by chastity, it is not on the body but on the mind.” Does this statement have any application to the lower animals?

Tulip stands beside me on the upper deck of a 93 bus. She made her debut as a passenger of London Transport during the events related, and all our troubles—or so I hoped—were at an end. The bus is almost empty and we are right up in front. She is standing in the attitude she customarily adopts, her back to the engine, her fore-paws on the seat, her rump pressed up against the prow. She chose this position; it steadies her, and she appears also to derive a pleasurable kind of vibrant massage up her spine from the throbbing and quaking of the vehicle. Every now and then I see a small bead of blood trickle slowly and stainlessly down the white underside of her drooped tail and fall to the floor. This manifestation of her condition I conceal from the conductor. He seems a decent chap who would not mind; on the contrary he might be outraged and order us off. It is not a situation in which the English are notoriously quick with sympathy. And we must not offend him on any account. The time of his bus suits me; he was good enough to accept an Alsatian as passenger when I made preliminary inquiries a week ago; we have been travelling regularly with him since, and wish to go on doing so while his spell of duty lasts. For London bus conductors have turned out to be a powerful and capricious race. They can refuse to carry dogs and often do, even when their buses are empty and likely to remain so. “Sorry, no dogs,” they say. Or, “Only little dogs.” Or, less subtly, “Too big.” Or, “I've got one up there already, gov.,” as though two dogs could not conceivably be expected to meet without flying at each other's throats. Or (more frequently and crushingly), “Not them dogs! Any dogs but them!” A few make no reply at all to my polite “Will you carry her?” but, sparing me a tired look, press a firm thumb to the bell. So we are grateful to and dependent upon our present conductor and do not wish to try his indulgence too far by letting him see the tiny trackless rubies run from long white hair to long white hair down the droop of Tulip's tail.

It is 6:45 am, and we are on our way to Wimbledon Common. If these various facts are put together the importance of our bus becomes plain. The Putney dogs are still abed, so we have reached it without molestation. To be sure, the stop is only some five hundred yards from my flat; but I have been developing an elaborate plan of campaign, and two considerations have influenced it at this point. It would never do to reach the stop in a fracas of dogs; the conductor might twig our trouble and change his mind. Also I do not want Tulip physically or emotionally upset. I want her to get through her season as peacefully as possible. And as pleasantly. Let other bitches in her condition be punished—for so it must seem to them—by being imprisoned for three weeks,
she
shall lose nothing. Now that we have the co-operation of London Transport, she shall have just as happy a time as she normally has. Indeed, I will fix it for her so naturally, there will be so little apparent difference in her way of life, that she will scarcely know she is in heat at all. Exertion will be required on my side. I am perfectly ready to expend it. I am anxious to expend it. I wish her to have a wonderful time. I wish her to have absolutely everything she wants … .