Only Glimpses 3

Another dog story - the saddest one, but it has to be told as it was such a grief in those first few months in Ireland before the birth of my child.

And I’ve recorded an audio too! It’s not perfect as the cat who was sat on my lap decided to move, hence unintentional sound effects of a bell ringing, and rustling papers, and a couple of pauses, and at one point a couple of sentences have been left out- not sure how or why? But its 2 am and cant be bothered to try and do it again .

1990

Now we know what ‘lands poisoned’ means.

A dog dying a long and cruel death, having eaten meat laced with strychnine, left in the fields, supposedly for foxes, but indiscriminately killing any other flesh eater that smells it, and then any bird or small mammal that eats that creature .

Our poor brave Hodge, so full of life and bounce and energy, so gentle and soft, lies now by the stream, curled in his grave, next to Speedy, who had died only a few days earlier; who had been my friend Sara’s cat, when she shared Park Farm with me back in Wiltshire.

Only Florrie remains from our family of animals brought from the UK and she looks so lost, keeps sniffing the air, looking for her companion of three years, the father of her one litter of puppies.

I rail against fate, and grieve for the waste; he was such a beautiful dog, and so full of zest for life – there is such a big gap; it is so quiet and empty without him.

I can’t believe so much life has just been put out, so suddenly, in one nightmare night.

I can’t believe he isn’t around anymore – pictures of him continually come into my head, making me weep for the pity of it all.

That he won’t be around during my daughter Izzie’s growing up; that she will hardly remember him; yet his name was one of the first words that she knew.

‘Hodge is gone.’ She keeps saying solemnly. He was important in her short life.

He was only three years old; he had just learnt to be a good obedient dog , he didn’t chase the sheep at all – he’d only been here six weeks but already he loved it here – walking the mountains with my husband, lying chewing bones in the workshop while he worked building a dresser to sell, (the dresser I still have in my living room, which I have brought to so many different homes) continually in and out the back door, playing with Florrie, stealing food off the table, lying curled on our bed.

He fought nobly all through that long night after he’d eaten the meat – he so rarely wandered off, but that day he’d not had a walk and when I went out to the toilet, which was a compost affair in the stone shed further up the hill track from the house, with a magnificent view out over the valley, he came out too, and only came back an hour later, wet through and looking guilty.

We had been told by Ted, the farmer who owned the land around our house, that poison meat had been put out, but never thought Hodge would smell it. But he did – an hour later he had the first spasm, and the horror began, (if only we had known then to give him washing up liquid to make him sick, - but it would in all probability have been already too late; the poison was already working through his blood stream.)

We got 2 year old Izzie out of bed, and rushed the 14 miles to the vet in Kenmare in the pouring rain; I working the windscreen wipers by hand with a bent wire contraption, because they were broken. The vet poured washing up liquid down his throat and gave him an injection and we came home to wait. He was sick on the way home, but didn’t bring up the poisoned meat – by then it was probably already half-digested..

He had no more fits until a couple of hours later, when we had gone to bed and he was curled up next to my husband. It was an awful one, his muscles going into spasm but he survived it and at some point he came downstairs looking better; we stayed up all night with him, as he was in the throws of repeated spasms, , and then in between the fits his breathing became worse and worse; but then he seemed to get better, and we took him for a walk along the track back towards the gate. He had a drink, which we took to be a good sign but now know was sealing his fate, as was taking him for a walk; he began to have more and more spasms so that by 10 am he was having them almost continuously; in despair my husband went to our nearest neighbour asking him to shoot Hodge but he wouldn’t think of it so we decided to go back to the vet – it was awful but the true awfulness didn’t occur to me then – we just got on with dealing with it.

Poor poor Hodge – we got to the vet and he was given a relaxant injection, and he died there on the table right away – it was only that bastard poison that was keeping him alive – he must have eaten so much of it.

It was a relief he was out of his misery, a relief that we didn’t have to watch him having those dreadful spasms any longer. We took him home and dug a grave in front of a huge rock in the garden, down by the stream, and buried him. None of us had slept – but we couldn’t sit around the house all day, it would have been unbearable.....so we went walking, by the Kenmare river, found a beautiful secret beach full of shells, where Izzie played, and we grieved separately and together, and comforted each other , trying to take in what had happened, struggling to accept.

I know we both felt like running away from this place that suddenly felt so alien, felt like never getting another dog. Hating the farmers, we had both begun to have a superstitious fear of what might happen next in this new unknown country so far from everything we knew.

I knew really we could not give in. It would make Hodge’s death worthless if we copped out of living here; of the new life we had come to live. If we packed up and returned to England.

We will honour him by staying, but not accepting the local traditions that killed him; the stark reality of his death has brought us up short, made us realise that this community within which we now live has it’s dark side.

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A Lament written just after Hodge’s death

‘You were not just a dog, you were Hodge, my friend, my child substitute originally I daresay, the pup I chose from a litter at the local farm where I bought my chicken corn, on the way to Chapmanslade, bought when I was my own person, living at Park farm with Sara, at the peak of that era when there was such a sense of informal community there, particularly for women and kids. When I had dreams of a future with Nick,my daughter’s birth father, who came to live and paint in the attic up the stairs at the back of the house .

Hodge you won’t be easily forgotten by any of us – you have been part of the little close-knit family we have so rapidly become and you won’t be forgotten either by many people in Westbury – the dog who nearly leapt the wall as they walked by; who bounced all over them when they came in to the yard. The dog with one ear up and one ear down, a quizzical look on his face, forever pawing at my lap to get my attention, ever apologetic, guilty at the slightest thing. A big soft gangly creature, all legs, lying asleep with his feet at strange angles in the air.

I could go on but I suppose I have to finish this lament, this memoir somewhere. I have to finish grieving , stop following the images through in my head; getting upset again and again, and start to get used to life without him. It feels disloyal.

Yesterday on our way home I asked my husband to let me walk all the way home from Blackwater; I, heavily pregnant and with my daughter in her buggy, up the road to the cross, and along the lane to Gearha bridge taking the left turning off the road that runs up over the Ballaghbeama pass, the long narrow track up through the valley into the pocket, Coomlumminy – the valley of light, shadowed now, but still our home; and I howled my grief and my lonesomeness all the way in ........

Postscript

A few years later when we were living in Sneem village, strychnine shadowed our lives again, or rather it took the lives, of several dogs one night in the South Square, to the stunned grief of their owners; and then up where the children played outside our house in the new council cottages, strychnine had been put out, so that two of our neighbours beautiful half-grown labrador puppies were affected; one died and the other I managed to save as now I knew what to do, and I threw washing up liquid down her throat immediately, and was straight to the pharmacy for a muscle relaxant, and put her in the shed to hopefully recover; and to my satisfaction she did, which went some way to ameliorate the grief that I still felt, and to this day feel, knowing that Hodge died due to our ignorance, both of the habit of farmers to kill foxes in that way, (although even then it was already illegal,) and of our lack of knowledge of how to deal with it. He was a casualty of our move to country where we were not familiar with the ways of the people we had come to live amongst.’