15. To Have and Not to Have
Ben was breathing a great deal of the sleepy puppy-air of the Fitches’ pig-sty, for he visited the puppies several times a day; and he was feeling better and better.
During his stay, the puppies began to be weaned. Grandpa started by persuading them to drink cow’s milk from a dish as well as – soon, instead of – Tilly’s milk. None of the puppies were interested in cow’s milk at first, and Ben’s job was to accustom them to the idea. He planted them round the rim of the milk-dish, brought them back to it when they wandered away, lifted them out of it when they began paddling across, and gently pushed their muzzles into it. Gradually, in a muddled way, they gained a taste for the new drink, first by licking it off the coats of those who had fallen in, at last by lapping from the dish.
When they began to feed as fast-growing puppies, they made more mess in their straw, and Ben took on the job of cleaning the sty out regularly and laying fresh straw.
In their daily company, handling them often, Ben came to know each puppy well. He gave them their names, which Grandpa – who hadn’t thought of names until Ben came – adopted. Two were Punch and Judy, because they resembled the Codlings’ Toby in colouring; two others, coloured liver-and-white, were called Mat and Tilda, after Tilly (whose real name was Matilda); then there was Midnight, all black; and Cloudy, who could not make up his mind whether to be black or white or even a proper grey; and Spot – whose name needed no explanation once you saw him; and Gravy, an all-over dark brown.
That was eight, and now Ben’s invention began to fail. About the ninth puppy there was nothing distinctive, unless perhaps he was the smallest – but he might grow out of that. His colour was like Gravy’s only lighter. Ben, searching his mind for an apt name, stared at the puppy: ‘He’s brown …’
‘A very handy name too,’ Grandpa said heartily. ‘I like Brown.’ And so – with Ben’s acceptance of his grandfather’s mistake – the ninth puppy was named Brown. Once he was called that, you could only wonder that he might ever have been called anything else.
Old Mrs Fitch had never seen the puppies – didn’t want to, she said. She grumbled, too, at Ben’s spending so much time with them – ‘cooped up in a pig-sty – what would his mother say?’
Ben heard from his mother regularly. In one letter Mrs Blewitt reported a Sunday visit that the family had paid to May and Charlie and Dilys in their new home. She had thoroughly enjoyed a proper talk with her two daughters, and had come to the final conclusion that their district was the best in all London to live in. For one thing, it was so far from the river-fogs and damps of the Blewitts’ part of South London. The air of North London was so pure, she wrote; but there! Ben was breathing fresh country air for the present, anyway. When old Mrs Fitch had had that read to her, she began sending Ben for afternoon walks along the driftway.
The driftway, smitten by winter, was cold, lifeless. It was hard to think of Grandpa finding even half a dozen early snowdrops there; he had known where to look. There seemed nothing now. Last year’s grass lay rotting and tangled round the feet of melancholy, broken-armed skeletons of what might once have been cow-parsley, meadowsweet, teasel. The hedges were without leaves, so that Ben could see through them to the cold, raw earth of ploughed fields; and winds blew over the fields and draughtily through the hedges.
Ben trudged along because he had to, and Tilly – when she would come at all – followed spiritlessly, her head drooping. She did not fuss over her puppies, but her thoughts must always be with them.
They never went further than the driftway bridge over the Say. The river, swollen with winter waters, was fast-moving and dangerous-looking, and grey and cold. No one would want to bathe in that. The willow tree beside which Ben had undressed was a bleak landmark in a desolate marsh.
Leaning over the handrail of the bridge, Ben felt a melancholy creeping over him, fixing him to this spot. There was, of course, no Mexican volcano in sight; but here he felt truly, as he had felt in his nightmares, that he had no dog. He had lost the woolwork dog; he had lost the visionary dog. He might tend and fondle Tilly’s puppies but none of them was his. He named them for other owners; not one of them was his Chiquitito. He had no dog.
At last, Tilly, who had been sitting beside him on the cold, damp concrete of the bridge, got up and began plodding back the way they had come, unwilling to keep him company any longer. Ben turned and followed her. Dusk came by the end of the afternoon, and, as they neared home, they often saw the lit windows of the Yellow Salden bus as it passed along the main road. Ben could see the passengers inside looking out over the lonely, wintry landscape, glad that they were not there.
Then Ben, not even having the heart to call at the pig-sty on the way, went drearily in to tea. After tea he always read to his grandmother, his grandfather listening too. Then, bed.
Ben had been waiting for a good time, preferably when his grandmother was alone, to tell her of the loss of the woolwork picture. He chose a Sunday evening after his walk and after old Mr Fitch had gone off to the chapel service in Little Barley. Ben was left to keep his grandmother company. He had been reading the Bible aloud; he broke off, and went on again at once: ‘You know Uncle Willy’s picture …’
He paused, waiting; but his grandmother, who had been listening with her eyes shut, did not open them now. Ben wondered whether she thought that this was all part of the Book of Jeremiah, or whether she had fallen asleep – but that was unlikely. Just as he was preparing to repeat what he had said, she opened her eyes. ‘What happened to Willy’s picture?’
‘I lost it.’ He told her when and where.
She said nothing.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said. ‘I know it was a present to you from Uncle Willy.’
‘And then a present to you, but you didn’t take to it.’
‘It wasn’t exactly that, but –’
‘You wanted a real dog.’
‘Yes.’
‘You still do.’
It was Ben’s turn to be silent.
‘That Joe should never have promised you a dog.’
‘Please!’ said Ben. ‘It doesn’t make any difference now, truly.’
‘A promise was broken.’
Another silence. Ben wondered if he should go on reading aloud, but his grandmother did not ask him to do so. She had shut her eyes again. Perhaps she was really asleep this time.
Ben closed the Bible and put it aside. He glanced at the clock. Grandpa would be home soon, and then it would be time for bed. Always, before bed, he tried to slip out for a last look at the puppies. He was pretty sure that Grandpa guessed where he went, but not Granny. He glanced at her now and decided that she really was asleep. He tiptoed into the scullery and out through the back door.
He never hurried in saying goodnight to the puppies. He held each one separately, bending his face over it, saying its name: ‘Midnight … Tilda … Cloudy … Brown …’
He became aware of some difference behind him, where the entrance to the pig-sty was. The flow of air from the outside was blocked by some body – a silent presence – in the doorway. For a moment Ben was frightened – too frightened to move or to show his awareness in any way. His grandfather would have hailed him, ‘Well, boy!’ at once – he always did; and the only other person it could rightfully be was his grandmother, but she never stirred out of doors in this weather, and in the dark too.
But, looking out of the corner of his eye, Ben could see – just within the light from the lamp – a pair of black buttoned shoes and grey cotton stockings above them: this was his grandmother.
She was standing at the entrance of the sty – probably stooping to watch him. He did not know why she watched, and could only suppose that she would be angry with him for being here yet again, and so late. He waited for her to speak, and in the meantime went on fondling the puppies, pretending not to know that she was there.
But she did not speak. After a while there was a little squeaking sound from her shoes, which mea
nt that she had turned away from the sty to go back to the house. Ben gave her plenty of time, because she would hobble so slowly, and it was dark. Then he followed. When he got indoors, she was sitting in her chair by the fire, with her eyes shut, as though she had never moved from it. Only, she was breathing a little heavily, and there was mud on the toe of one shoe.
Ben, not seeking trouble, sat down quietly, but then did not know what to do. He looked at his grandmother again, and found her eyes open and fixed upon him.
‘Shall I go on reading, Granny?’
‘To the end of the chapter, please.’ He began to look for the place again. ‘Ben, you were promised a dog. The promise ought to have been kept – kept properly. We ought to have done that. So, now, one of those puppies is yours by right.’
‘Mine – oh!’ For a moment Ben was dazzled by the amazing thought that he owned one of Tilly’s puppies. Which? – for they would let him choose. He was indeed dazzled, for his mind’s eye followed a rapid sequence of colours: liver-and-white, black and white, cloudy grey, dark brown, light brown – He stopped there because the puppy called Brown was the one nearest to Chiquitito-coloured. He would choose Chiquitito-Brown for his own, and together – he and this second Chiquitito, as small and as brave as the first – together they would roam London –
Then he remembered: if he were offered all the dogs in the world, he could not accept one. He could not keep a dog in London, where there was nowhere to exercise it, nowhere for it to run free.
His grandmother had been watching him – watching the expression on his face change from one moment to the next, with the change of his thought.
‘Yes, but –’ Ben said heavily.
‘Yes,’ said his grandmother. ‘That’s how things are, and I’m sorry for it.’ As she hated to wrap her meaning in politeness or irony or anything but its own truth, Ben knew that she was truly sorry. ‘And now, boy, go on reading from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah.’
16. A View from a Hill-top
He was Ben’s, then; and not Ben’s.
He was not an extraordinary puppy as yet, and he was much darker than the true Chiquitito-fawn. Nevertheless, Ben hung over him, loving him, learning him, murmuring the name that should have been his: ‘Chiquitito …’
Ben was there when Chiquitito-Brown barked for the first time. Standing four-square and alone, the puppy’s body suffered a spasm of muscular contraction which released itself when he opened his jaws. The open mouth was just about the size to take the bulk of, say a finger-end. From this aperture issued – small, faint, but unmistakable – a bark. Then Chiquitito-Brown closed his mouth and looked round, quivering back in alarm at the sound he had heard.
For the puppy, more like his mother than his heroic namesake, was not brave. That would have to come later, Ben reassured himself; and in the meantime – ‘You’re really Chiquitito,’ Ben told him again and again, trying to teach him his new name and the new nature that went with it. At least the puppy was still very, very small.
Grandpa, of course, did not know of the renaming; but he guessed, from Ben’s favouritism, which would have been the boy’s choice among all the puppies. On the last day of Ben’s visit, he asked: ‘And what shall I do with Brown, since you can’t take him back to London with you?’
‘What will you do with the others?’
‘Offer them round to the family – your uncles and aunties,’ Grandpa said. ‘And those pups that aren’t taken that way – we shall sell ’em off if we can, give ’em away if we can’t.’
‘Then you’ll have to do the same with him.’ Ben held Chiquitito-Brown squirming between his hands for the last time. He put his face against the puppy’s head, breathed his goodbye.
And, on the evening after Ben’s departure, Grandpa squared up to the table and wrote round to the families offering a gift of a puppy to each. He did not bother to ask the family so far away in Canada, of course, nor the Blewitts themselves.
After some time he began to get the replies. Ben, at home again in London, heard that an uncle who had settled in the Fens, the other side of Castleford, would take one puppy – Midnight; and another – Gravy – was going to the aunt who had married a man in Essex.
Ben laid down the letter which had brought this news, and thought: two puppies gone – that left seven to be disposed of, Chiquitito-Brown being one.
Ben, quite well again now, was back at school, thus altogether resuming normal life. He was never seen with his eyes shut in the daytime; he was never found in strange abstractions of thought. He was a perfectly ordinary boy again – only, perhaps, a little dispirited. But his mother was satisfied that the change to North London would work wonders in Ben, and in them all. For the Blewitt family were going to move house: Mrs Blewitt’s idea had really been a plan, as her husband had grasped, and now it had been decided upon and would be carried out.
‘But I’ve to be within reach of my job, mind that,’ said Mr Blewitt. Mrs Blewitt pointed out that, for someone with Mr Blewitt’s kind of Underground job, there wasn’t much to choose between living towards the southern end of the Northern Line, as they did at present, and living towards the northern end of the same Line, as they would be doing.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Blewitt. Then he closed his eyes: ‘But the upheaval – leaving somewhere where we were settled in so well.’ Mrs Blewitt pointed out that the departure of May and Dilys had already unsettled them: the house had become too big for them. (Perhaps, if the Blewitts had not been so used to squeezing seven in, five would not have seemed too few in the space. Or perhaps they would not have seemed too few if Mrs Blewitt had not been thinking of the comfort of living nearer to her daughters.)
‘And besides,’ Mrs Blewitt went on, ‘the air –’
‘I’ve heard enough about the flavour of that air,’ her husband said with finality. ‘If we go, we go. That’s all there is to it, Lil.’
‘We go,’ Mrs Blewitt said happily, as though all problems were settled now. So the rest of the family were told. Frankie – who took after his mother, everyone said – was delighted at the thought of the excitement of removal. Paul only worried about his pigeon: he did not yet realize that birds can be as cordial in North London as in South. Ben said nothing, thought nothing, felt nothing – didn’t care.
His keenest interest, but sombre, was in the news that Grandpa sent in his letter-postscripts. Old Mr Fitch was now getting rid of the rest of Tilly’s puppies, one by one, in the Little Barley neighbourhood. Jem Perfect of Little Barley was taking one – Punch; and Constable Platt another – Judy. That left five, Chiquitito-Brown among them.
‘It’s only a question of time,’ said Mrs Blewitt. ‘If anyone can hear of the right kind of house or flat for us, it will be Charlie Forrester. He’s on the spot; he’s in the know. We only have to be patient.’ She glowed with hope.
Another weekly letter came from the Fitches. ‘Here you are, Ben,’ said Mrs Blewitt, ‘there’s a message for you again.’
The postscript read:
TELL B MRS P TOKE TILDA
That meant that the Perkinses from next door had taken the puppy called Tilda. It would be nice for Young Tilly to have her own daughter living next door. And that left four puppies, Chiquitito-Brown still among them. Ben suddenly realized that his grandfather must be keeping his – Ben’s – puppy to the end: he intended to give him away the last of all. But, in the end, he would have to give him.
The Blewitts were going to look at a family-sized flat that Charlie Forrester had found for them in North London. It was a house-conversion job, he said, and wouldn’t be ready for some time; but it might suit them. There was even a back-garden, or yard, nearly fifteen foot square. As the only viewing day was Sunday, all the family went.
There seemed nothing special about the district – just streets leading into streets leading into streets – or about the house itself – just like all the other houses in all the other streets: Ben himself could not even dislike the street or the house, outside or in.
/> His mother was disappointed at it. ‘Only two medium-sized bedrooms, and a little box of a room where Ben would sleep.’
‘I thought his present bedroom was too big,’ said Mr Blewitt.
‘But this is poky.’
‘It would just take Ben’s bed and leave him room to get into it, anyway,’ said May, who had come with her Charlie. She was taking them all back to their flat for tea afterwards.
‘Well, what do you think, Ben?’ Mrs Blewitt asked.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Ben. He was indifferent; and Paul and Frankie were bored – they were scuffling in empty rooms, irritating their father, whose nerves were on edge. He sent all three out of the house.
They wandered together from one street to the next and so came to a road that was less of a side street than the others. The two younger boys pricked their ears at the whirring and rattling sound of roller-skates, and took that direction. Ben did not care for the sport, but he followed the others – as the eldest, he was always supposed to be partly in charge.
Boys and even a few girls were roller-skating in zigzags down a wide, asphalted footway that sloped to the road, with a system of protective barriers across at that end. Paul and Frankie recognized this as ideal skating ground, fast but safe. They settled down to watch. Soon, Ben knew, they would try to borrow someone’s skates for a turn, and they might succeed. Anyway, they would be occupied for some time.
Ben went on, chiefly because he did not care for all the company and noise. He climbed the sloping way, crossed a railway bridge, and came out by a low brick building. It was probably a sports pavilion, for it looked out over a grassed space, part of which was a football ground. To one side there was a children’s playground with a paddling pool and easy swings. Asphalted paths skirted the whole open space, which sloped steadily still upwards to a skyline with trees.