Up the garden path
Jeremy Clarke
Every day that I can, I take an elderly, obese, arthritic collie called Joe for a walk. I take him out because he’s a likeable old chap, and his owner, Margery, is too frail and bent with arthritis to take him out herself.
Margery lives in a house on top of a 300-foot-high cliff and depends on her home help, Edna, who has even worse arthritis, for everything. Edna says that Margery is driving her ‘slowly round the bend’. When I knocked on the door to collect Joe last week, Edna had gone home and Margery eventually answered it. She was wearing a grey ‘hoodie’ with the words ‘Air Patrol. We never die, we just go to Hell to regroup’ printed across the front. I complimented her on it. Edna had bought it for her in Peacocks, she said.
Joe was as usual beside himself with joy to see me. We took our usual route along the bridle path that runs steeply down to the beach. There are places along this path — a particular tuft of grass, the corner of a wall, a gatepost — where he picks up the canine equivalent of his emails. He smells these places with fanatical attention then cocks his leg and leaves a message of his own. I am always patient. By any standards Joe has had a dull and confusing life and these message boards seem to do wonders for his morale. I also have to be patient when Joe wants to try to pass his stool because it’s rarely easy for him.
Last week I was pressed for time and changed our route. At the bottom, instead of continuing along the beach, we doubled back along the foot of the cliff until we were level with Margery’s house, now high above us. On the cliff face, smooth slate showed through the gorse bushes. Higher up, the gorse gave way to trees and then Margery’s garden. It was almost, but not quite, a sheer drop.
Then I noticed what looked like a path tenaciously zigzagging up through the gorse and disappearing into the trees higher up the cliff. Margery has always said that when her husband was alive there was a path down to the beach that they sometimes used. ‘Come on, Joe,’ I said. And we tried the path to see if it was the short cut back up to her house.
It was a path, though very steep and hazardous. I was on all fours; Joe was blowing so hard I worried that he might have a heart attack. About halfway up the cliff, the path was blocked by a wooden gate and barbed wire. The gate was too high and too smooth to climb over and the wire was fiendishly positioned. We’d come too far to turn back, however. I made a hole in the wire large enough for Joe to wriggle his fat self through. I followed and got hopelessly stuck. It’s been many years since I last pressed my face into damp soil and smelt the richness of the earth. After unpicking my coat from the barbed wire, I finally threaded myself through the gap in the wire, and we pressed on up the cliff path.
Now we were in a sort of Lost Gardens of Heligan with old overgrown walls, where ancient palms and flowering shrubs survived in the shade of larger trees gone wild. The path continued to zigzag upwards, but now there was gravel underfoot. Joe was a walking bellows. His tongue was right out of his head, his eyes were glazed, and he was limping. Nearly there, Joe, I said.
The path turned sharply and there was a flight of old stone steps, at the top of which we found ourselves on a lawn in front of the wrong house. We’d reached the top of the cliff, but we were nowhere near Margery’s. A man was marching towards us at the double. ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ he yelled. I didn’t recognise him. The house must be a second home. Another one. He might own a house in the village, but he clearly felt no allegiance to the village. He came marching up to me and said, ‘How did you get in here? This is private property. Get off my land.’ He was absolutely furious.
Dear Joe now took advantage of the halt and the expanse of lawn to make another valiant, trembling attempt to void his stool. Forgetting the pompous man for a moment, I watched with interest. Furious though he was, the man fell silent and also watched. This time it was a success. A very great success. Joe then did that raking thing with the back feet that dogs do afterwards. I noticed a vein standing out on the man’s temple. ‘Well done, Joe!’ I said. ‘Good boy.’
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