Little gods
Jeremy Clarke
At the weekend my brother and his wife plus children and terriers came to stay. My brother is a large rugby-playing policeman. His wife, also an agent of law and order, is something high up in the drugs squad. The children, a boy aged seven and a girl aged five, are engagingly under the impression that they are small deities whose every whim must be pandered to immediately. The terriers, Harry and George, are elderly, slightly senile male Border terriers. I was especially glad to see Harry and George, and they were delighted to see me.
Harry and George have long and distinguished pedigrees, clear evidence of which is in Harry’s undershot jaw and George’s epilepsy. But it’s a tribute to the character of the Border terrier that, in spite of generations of in-breeding to satisfy the aesthetic whimsies of the Kennel Club, they still want to kill foxes. Our Jack Russell terriers have always been happy to have a go at anything from a butterfly to a badger. (I once read in a newspaper that a Jack Russell had sprinted into a circus ring and attacked the performing elephant.) But Harry and George are aloof even from rabbits. Originally designed for fox work, they are sticking to fox work — though if foxes are unobtainable they try to rip the throat out of a passing dog now and again, just to keep in practice.
Naturally, this has been a source of anxiety for my brother and his wife. For as P.G. Wodehouse has observed, the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who can break up a dog-fight and those who can’t. And my brother’s wife can’t. Once they’ve latched on to a foe, my brother’s Borders have to be strangled almost to unconsciousness to make them release their grip. I hadn’t seen Harry and George for some months and was surprised by how old, fat and blind Harry had become. His breath hadn’t got any sweeter, either. Harry has the vilest breath of any dog I have ever known. It’s sometimes amusing to ask guests to settle a family dispute. Would they say Harry had bad breath, or wouldn’t they? Harry is summoned and made to sit. The visitor bends, patronises, tentatively sniffs, then is flung backwards, as if by a powerful motive force. Some retch, others swear. All pull extraordinary faces. My brother should write to the Prime Minister about Harry’s terrible breath; if all else fails, perhaps Mr Blair could somehow threaten the Iranian President with it.
Mealtimes are invariably an ordeal when my brother’s family comes over. The two children consider the formality of sitting down and feeding at a dining table to be a form of ritual abuse and never fail to make a scene. When I was called to the lunch table on the first day, the boy was standing beside the table bawling his eyes out. The reason, I was told, was that he’d ordered the chef not to give him any baked beans with his sausages and chips. The chef (his grandma) had complied with the directive, but the boy was throwing a wobbler because during the dishing-up process a baked bean had touched his plate.
‘Where did it touch?’ said his father crossly. ‘Show me.’ Concerned parents, anguished chef and sceptical uncle clustered around the boy’s plate and followed his accusing fingernail as it skirted the bacon rasher and came to rest beside a tiny brown grease mark. ‘Darling, we are all so sorry,’ said his mother. ‘Rubbish,’ said his father, who wouldn’t have passed his sergeants’ exam without recognising a mark left by a baked bean. ‘That’s grease left by the sausage that has rolled over and rolled back again.’ To test his theory I flicked the sausage away from its partner then back again. The mark left on the surface of the plate was identical to the one under suspicion. ‘There!’ said my brother. ‘It’s a sausage mark.’ And the boy burst out wailing again. After lunch we sat around in the sitting room and worshipped the children. Being egocentric deities, they demanded our attention at all times. If adult attempted to speak to adult they interrupted with a banality. The trick is pretty much a reflex with them. We could comment on their games or praise them, but not speak among ourselves.
To divert the agnostics among us, I passed around a semi-automatic bloodpressure monitor I’d recently bought in a sale, and noted down the results. This the children permitted, as long as we took our own blood pressure, and did it quietly. My brother won, with a blood pressure of 160 over 100, which, according to the leaflet, was dangerously high. Later on there was another fortunate diversion, in the shape of the man who sells spinach door-to-door in the village. He’s been depressed lately. ‘Ah, Brian!’ we chorused as his drooping figure appeared in the doorway. ‘Would you mind settling a family dispute?’
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