As soon as I walked through the door of Windermere House there were tears of joy. ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ was the cry, the jumping up and down with excitement, the licking of my face and the wagging of the tail. Confused? Probably not as much as Tom and Finn, whose dad’s comings and goings produced a roller coaster of emotions, although not including face-licking or tail-wagging. That would be Bran’s department. Finn would have been about two years old when we acquired a pet dog. I say we but it was Thelma who decided that what every family needs is a dog and wasn’t there a park next door for it to run around, and wouldn’t it be company for our little son, and wouldn’t she feel safer when I was away from home? Well … er, if you say so, love.
There is a track on the Beatles’ White Album (1968) called ‘Martha My Dear’, named after Paul’s favourite pet. Martha, a big, floppy English sheepdog, produced a litter with the help of another of his dogs, a Dalmatian called Spot (actually, I’m just guessing at the name because we were never introduced), and when Thelma heard from the McCartneys that there were puppies in need of a home, she offered to take one. We chose the name Bran, not because it was full of goodness, or rich in dietary fibre, but because we were pursuing a Celtic trail at the time, christening our first son Finn after the legendary Irish king Finn McCool who had two wolfhounds, Bran and Spot. (Actually, it wasn’t Spot either, it was Sgeolan, but nobody could pronounce it.) When our second son was baptised we chose Tom Tara, Tara being the once ancient seat of the High Kings of Ireland. And so, with a bloodline running directly from Celtic royalty through to a Beatle, Bran, whose white coat with black splodges always looked too big for him, would be around for a long time.
Unlike all of my previous pets, I must confess. Yesterday afternoon Matt and I took our new kitten to the vet’s for its anti-flu jab and I was telling him how, as far as I remembered, none of my childhood pets ever saw the inside of a vet’s surgery. Kittens and puppies arrived, grew up and got run over. That was it, no need for expensive injections or treatments. In a month’s time he’ll be going back for a snip that will have me weak at the knees, and watching him now, curled up on the sofa like a discarded ginger toupee, I think of a verse written in my teens:
Play on young friend, leap and bound
Roll on around the tingling ground
Bite and scratch and act real claw-full
Before the vet does something awful.
He’ll get over it, but the tragedy that befell our first kitten was so heartbreaking, so disquieting, that readers of a nervous disposition may wish to skip the next paragraph. One evening after work, Dad brought home a kitten. It was a complete surprise, and my sister and I were overjoyed when he produced it from his overcoat pocket like a magician. ‘Hey Presto!’ he cried. That’s a funny name for a pussy cat, we thought, we’ll soon find a better one. But, sad to say, before we had time to think of a name, our very first kitten had come to a sticky end. Brenda’s, in fact.
I watched this tiny ball of electric fluff as it raced across the carpet to skid out of control on the lino and crash into the wall, thinking that cats were even more fun to play with than toy cheese. Again and again he did it until, tiring, he wandered out into the kitchen. Had I followed, it might never have happened. Mum was there getting our tea ready with my sister who would have been a toddler of about eighteen months old. According to my mother, Brenda had been squatting down on her haunches when she beckoned the kitten towards her, and pussy’s mistake was to stroll through the dimpled portals of her bonny knees. On turning her head to see where it was going, Brenda toppled backwards and …
If you have just rejoined the narrative after skipping the preceding paragraph, what happened was that my little sister sat on a baby kitten and squashed it to death. Splat! Just like that. Sorry.
The one good habit I picked up at Loughborough was the daily jog, and whenever I was home on leave I would put on my purple tracksuit and jog round Princes Park with Bran. The secret of jogging, I have discovered, is not to run too far, or go too fast. On no account must you overtake another jogger, or else the invigorating dawdle will turn into a three-mile sprint, ending in either a cheerless win or a cardiac arrest. Late one morning as I ambled through the park gates at the end of my run I saw two teenage girls waiting outside the house, so I put on a spurt along Windermere Terrace to impress them. I obviously did because the one holding the autograph book said: ‘You’re one-of-the-Scaffold, aren’t yeh?’
‘That’s right, yes.’
‘We’ve come for an autograph.’
‘A pleasure, girls, just hang on here and I’ll nip inside and get a photograph as well.’
‘No, we don’t want yours, mate, we want Paul’s dog’s.’
‘Pardon?’
The other girl produced an inkpad out of her pocket and, taking Bran’s paw, pressed it on to the pad and then on to the page of the book her friend was holding.
‘But how can you prove it’s Bran’s paw print?’ I muttered peevishly.
But the camera was already out and the photograph taken.
‘And here’s one of Philomena with Paul McCartney’s dog outside one-of-the-Scaffold’s house.’
During the mid-seventies, with Thelma living next door and the boys passing between us, I was at my wit’s end. The day-today drill left me with little time or energy to write, and I had to turn down any work that meant my being out of town. When I was away I would worry about what was happening at home, and when I was at home I would worry about what was happening at home. I needed advice on how to get organised but there were no local networks for single fathers and no one to whom I could talk, except the dog, of course, and, when I was really desperate, the wardrobe. Had he been able to cook and drive, Bran would have saved me the agonising experience of having to hire and fire nannies.
Two were OK. The hippy singleton with a five-year-old hippy daughter who wanted somewhere nice to live, but there was only so much dope I could passively smoke and so much muesli the boys could eat, so we were relieved when Claudia took over. An art school model, she was a happy-go-lucky American girl who fed them on home-made burgers and barbecue ribs until a photographer snapped her up. The other nannies who passed through were under the impression that there would be weekly showbiz parties and that the job would entail frequent trips to London and New York, as well as a request, eventually, to move into the master bedroom. One girl even volunteered to wear a French maid’s outfit around the house. ‘With black stockings and things.’
The outfit I chose to wear when I went down to the Philharmonic pub on Saturday 18 September 1977 was a rust-coloured three-piece suit of Irish herringbone and a collarless grandad shirt, very fashionable in a Gilbert O’Sullivan, down-at-heel sort of way. Luckily for me, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the beholder at the bus stop that evening, waiting for the bus that would never arrive, could see through the rough tweed to the coarse linen beneath. For my part, I could see in her someone strong and centred. The eldest of four children from a close family that welcomed me into its warm and mildly eccentric Yorkshire heart, Hilary Clough was secure enough in herself to allow me to continue my peripatetic life. Twenty-seven years later I don’t travel as much, and although she respects what I do for a living and will cast an eye over a poem if asked nicely, she remains healthily unimpressed by the mystique of la vie poétique. The existential darkness of the soul, the perpetual angst and ennui cut no ice with her. Whenever I allude to the infinite sadness within, the chaos that gives birth to the dancing star, she tells me to put the kettle on. Suffice it to say that I am grateful to the bus drivers of the Liverpool Corporation Transport Department for going on strike that sunny evening long ago, and now I will leave her be because she doesn’t like a fuss. Hilary made me laugh at a time when I really needed to, and we formed a bond that was to be tested by my mother’s death two months later, not to mention the spanners thrown into the works by one of our exes. But we determined to find a way out. And the way out was down the M6.
One question I have been asked over the years, usually as an accusation, is: Why did you leave Liverpool? From a Scouser it implies ‘traitor’, from someone else, ‘If the Liverpool you’re always banging on about is so great, why did you clear off?’ The answer I invariably trot out, ‘for domestic reasons’, sounds a bit lame, but is nonetheless true. After working for Granada television in Manchester, Thelma got a job with LWT in 1978 and moved down to London with the boys and her partner, and with Hilary considering a post in health education after topping up her Ph.D. with an M.Sc. at the Chelsea College of Science, it was time for me to up sticks and go. Unfortunately, the sticks proved difficult to up, and it was several years before I managed to sell Albatross House and move from our small rented flat in Fulham to a house on the Portobello Road.
‘If you can’t fight, buy a big house’ is inked inside a drawer of the desk at which I’m now sitting, written during the early seventies in a slough of prescient defeatism. Because buying a big house, like having a baby or wife-swapping, is an activity that couples very often engage in to shore up a failing relationship. When I went back to Windermere House for the last time, to collect Bran, I couldn’t get away from it quick enough, in case the new owners arrived with a police escort and a court order for me to resume habitation. Dwarfed by its size and pretensions, I was always cowed by the house and never grew into it, but now, in my mid forties, there was a new beginning. Finally moving away from Liverpool and living in London rather than camping out, would I be dwarfed by the capital’s size and pretensions, or would I grow into it?
I knew for a fact that Bran had never been on a train before, but on the journey from Lime Street to Euston he never once looked out of the window, even going over the bridge outside Runcorn, which is always good value. We were in one of those six-seater compartments, you rarely see on trains nowadays, and he spent the whole journey stretched out on the floor, gazing straight up at me. ‘You bastard. I can tell by the guilty look on your face that we’re not going on holiday. You’re taking me to a place that I’m not going to like. You’re planning to have me put down, aren’t you? Me, your faithful friend for more than a decade. Me, who confronted the burglars the night they broke in through the french windows. Me, who used to babysit Tom and Finn while you sloped off to the pub. Me, who chased the overtakers out of the park while you were jogging. Me, Paul McCartney’s dog’s dog, for godsake.’
Although wrong about the dogicide, he got two out of three right, which wasn’t bad for a big hairy mongrel with floppy ears; but unlike him, I became very fond of our new home at the Notting Hill Gate end of Portobello Road. The great advantage of living in a street famous the world over for its antiques market is that if you get lost, you can simply ask a passing tourist for directions. Although number 70 was a three-storey terrace-house with four bedrooms, it would have fitted inside the hallway of Windermere, but I liked its compactness, with my study on the top floor overlooking a busy street. My study in Liverpool had been a large, beautiful room with french windows through which you stepped on to a wrought-iron balcony that overlooked a garden the size of a football pitch, stretching down to the railings that separated us from Princes Park with its lake and trees. Beautiful, except for Mother Nature, to whose tender mercies I left the garden, and Mother Superior next door, who feared for the safety of her convent girls as the wild, lascivious jungle encroached.
The Poet’s Garden
The garden is looking particularly alright at this time of the year.
There are pinky things everywhere, and sort of red bits in waving clumps.
The lawn is as green as grass and studded with little yellow studs. Flowers, I think they are called.
I think I may suffer from a kind of floral dyslexia, in that I hardly ever notice flowers. ‘Did you remember to water the house plants?’ my wife will ask, after a few days away.
‘What plants?’ I enjoy sitting outside reading, or kicking a ball around the lawn, but the perfumed periphery remains a blur. And although I find pleasure in walking around the garden, with Hilary patiently naming the flowers she has nurtured, I’m ashamed to say that it’s in one ear and out the other. ‘Mmm, smell this,’ she will say. And I do, but it’s in one nostril and out the other. Perhaps that coffin-shaped patch of mud in the backyard of 11 Ruthven Road, with its man-eating worms and stinging irises, has a lot to answer for.
During the three days and nights of the Notting Hill Festival the revellers need somewhere to deposit their empty Red Stripe cans and half-chewed corn cobs, so all the houses at the south end of Portobello Road have small patios at the front. And there I would sit with my newspapers on warm Sunday afternoons, watching legions of excitable tourists making their way to the market, only to trudge back hours later like a defeated army, having found it closed. When space was needed I had a key for communal gardens in Ladbroke Square, but dogs had to be kept on a lead and Bran was never to find the freedom he had enjoyed in Liverpool. Nor the respect, for the local dogs were unaware of and unimpressed by his glitzy pedigree, so he began to throw his weight around, pummelling poodles, terrifying terriers, chewing Chihuahuas, to the extent that, pursued by angry neighbours, I was paying vet’s fees for half the dogs in Notting Hill.
Here lies Bran
Left Liverpool 8 for West 11
Couldn’t settle, went to heaven.