SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 35)

1997 - 2000

New Year’s Day of 1997, in the early hours of the morning, I simply collapsed on the couch and slept until my son and his girlfriend woke up.

The detritus of a good party was all around me and I set about cleaning up. Dan and Sarah seemed to think that they ought to move out - which I did not understand - but they did it anyway, taking a lease on a flat on Jaywick seafront. I guessed they valued their independence, so I didn’t object.

Once again, I found myself alone in my house. There had been a few changes in the area and one of my new neighbours was Billy Higgins. He had been one of the first young Glaswegians to come to Clacton and I knew him well. My experience of him was mainly negative. He was a consummate liar and thief, a charming persuader and an opportunist. He had moved into his girlfriend’s house and brought his dog, Tila with him.

Quite suddenly, Billy asked me to care for Tila, while he went into hospital for a kidney transplant. Tila was an 8 year old Belgian Shepherd, a little overweight, super intelligent and loving. Originally this arrangement was only supposed to be for a few weeks but, due to complications, stretched out to be two months. Naturally, I spoiled Tila relentlessly! I spent many hours teasing out the matts in her beautiful long coat and many more hours walking with her to her favourite places, like all the local parks and beaches. She was very easy to love and, when Billy finally returned for her, I refused his offer of payment for my expenses, on the proviso that he would try one last time to mate her with a suitable stud dog, so that I could have one of her puppies.

Up until then, Tila had always rejected every attempt at mating her. She had apparently attacked all her suitors so fiercely that none of them had ever succeeded in consummating the courtship. Billy did not think that she would ever submit, but decided to give her one more chance with a young Groenendahl Belgian Shepherd dog called Shadow that he had heard good things about.

When Tila came into season during the spring of 1997, Shadow travelled from his home in Birmingham and bounced from his owner’s van, gleaming blue/black in the sunshine and rippling with fitness. He was taller than Tila and held his tail high, curled over his back in true Alpha style. He was very strong and proud. Without much fuss, the two dogs were left together in Billy’s back garden and I waited, listening, in my own garden. I fully expected to hear a fierce battle, but there was none.

Later, Billy said that when Tila had attacked him, Shadow had grabbed her by the neck and swung her to the ground so quickly that he had knocked the breath out of her! He had then mounted and engaged before she regained her composure! Half an hour later, Shadow had completed his task and was ready to go home. I could hardly believe the luck!

When the local vet confirmed that Tila was pregnant I was ecstatic! I continued to take her for walks occasionally and she had a charming way of knocking on my front door to pop in and visit with me whenever she wanted some extra fuss, some grooming or biscuits.

On Wednesday, 11th of June that year, Tila gave birth to eleven identical puppies and Billy phoned me to pop in to see them. I held each one in the palm of my hand while Tila watched, thumping her tail with pride in her brood. There were six boys. Every one of them wriggled about except one. That one settled down in my hand and relaxed. We marked the point of his ear with some pink nail varnish to identify him and I visited every day to watch them grow until my pup was ready to leave his mum and come home with me at eight weeks.

At the time, I had a lodger called Mike who was a martial arts instructor and Rastafarian. He suggested that I should name the pup Lion of Judah Rastafari, which made me laugh. I could not imagine myself shouting all that across the park or beach, so we compromised on a shortened version of that venerable name.
We named him Rasta.

Every day, Tila would bash at the front door and come in to see Rasta. She cleaned his ears, nagged him, nicked his toys and encouraged him to play fight with her in my garden. She was an excellent and loving mother. By the time the last of her huge brood had been homed, Tila was happy to rest, but still enjoyed having one of her babies close by to nurture and love as he grew up. Rasta benefitted a lot from his long relationship with his mother.

In October of 1997, Rasta was only four months old when I took him to Cornwall by train to meet Danny and Khan. They had sold their red double-decker bus and had moved to a small holiday park where Danny was working as a caretaker. I caught up on all the gossip about the residents of Fraggle Rock. Apparently most of them had been allotted council houses in and around Liskeard but Danny had not wanted to take up that offer. Instead, he had applied for the caretaker's job which provided a very nice chalet bungalow as part of the deal. Rasta and I had a lovely holiday with them.

Back on our home turf, I set about training Rasta and he had mastered all the basic command words by the time he was five months old. I did all the road training at night so that he would not be overwhelmed by traffic and noise. It paid off. He was walking to heel, off leash and confident by six months.

In 1998 Danny and Khan moved again. This time they had rented a small bungalow in a tiny seaside village called Downderry, close to Seaton Valley in Cornwall where I had once holidayed with my family in a caravan. I had mixed memories of the place - it had flooded during a particularly bad storm and I had won a dressing-up competition as a dolly in a box. My brother, Roy had been dressed as a pop-star with a toy guitar, if I remember correctly. We were both under five at the time.

When Rasta and I arrived at Downderry it had barely changed since the 1950s. I heard that the little complex of twelve bungalows, known as Coombe Park, had housed some military staff during WW2 and briefly had been used as holiday lets in the 1960s, but they were now quite old and run down so the landlord had been renting them out at very reasonable rates for local people. The best of them were occupied by temporary workers from the daffodil farms in the surrounding valleys, so there was always someone moving out and new people moving in.

Danny and Khan were happy there because it was close to the beach and had a very convenient small supermarket within walking distance. A young couple told me that they were moving out of the bungalow immediately adjacent to Danny and Khan, so I went to see the landlord and asked if I could put a deposit on it for myself. Then I went back to Clacton on Sea at the end of my holiday to figure out the logistics of moving there.

I had a great new lodger looking after my house in my absence and so I asked him if he would like to rent the place when I moved to Cornwall. He jumped at the chance and we figured out a deal whereby he paid just enough rent to cover my small mortgage and insurance liabilities. Matty was in his early 20s, an electrician and this cheap arrangement ensured that he was able to save until he could buy his own home.

As luck would have it, Dan had a new girlfriend, Sue, and they had acquired an old Ford Transit van, which was parked on the driveway of their ground floor flat because neither of them had a driving licence. I registered it in my name, insured it and paid for some minor repairs.

When we heard from the landlord in Downderry that the bungalow was finally vacant, we packed the van with all Dan and Sue’s stuff, together with Sue’s two small cats, Rasta and my essentials. We moved to Downderry immediately and began to work picking daffodils within a few days. The van provided convenient transport for most of the farm workers who lived at Coombe Park. We had a new home, a new social circle and a way to earn cash in hand.

At the end of each working day, Rasta would greet me, yelping and leaping up into my arms, as if I had been missing for a millennium! He would flatten his ears to signal that he had been worrying and did not like it when he could not guard me. As you can see, he was pretty big by then!

That banana rain suit was a quiet little number, huh? 😂

Daffodil picking was, quite possibly, the hardest physical work I have ever done in my entire life. The picking began at dawn, daily in bitterly cold and wet January weather and we were paid by volume. Both Dan and I became very fast, earning really good money, but Sue hated it and elected to stay at home caring for Rasta and her two cats.

Many pickers got a horrible sore and livid rash from the daffodil sap even though we were all wearing rubber gloves. I was able to make a salve from a lone fresh plantain that I had found surviving among the crops of toxic daffodils. It seemed logical to me that if this one plantain specimen could survive in that field, then it might impart an antidote effect to the workers. At the end of my shift, I had walked back down my picking row until I found it again. I had carefully lifted the whole plant and wrapped it in a glove. As soon as I got home I washed and pounded it to a pulp and cooked it into a large jar of petroleum jelly. I wrapped spoonful’s of the cooled and strained salve in small cling-film bundles and handed them out to everyone. A couple of applications healed the rash and protected against further irritation, solving the problem.
Everyone was very grateful.

The tiny tower on the promontory, in the distance of this image, is Rame which overlooks the River Tamar. Rasta and I loved to run around there…. I tried to hide from him in the dense gorse bushes but he always found me! He loved that game!

When the daffodil picking season came to an end in the spring, I decided to follow up on a concern that Dan’s dad, Tony, had expressed to me. One of our old friends had also moved to Cornwall several years before, but nothing had been heard from him for some time. Roo had been a good friend for many years and was a great guitarist. The only clue Tony had of Roo’s whereabouts was a vague notion that he had been working in a bookshop in Falmouth. Tony asked me to see if I could track Roo down for him.

Rasta and I set off in the van and headed deeper into south Cornwall. When we pulled into Falmouth, I parked the van near the town centre and set about finding the bookshops.

There was one very large well-established bookshop right in the middle of town and I asked the assistant if she knew Andrew Melrose, also known as Roo. She said that he had worked there some time ago, but she didn’t know where he lived. Helpfully, she mentioned that he used to play guitar at one of the local pubs. She said it was at the top of Jacob’s Ladder, a steep stairway from the harbour level to the cliffs above.

It was late afternoon by then, so Rasta and I went back to the van for a meal. I moved the van from the car park and discovered a way to drive up to the streets at the top of the cliff. I found a quiet residential parking spot close to the pub, so that I could keep watch while I washed and changed for the evening.

Around 7pm, Rasta and I went into the pub, which proved to be quite a popular venue with regular gigs. The crowd looked to be very young and friendly, some were obviously musicians, so I was encouraged to think that Roo would hang out in a place like this. I bought a drink and sat at a table from which I could see both doors to the bar. Shortly after eight, Roo arrived alone and ordered his pint of beer.

I sneaked up on him and said, “Hi Roo!” which made him jump out of his skin. He was amazed that I had been able to find him so easily.
So was I.

I soon found out why Roo had slipped off the radar. He had inherited some money from his recently deceased father and was busy spending it on alcohol. He lived in a squalid little bedsit and was a reluctant member of a local band which played a style of music that he didn’t really like. The lead singer was a highly domineering character who did not give Roo any opportunity to shine. The rehearsals and gigs I witnessed over the following weeks were fraught with grumblings, temper tantrums and copious drinking. Roo was depressed, musically stunted and permanently drunk.

Falmouth wasn’t an easy place to find work or cheap accommodation for either Roo or I, so if things had continued as they were, Roo would have quickly run through his inheritance. Meanwhile, back in Clacton, my tenant, Matty had announced that he had paid a deposit to purchase a house in nearby Harwich town. He was hoping to fix it up and then move into it imminently with his new girlfriend.

I explained to Roo that I had to return to my newly empty house in Essex. Did he want to tag along? Take the opportunity to clean his act up? A fresh start? He thought about it for a couple of weeks and eventually it was agreed that he would become my new tenant.

We called in to say goodbye to Dan and Sue at their bungalow in Downderry and then somewhat sadly, we headed back to Essex.
Yet another adventure in Cornwall had come to an end.

—0—

Strapped for cash, I immediately found a job working at a residential care home for the elderly in Clacton. Roo applied for a clerical job at a local hospital which lifted his self esteem considerably and for a while, he seemed to get a grip of his alcoholism.

Rasta, by now fully grown and as beautifully powerful as his father, was not particularly happy. The neighbours said he frequently howled when I did late shifts or overtime. I did not like leaving him at home alone but had little choice.

Then, as if to drive another big change in my life, the van coughed its last, wasn’t worth repairing and had to be scrapped. Once again, I was grounded.
It was becoming a repeating theme in my life!

😔

I kept an eye on the job vacancies listed in my local paper, half heartedly hoping for something which would provide a decent salary and more time for Rasta, so you can imagine my surprise when I spotted an advertisement for a Dog Warden. This position, working for the local council, came with a smart uniform, a small purpose-fitted van and a generous remuneration.

When I was offered the job, I was delighted because there was no reason why I could not take Rasta out to work with me! I was certain that it would be easy for him to understand the work and to hone his already brilliant tracking skills. He was so gentle and friendly with other dogs, this job had potential beyond my wildest hopes!

It was the beginning of the year 2000.
Rasta and I were embarking on a new adventure!