I could have dropped to my knees and begged forgiveness, or sighed and sobbed over the death of poor cock robin. Instead I threw the body into a pond and made a simple promise to myself, that I would never, ever, do anything like that again as long as I lived.
After leaving school I had a brief dab at the navy, a sojourn chiefly remembered for the happy hours spent cleaning the bogs with a toothbrush. That was followed by half a year trying every job on every postcard pinned up at the Hull Labour Exchange. I attempted to explain to my father why it was that I appeared to be so useless. It wasn’t that I was, actually, useless; it was because I really was keen to work with animals.
‘You want to try cousin Jack,’ said my dad.
‘Cousin Jack? Who’s he?’ said I, knowing my dad’s sense of humour and so imagining that this previously unmentioned relative was perhaps a lonely goatherd living in a cave on the Lincolnshire Wolds, or someone who reared goldfish for the funfairs.
‘RSPCA, is our Jack. Has been as long as I can remember. Tell him that your mother’s mother’s sister was his wife’s brother’s wife, or something of the sort. Put that kettle on as you go.’
Quite how this information had passed me by I couldn’t explain, but cousin Jack, Jack Hartley, turned out to be an RSPCA senior figure, manager of the Hull station, and had been with the firm for thirty years. By this time he was approaching retirement with no enthusiasm for that indolent state at all. He was the big, bluff type, what you see is what you get, the sort who had respect for higher authority but no need of it and – not always visibly or obviously – would do anything to help anyone. Maybe such people still exist.
I called ‘our Jack’ from one of the special cream-painted Hull phone boxes and started to tell him about his sisters and his cousins and his aunts, but he seemed to know who I was anyway and told me to pop down and see him. Later I found out that he wasn’t a cousin at all but somebody Dad knew from the pub.
‘Now then, young Master Langdale,’ he said, after crushing my right hand into a third of its normal size, ‘sit you down and I’ll tell you what it is. The girl’s leaving to run after one of them long-haired boys that plays a banjo on the stage, and we’ve never had a lad doing it. But that doesn’t mean we won’t.’ I tried to look hopeful and expectant, rather than stupid. If I listened carefully, I thought, I might be able to divine what on earth he was on about.
‘Twenty kennels,’ he continued. ‘Sometimes up to twenty dogs, but never more. Understand?’ I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t test me. ‘If there’s no room when a new dog comes in, and we have to make room, you see, with the electrophanator, no blame can be attached to the kennel maid or, in this case, the kennel knave I suppose you are. Even so, if it was me, I’d regard it as a personal failure. Now, let’s go and have a look.’
Electro what? Cousin Jack pronounced this new word ‘electro-FANter-nor’. By the time I found out what it was, I would know it was an ee-lec-TROFFernater. Meanwhile, I had wild pictures in my mind of a dog-eating electrophant, pictures based on a boyhood trip to Scarborough where, in Northstead Manor Gardens, they’d had a gaudily painted mechanical elephant with castors on its feet, which gave small children rides in its howdah.
There were indeed twenty concrete cells, or holding pens, for stray dogs. As we walked along the barred fronts, every one of the inmates came rushing up, tail wagging, wanting whatever it was we might have, hoping that we might represent something better than their clean, tidy, all-essentials-catered-for lives, which were, nevertheless, awful for a dog.
‘For every miserable, sinful bastard who abandons a dog, or mistreats a dog, there has to be a person of the opposite kind, who will take this dog in and give it love and care and respect,’ said our Jack.
I was right with it now. I was to be employed by the RSPCA to look after the kennels and the strays and keep all in as good a condition as possible, and the better I did my job, the more likely it would be that a citizen of Hull and environs would find one of my charges attractive enough to take home. I smiled. Goodbye, Labour Exchange. Hello, destiny.
*
A large part of the work was mucky and repetitive. I had to scrub out twice a day and all my guests had to be fed, watered and exercised. That much was set in stone but it didn’t take up all my hours. New dogs usually needed some extra attention, which was no problem, and in any time spare from my routines I was happy fooling around with all the dogs. Some of them clearly had never had even the most basic training. Some had never known the fun a dog can have, just by being a dog with a kind and caring human. Some distrusted humans entirely, and winning their trust was a kind of emotional torture because I knew the original distrust might eventually prove to be well placed, because here came the hard part.
The longer-term residents created special pressures. As the numbers mounted in the kennels – seventeen, eighteen, nineteen – it became more and more important to persuade the nice people who came looking for a rescue dog that the one nobody had wanted so far, the one in kennel nineteen, was the one they should have. If not, and of course this had to remain unsaid, the next dog in would put nineteen into twenty, and there was no twenty-one, only The End.
My powers of persuasion, I felt, were not as fully developed as they might have been. I read a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. No use at all. I tried smooth-talking charm, but I never was cut out to be an estate agent. I tried little white lies, funny stories made up to make the less appealing hounds seem to be jolly characters, despite their shortage of good looks. I can’t say it worked very often. Something clicks between dog and potential owner, or it doesn’t. Even so, I could never give up, and I never could become immune to what our Jack had called ‘a personal failure’.
As kennel knave, I was mostly enjoying myself but it wasn’t what you might call a career position. I’d made my way into the RSPCA but at the very bottom, and I was looking for a step up. The most obvious, and the most exciting, had one big obstacle in the way.
A few of the staff were designated animal ambulance drivers. They had a duty rota, so many nights on call, so many not. If an animal was hurt in a road accident or needed care after any kind of incident, the RSPCA vehicle would attend. This was an idea I fancied, and one of the drivers had left. I’d still be kennel knave in the day but I’d be the RSPCA man at night, out there, in the world, driving to emergencies.
The obstacle was that I couldn’t drive. I had a brother-in-law who was sometimes persuaded by my big sister to take me out in his car but I needed practice, lots of it, and some proper lessons if only I had any money to pay for them.
At the age of seventeen, with nothing to declare but my ambition, I applied for the vacancy. When Jack raised the matter of my driving, I told him I’d booked some time off next week to take my test, and my only worry was the Highway Code questions. Jack told me to get swotting and not play with the dogs so much.
I couldn’t get my real test booked for another eight weeks so I did the obvious thing. I backed myself to pass first time, and told Jack that I had. He was so pleased that he never asked to see my licence, nor did the police, the fire brigade or anyone else who called me out over the next eight weeks, which gave me the driving practice I needed so that I won my bet with myself and passed the driving test.
Meanwhile, I met a drop-dead gorgeous blonde called Carol. I may have been a little naive but I actually thought that a penniless male kennel maid, whose idea of a good time was sitting up all night on the dockside waiting for a family of foxes to come out, stood a chance with a girl like that. Maybe it was the unpredictability