Gibson loomed over my toddlerhood like a guardian angel, tolerating with patience the fist I thrust in his warm wet mouth. I would lean in fearlessly as far as my shoulder, like a plumber probing a drain, and he’d just let it happen, while I dredged his mouth for marbles or simply explored the walls of gum in which his teeth were set. Dogs can smell fear, as we’re always being told, but on me Gibson must have smelled something very different, trust and love. It’s the simplest explanation for his long-suffering ways. According to family tradition he let me learn to stand and then walk by supporting myself on his ears. I clutched tightly onto those velvety flanges, while his breath came out and warmed my face.
Mum told me his breath stank. She didn’t know how I could stand it. Simple — as far as I was concerned it wasn’t bad breath, it wasn’t even dog breath, it was Gibson’s breath and it smelled fine. I don’t remember smelling his tuppennies but I dare say I would have liked them too. I certainly liked mine.
Something about Gibson reminded my senses of Granny herself. He smelled a little like her, which seemed only right, though she never smelled quite as good as he did. Dogs’ ears smell of mown hay.
I couldn’t know then that Granny, fastidious but well aware of the damaging effect of frequent baths on dogs’ coats, sprayed him fairly regularly with her own perfume. Gibson, the thoughtful friend who taught me to walk, had a depth of aroma, all the way from mud and glands to high floral notes, worthy of a court lady from the time of the Sun King. Gibson must have been one of the few boxers ever to wear Je Reviens.
Gibson lost his hearing quite young. White dogs tend to be deaf. Deaf dogs tend to be white. These things converge. In Gibson’s case, with my granny as his mistress, it was always on the cards that he went deaf as a husband might, for the peace it brought.
I loved and admired Gibson more than any person in my life, except the mother whom I only noticed when she wasn’t there. I formed a passionate attachment to him. He was my totem animal, yet I could learn nothing from him. He wouldn’t even let me take his ball. Dogs know what the nose knows: this and here and now. That, yonder, tomorrow — none of these carries a smell. Animals can’t show us how to live as they do. With their enclosure in the present they offer examples we’re disqualified from following.
When I put my finger in the socket of the lamp where the bulb went, I was in search of light, but my deeper interest from the start was fire. I loved it that both Mum and Dad could make smoke with their faces. Dad was a serious smoker and Mum was a frivolous one, restricting herself to three du Mauriers a day.
The du Maurier packet was a lovely piece of design, red with an odd black pattern like a modified swastika or cubist sphincter — there was definitely a suggestion of engulfment, of being hypnotised and drawn into the oblong void if I looked at it for too long. On special occasions I was allowed to pull the rip-cord of cellophane on a new packet, though Mum might have to raise the edge of it for my benefit. It gave me great joy that the top of the box opened upwards from a hinge on one of its long sides.
Mum and Dad demonstrated their incompatibility not only in the way they smoked — he absently masterful, she nervous — but in the way they lit the necessary matches. I watched closely, loving to see fire in all its forms, even this transitory one. Dad would blow out the flame when it had done its work with a single smart puff, without really even looking at it. Mum would wave her hand around, not quite rapidly enough to extinguish the fire she held, slowing down and wavering in a kind of panic, until she finally worked up enough velocity with her hand to strip the little stick of its flame, a fraction of a second before Dad muttered, ‘For God’s sake, m’dear! Is it so difficult? Is it strictly necessary to burn the house down?’ She was addicted to something other than cigarettes. Her air of being at odds with her surroundings was something that she insisted on, somehow. It wasn’t something that simply happened to her. Meanwhile I registered the beauty of flame, and the way it could be summoned by the agency of matches.
Adults worry too much
When I was three I made a bomfire — that’s bomfire with an ‘m’. ‘Bomfire’ always held a promise of devastation for me, smouldering away in the middle of the word. I used grass cuttings, lit with matches supplied by an older boy, who cuddled me. He sat with his legs apart, which left room for little me between them. Perhaps there wasn’t really an older boy — perhaps I stole the matches from home and he was just a story I told when everything went wrong, with the detail about him cuddling me just a bit of wish-fulfilment put in for my own benefit. If I’d made up an older boy for the purpose of spreading the blame, I might as well get some extra enjoyment out of my excuse. In my mind that was a very natural position for me, between a big boy’s legs.
Even if there really was an older boy, the bomfire was all my idea. I did the talking, calming Peterkin’s doubts. I said, ‘I know what I’m doing. I’ve seen how it’s done.’ Adding with grave assurance, ‘Adults worry too much.’ Then I burned the greenhouse down. Well, that became the family story. In the struggle for survival of rival versions of an anecdote, ‘John almost scorched the greenhouse’ has no chance against ‘John burned the greenhouse down.’ My memory of the incident is of triumph not disaster. It gave me joy to release the smoke and flame lurking inside an unpromising heap of cut grass. The word normally attached to such feelings is pyromania, but I don’t really think it covers my case. It misses the aspect of worship, the sense of a sacrament. I feel ‘pyrolatry’ comes closer to the truth.
My love of fire affected my feelings about the days we celebrated. Nothing about Christmas could compare with Guy Fawkes. For a born pyrolater like me, December 25th couldn’t hold a candle to November 5th, and not just because someone with a birthday on December 27th was bound to feel his own nativity over-shadowed. Bomfire Night was a festival with no moral improvement to offer, a gala of unholy combustion that had its own sort of holiness. It was also something that our family did rather well.
Dad never used milk bottles as rocket launchers for our family firework displays. He built his own, using broom handles sharpened at one end so that they could be driven into the ground more easily, with eyelets screwed in at intervals along the shaft. Eyelets of different sizes could accommodate different diameters of stick, without the sloppy angle that comes from a loose fit.
I suppose all this was an extension of his identity as a pilot, his sense of a general command of the air. Milk bottles were out of the question because the size of rocket he favoured would have tipped them over. Dad didn’t ordinarily enjoy spending money, but he never begrudged the expense when it came to fireworks, and perhaps a sense of family pride came into it. Even if he’d bought the same titchy little rockets as everyone else, I don’t think milk-bottle launch pads would have been good enough for the Cromer family fireworks. Not for us the 85-degree angle — 72°, even — of rockets that loll in the mouths of milk bottles before the moment of ignition. The family projectiles were never less than fully erect. Our rockets must ascend in a perfect vertical, as if they really were meant to escape the earth’s pull.