Soldier Dog

Soldier Dog by Sam Angus

For Cary

PART I

13 May 1917 Lancashire

Twelve hours had passed. He’d last seen her at eight that morning. Faint with exhaustion and hunger, Stanley sank down. How on earth could he find a creature lighter and quieter than the wind? He called out to her but his voice was caught up and whisked away over the sedge grass. All day out searching he’d seen only five dogs. There were fewer dogs in Longridge now, just as there was less of everything, because of the War.

He rose and pushed his bicycle up, on beneath the tracery of a rowan, dizzyingly suffused and glowing with tarnished orange, on upward to Rocky Brow. Stanley called out again. A merlin rose and dashed away in alarm, but the sedge and the hawthorn gave no answer. Rocky Brow was Stanley’s last hope. He’d said to himself he’d go all the way there and then turn back. When he got home, it would all depend on Da’s mood. Stanley never knew what to expect any more. Living with Da was like living with a volcano.

As Stanley approached the brow, a magnificent hound, his head and neck strong enough to hold a stag, appeared from the other side and paused on the crest, his feathered hocks whipping like banners in the wind.

‘Where is she? Where is Rocket?’ The dog, a deer-hound cross perhaps, lifted his handsome head, looking down, beyond Stanley, on the land below as though he owned it. Stanley raised his head too. ‘Hey, boy, where’s Rocket?’

The warrior dog responded with a defiant stare, then loped easily away in the direction of Gibbon. They bred cross-dogs, deerhound mixed with collie, at Gibbon, and that was Jake, the crack Laxton sire. Da didn’t think much of the Laxtons – tinkers he called them, both them and their half-breed dogs – poachers, in his eyes.

Stanley closed his eyes and bit his lip. He’d looked everywhere. There were only three roads out of Longridge and he’d cycled three miles out on each of them, calling and calling to Rocket. Everyone in the village had said they’d look out for her, they all knew Rocket. She’d be stolen, someone had said, a dog that valuable, but she wouldn’t be stolen, she was too fast for that. She’d come home, sooner or later, but until she did, Stanley had to face Da. He rocked himself, racked with guilt, remembering Rocket with the sash draped over her, the last time she’d won the Waterloo Cup. Over a three-day knock-out competition, she’d beaten sixty-three dogs to the greatest prize a greyhound could win. He saw Da and Ma and Tom and himself, the crowd of thousands, and the tears in Da’s eyes as he held the glinting cup and chain.

‘And don’t come back till she’s found.’ That’s what Da had said. He couldn’t have meant it, couldn’t have meant Stanley to stay out all night. Miss Bird, his form teacher, had seen Stanley crossing and criss-crossing Longridge. The third time he’d passed her, she’d stopped him, and when he’d explained she’d said that of course Da would want him home, hadn’t meant what he’d said, that Rocket would come home of her own accord, that she could look after herself. Wearily Stanley rose and turned for home.

By the empty gatehouse, he turned off the lane and passed beneath the gloomy spruce that clung to Thornley’s north drive and the new lake. What should he say to Da? What would Tom say? This would never have happened to Tom. His brother would have known not to let Rocket out while she was still on heat. Stanley winced; it was all his own fault, he shouldn’t have let her out.

Stanley paused at the arched entrance to the yard. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and turned the corner.

Across the yard, next to the iron bars of the kennels, stood Da, hunched, dangerous and explosive, white hair bristling, fists swivelling in his pockets. At his feet was Rocket’s bowl, put out for her as always on the dot of five. How long had Da been standing there? Stanley gathered his courage and brushed his hair clear of his forehead.

‘I c-can’t find . . .’ His throat was prickling, his words shrivelling in his mouth. ‘She’ll c-come back . . .’ If only Da would say something, look at him even.

Da’s feet shifted, his shoulders collapsed and he tramped towards the cottage. Stanley abandoned his bicycle and followed. There was Da, already slumped in his chair, scowling into the unlit hearth. He looked so old. Da was the husk of a man, a man shrunken and emptied by grief. That hair had once been chestnut, like Stanley’s own, before sorrow turned it white, before Mother died, but Da wasn’t that old, or at any rate, he wasn’t as old as he looked.

Da’s hands fretted the edges of his green cardigan as he stared at the photographs of Tom and of Mother on the mantel. Da only ever thought about Da and about Tom. There was Tom in uniform, looking smart and brave, on his collar the red rose of the East Lancashires. Tom always had that smile in his eyes. To his right, in a separate frame, was Mother. They both had the same sandy hair, hazel eyes and steady gaze. There were six years between Stanley and Tom, Stanley was nearly fourteen to Tom’s twenty. Since Mother had died, Tom had been brother, friend and father to him. Then the day he’d turned seventeen, he’d enlisted and he’d come home, and with one hand on each of his brother’s shoulders, he’d said, ‘I’m off, Stanley. Tomorrow. Look after our da. And I’ll come back for you.’

Da had at first grown silent. Then his grief turned to anger, his long, menacing silences interrupted by sudden violent rages as his love for Stanley changed to indifference, then to wounding scorn.

Stanley would remember the golden afternoons when he and Tom and Da had lain like hares in folds of soft brown grass as Da taught them to make reed whistles and sound the song of the curlew. They’d all been together that last afternoon before Ma’s sudden death, sun-warmed and smiling, and Stanley had never imagined that all he’d thought so safe, so permanent, could fall apart.

A sudden shudder rattled Da’s body and Stanley saw him pull his cardigan tighter round himself. Stanley sat at the table, still watching Da, waiting for a moment that might be less dangerous than any other. He took a deep breath and willed his words to come out whole, not splinter in his throat.

‘Do you . . .’

Da’s glare was turning, like the slow hand of a clock, across the room to fix on him. Stanley faltered and withdrew. Da exploded in a violent rush from his chair and launched himself at the mantel. He lunged at Rocket’s silver trophy and spun round to the table, sending the ceiling light swinging wildly to and fro as he pushed the great cup into Stanley’s face. Da jerked it forward again, forcing Stanley’s head back.

‘Aye, she’ll be back. But never the same again.’ Da’s hair stood in fierce tufts, his brows twitched like malevolent centipedes. He slammed the immense trophy down. ‘A bitch never runs so fast after whelping.’ Da rammed the iron bolt across the door and headed for the stairs.

Stanley looked through smarting eyes at the bolt. That door had never, ever been locked at night. Stanley took Tom’s coat from the peg. He’d curl up in Mother’s chair, with Tom’s coat over him, so he’d hear Rocket if she pawed the door. If she didn’t come during the night, he’d leave first thing tomorrow and go to the Laxtons at Gibbon.

Through the window, Stanley saw the empty yard, the chalked slots beside each box: Goliath, Milcroft, Warrior, Murphy. Those prized pure-blood horses Da had bred and broken in, every one of them gone. The yard had once been full, a dark-eyed head at each door. Da had been proud and busy, revered across the county for his shining, fine-skinned horses. Horses with bloodlines, he used to say, as pure as gods. How those horses had loved Da. How he’d loved them. Then each and every Thornley horse, twenty-three in all, had been requisitioned by the War Office. Only Trumpet, the old cob, was left.