Death was all around. I got used to the lambs being taken off to the abattoir at the end of the summer, although I’d be upset if it was a year when I’d looked after any of them. Sometimes when a mother died, and no other ewe would adopt the offspring, the lamb would live in a blanket-lined cardboard box by the range, and before and after school I’d feed it milk from a baby’s bottle. I knew it would be more likely to stay on the farm if it were female, as it would be useful, having lambs of its own one day. But either way, I didn’t name any of the lambs after that first year, the one when I was five and looked after two males all through that cold spring.
Chickens were regularly eaten by foxes and then replaced, following repairs to the henhouse; mice tried to nest in kitchen drawers and were killed by traps set by my parents; rats who attempted to make their homes in outhouses were poisoned. I didn’t like it but – particularly when it came to the lambs and the rats – I tried to understand why some things happened as they did. Others I found more distressing, such as the killing of pheasants that my father called ‘sport’, and ‘lamping’, the night-time murdering of rabbits. But the hardest of all were the dogs.
Outside my bedroom window was a grave. Looking down and across the lawn, just a few feet into the woods, I could see a dog-shaped stone carving that marked the site. The dog – a spaniel – had belonged to the family of my father’s first wife, and it’s memorial was an object of fascination to me as a child. Perhaps my initial curiosity was as much about the ghosts of my father’s past as it was about the real dog who’d died, or the stone one that followed in its wake.
The dog sat on its hind legs, its four paws obscured beneath tangled undergrowth. It had a long nose-mouth – a bit like our dog Seamus, but smaller; flat ears; and undefined eyes, nothing more than small hollows in the stone. Its pitted head was covered with blooms of lichen, dry and scratchy, the colour of morning ash in the grate.
I used to run my hand across the dog’s head. It felt like the peeling paint on the frame of my bedroom window – good to pick at until I got one of those sharp bits stuck under my nail that made my finger sore for days.
I was about six or seven when my mother explained about the grave. It was the first time I had heard of ‘a body’ being buried and I felt confused: if the spaniel’s body was under the woods’ edge, then where was its head? I couldn’t ask; perhaps I hadn’t even formed that question in my mind at the time, but the vivid picture I had of an animal being separated into two parts stayed with me for a long time.
The stone dog must have also been confusing for Seamus. It didn’t smell of anything, it never moved nor made a sound, and it was always cold, even in summer. I used to wonder what Seamus found so interesting when he sniffed around it. I wasn’t sure whether he was attracted by the image of the dog – presumably the canine features were recognisable to him – or whether he could sense that something else lay beneath.
The stone carving was less obvious in the spring and summer months, when it was surrounded by tall cow parsley and fern, but I was always aware of its presence, as though there were a connection between us. When I played one of my favourite games – lying on the bed with Seamus, pulling the blankets around us and pretending we were on a raft in a stormy sea and it was up to me to save us – it was as though I had two dogs to look after, one living and one dead.
But there’d been another dog too, before Seamus.
Jessie arrived in the autumn when I was five. She was a liver and white Springer spaniel, about three months old, who’d been offered by a friend of my parents. I have no direct memories of Jessie, although there was once a photograph of us sitting together on a tartan rug in the garden. We were on the bit of lawn beneath my bedroom window, under a plum tree, not far from the stone dog. I imagine my mother must have taken the picture, but I don’t know what happened to it.
I can recall, in detail, the bendy Pink Panther toy I had been given for my fifth birthday. Over a foot long, it was made of a spongey kind of rubber surrounding a wire skeleton, meaning I could move the arms, legs and torso into different positions. I decided he was a boy on day one, but I didn’t name him. He had huge hands and feet, and a slightly surprised expression.
Jessie was with us for two months. I don’t remember much about the day she died, only that my father found her body on the edge of the woods. I was told later that she had choked on a piece of wire that got stuck in her throat. I must have left my Pink Panther on the floor (or on the rug – could the photograph have been taken on the day Jessie died?), and Jessie had taken it under the trees and tried to eat it.
We collected Seamus the following spring, and he soon filled the gap left by Jessie. I used to wonder about his name: the word looked as though it should sound like Seamer, a nearby village where we’d go for fish and chips. But Seamer sounded like ‘sea’, and Seamus sounded like ‘shame’. Shame-us.
GINNY THOMAS is a psychoanalyst working private practice in Cambridge. She recently completed an MA in Creative Non-Fiction at UEA, and is currently doing a Faber fiction course. She is working on a novel about art, bodies and psychosis. Her piece 'A different kind of man' appears in the 2024 UEA Non-Fiction MA Anthology.