The Spuddy Read online

  Bello:

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  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

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  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/lillianbeckwith

  Contents

  Lillian Beckwith

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Lillian Beckwith

  The Spuddy

  Lillian Beckwith

  Lillian Comber wrote fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children under the pseudonym Lillian Beckwith. She is best known for her series of comic novels based on her time living on a croft in the Scottish Hebrides.

  Beckwith was born in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, in 1916, where her father ran a grocery shop. The shop provided the background for her memoir About My Father’s Business, a child’s eye view of a 1920s family. She moved to the Isle of Skye with her husband in 1942, and began writing fiction after moving to the Isle of Man with her family twenty years later. She also completed a cookery book, Secrets from a Crofter’s Kitchen (Arrow, 1976).

  Since her death, Beckwith’s novel A Shine of Rainbows has been made into a film starring Aidan Quinn and Connie Nielsen, which in 2009 won ‘Best Feature’ awards at the Heartland and Chicago Children’s Film Festivals.

  Dedication

  In memory of ‘The Spuddy’

  Chapter One

  When Joe died Marie Glenn decided to say goodbye to her home in the brisk little fishing port of Gaymal and take herself off to begin a new life in Glasgow. All she was leaving behind was her husband’s dog, ‘the Spuddy’, a thick set, grey-black mongrel which he had brought home as a puppy four years previously. He was called ‘the Spuddy’ simply because Joe had been in the habit of describing anyone who was, in his opinion, more than a little astute, as a ‘Spuddy’ and when the dog had begun to display a remarkable intelligence Joe had observed repeatedly, his voice full of admiration. ‘He’s a real Spuddy, that one’. So ‘the Spuddy’ he had become. Despite his hybridism (Joe used to say his coat looked as if someone had dipped him in a barrel of glue and then emptied a flock mattress over him) the dog had an air of aloof self-assurance emphasized by an arrogantly held head and a long droop of a setter-like tail which, as he moved with his easy sauntering gait, swung from side to side with the stateliness of an ermine cloak.

  The bond between Joe and the Spuddy had never developed into devotion on either side for though he had housed him, licensed him and seen that he was well fed, Joe’s feeling for the Spuddy was mostly approbation linked with an absent minded sort of affection while the Spuddy, accepting that he had an owner but not a master and too proud to beseech that which was not offered, retaliated by according to Joe the forbearing protectiveness he might have bestowed on a child.

  Joe had worked as a fish porter down at the pier and thither the Spuddy had loyally accompanied him on six mornings of every week with such regularity that people said the dog ought to be drawing the same wages as the man. And certainly the Spuddy proved himself useful. If anything was dropped into the harbour and needed to be retrieved Joe had only to call the Spuddy’s attention to it and at once, winter or summer, storm or calm, the dog would plunge in. Once he had saved a child who was in danger of drowning and people had made a fuss and said he ought to have a medal but since no one outside Gaymal got to hear of the rescue and since Gaymal itself forgot the incident within a week or two there never was any medal for the Spuddy to wear on his collar. Apart from the Spuddy’s skill at retrieving Joe valued the dog’s company because he performed two self-imposed but important tasks on the pier. Firstly he kept all loafing dogs from fouling the boxes of fish that were waiting to be loaded on to the lorries – a job he accomplished with snarling efficiency. Indeed the only time the Spuddy behaved aggressively towards other dogs was when he caught sight of them sniffing too urgently around the full boxes of fish. He ignored their interest in the piles of empty boxes since these would all be hosed clean before being used again but let any dog incautiously loiter too near the full boxes and the Spuddy would be swiftly upon him sending him yelping and racing for safety. His second task was to keep the seagulls away from the newly landed boxes of fish, a task he performed with boisterous venom for if there was anything in this world that the Spuddy had learned to hate it was the omnipresent rapacious gulls. When, among the hurry and bustle of landing fish from the boat, the weighing and auctioning, the gulls converged piratically upon the boxes of silvery fresh fish, the Spuddy would be there leaping with lightning snaps and spitting out feathers while he dodged the beaks that jabbed at him from all sides. He was responsible for many damaged wings among the local gulls and once, when he had caught the wing of a greater black-back and refused to let go, the gull had somehow managed to pull him over the side of the pier and into the harbour. But the Spuddy had held on and, while the fishermen and fishporters ceased work to watch, the contest continued among a great splashing of water and a chorus of cries from the black-back and from spectator gulls. The battle lasted all of five minutes and then the Spuddy, his nose red with his own blood, swam back to the pier steps, leaving the dead black-back floating on the water and the harbour patterned with white gull feathers.

  After Joe died the Spuddy appeared to go into semi-retirement, and though he still visited the pier from time to time to assess the activities he usually arrived in the late morning when the boats were at sea and the gulls, either hungry or gorged, arranged themselves in a white frieze along the roof ridges of the sheds and shops that adjoined the pier. It was almost as if he had called a truce with the birds. He still went home for his meal each day as soon as the clock struck twelve just as he had always done with Joe. He continued to sleep on the mat inside the porch, but Marie, who had made no secret of her aversion to dogs, and who had been appalled when Joe had insisted on introducing the Spuddy into the household had, even after four years, conceived no real liking for the dog. For Joe’s sake and because she considered it her duty she still put out the Spuddy’s meal every day but not for anybody’s sake, she vowed, was she going to take him to Glasgow with her.

  ‘You couldn’t keep a dog like the Spuddy in a room and kitchen high in a Glasgow tenement,’ she told her friends. ‘Not even if you wanted to – which she certainly didn’t.’

  She had made one or two irresolute attempts to give him away but Gaymal was a stony-hearted place where dogs were tolerated as playthings for the children only until the children were of an age to be packed off to school. Then the dogs became a nuisance and were disposed of speedily and without compunction. The few people who professed to like dogs acquired them as status symbols and were unlikely to give a home to a non-thoroughbred. Effie, one of Marie’s neighbours, had summed up the problem with soulless clarity.

  ‘What? Give a home to a beast that’s as much an accident as a rabbit on the moors?’ she had shrilled derisively at Marie’s tentative suggestion that she might take the Spuddy. ‘Indeed if folks is goin’ to be bothered with a dog then they want one that has a dece
nt pedigree so that everyone will know it’s cost good money.’

  Marie accepted the truth of Effie’s assertion. In those days, not long after the war, the fishermen of Gaymal were prosperous and they had to ensure that everything they possessed not only cost money but could be seen to have cost money. ‘You’ll just have to have him put down before you go,’ Effie had insisted. But Marie, briskly matter of fact as she was, somehow recoiled from the idea.

  ‘I don’t know indeed,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Joe wouldn’t have liked me to do that.’ The mention of Joe brought tears to her eyes.

  ‘There’s nothin’ else you can do, is there?’ pursued Effie, more gently though at seeing the tears. ‘Give him to one of the boats and get them to weight him and throw him overboard when they’re well out to sea.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem right, that,’ objected Marie hesitantly. ‘After all, the beast hasn’t been much trouble. I think the best thing to do is just to leave him here. He’s always been kind of independent and I daresay he’ll make out.’ She paused, seeing Effie’s lips tighten. ‘He’d get plenty of offal down at the pier,’ she resumed, ‘and the boats throw out plenty of food into the harbour he could get for himself. He wouldn’t starve.’

  ‘If you leave him to stray round here folks will soon get fed up with him an’ it won’t be long before one of the boats takes him out to make an end of him,’ Effie told her. ‘You’d best just give him to the Cruelty an’ then he’ll be off your mind.‘

  ‘It seems a shame.’ Marie’s voice wavered.

  Effie glared at her. ‘I’m no dog lover myself,’ she asserted, ‘but to my mind it’s not so cruel to have an animal put down as it is to leave him to stray after once givin’ him a home.’ She turned towards her own front door. ‘But I daresay I might just as well save my breath to cool my porridge,’ she said as she inserted the key. ‘You softhearted folks make your own troubles, always takin’ the easy way out.’ The door closed firmly behind her.

  Back in her own kitchen Marie tried to make up her mind whether or not she was going to approach one of the skippers to dispose of the Spuddy. If she just left him and if what Effie had predicted were true then he would end up in the sea anyway. But at least, she told herself, when that happened she wouldn’t be there and so have to feel guilty about getting rid of Joe’s dog. In the end she decided to leave the Spuddy. She reckoned Effie was right about her being too soft-hearted.

  The furniture van had left. The hire car that was to take her on the first stage of her journey had arrived. Marie settled herself in beside the driver, telling him she wished him to get away as quickly as possible and giving an explanatory nod towards the Spuddy who was hovering around as if awaiting the invitation to join her. As the car drew away from the kerb Marie turned to wave to the neighbours who had gathered to see her off. The car reached the end of the street and turned into the main road. The Spuddy stood watching it until it disappeared and sensing the finality of his rejection made no whimper of entreaty or protest. After a few minutes he climbed to the top step of the empty house and lay down, staring along the street, his mixed tobacco brown eyes shadowed with the fatalistic acceptance of his plight. The neighbours lingered gossiping for a while before returning to their own homes. The street became quiet save for the mocking echoes of gull cries carried in by a sea wind. With a sigh the Spuddy’s head sank down on to his outstretched paws but his eyes stayed wide and reflective, like those of a man meditating over future plans.

  Chapter Two

  When his son was six weeks old skipper Jake’s wife announced that she must take the baby home to show him off to her family. ‘Home’ to Jeannie was the home of her parents, a croft in the outer islands. The home Jake provided for her she always referred to as ‘the house’. Jake accepted her announcement impassively. Jeannie was forever making excuses to visit home. Either her father or her mother was ailing and needed her or there was to be a wedding in the family or a relative had just had a baby. In fact Jeannie’s relatives made so many demands on her time that in the three years since she had married him Jake doubted if she had spent more than six months with him. It hurt him that she wanted to be away from him so much of the time and he had hoped that when the baby was born she would become more attached, if not to himself, then to the home he worked so hard to give her.

  As he came through from the scullery into the kitchen where Jeannie was ironing he was pressing a towel against his newly shaven cheeks and only his eyes betrayed his unhappiness. There were times when Jake thought he ought to put his foot down about Jeannie’s frequent absences but he knew in his heart he never would. She was so fair and young and slight and he was so big and swarthy and had such an intimidatingly gruff voice that he was fearful of appearing a bully in her eyes. So he erred on the side of over-indulgence, giving her everything she asked for and never complaining of her lack of interest in him.

  ‘Is the baby old enough to travel?’ he asked, trying so hard to keep his voice gentle that it sounded almost meek.

  ‘Surely,’ returned Jeannie as she guided the iron over the sleeves of a tiny jacket.

  ‘It’s just that I’ve heard folks hereabouts sayin’ a baby’s not strong enough to take the fresh air until it’s six months old,’ he persisted, the gruffness edging back into his voice. ‘D’you not believe in that yourself?’

  Jeannie tossed her head. ‘Indeed I believed that when I was younger because that’s what the old folks say. Now the nurse says the baby’s ready to take fresh air after about two weeks. After all,’ she added, ‘it isn’t as if it’s the winter time yet.’

  Jake went over to the cot in the corner of the kitchen and lifting the coverlet gazed down at his sleeping son. His sad, tight mouth relaxed into a tender smile. Was he going to see as little of his son as he did of his wife, he wondered bitterly and looked across at Jeannie who with her back to him was still ironing. She had once seemed so shy and desirable with her clear smooth skin and glossy hair but soon after they married he noticed her shyness had given way to an almost vixen-like quality and though her complexion and hair remained as attractive as ever he rarely saw her other than as she was now in carpet slippers and overall with her hair confined in a structure of steel curlers. He let himself wish that she would dress herself up for him when he came home at weekends. But she never did. When he went away to sea on Monday mornings her hair was in curlers and when he came home on Friday nights it was still in curlers. For only about two hours on a Sunday was her hair unconfined and then, because she was going to church, it was hidden under her hat. However, this was not all that disturbed him, for it seemed that she found an awful lot of housework to do at weekends when he was at home and while he admitted it was nice to know he had a clean shining home he would have preferred it to be a place where he could relax and rest his body from the constant swing of the sea: a place where he would be greeted by a neatly dressed wife prepared to share with him the comfort of their own fireside with perhaps later a few of the neighbours dropping in for a wee dram and a ‘wee crack’ and a discussion of the week’s fishing. Like most fishermen he had a strong streak of romanticism and when he was first married he had dreamed of the weekend respites from the discomfort of the boat: of returning and opening the door of his welcoming home to call ‘I’m back, Jeannie!’; of finding her in his arms; of lifting her up and carrying her to the kitchen. But even before he had touched her she had seen the eagerness in his eyes and had evaded him. ‘She didn’t like that sort of thing,’ she had rebuffed him. ‘It was soft.’ Now at weekends he returned either to a listless greeting and the bustle of housework; the moving of furniture that she was unable to move by herself; the careful treading over newspapers that covered the constantly washed floors, or else too frequently he returned to a house that was clean and shining but was cold and empty and there would be a note on the table saying: ‘Have gone home – mother not keeping well’. At first she had stayed away only two or three weeks at a time but then her absences grew to months an
d he realised that except for financial support there was little else she wanted from him. He wondered if she wanted what any man could give her since island girls had a reputation for making their first duty the wellbeing of their parents. No matter what other commitments a woman might have she had from childhood been so indoctrinated with the belief that her loyalty was to her parents and to the homestead where she herself had been born and reared that she cleaved more naturally to them than to her husband.

  Gently Jake replaced the coverlet over his son. He cleared his throat. ‘I’d like to see a fair bit of the boy, Jeannie’ he said.

  ‘And when would you see him anyway?’ Jeannie taunted. ‘With you away at the fishing all week it’s precious little you see of your own house let alone your son.’

  ‘But Jeannie!’ he expostulated. ‘I’ve to earn money for us, haven’t I? An’ how else would I do it except for the fishin’?’ He knew just how much money he had to earn to keep up with Jeannie’s whims. She tired of things so quickly, forever demanding change and he reckoned they had bought enough to furnish three homes in the time they had been married. Only he knew how he hated to have to call out his crew in weather that made other skippers comment: ‘It’s only greed or need that would make a man go out to sea on a day like this.’

  Jeannie shrugged. ‘Well, what sort of a life d’you think it is for me here all by myself with a man only coming home at weekends and him only wanting his bed then.’

  ‘But the other wives are the same,’ he pointed out. ‘A fisherman’s wife knows what to expect before she marries him.’

  ‘Well, I can’t help it if I like company,’ she retorted. ‘It’s what I’m used to.’

  ‘Can you not make friends with the other women?’ he asked. ‘They’d be company for you.’