“Children,” a friend of mine recently remarked while watching her daughter plunge her face over and over again in to a bowl of apple puree “they’re so simple, aren’t they. They don’t overthink things. Carefree! I’d love to be that carefree again!”
I was struck by two things.
Firstly that I didn’t know what, in this situation, overthinking on the part of her daughter would constitute “shall I dip my happy face into this mixture of apple and sugar again or... is that schtick getting old fast?” and secondly that I didn’t think her statement was true.
I remember as a child being called upon to sing the theme to The Wombles daily in school assemblies.
I don’t know why.
Perhaps someone somewhere in the ranks of governance had decided we needed secular music and this was all they could find, perhaps the school had some kind of indoctrination raquette going on with Bernard Cribbins. Either way I became really worryingly fixated with the lyrics and where the pause was meant to go, whether it was...
“The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we,
Making good use of the things that we find”
... as in, this is who we are (the Wombles of Wimbledon) and here is what we do (recycle shit).
This in retrospect is definitely the way you are meant to take this lyric, but also on the cards was...
“The Wombles of Wimbledon Common,
Are we making good use of the things that we find?”
... In the sense of ‘we know who we are but are plagued with self-doubt about out recycling abilities’, and...
“The Wombles of Wimbledon,
Common are we.”
...as in ‘have you been to Wimbedon, lately? You can’t move for those fucking wombles.”
Huge periods of my early life were spent cross legged in an assembly hall turning these possibilities over and over in my mind. Which one was it? What were the Wombles really like? And could I ever truly know? I mean really know.
I told this to my friend and she said that because I was an obbsessive care-worn adult, it followed that I was once an obbsessive care worn child. This was peculiar to me and not the default state of universal infancy.
Recently though I came a mob of children who gave me pause.
I say I came across them, they swarmed me in the street. There were about 8 of them, and they dragged along with them a dog without a lead, three of them holding its collar.
“‘Scuse me!” they yelled at me from across the road (for those of you not used to the Medway accent, try to imagine the cockney children of seasonal Dickens adaptions crossed with the elogated vowel sounds of people who have recently suffered strokes.)
“‘Scuse me! Is this your dog?!”
I looked down at it.
It looked dreadful.
Someone had half-heartly covered a wound on the tip of its tail with a mixture of tissue and sellotape, and it’s knees were crusted over with age.
“No.” I said “No, I’m pleased to say that’s not my dog.”
“Oh.” They looked like I might have been the person to sort the whole thing out for them. To take the dog in to my arms and cry “Yes! Skankly! You’ve finally come home!” and give them each money or some confectionary or something.
“Sorry” I said again after they continued to look at me “It’s not my dog.”
“Oh. What should we do with it?” said the lead child “We found it... by the bins.”
Shit. I thought. I am going going to have to be the one that sorts this whole thing out for them.
I told the children to stay with the dog while I walked back to my house, and got a lead for it, and the number for the vet. Who I phoned while walking back to where I’d left them.
“Hi,” I said to a receptionist who seemed to hate, not just the world but particularly the animal life it contained. “I’ve had a roving dog delivered to be by some roving children. Whats the process now? Do I bring it to you?”
“God, no!” she said, as her reception was overrun with stray dogs and she could barely see the phone for them. “I can give you the number for a dog catcher”
“Dog catcher? Really? I thought they only existed in American films”
“Do you want it or not?”
“Hold on I don’t have a pen”
I ran the distance back to my house and she listened to the thump of me running and my breathing down the phone. She knew, she must have know exactly what I was doing.
“Ok,” I gasped once I was through the door, “Ok, I have a pen.”
“The numbers 01634 (that’s the area code so I knew that!)”
“Yes right”
“111 double 1... 1”
“Right.”
I threw the pen down. She was clearly comprised of spite.
When I got back to the children I found them exactly where I’d left them, I’d really expected them and the dog to be long gone by now but there they were, forming a protective circle around him. One of them had bought it a dish of water from his nearby ground floor flat.
“I’m phoning a dog catcher.” I announced, and they nodded sagely, and motioned for me to join them in the circle. I was put interminably on hold, while the dog catcher, presumably, caught more urgent dogs.
One of the children tapped me on the shoulder while I waited. His name, he told me, was Tommy, and he looked like he was carrying some unspeakable burden, he had the heavily ringed eyes of Korean war veteran who has seen dreadful things, and is weary now.
“It’s hard to know what to do isn’t it.” he sighed “It’s hard to know what to do when you find these dogs.” He said it as if he was constantly coming up against the problem. As if he couldn’t leave the house without being set upon by ancient wayward labradors.
Together we gazed forlornly at our charge. The dog was probably about 12 and in addition to the scabby knees I noticed that it was mainly comprised of bald bits and pendulous fatty lumps. It was uncastrated, it’s hips no longer worked, all things being even it probably should have bitten one or more of the childrens faces off by now but there it was, allowing itself to be lead meekly around by three of them, each tugging its collar in a slightly different directions. Meek and peaceful. It looked up at me with milky eyes “I’m a happy camper!” they seemed to say.
At long last, the dog catcher asnwered the phone.
“Hello, I’ve found a dog and I’d like you to come out and catch it”
He asked me to describe it and I said it was black and very old.
“Warn them about its scabby knees” hissed Tommy conspiratorially. “Tell them it’s got scabs”
“It’s got scabs.” I repeated, “it’s a very scabby dog.”
Undissuaded by this because he was a consumate professional, the dog catcher took my details and said he'd arrive in 20 minutes.
Knowing that 20 minutes is a lifetime when you’re ten so I got the children to go round the circle and tell me their names and ages and if they had any pets. Though what I was really trying to establish in a roundabout way was whether any excessive worries, or deep but pointless trains of thought they liked to return to.
I wasn't disappointed.
The main thing I took from this exercise was that one of them was called Tiresias. And he had rabbits... but he wasn’t allowed to touch them.
He didn’t know why.
I tried to work out what, aside from the obvious, was strange about this situation before realising that Tiresias is the one in Greek myth that is both a man and a woman at different stages in his life. I wanted to know the story behind his parents picking this name, I wanted to know if they knew!
Tiresias had found a stick the end of which he was worrying away with one hand while looking with concern at the dog. Tommy, with a melancholy befitting him, chose this moment to take a harmonica from the pocket of his shorts.
“Look,” he said holding it out to me solemnly “at my mahonica. Sometimes I’m scared that if I suck too hard, I might swallow a bit of it”
“Yes” I thought, “that’s exactly the kind of thing I would have worried about too.”
I was pleased in a bitter sweet sort of way by how much my interactions with them were confirming my theories on the care-worn nature of childhood and disproving my friends, and I was just about to ask them ‘so do you think it’s meant to be the Wombles of Wimbledon (line break) common are we, or the Wombles of Wimbledon Common, are we making good use, etc...” when the dog catcher arrived.
It was over very quickly.
I’d expected a high octane chase and a - well - a catching process. I’d hoped we would all stand around and hum the Benny Hill theme while he ran round in circles after the dog for a few minutes but as it was he just got out and lifted the unresisting dog into the back of the van, and the process was over.
I signed a great deal of paper work, while Tommy sat, nose to nose with the crate, looking troubled.
“Are they going to kill it if no one adopts it?” Tommy asked me.
“No of course not” I said. “(Will you?)” I mouthed at the dog catcher, he shook his head.
The children swarmed the van to say one final goodbye to the dog and the dog catcher rolled his eyes at me as if it were my job to get out a broom and start dispersing them.
Eventually they backed away of their own accord. Once the dog was gone I’d expected them to wander off into the afternoon, but they wanted to have a sort of post-event discussion. A discursive chat, a good long think about exactly what had happened.
“It’s sad now he’s gone isn’t it.” said Tommy, playing a few mournful bars on the mahonica.
This was too much, my experience with them all had more than proved my point, even I wanted them to buck up a bit now.
“What a story though!” I said “you guys found and saved a dog. This will give you something to talk about at show and tell. Do you still do that?”
They didn’t, it’s gone apparently. I explained what it was and they all agreed that if they were going to it do it they would definitely show and tell Tommy’s mahonica.
“What about the dog you just saved?” I asked. They all agreed that now the dog was gone, they were pretty much over the dog. Mahonicas though, they the wave of the future. Tireseare waved this stick which had gone from being a sort of staff of worry, to a wonderful sword, as if to say ‘never mind the dog - this stick though... I mean look at this fabulous stick!’.
“You can do it for show and tell!” said Tommy kindly giving me the story out of pity, seeing that I was dissapointed by how quickly they had all moved on.
“I don’t do show and tell I’m an adult” I said before realising that between the blogs and the standup - I was lying. I was probably going to get much more milage out of this story, think a lot more about it, than any of them.
The cheery manner in which they’d dismissed and tossed my way what I’d thought would be The Event of their summer, made me question my theories. Clearly the drawn, worn face of Tommy was testament to the fact that a child's life is not all apple puree face dipping as my friend thought. But probably not quite as careworn as I’d thought either. They’d all bounced back with wonderful ease.
Still though, there something very reassuring about the notion that I wasn’t a pecularly careworn child. That just as I’d sat in my school hall wondering if I could ever truly know the soul of a womble, there was now a new generation sitting cross legged in the same hall thinking “God, I hope I haven’t swallowed any parts of the harmonica today” or... “Oh! Why?! Why am I not allowed to touch my own rabbits?”
