There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
But when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.
(from Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Power of the Dog’)
When I came across Kipling’s poem, I thought not only of dogs I had loved but of Owd Bob, a book designed to tear the heart. For many years I thought I was the only person, apart from my family, who knew about it, and among them I was certainly the one who read and reread it and cried over it the most. Owd Bob, of course, is a dog and a beautiful one, but it is not noble Bob but his savage and ugly rival Red Wull who leaves the heartstrings in shreds in this tale of Cumberland sheep farmers and their dogs.
My raddled copy of Owd Bob: The Grey Dog of Kenmuir, with its broken spine and pages falling out, sits in my bookcase alongside other lifelong companions such as Come Hither (which I was delighted to see featured in Issue 43 of Slightly Foxed), but as an adult I feared to open it, because I had once loved it so much. I never knew who wrote it since the title page was missing and the wording on the spine was obliterated by brown sticky tape, until some years ago I mentioned it to my bibliophile brother-in-law, who came up with the author’s name – Alfred Ollivant. Subsequently I discovered not only that Owd Bob, published in 1898, had been a bestseller here and in America, but also that several films (which sound like travesties, although Will Fyffe is said to have turned in a great performance in one of them) were based on it, and that Alfred Ollivant had been a prolific writer.
Last autumn, to my astonishment, a friend was sent a handsome volume entitled Alfred Ollivant’s Bob, Son of Battle: The Last Gray Dog of Kenmu
Subscribe or sign in to read the full article
The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.
Subscribe now or Sign inThere is sorrow enough in the natural way From men and women to fill our day; But when we are certain of sorrow in store, Why do we always arrange for more? Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.
(from Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Power of the Dog’)
When I came across Kipling’s poem, I thought not only of dogs I had loved but of Owd Bob, a book designed to tear the heart. For many years I thought I was the only person, apart from my family, who knew about it, and among them I was certainly the one who read and reread it and cried over it the most. Owd Bob, of course, is a dog and a beautiful one, but it is not noble Bob but his savage and ugly rival Red Wull who leaves the heartstrings in shreds in this tale of Cumberland sheep farmers and their dogs. My raddled copy of Owd Bob: The Grey Dog of Kenmuir, with its broken spine and pages falling out, sits in my bookcase alongside other lifelong companions such as Come Hither (which I was delighted to see featured in Issue 43 of Slightly Foxed), but as an adult I feared to open it, because I had once loved it so much. I never knew who wrote it since the title page was missing and the wording on the spine was obliterated by brown sticky tape, until some years ago I mentioned it to my bibliophile brother-in-law, who came up with the author’s name – Alfred Ollivant. Subsequently I discovered not only that Owd Bob, published in 1898, had been a bestseller here and in America, but also that several films (which sound like travesties, although Will Fyffe is said to have turned in a great performance in one of them) were based on it, and that Alfred Ollivant had been a prolific writer. Last autumn, to my astonishment, a friend was sent a handsome volume entitled Alfred Ollivant’s Bob, Son of Battle: The Last Gray Dog of Kenmuir. It had just been published by the New York Review of Books, in their Children’s Collection, and is a retelling of Owd Bob by the celebrated American writer Lydia Davis who contributes a fine and illuminating afterword. She, like me, encountered the book as a child and has been haunted by it ever since. Yet I think this is not a children’s book, and was not intended to be one, with its gory details of dogs fighting to the death, a child-beating father, malice and revenge. As a canine heartbreaker, however, it’s up there with the story of Gelert and the song ‘Old Shep’. Back in the 1950s, the book’s dialect and dense prose helped me to skip and gloss over some of the awful things that happen to dogs and sheep, although I never forgot them. Lydia Davis says of her new version, ‘I did not want Ollivant’s powerful story to be forgotten simply because it was difficult to read, so I had an idea. I would go through the whole book, and change the speech of the characters from their Cumbrian or Scottish way of speaking to regular, standard English, so that it would be not so hard to read.’ She has done a sensitive job of making the story accessible without losing its brutality or pathos (although it’s amusing that British children will have to translate rutabagas back into swedes) and I’m delighted that through her the book will live on, even though it might tear the hearts of a new generation of young readers. Deeply sentimental, this story of a thrawn Scotsman, for all that it is set in the Dales, seems very much of the sometimes maudlin Scottish Kailyard school of writing – to which my sisters and I, as children, were no strangers. J. M. Barrie’s Sentimental Tommy, Ian McLaren’s Young Barbarians and more were staples of our reading. Perhaps it was something irredeemably Kailyard in me which drew me to Owd Bob, although it came into my possession when we were living in the English village of Shoreham in Kent. Our road sloped down to iron railings behind which ran the river Darent. On the corner was the dark shop, stocking musty packets and tins, kept by the terrifying, white-moustached Mr Besley. He hated customers who spent only a few odd coppers with him while doing the rest of their shopping elsewhere. We were sent there occasionally to buy an emergency packet of ten Woodbines or a box of matches. ‘A box of scratches?! And the next please?!’ he would roar, before slamming the matches down on the counter. To the left of Besley’s was a terrace of little houses named Riverdale Cottages, with gardens fronting the river, and in one of these lived Bob Eastwood with his elderly mother. After Mrs Eastwood died, Bob knocked on our door to ask my mother, who taught at the village school, if she would like some books. Bob was stammeringly shy, with a big, mild face like a bullock’s, and hair Brylcreemed back from a wide forehead, and he walked with a limp. When my mother offered her condolences Bob replied desolately, ‘Yes, she worshipped the ground I trod on.’ I saw his mother in the clouds, watching mournfully as Bob’s black orthopaedic boots clumped up the stairs to her empty bedroom. Among the pile of books he gave us were mildewed copies of that veteran tear-jerker East Lynne, the intriguingly titled Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles, and Tom Brown’s Schooldays. And there was Owd Bob. Alfred Ollivant (1874–1927) was born in Kent, the son of a colonel in the Royal Horse Artillery. He intended to make his career in the army but a riding accident in which he was seriously injured put paid to that. His recovery was painful and took many years. Lying on his back, he wrote Owd Bob. At the beginning of the story, Adam McAdam, a diminutive Scottish sheep farmer exiled among Dalesmen, self-appointed pariah and eloquent quoter of his beloved Burns at every opportunity, is an embittered man who detests his neighbours, particularly the good James Moore and his family. McAdam’s wife is the only person who can understand him and sweeten his temper. When she dies he takes to the bottle, lapses into squalor, and treats his little son David with cruel neglect. David, blithe and bonny, takes after his mother and, as he grows, repays his father with contempt and mockery and spends as much time as he can in the Moores’ welcoming farmhouse. Eventually, he falls in love with the daughter of the house, Maggie, who, like all the female characters, is wise, kind and forbearing to the point of saintliness. All the blame for his own isolation lies with Adam McAdam who, with his vitriolic tongue, rejects every hand proffered in friendship. As somebody remarks to general agreement, ‘When he’s drunk he’s violent, and when he ain’t, he’s vicious.’ Yet this ‘son of Hagar’ can inspire pity as well as hatred. At the heart of the story are the two dogs, James Moore’s Bob, a scion of the great grey dogs of Kenmuir, legendary sheepdogs of the Dales, and Adam McAdam’s ill-favoured foundling Red Wull, known as the Tailless Tyke, feared by all and unswervingly devoted to his master. The dogs are rivals for the Shepherd’s Trophy, the silver cup which is the accolade for a sheepdog. McAdam is determined that Wull shall triumph over Bob, who has won it twice and with a third win will seal his triumph and keep the trophy. Every man for miles around has his money, and his heart, on Bob. Wull does wrest the trophy from Bob, but McAdam’s disputed victory leads only to more ostracism and pain, and the final violent estrangement from his son. Then the worst happens. A sheep-killer is on the loose. Nobody dares believe his own dog is the Black Killer, as the elusive and fiendish renegade is named. At length the suspects are narrowed down to two – the saintly Bob and the hated Wull. The narrative is gripping, a tour de force of tension, before a prolonged and terrible vengeance is exacted. It would be unbearable whichever dog was exposed as the Black Killer, and therein lies the power and the humanity of the book. Its ending is redemptive, leaving that ache of loss which knows that everything could have been so different if only . . . While my old heart doesn’t break quite as it did when first I read Owd Bob, I am still affected by it and admire the humour and compassion in this masterly portrayal of the tightly knit community of Kenmuir set against the grandeur and harshness of the landscape of fell, dale and pike, and I recognize in the psychologically astute depiction of Adam McAdam a personification of the duality said to be inherent in the Scottish character. And to this day I can never hear the line of Auld Lang Syne which goes ‘And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere . . .’ without seeing a heartbroken old man reaching out his hand to seek a dog’s bloody paw.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 48 © Shena Mackay 2015
About the contributor
Shena Mackay was born in Scotland, and now regrets having changed her name from Mackey to Mackay when her first book was published in 1964. A collection of her stories, Dancing on the Outskirts, was published in 2015.