The Right Write Rite

Dogbasket.

Warm, cosy.

A place of one’s own.

But one can’t call a dogbasket a room, a refuge.

Surely a dogbasket is a place for a dog. Yes, well that would seem reasonable, but life’s not like that.

Not my life anyway. No, this isn’t a sobber; not a tale of woe and degradation. It’s not a baleful biography of torture and abuse. It’s my story of how I grew up in a world of strange things, with a dogbasket and a plaid cushion that smelt of puppy.

When the puppy went, they didn’t want to waste the dogbasket. It was wicker, hand-made and had cost a fortune. The puppy had been a nuisance and it disappeared in December, but the basket stayed, in the kitchen, by the fire. And when my brother arrived, purplish pink and with a withered arm, I was given the bed out in the scullery, moved from by the fire because the nappies had to be hung there. When the doctor came to see my brother he asked after the puppy. Mum lied, “It’s in the garden,” so, I yelped just like a puppy.

Just a little yelp, more like a seal than a puppy, but I think the doctor heard me. I went to school occasionally, but often didn’t stay for long. I found I couldn’t concentrate on school work and the hills outside our classroom looked far more appealing than the chalkboard at the end of the high ceilinged room. One day, I forgot myself and after morning play came into the school room and curled up by the fire. The lack of a basket didn’t confuse me, it seemed so natural just to turn myself around a couple of times and lie down on the ground. The children laughed loudly, so the teacher beat me, but as soon as I was at my desk I longed to be back by the fire. I soon forgot how to read; while the others progressed from Janet and John, I could barely say “bat” or “ball”, though the picture of the boldly striped object excited me so much that I yelped out loud when the teacher held up the picture. Sometimes, I’m sure she did it as a joke, because it made the children laugh, but sometimes it was only me in the classroom.

It was on one such occasion that four grisly old teachers at the front of the class all stared at me as I sat in front of them, trying to stifle my puppy yelps. They peered down and scratched at notebooks and my teacher said, “Thank you Millie, that’s enough now.” Soon after that I was refused entry to the school. My parents shouted at each other. My mother cried and the baby, ever present at her breast, shook as she wept violently; his little arm, like a strip of pallid jelly, wobbled loose of the swaddling blanket that appeared to keep him calm and he started to scream. Later that night, as I waited to be fed, my father returned from the village with a smell about him I did not recognise. He staggered slightly, levelled a kick at my head and then marched into the scullery. Using words incomprehensible to me he stood by the dogbasket, undid his trousers, tried vainly to steady himself and then, with thundering ferocity and a steady golden stream, went to the toilet on my bed. I was nine, I think, I never went back. My husband says he doesn’t believe me. When I asked for a large dogbasket for an engagement present he assumed I would want the dog as a wedding gift. When we moved into our house, the wicker bed was put in the living room, in front of the open fire that had caused ructions as we house hunted – no fake gas fires, no blocked up chimney breasts filled with pebbles and candles, it had to be an open fire, with space for a dogbasket. And the night he found me in it when he returned from the pub, he dragged me out and called me a freak. With great hilarity he re-enacted my father’s bed-wetting antics all over the basket and then told me he was leaving me for a woman who kept horses. So, now I am alone. I’ve resisted the temptation to buy another dogbasket, I’ve put a plaid blanket in my large brass bed and that has to suffice when I find I am disheartened by the world and all its horrors. I have a place of my own now, my husband didn’t want it. He told the judge I was mad and should be left to suffer in my own shit. The judge said I should keep the house and my husband got custody of an injunction. I’m happy, sometimes. But it's hard to get warm and cosy on your own.