Feed My Dear Dogs. Emma Richler

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СКАЧАТЬ minutes, darling. Why don’t you check on the children? Yes, right now would be a good time for a boxing lesson. Oh well. Maybe that is what this time of day is for, figuring out when is a good time for things, I don’t know.

      My dad does not give lessons in a lot of things, or many lessons in any one thing and when he does, they do not last very long, maybe eight minutes or so and then he’s knackered and needs a drink or a tomato on a plate because he has had enough of your company, the only person he wants for long is Mum. When he decides to give a lesson in a thing, it’s wise to be at the ready and abandon all other activity. Up in the tree, Jude’s and mine, I try to think of what else besides boxing I have ever had a lesson in from my dad. Not much. But that is because we need to learn for ourselves plus we go to school five days a week and we have Mum. And Ben. I don’t believe my dad knows how much Ben teaches us.

      I’m not tired any more. I’m getting stiff up here.

      Here’s a thing. Dad is a sports writer and he hardly ever plays sports with us. A football rolls up to him on the terrace when he is reading and he ignores it completely, or he says, Oh! the way he does when the telephone rings and ruins his concentration. One time he tossed a cricket ball at Jude but kept aiming at his head for some reason, with Jude stepping away neatly each time and me chasing all over the shop for the ball and trying to explain the rules of bowling to my dad all by myself, because it was just too many words for Jude who could only say, She’s right, Dad, she’s right, Dad, while Dad shifts impatiently and says, OK OK OK, to my instructions, and then goes right on pelting the ball skyward like Jude is a coconut on a stick, my dad simply unable to do two things at once, listen and bowl. It was pretty terrible all round and I do not recall which one of them walked off first, dropping bat and ball in the middle of the garden for me to stare at, both of them slamming the door on sports.

      What exactly does my father do around here besides sports writing and lying on sofas and talking to Mum, sometimes twirling her about the room in an olden times dance step involving twirls and sudden dips that look a bit dangerous? Sometimes he messes about in the kitchen, OK, and mostly on Saturdays. Other times he grapples with our homework mainly to see where we are in terms of world knowledge. NOT VERY FAR, he thinks. Also, he drives Ben and Jude to school, yelling at them in a jovial manner while shaking the car keys in the air. Make tracks! Shake a leg! Did we get you out of bed, Jude? Keeping you awake, are we? Feel like walking to school? Ha ha ha! It’s kind of noisy, but my brothers do not mind, carrying on cramming their satchels in a leisurely manner, with pieces of toast clamped in their jaws and Gus peering at them with great attention and a slight frown, and Harriet raising her arms aloft and crying out What larks! We shall have larks! which is her new favourite expression from another book Mum is reading to us right now by Mr Charles Dickens, Great Expectations it is called, and this sounds to me always like the name of a house but it is not, it is the name of a feeling.

      Here’s another thing. My dad is good at short cuts and he has taught me one or two. 1) How to tidy up your hair when you do not have a big thing for combs and are in a needing-to-be-neat situation. Step out of sight and make your fingers comblike, as in a garden fork, say. Keep your fingers stiff and push them through your hair from the front to the back, going slow to allow for snags. Too fast and you get a pain in the roots. You can use both hands. 2) If you are not in the mood for cutting and cutlery, here is how to have a sandwich snack quick sticks. Spread out what you want on one slice of bread, peanut butter, Cheddar, etc. Now FOLD over the bread. This way there is one less edge things can spill out of and your sandwich is ready fast, and you need a single knife only, a spreading knife. Lastly, use your palm or a napkin for a plate, or eat outside to reduce clean-up operations. 3) In an emergency, here is how to unscuff your shoes. Stand on one leg and polish the toe part on the back of your standing leg. Forget about the heels. It is too hard and people do not pay a lot of attention to heels unless they have very fine eyesight and are watching you walk away and by then, you are gone, so what. Unscuffing works best on trousers, but socks and tights will do also. Another shoe tip from Dad is handy for when you are bashing off to school in a flurry, or from indoors to outdoors when at school. Do not tie your laces too tight. That’s it. Now you can slip your feet in and out, no tying and untying necessary, just as if your lace-ups are slip-ons! Be careful NOT to do this in front of Mean Nun who hates you, or she will say, as she did one time, Weiss! Weiss! Untie those laces and tie them up at once! You are a very lazy girl! Mean Nun is a bit crazed when it comes to shoes.

      So these are some useful short cuts my dad has taught me, and I certainly hope he will teach me more as we go along because I am only ten going on eleven and cannot take everything in at once and there are things I do not need to know just yet. It changes all the time, the things a person needs to know. A stranger might think a small girl does not need to know how to box, but that is an opinion among others. I have had just one boxing lesson so far and here is how it went.

      ‘Hey, Jem,’ my dad says. ‘It’s time for a boxing lesson. You will need to know how to box where I come from!’

      Whoa. What does he mean? I am getting all kinds of strange ideas about this place, this place where in winter it never stops snowing, which is what I explained to Lucy White, how it snows all the time, all-out snow, nothing like the wee sprinkling of frost and fluff we have here.

      ‘In winter,’ I said in a proud voice, in the manner of an Antarctic explorer, ‘it snows non-stop. That’s how it is.’

      One proof I have of this ferocious snowing in my dad’s country is from Victor, my second favourite comic after Commando. In Victor there is a story about a dog called Black Bob, who is a sheepdog, not the roly-poly hairy kind resembling a sheep himself who traipses about Alpine passes bearing a tiny keg of cognac for types who have fainted in Alpine passes, no, Black Bob is a real sheepdog, the looking after sheep kind. There is a proper name for this kind of dog and Harriet will know it. All I have to do is slide my comic her way one day without asking anything directly, and she will tell me the name of this dog plus related details. It is not important right now.

      Black Bob is good-looking and pretty sleek, a word denoting strength and slimness in a dog or horse, and possibly even a human, and seeming to me a handy word to call upon if I get to be a sports writer. I make a note of it in my Mendoza notebook. Black Bob goes to Canada in this story, though I do not know how he got there from Yorkshire where he lives with a handsome shepherd in a flat cap and waistcoat, thick black belt and dashing little white scarf. I do not know how he ended up in Canada having adventures because I missed out on some issues of Victor due to Jude taking a little time off from robbery. Never mind. Maybe for Black Bob travel is important, who knows.

      In Canada, Black Bob stays with a Mountie, a Canadian type of policeman in a very big hat which must be downright annoying to run with against the wind. It could fall off, the chinstrap grabbing at the Mountie’s throat, or it could hold him up like a sail on a boat. It is not an aerodynamic hat. Jude has explained a thing or two to me regarding aerodynamics. This is no hat for a man on active duty. The Mountie and Bob have a big feeling for each other, close to how it was with the shepherd, a man Bob misses a lot. He needs to get back to Yorkshire, but meanwhile he has adventures in Canada largely involving the chasing of criminals in snowstorms, meaning nearly all the boxes in the story are white spaces except for Black Bob and the Mountie peeping through the snow, and skinny lines scraping across the page at a slant to indicate fierce winds, not very hard work for the artist, it seems to me, when the background is all snow.

      The Mountie has a problem. He has a problem of snow-blindness, which I am now quite worried about also even though it seems to be a passing sort of blindness, for storms only. There is the Mountie, suddenly snow-blind, trying to chase criminals with his arms outstretched like Harriet doing her Egyptian mummy act and now Bob has to do everything, catch the criminals, take care of the Mountie, all of it. This is no surprise to me because Black Bob is always the main hero in every adventure, having a single-most desire plus the qualities of calm and modesty, making him an even bigger hero. Nothing matters to Bob except that his master is safe and СКАЧАТЬ