Richard Glover - Love, Clancy

Contents

The Land Before Avocado

This is vintage Glover warm, wise and very, very funny. Brimming with excruciating insights into life in the late sixties and early seventies, The Land Before Avocado explains why this was the cultural revolution we had to have Hugh Mackay

Hilarious and horrifying, this is the ultimate intergenerational conversation starter Annabel Crabb

Richard Glovers just-published The Land Before Avocado is a wonderful and witty journey back in time to life in the early 1970s

Richard Wakelin, Australian Financial Review

Flesh Wounds

A funny, moving, very entertaining memoir

Bill Bryson, New York Times

Not since Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James has there been a funnier, more poignant portrait of an Australian childhood

The Australian Financial Review

Poignant and wildly entertaining

The Sydney Morning Herald

Engrossing and extremely funny

The Saturday Paper

Heartbreaking and hilarious

The Sun-Herald

A new classic... a breathtaking accomplishment in style and empathy

The Australian

Sad, funny, revealing, optimistic and hopeful

Jeannette Winterson

Unputdownable

Matthew Parris

To Pepper

Contents

Have you had the experience of calling out to your new dog, but using the name of your old dog by mistake? It happens to me all the time. Its like a scene out of Rebecca, Daphne du Mauriers novel about a household haunted by its previous queen.

Come here, Darcy, I mean Clancy. Oh, damn, sorry.

Of course, I love my new dog fit as a fiddle, eyes bright and ears keen. But there is something about an old dog: the way in which the body may be weak but the spirit is still so eager.

My old dog ended up deaf, so he couldnt hear me coming in the front door. Id clatter up the hallway shouting his name as Id done for years, and then into the kitchen where hed be slumbering oblivious on a rug. Then, as I leant over to pat him, Darcy would suddenly see me. His head would tilt quizzically, the eyes suddenly gleaming like those of a puppy, as if to say: Whats next, boss? Where are we off to now?

These maudlin thoughts were intensified thanks to the book An Odyssey by the American writer Daniel Mendelsohn. Its a tender account of teaching Homers Odyssey to an undergraduate class whose ranks have been swelled by Mendelsohns irascible 81-year-old father. Amid the family drama, the book offers a retelling of Homers poem, including the emotional climax: the moment when Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca after two decades of travails.

Its a scene involving an old, loyal dog.

The Homeric epics date from about 800 bc. Thats a long time ago. The poems provide evidence for the early importance of dogs not just for their hunting ability or their role guarding the camp, but for their emotional succour. In The Odyssey, the hero returns home wearing a disguise so that he might assess the loyalty of his household. As Odysseus dressed as an old beggar walks up to the gates of his palace, a mangy dog is lying on a dung heap outside the palace walls. It is the loyal dog Argos, trained as a puppy by Odysseus, and then abandoned an object of revulsion, his master long since gone.

The humans are fooled by the disguise, but not so the dog. In Mendelsohns translation:

When he sensed that Odysseus was close by

He wagged his tail and lay his ears down flat,

But no longer has the strength to come to his master.

Heartbreakingly, in order to protect his disguise, Odysseus cannot acknowledge the dogs existence. He just walks past his inner torment expressed through a single tear, which rolls down his cheek.

Next, says Homer:

Deaths darkness then took hold of Argos, who

had seen Odysseus again, after twenty years.

Argos can die because he knows his master is now safely home. That, for him, is even more important than his masters touch.

Its hard not to cry at the scene, dog lover or not. Im sobbing a little myself as I type out Homers words for you, sentimental fool that I am. My young dog, Clancy, half-asleep on my bed, jumps up in order to investigate these strange choking noises coming from my throat. He stands next to my office chair and rests his chin on my lap, his tail wagging, demanding I pat him, glancing up at me to check Im okay. Like all dogs, he has this curious ability to demand love as a means of supplying it.

Clancys concern reminds me of other dogs in world literature. For instance: Sashenka, the dog in Tolstoys War and Peace. At the end of the BBCs adaptation of the book, Pierre Bezukhov is struggling to find meaning in life. He remembers the peasant who owned Sashenka and how that man talked about his little dogs spirit.

She knows how to ask for love, Pierre remembers the peasant saying, and she knows to give it. What else can you ask?

Thinking of this scene tips me into further weird choking noises, which further panic Clancy, leading to more nuzzling, more patting and more anxious upwards glances.

Argos. Sashenka. Darcy. Clancy.

Maybe all this emotion is not about old dogs and young dogs; not even about my old dog Darcy and my new dog Clancy. Its just about dogs.

When Darcy died, it seemed impossible that a new dog could ever enter our lives. After we lost him, at the age of fifteen, misery seemed to fill every part of the house. There was not a corner of the place that didnt hold a memory. In the bedroom, it was the recollection of me reading the newspaper at the start of every day, holding the Sydney Morning Herald in one hand as I stroked his head with the other, his outrage palpable when I tried to move my hand to turn the page.

Id try to explain Ive finished the Julia Baird column. I need to move on but Darcy would just push his muzzle more firmly towards me, as if to say, I think youll find shes worth reading twice.

Or in the kitchen, the way hed suddenly appear, head cocked to one side, eyes quizzical, whenever the fridge door was opened. While youre there, I dont suppose youd mind fetching a small slice of cheese?

Or in the back room, where Darcy could find some early-morning sun to bask in, his black fur hot to the touch, as if he were a battery, recharging himself.

They say, in the moments before death your life is replayed at high speed. I dont know if thats true, but as I walked home from the vet, an empty dog collar in my hand, my partner sobbing beside me, scenes from Darcys life filled my head.

Wed picked him up from a farm near Orange, almost 15 years before, a tiny kelpie puppy. Hed sat in the back seat of the car, nestled between our two young children, his head tucked down into his own body, too nervous to look around. He grew bigger, the boys grew bigger. I wonder now whether I was weeping for him or for a time of life that had passed.

Like all dogs, Darcy had a personality of his own. Thoughtful rather than rambunctious; listening hard to understand what people were saying; anxious when it came to his personal nemesis the Wheelie Bin; joyful when he was around wind or water.

He was always eager to be trained. When we first took him walking, hed overhear us talking about whether it was time to turn for home. Soon hed created his own dog-training command, looking up with a searching gaze for any mention of the word turn. Over the next few weeks, he put in effort to train his humans. In the end, we understood what he was after: at the furthest part of our usual walk, we were to stop, allow him to adopt a racing position, then deliver the brisk order turn at which point he would pivot, sprint for 200 metres back the way we came, pause, then swivel to face us.