The Silver Fox

 

          When I was a very little girl my grandmother had a black jacket with a flamboyant fur collar that she said was a Silver Fox.  She said her Edgar had treated her to it after a particularly gratifying day at the races back in 1930 or thereabouts.   She always wore it when she was going somewhere special and sometimes even on a trip to Gravesend market if she was intending to make more than one purchase from Strongy.    It was some years before I quite realized that the collar had started life on an animal and was a relative of the red fox reputed to live in the adjacent countryside.  Back then it was an animal we rarely caught sight of and Mr Clarke at school said that was because it was naturally shy and fearful of human beings.   When I first saw the Keeshond puppy I was to become owner of I was immediately reminded of the Silver Fox collar.

More recently I was astonished to discover that these days a Keeshond puppy might set you back several thousand dollars.  I imagine the price depends a great deal on the breeding but even so when put alongside what my father paid for the puppy he acquired a few days before Christmas in nineteen-fifty it seems extortionate.   He handed over very nearly five pounds for our puppy at a time when that sum represented a week’s wages.   It was my Christmas present and a very special one indeed and by rights should have arrived at the bottom of my bed early on the morning of the twenty-fifth but that was impossible because the breeder made it quite clear that she wasn’t prepared to be all things to all people.   So it was take it or leave it on the twenty-first and we took it.   My mother rapidly established the fact that I certainly would not be getting anything else for Christmas so not to expect anything and not to make a fuss when my brother opened his presents.  I promised faithfully that I would be as good as gold but of course by the time the twenty-fifth arrived and the puppy had been with us for several days the promise was hard to keep.   Anticipating this my father gave me a copy of Treasure Island which I pretended to find thrilling as I glared furiously across the room at my brother exclaiming over a toy truck and a junior printing set.   Why, I wondered, could I not also have a printing set?   

However, the puppy was quite delightful, a ball of silver-grey silky fluff and more than ready to be a friend heaven-sent but having said that he did not come without problems.   The first was the question of his name which I felt I should choose as he was supposedly my dog.  I chose Trixie and when my father said that was unacceptable as it was a female name I simply changed it to Tricksie because I was planning to teach him a lot of tricks.   My father said dogs were unable to spell and his own choice was Rex and when I hysterically sobbed that he was now accustomed to Trixie/Tricksie I was told I could ease him gently and without emotional trauma into the new name via the diminutive of Rexie.   I very much disliked the name Rexie.    The second stumbling block was that because he had grown up in The Medway Home for Orphan boys my father was totally familiar with harsh treatment and when the poor animal failed to get the hang of toilet training in the first week of his tenure he at once dealt out to him what appeared to me to be savage beatings with a rolled up newspaper.     My reaction was perhaps predictable whereupon it was patiently explained to me that Rexie knew right from wrong because his age of nearly four months placed him somewhere between that of a boy of fourteen or even fifteen.   And would you, I was asked, allow such a boy to deliberately soil your kitchen floor on a daily basis?    When my grandmother visited on New Year’s Day she said she’d no more put up with a dog piddling all over the place than she would a child and that was a fact.   But then she didn’t hold with dogs because it wasn’t as if they were cats and could keep down the mice was it?   My father, who was not altogether accustomed to my grandmother agreeing with him about anything, stood up a little straighter and said it was a well-known fact that some dogs were good ratters to which she retorted that her tomcat Mick was as good a ratter as any you’d find anywhere and what’s more had never piddled in the house in all the years she’d had him.  Moreover, he was put outside each night and didn’t howl like a baby when that happened.  She certainly didn’t hold with animals being kept inside all night.   My mother told her that the problem was that a lot of money had been handed over for the dog on account of it having a Pedigree and as everyone knew animals with Pedigrees could be delicate.   At that Old Nan said something like delicate her arse and banged her fist on the table.  

It would be fair to say that Rexie, who rapidly became simply Rex was not a total success with any of us even me at first and looking back I can only feel sorry for him.   My father had hankered after a gun dog, preferably a black Labrador that he might call Betsy, and take out on the marshes with him to catch rabbits.   As he did not own a gun and had never dared raise the idea of ownership of such a weapon with my mother it was difficult to see quite how this dream could ever be fulfilled.  My brother was more interested in birds than in dogs and my mother was largely uninterested in pets of any kind.  At the age of ten I was of course quite obsessed with the idea of animal ownership and thought I might at some future stage explore the notion of working in a zoo because the more unusual and exotic an animal was declared to be, the more I wanted to somehow connect with it. 

Initially the Keeshond puppy had seemed exotic which is of course why I had wanted him so much but he rapidly became less glamorous and more fearful as he struggled to understand what exactly it was that he was doing wrong on the kitchen floor, and on several occasions in my bed when I smuggled him upstairs from time to time.   It would be true to say that my mother’s fury did not abate for some considerable time when she discovered the mishaps in the bed for which both of us were punished.  At one stage I even considered running away from home and hiding with Rex in Cobham Woods where we would live off blackberries and cobnuts and mushrooms and it wouldn’t matter where he chose to make his lavatory.  When I failed to persuade Molly from number 31 to at least consider the idea of coming with me together with her dog Rover, I did give a little thought to the fact that a woodland life might be lonely but imagined that it would be possible to perhaps be befriended by a family of foxes or badgers.  Although I had never seen a badger except in an Enid Blyton wildlife book, very occasionally when walking back to York Road in the half light of a summer evening a rustle on the side of the lane might cause my father to whisper that it was a fox and we would stand still hardly daring to breathe in order to catch a better glimpse of it.   And then I would return home in great excitement to acquaint my brother of our brush with nature and announce that he should have been there.  When put alongside the manner in which these animals have now invaded towns and cities and brazenly parade streets tipping over dustbins to search out the very best leftovers McDonald’s can offer, the behavioural change can only be described as astonishing.   In Islington according to my daughter the family of foxes residing in her garden have even learned the judicious use of pedestrian crossings so perhaps it is never wise to make assumptions as to how the world is likely to change in the space of little more than half a century. 

Back in 1950   I found myself wondering about foxes a great deal and asked my father if they could be tamed, silver ones in particular.   He said not as far as he was aware and anyway there were no silver ones in England which response did not please me at all.   I had already decided to transform and remodel Rex the Keeshond with the unpredictable bladder to become Riga The Silver Fox and it would have been helpful if at least one or two could be found occasionally in Cobham woods.   I am now no longer sure where the name Riga came from but it sounded the right kind of name for the animal I had in mind.  

The first person I apprised of the dog’s altered identity was June Dawson who lived at the Buckingham Road corner of Shepherd Street when I met her pushing her little brother Christopher towards Trokes’ shop.   She stopped to tell me she had now read all the Secret Seven books in the local library and ask how many I’d read so I told her that I finished them all years ago which was of course quite untrue.   She then asked me how dear little Rex was and I said she now had to call him by his real name which was Riga.  I was slightly annoyed when this instruction did not seem to unduly faze her or cause her to ask why but overall I started to feel a little more cheerful.   

I began to tell everyone, well everyone under the age of twelve or thirteen to be more precise, that my exotic Christmas gift of a Keeshond puppy called Rex had been simply a cover story.  I had not been at liberty to reveal the truth about his identity before now. He was not a domesticated animal at all but in fact a Silver Fox and the original information had been a necessary stratagem - a ploy because he was part of a secret special breeding programme to produce tame foxes for the world market.     I had been specifically chosen as part of the Trial but they must not tell any adult because it was still very much Top Secret.  All the girls seemed quite accepting of this information and little Marjorie Ditchburn hopped excitedly from one leg to the other and said I was just so lucky, even observing that it was a great pity she couldn’t tell her Mum because she was sure she would find it very interesting news.   A number of the boys on the other hand were harder to convince and Peter Jackson said he was going to ask Mr Clarke first thing on Monday morning when he got to school because if there was such a thing as a special breeding programme he would know about it for sure.   I now can’t remember whether he carried out this threat but at the time I was quite worried that he might. 

Oddly enough many years later I learned from Google that at the time I had been inventing this most unlikely tale a Russian scientist called Dmitri Belyaev was conducting a long-term experiment to study the process of domestication in dogs.  I don’t know what his findings were but it appears that instead of using wolves, he chose to use silver foxes.  I do so wish I had known this at the time!