The 1962 Club: A Dog So Small / Philippa Pearce

Of all the books I earmarked for the 1962 Club, A Dog So Small is the one I’d never have picked up otherwise. What’s less interesting than a book about a dog? Only a book about a cat, right? But I trusted Philippa Pearce to know what she was doing, and was vindicated.

Ben Blewitt is the middle child of five, and an outlier. He has two older sisters, May and Dilys, who are occupied with May’s impending wedding, and two younger brothers, Paul and Frankie, who are occupied respectively with a pigeon and a white mouse. (I’ve thought of something less interesting than a book about a cat: a book about a pigeon.) But today Ben’s in high spirits, because it’s his birthday and his Grandpa has promised him a dog. At dawn, he ventures out.

This morning Ben was making for the River – some way from his home, but worth the walk. Looking over the parapet, you had the only really extensive view possible in this part of London, and that was the kind of view you needed when you were thinking of a really big dog.

Pearce maintains this lovely child’s-eye view throughout the book, which tells of Ben’s disappointment when the promised dog fails to materialise, and of the unexpected influence of the present he receives in its place, an old woolwork picture of a Chihuahua called Chiquitito, brought back from Mexico by his late Uncle Willy.

There are hints of my beloved Marianne Dreams in the way this picture comes to dominate Ben’s dreams and eventually his life, but there is a stronger connection to another, obscurer children’s book I love, A Fox Under My Jacket by Harriet Graham, published in 1971. (Books about foxes, can’t get enough of ’em.) Graham’s book is about a boy transplanted to North London who misses the countryside and finds joy on Hampstead Heath looking after two motherless fox cubs. Ben from A Dog So Small, by contrast, is a city boy through and through:

Ben liked to rattle down moving staircases to platforms where subterranean winds wafted the coming of the trains; he liked to burrow along below London. Above ground, he liked to sail high on the tops of London buses, in the currents of traffic. He liked the feel of paving-stones hard beneath his feet, the streaming splendour of a wet night with all the lamps and lights shining and reflected, the smell of London. After all, London – a house in a row in a back-street just south of the River – was his home; and he had been called – so his father said – after Big Ben.

But he would have liked to have had a dog as well.

One reason why he can’t have a dog is that their South London home isn’t an appropriate milieu. ‘[We’re] not even near an open space where you could exercise it properly’, sympathises Mr Blewitt. Then May and her new husband find a place to live north of the river. As soon as ‘tough, tousled, wild, free’ Hampstead Heath was mentioned I could see where we were headed.

It’s an enchanting book, really. In the middle it appears to be a lesson in making do with not having something you really want (an important lesson); then, as the prospect of a real live dog comes nearer, different problems arise.

Granny shaded her eyes, looking after them.

‘People get their heart’s desire,’ she said, ‘and then they have to begin to learn how to live with it.’

I had tears in my eyes at the end. I can see this is going to happen more and more as I get older. I used to go years, genuinely years, without crying, then I hit my mid-thirties and the waterworks came on.

The edition I read was a reissue from 2012, but showed no signs of having been updated. No explanation was provided of what it meant for Grandpa to have taken the Pledge. I don’t think a modern book for young readers would contain the phrase ‘sly bitch’, even referring to a dog. Ben’s objection to a library book’s description of a Chihuahua as a ‘pet’ on the grounds that the term is ‘womanish’ is a bit unusual too.

Nice to have a cameo appearance from Adam Codling of Pearce’s earlier novel Minnow on the Say. One for the superfans.

Tags: A Dog So Small, Books, Dogs, Hampstead Heath, Philippa Pearce, Reading, The 1962 Club