Black Dogs

Ever since Winston Churchill famously likened his struggle with depression to a ‘black dog’, the term has entered our culture as a popular metaphor. In 1992, Ian McEwan published a brilliantly sinister short novel, ‘Black Dogs’, playing on their totemic significance. Thanks to the marvels of technology, you can read an extract here.

As Megan McKinley, writing for the intriguingly named Black Dog Institute puts it:

“In modern parlance, we let sleeping dogs lie; we go to the dogs or die like a dog; we dog someone at every turn, or compete in a dog-eat-dog environment. And when we put a name to our depression, increasingly it is that of the black dog, lurking behind us, or clinging
tenaciously to our backs.”

The term has far older supernatural connotations, of course. In British folklore, the black dog is a nocturnal apparition, often said to be associated with the Devil, and  its appearance was regarded as a portent of death. In my old stamping ground of East Anglia, some still fear the Black Shuck – a large creature with malevolent flaming eyes (or one eye, or eyes that change from red to green, depending on what takes your ghostly fancy), otherwise known as the ‘Doom Dog’.

These terrifying beings are often supposed to appear in mist or on lonely stretches of moor (as in the legend of The Hound of the Baskervilles, famously encountered by Sherlock Holmes), but almost always at night. In ‘A Pint for the Ghost’, I wrote a poem about Derbyshire sightings of Gabriel Hounds, who bring bad fortune to all who see them:

Each time I read a cloud’s dark countenance
or watch two crows stitch out a warning
in the clear blue air, I can’t forget

the Bradwell miners, bound for home
without a lamp to guide them, night as heavy
as the earth they’d toiled beneath all day.

They heard the long grass stir. They stood
dead still. A beam, sharp as a skinning knife
shone from the moon down to the hill

and carved the huge shape of a hound; a dog so quick
they’d barely taken flight before they heard it bay
and felt its harsh breath at their heels. They ran

full speed with burning lungs until the dawn,
until the daylight overtook them and they went,
grim-faced, down to the mine

to meet their certain fate. Remember them
as you lie in bed, when the empty house
has fallen still, and you stare through open curtains

at a starless sky, imagine it’s a dog’s
black flank that passes you, bound
for somewhere else tonight.

(from ‘A Pint for the Ghost’, tall-lighthouse, 2010)

Imagine my terror as I lay in bed in Grasmere the other night, listening to the silence outside – the A591 quiet at last, the lights off in all the other houses – and, through the shadows on my floor, saw the shape of a sleek black dog stalking towards me.

Luckily, the spectre leapt on to the bed and proceeded to lick my ear enthusiastically. It wasn’t a Hell Hound at all. It was Bell, my 6 year old rescue whippet. Bell comes from Animal Rescue Cumbria near Kendal, a charity supported by one of the Lake District’s most famous residents, Alfred Wainwright. She’s a real character and fast-attempting to become the most cultured pooch in the village, having attended several poetry readings with me around the country.

In fact, Bell was pretty chuffed to get her first ever poetry review after accompanying me to ‘Word Life’ in Bradford recently. She was even more chuffed to be described as ‘gorgeous’…

I can’t imagine a less sinister creature than the one who curls up next to me on the sofa, trots around on the fells or sits in on Dove Cottage poetry workshops. But, none the less, whenever there’s a full moon over Grasmere, I find myself eyeing her nervously as she pads around in the darkness… Well, actually, I don’t. But I can’t think of a suitably chilling conclusion to this blog. Perhaps I’ll let Bell have the last word. Here she is, windswept in Shetland.