The Dogs They Found in The Crooked Things

How a poem about one damaged childhood dog brought back the memory of many others.

When The Crooked Things left the page and became silk, the dog at its centre began to acquire other names. Nelly was one. Sam was another. Then came Moss, Pepper, Milo, Paddy, Colin, Benny and Jack. None looked quite like the animal in the design, although resemblance was seldom the point.

The poem began with a childhood errand. A little soup and bread were being taken to an elderly neighbour, in whose house lived a dog marked by cruelty. Its body was scarred and bent. Its pleasure in being alive appeared undiminished.

Years later, the memory of that animal seemed to explain a preference that had followed the child into adulthood: a fondness for things slightly askew, clothes frayed through use, colours that ought to quarrel, chipped possessions and people who had escaped being made too smooth. The dog had been injured, but it had never become an injury with a tail attached.

The final lines return to the neighbour’s house. It is closed and empty. The old route can still be walked, but not innocently.

The design itself began with a conversation overheard on a train. One passenger was remembering “the ugliest dog I ever knew”. A moment later came the thought that stayed: “I’ve always loved scruffy things. Maybe it was that dog that made me that way.”

Perhaps this is why people rarely write about the dog in the poem for very long. They soon begin writing about their own.

The dog was never the damage

Lucy’s message concerned Nelly, a small black dog whose left foreleg had stopped growing after an early injury.

Hi, I bought the scarf because the little dog made me think of our Nelly. Her front leg was much shorter and she ran in a sort of sideways hop. People always did the sad face when they first saw her, which annoyed us because she wasn’t sad. She was usually trying to steal whatever they were holding.

I think the poem gets something right that is difficult to say. A bad thing had happened to her. She wasn’t the bad thing that happened.

Lucy had underlined two lines in the accompanying poem and written Nelly beside them in blue biro.

Daniel wrote about Sam, whose jaw had been damaged before he was taken into rescue. One side of his mouth hung lower than the other, and he could make an impressive mess of a bowl of water.

I don’t want to pretend Sam was beautiful because honestly he was a very odd-looking dog. His tongue was always out and he dribbled on everybody. But he was a proper dog, if you know what I mean. He liked bins, hated the postman and could hear cheese being opened from two rooms away.

The poem didn’t make him sound brave or special. I liked that. He would have found being brave very boring.

There is a temptation to improve an animal while remembering it. Appetite becomes courage; stubbornness is renamed loyalty. Sam has been allowed to keep his bins.

Margaret found her dog elsewhere in the poem. Moss was fourteen and beginning to misjudge the position of his back feet. She recognised him in the lines about chipped things.

That bit made me laugh because nearly everything in our house is chipped. Moss barges into the little table at least once a day and his tail has cleared more glasses than I can count.

My daughter says the house looks lived in. It is, mostly by him.

A photograph accompanied the message. Moss was asleep across a doorway, forcing everyone else in the house to step over him.

What a dog does to a place

Amira did not see Milo in the crooked dog’s body. She found him in the way one animal can permanently alter a person’s attention.

Since Milo, I know things about this neighbourhood I never knew before. I know which gate has the angry terrier behind it, where the fox crosses at about five in the morning and which café gives dogs the end bits of sausage.

He died two years ago but I still notice all of it. I suppose he changed what I see.

The streets remain ordinary. A person simply learns to read them at a different height.

Jo’s message was shorter:

Eddie has given me worse shoes and better Saturdays.

A later email supplied the missing particulars. Eddie was a lurcher who disliked rain until he was outside in it, at which point he refused to come home. Jo now owned three waterproof coats, knew the names of several people whose surnames she had never learned and had spent more time standing beside muddy water than she considered reasonable.

Pepper altered Ruth’s taste in objects.

She had half an ear and one cloudy eye. After we got her I stopped wanting everything new. New things looked a bit nervous in our house anyway.

I wore the scarf for the first time last week and caught it on my ring before I had even left the bedroom. I nearly cried. Then I thought Pepper would have managed much worse.

The thread was drawn back into place. Ruth wore it to lunch.

The house is empty now

The ending of the poem was understood differently by people whose dogs were gone. June had lived with Paddy for sixteen years.

It was the shut-up house at the end that got me.

After Paddy died I kept walking our usual way because staying indoors was worse. At the corner by the pharmacy I would still slow down. He always stopped there for no reason. My body expected the lead to pull even though there was no lead.

I don’t really know why I’m telling you this, except the poem knew about the corner.

Grief often retains an address. It occupies the turn towards home, the space beside the bed and the part of the kitchen floor where a bowl stood. The house in the poem belongs to one childhood, although readers have supplied it with many doors.

For Caroline, it did not recall a particular dog at all.

My aunt lived in a narrow house that always had dogs in it. I couldn’t tell you all their names now. There were old towels by the back door and leads hanging from every hook, and you had to check the chair before sitting because one of them might already be under the blanket.

The house was sold when she died. I haven’t thought about the smell of that hallway for years, but reading the poem brought it straight back. Damp coats and toast, mostly.

Memory is not always courteous enough to preserve the important facts. It may lose the names and retain the toast.

Rebecca kept a photograph of Alfie on her desk but found it difficult to look at on his birthday. The scarf offered another way of carrying him through the day.

A photo felt too direct, if that makes sense. Everyone at work would have asked about him and I didn’t want to explain.

I wore the scarf instead. Nobody knew, but I did.

She tied it once at the neck and left the ends loose. That was the whole story.

Taking the poem out

Helen wore The Crooked Things to a wedding with a plain navy dress. Colin, her elderly pug, remained at home with a veterinary nurse.

She saw a picture afterwards and asked if the dog on my scarf was meant to be Colin. It looks absolutely nothing like Colin. He was fat, beige and had the expression of a disappointed headmaster.

Still, I knew why she asked.

A scarf is worn among people who know nothing of its private associations. It passes as colour and pattern. That privacy appears to be part of its usefulness.

Sophie bought hers after unexpectedly remembering Benny, a three-legged dog her family had when she was young.

I hadn’t forgotten Benny exactly. I just hadn’t thought about him for a very long time.

There is a shape in the corner of the scarf that looks like the way he used to stand when he wanted to be lifted into the car. I showed my brother and he saw it too. We ended up talking about him all evening and remembered he used to bark at the iron.

No idea why the iron offended him.

The conversation did not produce a grand recovered truth about childhood. It recovered a dog shouting at household equipment. That may be better.

A gift that knew which dog

Buying presents for dog lovers ought to be easy. There are mugs, cushions, socks and keyrings carrying almost every breed. Yet recognising the breed is the easy part. The difficulty lies in recognising the life arranged around it.

David gave The Crooked Things to his sister Eleanor. Her dog Jack had lived with her through a divorce and several moves between rented houses.

Jack was a nightmare, to be honest. He ate part of a door frame in Leeds and got us asked to leave a holiday cottage in Wales. When Eleanor was having a bad time, though, he got her out of bed every morning. Mainly because he wanted breakfast, but it worked.

I gave her the scarf for her birthday. She cried and then said it made Jack look far more poetic than he ever was.

It was a good gift because David knew which dog he meant. He was not buying for somebody who happened to like dogs. He was buying for Eleanor, who had once lost a deposit because Jack objected to a door.

The most meaningful gifts for dog lovers often work this way. They leave room for the recipient’s animal to enter. A precise painted likeness can preserve a face. Something less literal may hold the habits, places and years that gathered around it.

The Crooked Things is printed on 18-momme mulberry silk twill and measures 90 by 90 centimetres. Its hems are rolled by hand. Only fifty scarves will exist in the worldwide edition, and the design will not be printed again.

Those facts describe the object accurately. They cannot predict what somebody will find in it.

One final message arrived after a scarf had been worn for almost a year.

I used to steam every fold out of it. I don’t now. It looks more mine with the creases.

There is probably nothing to add to that.

Discover The Crooked Things, a limited-edition silk scarf for dog lovers, from a worldwide edition of fifty that will never be reprinted.