25October1997

Saturday 25 October 1997
My dear folks,

This Quinta break will go down as the week of the dog. The dog is Samson, a grey-muzzled gentle, medium-sized fellow who, for the past several years, has lived a miserable, chained-up existence in a barrel at the bottom of the path that leads down from the Quinta to the main road. Each evening, Jones has trotted down the path with a morsel & a heart full of love for Samson. Each evening Samson has emerged from his barrel at the sound of her voice to guzzle down his morsel & wag his tail & hear that he is still loved even if his owners have deserted him. We never really met the owners, a family who occupied a mansion below the Quinta. But we knew Samson from puppyhood when he would come visiting on the lookout for company & the odd shoe. When the owners vanished, Samson roamed the streets until local peasants decided that he should be chained up for his own good. He existed on the scraps & pity, doing better some months than others & growing steadily leaner as the worms & the ticks & the fleas took their toll. It’s hard to know if Samson was resigned to his fate; but it certainly troubled Jones & it troubled me.

As another winter loomed we cast around for potential owners & rang a friend who has recently lost an old dog. Might she be interested? She was. We rejoiced & began the train of events necessary for Samson’s handover. First was a mega-purchase of dog food from the wholesale store to accompany him. His new owner was to be a pensioner with a much bigger heart than income. Then came a negotiation with the old woman who had chained him up & fed him. We sent Maria to make contact with her & the pair of them arrived at the Quinta one evening just as we were settling down to drinks. Although she’s a typical peasant, by her own admission she owns at least half a dozen properties in the area. An exchange of greetings led to a cautious negotiation. The woman said she had bought the chain & collar & would like to be paid for those. I agreed. She had also, she pointed out, paid for food for several years; she left the implication in the air. I responded that she would not have to pay for it any longer. Clearly this missed the point which was presumably that I was an “estrangeiro” & since the dog had belonged to estrangeiros, it was incumbent on me to compensate her. I agreed a goodwill payment & we drank a glass of wine to seal the understanding. Jones was pissed off at such meanness. But such is life.

To make Samson presentable we invested in deworming pills, an insect-ridding shampoo & some muti to keep the pests off him in future. In triumph we marched down the hill to unchain him. I thought I would have to cut off a lock securing the chain to a tree but an old peasant who was busy facing stones produced a key from beneath a pile of leaves & Samson walked free. His breakfast was limited to the deworming pills concealed in some meat. We tried to tell him that it was in his own interest to go hungry for a few hours.

Next the toilette. I half filled Jones’s largest plastic basin with warm water & tried to entice him in. No chance! So I sponged him down & shampooed him as thoroughly as I could. Samson didn’t enjoy the process but he’s a patient & placid dog who seemed to sense that it was for his own good. To dry him, we went for a walk around the neighbourhood, an excursion during which he stopped to void his bowels, ridding himself in the process of a truly horrid mess. “Did it look like a plate of spaghetti?” the vet asked me that afternoon. “Exactly,” I replied. “That was the worm,” she said. Poor bloody dog!

Getting Samson down to the vet naturally meant coaxing him into the car. I covered the seats with old mats, persuaded Jones to take a seat at the back & then shoved Samson in beside her. He wasn’t happy & had to be stopped from leaping straight out again. He sprawled all over Jones, falling about as we went around corners. Jones coped as best as she could - keeping her muffled complaints to a minimum. At the vet Samson welcomed the opportunity to hop out again & didn’t mind waiting a bit as other, wiser dogs were dragged into the surgery for treatment they clearly didn’t want. We had to wait the best part of an hour to see the vet but it was worth it. The woman who attended us had trained in Australia & we were able to converse in English. She carried out a range of tests on the dog, inoculated him & finally pronounced him in pretty good nick given his history.

Back into the car for the 30-minute trip to Sheela, his new owner to be. This time Jones found the going tougher & struggled to retain her composure & restrain her feelings as the dog grew increasingly restless. “Nearly there, nearly there,” I assured them frequently, more for her benefit than his. When we eventually arrived, we tumbled – all three of us – out of the car with equal relief. Samson inspected his new quarters & then settled down on his mat as if he’d lived there all his life. The only creature who wasn’t pleased was Monty, Sheela’s resident dog, a little guy with one brown eye & one blue one. But we reckoned – over celebratory gins & tonics – that they’d be buddies in time. And that, more or less, is the story of Samson. No doubt you’re muttering “about time too!”.

Also down with us in Portugal was Annelize, the friend who’d stayed with us some years before to write a novel (Julia se Broer) which I read during the visit. It’s different – about how a brother tries to cope with the suicide of a sister he hadn’t seen in years. Annelize was pleased to be back in her old haunts. She joined us on one or two walks & for outings to favourite places & restaurants. She also looked after Noite during our two-day excursion to the Alentejo. Noite hardly knew on our return whether to stay in the house with Annelize – her mentor from the previous visit - or to return to Jones’s little cottage. This dilemma was resolved only when Annelize flew out on Thursday (the day of the dog!). While on Quinta creatures, I ought to mention that the lynx (Noite’s bete noire) made a confident appearance on the night we had a barbecue, dispelling our fears that its ambush by the shepherd’s dogs last month had been fatal.

Another creature that attracted our attention was a huge spider that built a metre-round web right at the entrance to MCP. The main rig of this web was just above head height so that we could enter & exit without being netted ourselves. The spider would retire during the day to the small tree to which one side of the net was fastened. At night it would emerge to crouch menacingly at the centre of its webby world. I had to break the main strand of this web in order to replace some broken tiles on MCP’s roof. But the following morning the spider had repaired the damage, leaving his web as good as new.

Jones & I took Friday p.m. off to visit Tavira, a lovely old coastal town that sprawls around a river mouth & any number of squares. We drove there through the hills, stopping for a picnic lunch on a route that wound so steadily that it nearly put me to sleep. I had to pull off the road for a doze. But they were pretty hills where it was easy to imagine having our next house. (Jones is forever planning her next residence.) In Tavira, we found parking & wandered through the streets. There were shoals of small fish in the river. It was low tide & anchored boats had settled on the bottom. We could easily have spent a weekend there. In fact we regretted not doing so rather than taking our expensive & rather disappointing trip north.

On the way back, after a week of trying, we managed to obtain a beige wooden loo seat to replace the cracked plastic one in Casa 4. Such are the victories of living in Portugal. There were a lot of other things I ought to have got done as well & didn’t. As a result, we were running around with paintbrushes & things early on Saturday ahead of two families due in mid-morning. They duly arrived off a red-eye charter from Gatwick, without a decent night’s sleep between the eight of them. Both couples are regulars & their children will be good company for one another. Two of the boys promptly plunged into the pool (while we were out on a walk). By all accounts, they didn’t stay in very long. The water is wicked – although air temperatures are mild (in the twenties during the day).

We will have two couples staying at the Quinta over winter, one house sitting & one renting. Jones will return to London in the second half of November once she’s seen them in. I may be able to manage one more trip down, depending on my BBC schedule. Clocks go back tonight in Portugal & the UK. And that’s enough news for now.

Blessings
T