Green Dog

This is Green Dog, a plaster model made by my niece over thirty years ago when she was six or seven. Why is it green? Because her father, my brother, helped paint it. Like me, he had protanopia. He would have thought it was brown. He died when my niece was eight.

Protanopics have difficulty distinguishing browns from greens because we do not detect all of the red component of brown. For the same reason, orange is sometimes seen as yellow or light green because the red component of orange is weak. Red poppies fail to shine out from fields of green, and red fuchia flowers look nearly the same as the leaves. Purple and mauve look blue. Our ginger and white cat is delightfully camouflaged against the lawn, especially if there are snow patches. I’d be completely stuffed if there was a tiger in the garden.

Green Dog looks quite normal to me. I only know it is green rather than brown because someone told me, and because I ran samples of the head colour through Name That Colour (https://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/#55642B) which identifies it as a mixture of browny-gray-greens with fancy names like “Woodland”, “Kelp” and “Verdigris”. 

On the bottom my niece wrote “To Grandpa from C---”, with four hearts and five kisses. My dad kept it for his last fifteen years, after which my daughter had it as a reminder of her grandpa. It has been neglected and ignored since long before she went to university.

Recently, it was my niece’s birthday. She has reached an age at which she has been of this world for longer than her father was. We packaged up Green Dog and posted it off to her with a note explaining that he (?) had been feeling lonely and rejected and thought he would be better looked after back in Sussex where he was born, in a house with three lively children – three grandchildren my brother never knew. 

My niece had no memory of it. She had to decipher her own writing on the bottom to work out what it is. It is now in her display cabinet. There is a three in four chance that one or both of her sons will see is as a normal brown dog too.

Re-reading: Nevil Shute - A Town Like Alice

Nevil Shute: 
A Town Like Alice (4*)

Another paperback I remember getting through the nineteen-sixties Pan books offer, as mentioned previously. It was not a top choice but I was running out of options. I was surprised at the time how much I enjoyed it. And I enjoyed it again now, the first half, anyway. Compared to The Saint and James Bond this was far more satisfying.

I downloaded it to my new Kindle from the Faded Page site I also mentioned a while ago, which was naughty because the book is still under copyright in the U.K., but it makes no difference to Nevil now. How ridiculous these days that a book can be out of copyright in Canada but still within in the U.K. The Kindle, incidentally, is a front-light model which on just 4% brightness can comfortably be read in the dead of night without eyestrain or earstrain.

A Town Like Alice is indeed a book of two halves, the first set in London and Malaya and the second in Northern Queensland. I don’t want to spoil it other than to say is a powerful and engrossing story about the survival of a group of English women led by a strong, modern heroine, who are forced to walk from place to place across Malaya during the Second World War because none of the occupying Japanese officers will take responsibility for them. It was based on a real incident that took place in Sumatra rather than Malaya.

It is worth reading for this first part alone. The Australian second half of the novel is meanderingly “happy ever after”. 

Written in 1950, it has a lot of words and attitudes that would get you instantly kicked out of the Labour Party on multiple counts. Not that Shute would ever have been a member. He left England to live in Australia because he objected to the rise of the welfare state. His belief in the dignity of self-sufficiency and hard work is perhaps the major theme. 

However, I must mention the passing references to Driffield, Goole and Kirkby Moorside, my part of Yorkshire, which Shute would have known from his time as chief engineer on the R100 airship at Howden in the nineteen-thirties. Nice, Nevil, but it can never compensate for what you said in your autobiography about the hard-working local people: …the girls were ... brutish and uncouth, filthy in appearance and in habits ... these girls straight off the farms were the lowest types that I have ever seen in England, and incredibly foul-mouthed .... Did my grandma and her cousins tell you what they thought about you, you stuck-up wuss? 

It seems that books I most sought as a teenager (The Saint, James Bond) are less rewarding than the one I got just to make up the offer numbers. I am not sure, though, whether I will read any of these authors again. I’ve got Salman Rushdie next. That will keep me occupied for a while.

Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

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