Notwithstanding Read Online Free

married.’
    ‘I swear it,’ I spluttered (for the tears were making speech difficult), and with that his breathing stopped. There was a horrible rattling from his throat, and my mother, who had been standing there all the while, said fondly, ‘The poor old sod.’
    As the years have succeeded one another, I have increasingly appreciated my father’s wisdom. The fact is that Mother gets curious fancies that fly into her brain one day, and fly out of it the next, such as the time when she started to make cabbage wine because she had conceived the notion that it was good for the pancreas. Of course, it was undrinkable, and so she gave it away at Christmas time as presents for folk in the village that she didn’t think highly of. She sold some at the WI fete, and most people poured it straight on the compost after a single sip.
    However, this idea that I should be getting married rankled in my mind like a bur in a woolly sock. It seemed a fine idea to have someone to share a bed with. I hadn’t had a decent pillow fight for twenty years. And apart from that, a man needs a female, other than his mother, to rub along with.
    The problem was, of course, that I had to find some women to meet with, so that I would have an idea of what there was in the offing.
    I ruled out an advertisement in the lonely hearts; I hated to tell lies, and an honest description of myself would have put off all but the desperate. I wasn’t so desperate that I would have taken someone else who was.
    I thought about how one meets people in my village, and very soon realised that of course it was because of the dogs. Almost everyone had one, and most took their animals out every day, to stretch their legs and take a gander at what Mother Nature was doing to the common land or the Hurst. There was a regular ritual about all this, for if one met another dog, it was obligatory to pat it on the head, ruffle its ears, unclamp it from one’s leg, and discuss its virtues with the owner while the latter performed the same ritual with one’s own dog. First came the enquiry as to the dog’s breed, which was usually a matter of some doubt, then followed anecdotes intended to illustrate its irresistible appeal, its great intelligence and its extraordinary powers of intuition. Then came news of its health problems, and the fact that garlic pearls in its food had been working miracles. Naturally, one could while away many hours in doggy conversations in the process of taking a long walk, and one could come back at dusk and say, ‘I’m sorry I took so long, I got caught by Mrs John the Gardener, and she just wouldn’t stop going on about that bloody mutt of hers. I’ll dig the new potatoes and bring in the coal tomorrow,’ and my mother would tut, and say something like, ‘It was that woman’s dog that put Sir Edward’s Labrador bitch in the family way.’
    I think I might have told you about our dog. He was a great big fool of a hound. We called him Archibald Scott-Moncrieff, which soon got shortened to Archie. He was a black retriever who took his vocation seriously. At one time Archie got delusions of grandeur, and came back from walks with fifteen-foot branches of oak in his maw. Then he would get stuck at the gate.
    All this retrieving gave me a humorous notion, and so it was that one day at lunch I said to my mother, ‘Mother, do you think it would be a fine idea to train Archie to retrieve eligible spinsters?’
    My mother looked up from slurping her soup, and eyed me. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I have my doubts.’
    ‘Why’s that, then?’
    ‘Because a dog’s “eligible” might be a funny thing, and not to your satisfaction, I should think. He’d want her to smell of lady dogs.’
    ‘Nonetheless,’ I said.
    ‘No harm in having a try, then,’ she observed, ‘but don’t hang any washing on it.’
    Of course, the difficulty wasn’t with the idea, but with the execution. How does one train a dog to retrieve women who are specifically