The Silence of the Puppies

    When I was fourteen, my mother decided that she wanted an Old English sheepdog. The fact that she had five children, and no money, seems not to have entered her head. Perhaps she thought that such a symbol of middle-class prosperity would somehow act as a self-fulfilling prophesy and we would miraculously resume our rightful place in society, instead of languishing, as we were, in the open jaws of destitution.
    And, so, a pedigree dog was purchased, at large expense. We had had the dog for almost a year when we were forced to move house. My father had been gambling the rent money for many months and the landlord had reached the end of his tether. We moved into a decrepit Victorian boarding house in the Dandenong Ranges, consisting of four rooms, arranged along a wooden platform, with a separate kitchen room, which was little more than a wooden box with a sink in it. There was no running water.
    Even at the time I thought it unforgivable that the neurotic landlady (who lived in the main house at the back of the ‘boxes’) charged any rent at all for this unsanitary, squalid nightmare. She has earned my undying animus. I recall that she invited my mother and us kids into her foul-smelling kitchen for lunch one day. She had prepared home-made chips, which were thinly-cut and curly and black from the oven; she proudly placed the burnt, smoking things on the table, where they were immediately besieged by blowflies, and told us to “dig in”. She then busied herself with a large glass jug, which she filled with water. She opened a sachet of green powder, which she emptied in. A tray of ice blocks followed. And then she rolled up her shirt sleeve and plunged her hand, with its filthy black fingernails, up to mid-forearm, into the vessel, to stir everything together. “Who wants some cordial?” she proudly bellowed, face beaming.       
   The dog had been impregnated by a big mongrel a month before we moved into the hovel. She eventually gave birth to thirteen large puppies. 
    And, there we all were, in our decrepitude: my mother, who spent each day sitting in the filthy ‘kitchen’, smoking and listening to the radio; my two brothers and two sisters; a black cat, which we had brought with us; the dog and her thirteen puppies. My father was spending more and more time away from the family as he dodged creditors and visits from policemen. 
    We discovered that the cat was also pregnant: she gave birth to one rather sickly-looking kitten. My mother’s reaction to this was rage. She furiously demanded that I get rid of the thing immediately. My mother’s increasingly-exhibited ferocity was not something to be taken lightly - we had all had our share of angry lashings, with extension cords, broom-sticks and wooden spoons, throughout our lives. 
    I agonised for days about the best way to dispatch the animal, before finally, reluctantly, fixing on what I hoped would be a very quick method. My younger brother had been given an air-rifle for a birthday, so I took the kitten out onto the back lawn, behind a rhododendron bush and fired two pellets through its skull. I announced to my mother that the job was done. “Good”, she replied. 
    The puppies grew, as puppies will. Soon enough, they were almost as high as my fourteen-year-old knees. We attempted to interest people in taking some off our hands, but found no  one interested. 
    My mother did not like the puppies because they were a daily reminder of the fact that her dog had been ravished by a mongrel. She ranted at my father (who was on one of his rare visits home). He decided that a culling was in order, and I was pressed into service to facilitate it. The event fills me with shame, horror and revulsion to this day. I view it as a measure of the complete dysfunction to which my family life had devolved, and how totally subjugated my siblings and I were under my parents’ regime. 
    One Saturday my father took the puppies, two at a time, around the back of the building. There was an old metal drum behind the residence. It was just big enough for two of the young dogs to be placed inside. A sheet of Masonite was then positioned across the top and I was required to sit on this. A length of hose-pipe had been fed into the drum, and the other end was taped around the exhaust-pipe of my father’s car. He sat in the vehicle and turned on the engine. There was immediate activity beneath me in the drum as the animals began to become alarmed; they started to move around as best as they were able in the close confines. And then the horrible bouncing began as the dogs became more frantic. They hurled themselves against the Masonite upon which I sat, denying their escape. Tendrils of carbon monoxide curled up around my legs and assailed my nostrils, but this was not a fraction of what the poor animals were enduring below me in their metal cell. I was the only one in the world who could possibly have saved them, and I betrayed each and every one of them by obeying my father. Their bouncing became more frantic as the poisons replaced the air inside. After what seemed years there was no more movement. The Masonite was lifted off and the two dead pups were lifted out and placed in a sack in the boot of my father’s car. This horror was repeated six times, two puppies at a time, with the final pup having the dignity of attending the drum by itself. All of them ended up in the sack, which, I was later told, my father took to the local tip and discarded amongst the township’s refuse. Not one of the pups barked or growled during these procedures – a fact that has troubled me for nearly half a century. They all went so meekly and trustingly to their end. Their silence was deafening.