Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

where to join battle; at other times he simply dissolves and evaporates into the countryside.

A nation looks for a hero, the stentorian voiceover informs us. And who answers the call? Clip does. Cut to close-up of Clip the Sheepdog on a Welsh hillside. His ears prick up at some unheard summons, his head swivels. Comprehension lights up his bright intelligent eyes. He understands. He turns and runs home across the hillside; he reaches his master and barks a few words, and carries on running. We see him trotting down the road past the postman, ‘Hello, Clip, old boy, where are you off to in such a hurry?’ Soon he arrives at the recruitment office. ‘Hello, Clip, old boy,’ the men in the queue say. They pat and stroke him. He runs on into the office and by the magic of cinema runs out pulling a trolley bearing his army kit. To the people back home, says the voiceover, he was just good old Clip. Cut to Patagonia, where Clip is running between the lines: carrying messages, impervious to the shells exploding all around. But to the peasants of Patagonia, the voice continues, he was something else: a vision, an inspiration, a hero, the dog that saved the hour, he was – the voice pauses for dramatic effect – he was Pata Brillante, or . . . and before he can say it everybody in the cinema shouts, ‘Bright Paw!’ Everyone in the audience except me raises his or her hand, crooked at the wrist, in emulation of a dog offering his paw to shake. They sing the famous Bright Paw song to the tune that was later stolen by Champion the Wonderhorse. Tadpole nudges me and grabs my wrist and pulls it up into the correct shape. I, too, make the gesture of the Bright Paw salute. This is an unusual case.

‘Pata Brillante! Pata Brillante! El Perro Maravilla!’

I turn my head to look at Tadpole. She is singing her heart out. Her eyes are on fire, cheeks glistening with tears. The singing carries on for a while and then peters out. We watch enthralled as Bright Paw scampers across ridges, doggy-paddles through the foam of torrential rivers, runs headlong but miraculously unscathed into machine-gun fire. He dodges mines that explode a fraction of a second after he passes. He was a hell of a dog, that was for sure.

The movie tells the famous story of the Mission House siege. The men of the 32nd Airborne are bivouacked at the Mission House, marooned in bandit country. Clip heroically passes messages between the Mission House and HQ a hundred miles away, by using the legendary secret passage of the Incas that only he knows about. The situation is desperate, and General Llanbadarn, returning from Buenos Aires, decides to stake all on a bold, audacious, and some would say suicidal reconnaissance patrol. The men are afraid. Very afraid. On the eve of battle there are whisperings of mutiny among the ranks. And then lo! in the light of the silvery moon an angel appears among the men, plucking the terror from their hearts, filling them with courage. An angel on a white horse holding a flaming sword aloft. Next day at dawn the men ride out and fight like lions. Losses are heavy, the battle desperate, but the day is won and the honour of the Legion saved. Clip, though he manages to limp back to camp, dies from his wounds and pays the ultimate price. Tadpole was inconsolable.

Normally when the first bar of signature tune starts up there is a stampede for the door, but tonight the people of Aberystwyth, many openly weeping, remained seated in a mark of sombre respect. There was still the famous epilogue, a simple device of white type on a black screen. Most of the people there that night knew it by heart and whispered the words under their breath, like pilgrims reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

Bright Paw’s death on the killing fields of Patagonia was not in vain. His brave spirit and noble example provided a rallying point for the growing disaffection at home. Confronted in the streets and lanes of Wales with the spectre of so many blind and amputee dogs, of hounds unable to return to the hayrick or pasture, in their gaunt and haunted eyes the look of a dog that has lost his youth by the age of four, the people rallied. There was a revulsion against the pitiless and mindless slaughter, an unstoppable groundswell of public anger. Within six months the decision had been taken to bring the dogs home

.

The men, of course, stayed on for another three winters.

After the movie we went to the Indian restaurant in Eastgate Street and sat at a table in the window. Tadpole, cheeks still glistening with tears, examined the menu carefully, while I glanced nervously at my watch. We needed to be quick, because the pubs would be chucking out soon and the Indian restaurant would become a scene which made the battlefields of Patagonia seem a picnic.

‘Oh, Louie, I don’t know what to have. It all sounds so good.’

‘Don’t agonise. It’s not really good, it’s just well written.’

‘Oh, Louie, you’re such a cynic.’

I tapped my fingers and stared out at the darkened street. Across the road a man in a fedora stood in an alley. He met my gaze and hurried off. I’d seen that hat before but I couldn’t remember where.

‘How about telling me the name of this guy.’

‘Which guy?’

‘Oh, come on, Tadpole, please. I took you to see Clip didn’t I?’

‘Yes, and it was so wonderful.’

‘So tell me about the soldier who was tortured and who used to cry out, “Hoffmann!”’

‘Oh, him.’

‘Yes, him. Tell me his name.’

‘I don’t know his name.’

I flushed with anger and snatched the menu out of her hand. ‘You said you’d tell me his name.’

‘No, I never. I never.’

‘Yes, you bloody well did. It was a deal.’

‘I didn’t say I’d tell you his name. I said I’d take you to see him.’

I paused, slightly taken aback. ‘So when are we going to see him?’

‘We just did.’ She giggled.

I looked at her in cold fury as the implication became clear.

‘He was there on the screen.’

‘It was a cast of five thousand!’

‘That’s not my fault.’

I stood up and threw a tenner down on the table. ‘Here, enjoy your meal.’

‘But, Louie, you said you’d buy me dinner.’

‘That’s right, but I don’t have to sit and watch you eat it. No wonder no one liked you at school.’ I stormed out and as I passed by the window I saw in the corner of my eye Tadpole sitting grief-stricken, her fist pressed into her eye, her mouth disfigured into a figure-of-eight. It was a pose I was starting to get quite familiar with.

I hurried down Eastgate Street towards the office and saw up ahead the man in fedora and black and white shoes. He turned into Stryd-y-Popty. I quickened my pace. He was waiting in the shadow of the door to my office and I grabbed his arm and dragged him into the light; but it was the wrong man. It was someone wearing a Jew’s broad-brimmed hat and sporting a long grey beard; a man in a coat full of holes. Elijah.

‘There’s been another death,’ he said and tut-tutted in a manner that suggested it wasn’t anyone close.

‘Is that a fact?’ I said.

The man in the fedora slipped out of the doorway across the street and hurried towards Great Darkgate Street. We both watched him slink away.

‘You have a friend,’ said Elijah.

‘I thought maybe he belonged to you.’

‘He’s not my friend.’

‘Who is he?’

‘I really don’t know.’

‘Maybe if I bang your head against the wall it might help you recall.’

‘There is nothing to recall. It is you he is following. Such visitations are commonplace in cases involving Hoffmann.’

‘So who has died?’

‘A girl, an innocent girl. You’ll read about it in tomorrow’s paper.’

‘Why should I care?’

‘There will be more.’

‘More papers?’

‘More deaths.