CHOWCHOW AND A CHURCH

Chowchow seeks refuge in an ancient church

For Chowchow the next few days were a nightmare.

It was bad enough back in the forest when a pack of wolves or even a solitary bear could be on the scrounge behind any tree, looking for meat, but here in what we know as the twenty-first century and he perceived as a nightmare, things were a great deal worse.

The first thing he learned was that roads were best avoided at all cost. He didn’t call them roads, of course, but his profane description of them is beyond translation. The truth is he almost got himself killed half a dozen times before he realised that vehicles normally travel on the left (at least they do in Brumpton) and that making the few manoeuvres he needed in order to get from one place to somewhere that looked as if it might be better would be safer if he made use of the right sides of roads whenever possible. But even that was thwart with dangers when it crossed his mind that vehicles travel in both directions and nowhere is really safe.

Then there was the issue of food. Trees were few and far between and those that could be found bore little edible fruits, it being late Autumn and the leaves falling. It wasn’t until, whilst lurking in what we know as a garden and he knew as another corner of his nightmare, he discovered waste bins. That was when he found edible stuff, though to him some of it was rather disgusting. Still, it had the promise of holding body and soul together and so he feasted on what he could.

After several days of living like that, of lurking in dark corners, remaining unseen whenever he could and only venturing forth after dark, that he came upon a building the like of which was beyond belief.

We would call it a Gothic church from the later middle ages and he saw it as just another element of a mad world. But it was getting cold outside and it had an open door. He understood doors. He had even learned that they can be opened and closed. They separated one world from another. And they had saved his skin more than once. Doors excited him and he resolved to have one of his own one day.

So, furtively, he was always furtive, he slipped through a magnificent oak door into the church.

Even to him it smelled of age, and his sense of smell would put yours or mine to shame. He could detect layers in that place via his nose. There was the staleness of old timbers, the skeleton on which the building was hung, and on top of that the dust that ages had accumulated high up where the mops of cleaners never reached. And although he knew nothing of paper of books, he could smell the staleness of piles of the things. Hymn books, prayer books, totally meaningless to him but all around on little shelves in front of what looked like useful seats.

He needed a useful seat. He was tired. Tired of constantly being on his guard against yet another unsuspected danger, tired of hiding, tired of melting into the background so that not one of the people milling in unbelievable numbers here, there and everywhere could see him. And he was scared of them. Scared beyond belief, for he was one and they were many and he knew that in their eyes he must be food for empty bellies. For that was all there was in life as far as he was concerned: food, and, of course, sex. But there was none of that here, no b*****s eager for a romp, just the strange clothed animals going about their mysterious lives in an incomprehensible rush.

So he found a seat in a corner, a lovely long pew on which he could curl up and sleep. And that is what he did. The hardness didn’t matter: he was accustomed to that.

Meanwhile, Mrs Hampton and Sally were visiting Uncle Colin.

Sally was worried about Chowchow. Nothing had been heard of him for several days, though there was the odd report in the local press that a monkey-like creature had been spotted around in the town. But nobody paid much attention to those reports and when they were investigated they were either proved to be false or the monkey had long left the area where he’d been seen, and slowly interest in the creature who had boarded a bus and scared its passengers half to death waned.

Then, when it was clear that no zoo for miles around had lost a monkey and nobody with an illegal pet came forwards to claim they had lost such a beast, the news of a lost monkey disappeared altogether.

But that didn't stop Sally from worrying about him. After all, she was the one who had been with him in his own world, had snuggled up to him when she had felt overwhelming terrors of her own, and she felt responsible for him.

Uncle Colin was smug about their adventure in the past. His equipment had performed faultlessly, though somehow their return from the past had resulted in a little what he called slippage. They’d lost a little bit of time, but that didn’t matter to anyone except the neighbour who couldn’t reverse his car out.

“It was the remote connection that did it,” he smirked, holding up what looked like a television remote control.

“How does it work?” asked Sally, who was doing well at school when it came to science subject, but he merely looked down his nose at her and shook his head.

“You wouldn’t understand if I told you,” he said.

Sally rather suspected that she wouldn’t even begin to understand the complexities of a subject that has strained the greatest minds for centuries, but didn't like to be told that by an uncle she found, at best, detestable.

“You see,” he went on proudly, “this button here, the green one, is configured to home and the here and now, and the red one to whatever place or time it last travelled to. It’s all rather beautifully simple, don’t you think?”

“So if we find Chowchow?” she asked.

Uncle Colin sniggered. “I should think your ape is long dead,” he said grandly, “expecting a creature from millions of years ago to survive in the here and now? Impossible! No, mark my words, he’s deader than a dodo!”

But, impossible or not, Sally found an idea worming its way into her mind.

Find Chowchow, she thought, and use the red button. Yes! That’s what I’ll do. I’ll take him back to his own time, to his family and his friends...

It was just as well that Uncle Colin didn’t notice the way she secretly slipped his remote control into a pocket before she left, and when she smiled at him sweetly and said, “We’ll come and see you again, uncle, and find out all about your next bright ideas” as she and her mother made their way out to their car,

“I can’t stand that man!” hissed mother angrily.

“Neither can I,” agreed Sally, tapping the pocket in which the precious remote control was nestled.

© Peter Rogerson 20.11.19