April 7

WARNING: This handwriting exercise contains scenes the reader may find distressing.

It’s about Pongo the dog, whom I’ve said on several occasions we need to get rid of. My reasons for this aren’t emotional; they’re based entirely on logic and reason, and today something happened to add fuel to my arguments. I’d been out in the back garden with Pongo for a while, playing with the ping-pong ball (which he completely destroyed), and we’d even had one of our usual sessions of cuddles and affectionate words. Then Pongo the dog went over to a spot very close to his lair among the hortensias, and when I followed him I saw to my horror that he’d gotten ahold of a small piece of rotten meat. He’d probably buried it a few days before. Some time ago, I’d found a big piece of meat in the garden covered in soil, but it wasn’t rotten, perhaps because it was almost entirely coated in a layer of fat, and after I’d dug it up Pongo hadn’t shown the slightest interest in it. But standing over him now, I saw he’d put this new piece of meat down in a clear patch of ground and was pretending to be lying casually on his back, the way he often does, only this time aiming to have the piece of meat more or less underneath his neck. I made a sound he recognizes as disapproving and he stopped what he was doing; when I looked more closely, I spotted two or three little white conical maggots on the ground (shaped like truncated cones, and similar to the ones I once found in the cap of an empty bottle of floor wax, though much bigger and fatter). Then I saw, disgusted, that the piece of meat Pongo had dug up was covered in the very same maggots.

(second sheet)

Pongo the dog was on the alert, guarding the piece of meat. He growled when I tried to pick it up with the shovel and poker from the outdoor stove and even grabbed it in his teeth to take it away somewhere safe. I gave him a severe telling-off, at which point he let go and stood a few feet away, letting me do what I wanted but not taking his eyes off me. I carried the hunk of meat to the stove along with the fat-covered piece I’d found before, doused them both with methylated spirits, and set them alight, feeding the flames with some newspaper and twigs, and later with a couple of logs. Flies of all sizes were soon lured over by the smell of the roasting meat, fat, and maggots, and they even flew inside the stove and darted around looking for the source (though without getting as close to the flames as I would have liked).