Gary William Crawford's monograph Robert Aickman: An Introduction is indispensable for its biographical overview and for its section on Aickman's nearly unobtainable novel The Late Breakfasters; but its attempt to summarise each of Aickman's stories in a few dozen words appears more industrious than prudent. Although he classifies "The Same Dog" as an "enigma", a story in which "Aickman draws much material from his own subconscious, making [it] difficult of interpretation" (RA 52), the tale as told by Crawford seems a rather conventional ghost story:

"The Same Dog" centres on Hilary and his childhood friend, Mary Rossiter. As children, Hilary and Mary encounter a reputedly haunted house surrounded by a high wall and gate, and see a strange yellow dog that seems to mesmerise Mary. Later, after a long illness, Hilary returns to school and is told that Mary has died. Hilary carries this memory into adulthood and confides it to a friend, Calcutt. With Calcutt he visits the haunted house and sees not only the same yellow dog, but also the adult Mary. Above the gate is the title "Maryland". The suggestion is that as an adult he sees the ghost of Mary and the yellow dog. (RA 54)

Not only does Crawford's bald summary entirely fail to convey Aickman's careful accumulation of details in the service of his weird effects; but the reference "a reputedly haunted house" is simply inaccurate. Although the house (which Hilary and Mary find "down a sandy track, which they did not exactly know"), is described in some detail (CHM 156, 158), there is no mention whatever of a reputation; it is Mary who pronounces it haunted, apparently because of its air of sinister dilapidation:

Hilary and Mary could see a large, palpably empty house, with many of the windows glassless, and the paint on the outside walls surviving only in streaks and smears, pink, green and blue, as the always vaguely polluted atmosphere added its corruption to that inflicted by the weather. The house was copiously mock-battlemented and abundantly ogeed: a structure, without doubt, in the Gothic Revival taste, though of a period uncertain over at least a hundred years. Some of the heavy chimney-stacks had broken off and fallen. The front door, straight before them, was a recessed shadow. It was difficult to see whether it was open or shut. The paving stones leading to it were lost in mossy dampness.

"Haunted house," said Mary.

"What's that?" enquired Hilary.

"Don't exactly know," said Mary. "But Daddy says they're everywhere, though people don't realise it."

"But how can you tell?" asked Hilary, looking at her seriously and a little anxiously.

"Just by the look," replied Mary with authority. "You can tell at once when you know. It's a mistake to look for too long, though." (CHM 158-159)

The house is surrounded by a high wall which "had been covered throughout its length with plaster, but much of the plaster had either flaked, or fallen completely away, revealing the yellow bricks within" (CHM 155-156). The dog, when it appears, is explicitly connected with the wall:

It was a big, shapeless, yellow animal, with long, untidy legs, which shimmered oddly, perhaps as it sought a firm grip on the buried and slippery stones. The dog's yellow skin seemed almost hairless. Blotchy and draggled, it resembled the wall outside. (CHM 159)

Before they see the dog, the children hear it barking - "if, indeed, one could call it a bark. It was more like a steady growling roar, with a clatter mixed up in it, almost certainly of gnashing teeth: altogether something more than barking, but unmistakably canine all the same - horribly so". The barking starts not, as one might expect, when Hilary tries to scale the wall and suffers a fall thanks to the decrepit plastering; but immediately after he has reassured the distraught Mary that he is uninjured: "'I am all right, you know, truly I am. You can feel me if you like.'" (CHM 157).

When Hilary revisits the house as an adult, he finds it has become part of a vulgar, modern estate: "They were big, expensive houses, but they had converted the wilderness of Hilary's childhood into something more like a public park ... Despite all the desperation of discrepancy, there was a uniformity of tone which was even more depressing" (CHM 170-171). The houses are kitschily named; as Callcutt puts it, "'Samandjane, and Pasadena, and Happy Hours, and all that; the executive style.'" (CHM 173). As for Maryland itself:

One of the biggest houses was in the Hollywood style: a garish structure with brightly coloured faience roof, much Spanish ironwork, mass-produced but costly, and a flight of outside steps in bright red tiles. The property was surrounded by a scumbled white wall. Hilary and Calcutt stared in through the elaborate, garden-of-remembrance gates.

"It's like a caricature of the old place," said Hilary. "Much smaller, and much louder - but still..." (CHM 171)

Unlike most haunted houses, which are reliquaries of the past, this one seems to have adapted itself to the present. "Much smaller, and much louder" is as concise a summary as one could wish of Aickman's opinion of modern times as compared with the Victorian-Edwardian age whose passing he so deplored. The gates, which at the time of Hilary's childhood were "high, wrought iron, scrolled, rusted, and heavily padlocked" (CHM 158) are now "elaborate, garden-of-remembrance"; it seems likely that, aside perhaps from the rust, they have remained the same. Although the condition of the wall has improved, the term "scumbled" (meaning coloured in a thin layer) is derived from the word scum, and suggests that the rot has been merely glossed over.

The dog, which twenty years earlier was "almost hairless", is now simply "moulting", which may or may not mean that its appearance has also improved; but its temper certainly has not: its frightening combination of calculation and "furious, almost rabid aggression" (CHM 171) is precisely as before. Worse yet, perhaps:

The glass-panelled front door of the house opened, and a woman walked out.

Perhaps she had emerged to quiet the dog and apologise, perhaps, on the contrary, to reinforce the dog's antagonism to strangers: to Hilary it was a matter of indifference. The woman was of about his own age, but he knew perfectly well who she was. She was the grown-up Mary Rossiter, who twenty years before had been killed by a dog, probably a mad dog, possibly a dog that had been shot, certainly a most unusual dog, this very present dog, in fact. (CHM 172)

The fact that Mary has grown up seems to contradict Crawford's implication that Hilary is simply seeing her ghost; surely the ghost of a little girl who had been killed would remain as a little girl?

The manner of Mary's death is one of the story's many intriguing points. After the children's encounter with the house, and perhaps as a result of it ("The outing must have upset Hilary more than he knew", we are told), Hilary is confined to bed by a long illness, during which he is unable to see Mary. The presence of his distant, pedantic father and his two much older brothers seems to discourage him from asking for her: "He would have liked to see her, but had not cared, rather than dared, to suggest it. At no time had he even mentioned her at home" (CHM 162). When he returns to school, he hears from another child, Valerie Watkinson, that Mary is dead; the cause of her death is "a mystery":

We haven't been told she's dead. We thought she was ill, like you. Then Sandy saw something in the paper." Sandy Stainer was a podgy sprawling boy with, as one might suppose, vaguely reddish hair.

"What did he see?"

"Something nasty," said Valerie with confidence. "I don't know what it was. We're not supposed to know." (CHM 163)

Sandy Stainer, whose name suggests the "blotched and mottled" (CHM 156) wall around the haunted house as well as the sandy track leading up to it, isn't even worth asking; not only is he a bully, but he has been sworn to secrecy by a member of the school staff (CHM 164).

Hilary soon falls prey to a renewed bout of illness. In an effort to find out what happened to Mary, he asks his father's housekeeper to bring him the copies of the local newspaper which her husband has allowed to pile up. We are never told whether she brings them or not (both she and the maid seem to think Hilary incapable of reading the newspaper), and "as much as three days later" Hilary finally gets some information from the maid:

"Do you know what happened to Mary?" he asked, looking as far away from Eileen as he could look.

"Not exactly. She was interfered with, and mauled about. Bitten all over, they say, poor little thing. But it's been hushed up proper, and you'd better hurry and forget all about her. That's all you can do, isn't it?" (CHM 166)

Eileen's "hushed up proper" ironically echoes Hilary's earlier thoughts on the impossibility of asking his father: "Nor, as usual, was the death of Mary a matter that could be laid before his father. In any case, what could his father permit himself to tell him; when all was so obscure, and so properly so?" (CHM 164). Indeed, the impossibility of asking important questions of fellow males (and Hilary's family is notable for producing only boys (CHM 168)) has been established on the first page of the story: "there are few questions asked by a young boy when there is no woman to reply to them; or at least, few questions about anything that matters" (CHM 153).

Aickman has here gone to considerable lengths to ensure that Hilary, and we, are told almost nothing specific about Mary's death. We never see the facts as reported by the newspaper; everything we know is third-hand rumour. Given what we are told about Surrey society's ideas of propriety, there may even be some doubt that Mary has really died; Eileen's "interfered with, and mauled about", and even her "bitten all over" imply a sexual assault as much as a fatal one. The events of Hilary's childhood apparently occur before or during the Second World War (CHM 166), a time when sexual assaults on children, whether the child survived or not, were far from being acceptable fodder for local newspapers.

Significantly, the affection between Hilary and Mary has a decidedly physical aspect: Mary's "fine eyes were for Hilary alone; and not only her eyes, but hands and lips and tender words as well" (DHM 154); they "would sit close together, or one at the other's feet, talking without end, and gently embracing"; and when they take their walks, they frequently do so hand in hand (CHM 155). The narration emphasises the point (and telegraphs the sight of the grown-up Mary at the story's end) by noting, while Hilary is still a child, that "Perhaps Hilary was one of those men who are designed for one woman only" (CHM 164).

This brings us to the second apparition at the haunted house, which Hilary sees as they are leaving:

When some way up the steeper slope, he seemed to hear something, and could not stop himself from looking back.

At the corner of the wall, there was no special feature, as one might have half-expected, such as a turret or an obelisk. There was merely the turn in the hipped roofing. But now Hilary saw, at least for half a second, that a man was looking over, installed at the very extremity of the internal angle. There was about half of him visible, and he seemed tall and slender and bald. Hilary failed to notice how he was dressed: if, indeed, he was dressed at all.

Hilary jerked back his head. He did not feel able to mention what he had seen to Mary, least of all now. (CHM 161)

We are told immediately afterwards that Hilary was unable "to mention the sight to anyone" and that "Twenty years later, he was once about to mention it, but even then decided against doing so". This telegraphs the second part of the story, in which the adult Hilary tells his army comrade Callcutt about Mary. Hilary tells Callcutt almost everything: about his feelings for Mary, their walks together, their fantasy life (drawing "maps not only of Surrey, but of Fairyland, and Giantland, and the Land of Shades also") and the finding of the house - "But Hilary did not tell Callcutt about the lean, possibly naked, man he had so positively seen at the extremest angle of the wall. He had been about to tell him, simply without thinking, at the point where the incident came in the narrative; but he passed over the matter. (CHM 169)

Why does Hilary deliberately conceal this detail from his friend, while being so frank about everything else? Clearly, the bald man's presence has some deep and sinister significance. Aickman deftly eliminates the possibility that Hilary kept this part of the story from Callcutt simply because he was unsure it had actually happened: the man was "positively seen". The man's leanness, baldness and possible nakedness are all strongly sexual indications; his hardness and baldness contrast explicitly with the "soft, fair thicket on top of [Hilary's] head" which Mary had been fond of caressing (CHM 155). Could it be that Hilary is jealous, that even before the final encounter at Maryland he has some sense of having lost Mary to a powerful sexual rival? It seems somewhat odd, given all this, that Gary Crawford classifies "The Same Dog" among "those stories of Aickman not focused on men or women and their relationships" (RA 52).

The children's reactions on first encountering the haunted house and yellow dog may be worth examining here. Before they hear or see the dog, Mary says flatly, "'I don't like this place'"; and although she says it after Hilary's fall, it seems evident that it is not only the fall that has unnerved her: "It was most unlike her to say such a thing. He had never before known her to do so". When the dog begins to bark, she suggests running away, but Hilary reacts with cool logic: "'Either the dog is chained up, or shut in behind that wall, and we're all right. Or else he isn't, and it's no good our running.'" She accepts this, presumably because it is "somewhat the way that Mary's own influence had taught him to think", and she starts collecting stones as a precaution. Meanwhile, "Hilary had gone a little along the track. He stood there, listening to the clamorous dog almost calmly" (CHM 157).

Just after Mary has declared the building a haunted house, and has again suggested that they leave, the dog appears. It stops barking, "but instead emitted an almost continuous sound halfway between a growl and a whine, and quite low", and shows a "most un-doglike" calculation in not attempting to rush the gates to get at them. Hilary advises, "'We must show no sign of fear'", but Mary is "already standing rigidly, with her big eyes apparently fixed on the animal, almost as if hypnotised":

Even the dog's eyes were a flat, dull yellow. Hilary felt strange and uneasy when he observed them; and next he felt upset as he realized that Mary and the dog were gazing at one another as if under a spell.

"Mary!" he cried out. "Mary, don't look like that. Please don't look like that."

He no longer dared to touch her, so alien had she become. (CHM 159)

Hilary's plea is a fine Aickman double entendre;  is he referring to the way she appears or to the way she is looking at the dog? He becomes more and more distressed, "while all the time the dog kept up its muffled internal commotion, almost like soft singing"; is this hypnosis, or is it perhaps seduction?

Eventually Mary seems to recover herself, but her manner seems changed, unnaturally cold: "'What are you frightened of? It can't be the dog. He's gone'", and eventually, "'What's happened to me is that I've got back a little sense'"; which Hilary finds "so obviously insincere, that it first hurt, and then once more frightened him" (CHM 160-161).

In fact, Mary's speech after the dog's departure resembles nothing so much as the speech of an adult trying patiently to calm a childish fear. In places, it also resembles the speech of a dissembling lover trying to cope with a jealous outburst: "'He's gone. And that's what you care about, isn't it?'" After the last, insincere reassurance, Hilary ends the conversation with a childish, "'I want to go home'"; Mary nods silently and "they set off, but not hand in hand". When Hilary looks back and sees the man watching them, he is unable to mention it to her, "least of all now" (CHM 161). It seems evident that, whatever may have happened to Mary during Hilary's subsequent illness, he had lost her by the time the dog disappeared from sight.

S. T. Joshi has noted (MWT 224) that "Aickman's fiction has pronounced autobiographical overtones, although they are never presented bluntly and are always skilfully and seamlessly enmeshed in the narrative". In the case of "The Same Dog", it appears that the story is in part a poetic retelling of a specific and painful episode in Aickman's autobiography:

When I was very young, I had a friend of my own, a little fair-haired girl named Anne Watson, born in Virgo. ... Anne was one of those angelic children who, though dear to the fancy of sentimental Edwardian writers, really are to be found from time to time. For a year or two, we were together constantly, with never a misunderstanding, cross word, or absence of total sympathy. I devised intricate garden games with ingenious rules and distant objectives, which transfigured the garden into Eden. Anne, especially as she was also very pretty, brought out all the good in me, though it was a somewhat slender stock; and with no one else have I ever been so happy for so long. (AR 61)

There seem to be clear parallels between the pretty Anne Watson and Mary Rossiter, who, at school celebrations, could "appear in a really beautiful silk dress, eclipsing everyone" (CHM 154); and between Aickman's intricate garden games and Hilary's and Mary's map-making sojourns over the Surrey countryside. Furthermore:

She faded and she changed, as does all that is good. There were years when I heard nothing of her. Then, just before the Second World War, she wrote to me and I saw her once. She had become a quite distinguished scholar in Latin and Greek. She had also become a bitter Left extremist, certain that the impending struggle was the artifact of Capital, and that no other comment should be permitted. She had no humour and no sweetness, though she treated me as one intellectual treats another. We ate a bun and drank a cup of mock-coffee and had nothing more to say. We should have died together, ten years or so earlier, rather than let it all happen to both of us. (AR 62)

Again, presumably, the parallels are clear. A "bitter Left extremist" even gets a look-in during one of Aickman's characteristic asides, where he notes that Hilary's teachers feel he has been sent back to school too soon: "the children often seemed to divide into those perpetually truant and those perpetually in seeming need of more care and attention than they were receiving at home. That it should be so was odd in such a professional and directorial area; though Mrs Cartier, who looked in every now and then to teach elementary French, and was a Maoist, said it was just what one always found" (CHM 164).

I think, then, that "The Same Dog" is rather more than a story in which a man sees the ghost of a dead childhood friend. It seems to me one of Aickman's most poetic and personal tales, and a good example of the "dislocation of time" which Crawford notes (RA 54) as one of Aickman's frequent motifs. The dog's mesmeric effect on Mary, her suddenly "grown-up" demeanour, the lack of concrete information about her death and her final appearance as an adult seem to imply that Hilary's loss is the result not so much of Mary's dying as of her somehow outgrowing him; indeed, when the adult Hilary begins to walk away from the house, "it was somewhat as on the previous occasion; veritably, he was behaving exactly as a small boy might have" (CHM 172). The sight of the adult Mary behind the "garden-of-remembrance" gates suggests an expensive, tidied-up kind of death-in-life. Perhaps the bitings and maulings of a slender bald man, and the promise of a large house named after herself, have seduced Mary away from childhood's romantic Fairyland and Giantland, and into the grindingly prosaic yet sinister adult Land of Shades at Maryland.



Works Cited

Aickman, Robert. Cold Hand in Mine. London: Robinson Publishing, 1988 (CHM)

Aickman, Robert. The Attempted Rescue. Tartarus Press, 2001 (AR)

Crawford, Gary William. Robert Aickman: An Introduction. Baton Rouge, LA: Gothic Press, 2003. (RA)

Joshi, S.T. The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001. (MWT)



Philip Challinor
28 October - 30 October 2005