Empty dogs’ home hit by surge in demand
THE FORMER boss of Battersea Dogs and Cats Home has revealed it could not meet the “massive surge” in demand for pets in the first lockdown – because it had been cleared of animals.
Claire Horton, 58, told Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs: “There were no animals in rescue homes. We had to get them out to foster homes as quickly as possible as no one knew whether we would be able to operate and look after the animals.”
Ms Horton added: “We also saw a surge in animals coming into the country from abroad and puppy farms churning out animals, often in poor condition, taken away from their mothers too early.” Despite this, she welcomed the rise in responsible pet ownership, saying: “Dogs and cats give people a real sense of calmness, comfort and companionship.”
Ms Horton, now director general of the Commonwealthwar Graves Commission, selected discs including Ghosttown bythe Specials and Heroes by David Bowie. Her book choice was “anything by Dick Francis”.
The full interview is on BBC Radio 4 at 11am.
APART from a slash of scarlet lipstick and a tailored grey coat with a 1940s vibe, Lucy Worsley left the dressing up to others in her BBC One documentary Blitz Spirit last week. Actors in character read extracts from the Mass Observation diaries which painted a picture of extreme suffering, division and government dithering far removed from the cheerful stoicism conjured up by that overused phrase “Blitz spirit”.
Though there was bravery too – the nurse’s account of being lowered headfirst into rubble to put a crushed man out of his misery was intensely moving. She applied the merciful chloroformed pad to a “red mess” that had once been his face.
Worsley didn’t labour obvious parallels between that national emergency and the one we are living through now. But as she said “history is messy”.
I’ve been reading the newly republished, unexpurgated diaries of the American-born Conservative UK politician Chips Channon which reveal just how much of an apologist he was for Hitler. “One felt one was in the presence of some semi-divine creature,” he wrote of the Führer at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. And as we know, he wasn’t alone in his view.
Our current national emergency isn’t the Blitz. Our cities are not on fire. But the pandemic has divided us bitterly. Like the Blitz it has brought out the best and the worst in us. In her great novel about wartime London, In The Heat Of The Day, Elizabeth Bowen writes of “the tideless, hypnotic, futureless every day”.
I think we’ve all experienced that.