‘Like us he is on a shoestring, and collared by the awfulness of life. He is so well trained that he shares my compassion for the human race as not worth biting. His name is Algernon James Matthew Glover, and he answers to ‘Come ta heel!’’’
That is how Denis Glover, one of Aotearoa’s finest poets, registered me – Algernon, a black-and-white springer spaniel – with the Hutt County Council on 6 August 1967. Now I lie six feet under, reduced to bones and dust.
Another illustrious Aotearoa poet, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, and his wife Meg – both Pukerua Bay poets and springer spaniel enthusiasts – gave me to Denis when I was only a pup. Denis’s seaside perch at nearby Paekākāriki was homely enough, but I missed my canine whānau on Pukerua Bay’s clifftop, where we crowded the living room forcing visitors to step over us.
My flamboyant name suited Denis’s devilish humour. Who wouldn’t itch to take an Algernon down a peg or two? In the 1960s, the Campbells staged Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in their makeshift theatre, and I was named for one of its protagonists, Algernon Moncrieff – Algy: privileged, idle, amoral, and gluttonous. Algy invented Bunbury to escape dull obligations and live a double life. Ironically, Denis resembled him. He often spun whoppers to his live-in companion, Khura, about his whereabouts so he could slip away to the pub under the pretext of walking me, his own four-legged Bunbury.
The first verse of Denis’ poem ‘The Weather Cast’ depicts a kindly dog owner:
At breakfast-time when I eat eggs
my panting puppy ups and begs
To make him happy
I am forced to hand him down a piece of toast.
But while ‘Gloves,’ as his friends called him, was eloquent, talented, industrious, rambunctious, and refined, he was sadly no model dog owner. He walked me and was affectionate in his own way, but Khura mostly looked after me. Like Denis, she was larger than life: screechy and theatrical, especially after a drink, but kind, often tossing me tasty titbits from the table.
Each morning, after seeing Khura off to her job in Wellington, Denis and I set out along the beach. Whatever the hour, the Paekākāriki Hotel – that ‘tatty old pub in all the dignity of its decay’ – drew Denis like a star of Bethlehem. In his 1981 autobiography Hot Water Sailor and Landlubber Ho! Denis describes our morning routine:
Often after my early morning walk on the beach with my dog, whose racing efforts to catch seagulls were always thwarted by last minute lazy wings, I called in at the pub about seven in the morning, knowing my devious way in, ‘twixt-hours drinking being an old hobby.
Rain or shine, I waited outside, tied without ceremony to a post like a reluctant guard dog. ‘K. has been a fortnight in the S.I., leaving me & dog as night watchmen of the Aspell establishment,’ commonly known as the Paekak Pub, Denis wrote to a friend in June 1967. From my post I sometimes heard him tell fellow soaks that I fancied myself and had rejected my name as a poor anglicisation of aux gernons, Norman French for moustachioed or whiskery. He also declared that, as a pedigreed working dog, I was a contradiction on four legs. His nonstop nonsense, rich ringing voice, educated enunciation, and high-wattage performance, especially when pissed as a newt and helpless with laughter, worked on them like catnip on cats.
Showing off was nothing new for Denis. As a schoolboy, he famously claimed the school record for eating prunes -forty-nine in one sitting – along with ‘cubic yards’ of Spotted Dog, ‘one of those beastly steamed pudding things with an occasional raisin in it.’ And here he was again, acting the goat despite being a famous poet, an exceptional printer, and, with Charles Brasch, co-founder of the learned literary rag Landfall.
Afterwards, with Denis usually the worse for wear, we trudged home against a bone-chilling wind blown straight off Antarctica’s ice fields, flattening the waves and driving blinding sand low across the beach. On those desolate southerly days, sand, sea, and sky struck the same flat grey note. Bent into the wind, coat collar raised, Denis cursed the weather gods, borrowing lines he had written years earlier to liken the ocean at our door to loathsome creatures. On wild nor’wester days it was ‘old Tasman, the boar, / Slashes and tears;’ on gentler days, ‘at our door the sea / Licks its whiskers twice in a day.’ Yet in any weather the beach beckoned, with its salt-and-dead-fish tang, picnic scraps, sticks of every shape and size, jeering gulls, black, orange-stockinged oystercatchers, and the pungent pong of penguins. In nesting season, those noisy black-and-white waddlers kipped beneath the neighbouring cottage. Once I burst through the hedge to sort the blighters out. What a racket! Denis threatened culinary revenge if they tried their breaking-and-entering tricks on him. But he was all mouth and no trousers for had he not written the famous rhyme,’ with its unforgettable first verse sentimentalising those bewinged but flightless beasts?
In Plimmerton, in Plimmerton,
The little penguins play,
And one dead albatross was found
At Karehana Bay.
Once home from the hotel, having breached his ‘brushwood barricade keeping out, hopefully, the ravenous storms,’ Denis lit his pipe, poured a drink, and picked up a book or manned his typewriter. He sometimes forgot to feed me, although Khura gave me scraps and bones, like her gentle old Aunt Ida who had loaned her the down payment for the Paekākāriki cottage and then ended up invalided there. Denis professed to be fond of ‘old log Ida,’ but complained of having to make endless hotties and cups of tea, and of missed pub visits, forcing him to lay siege to the flagon hidden in the washhouse. Sometimes, I slept beside Ida’s bed, and she would dangle a withered, flannelette-draped arm and stroke me. She fretted about their drinking. For a time, Denis’s mother, the larger-than-life Lyla, also landed on us. Like him, she was all words, wit, and cleverness, ‘mettlesome to the last.’ Then there was the odd literary lodger.
Things went downhill for Denis after his printing job with Harry H. Tombs ended in 1961. Though he claimed to enjoy his ‘meditative loaf’ at Paekākāriki, his drinking worsened. As for me, I was thrilled by the promise of more beach gallivants. In Hot Water Sailor and Landlubber Ho! he describes his daily routine.
For a glorious time I lived the life of a pseudo-squire, reading and scribbling in sunshine, assiduously attending a goodly vegetable garden (flowers not my department), though what to do with thirty-two football sized cabbages all maturing together was a problem … Then I would stroll on the beach with dog Algernon, or call on people I knew.
Denis often used me to break the social ice with guests. Writer James McNeish and his wife Helen visited Paekākāriki to record him reciting his Sings Harry poems. Helen recounted to Denis’s biographer, Gordon Ogilvie (Denis Glover: His life, 1999), ‘He had a black spaniel tied up by the front door; the dog was almost the first thing you saw on arrival. We went in. Denis turned around and thundered at Algernon, ‘They’ll never let you into South Africa!’
Then there were the neighbours. Denis sometimes cursed them darkly and loudly as stickybeaks perennially prying through privet hedges. The hedges were mostly bamboo but, Denis, who loved to bamboozle, insisted they were ‘only bean stalks’ whenever the neighbours asked to trim them. Long after the great poet passed into the next world, writer Frances Cherry interviewed several of his Paekākāriki friends and neighbours. Eve, who lived next door, was among them and, gratifyingly, remembered me.
‘I remember his dog Algernon. A big black and white dog. It had a kennel in the corner of the garden. Denis used to come out and screech and shout in that terrific voice of his for Algernon.’
Khura died at home, unexpectedly, at age 57, in July 1969. She caught influenza and collapsed one evening. A few weeks later, Denis wrote a plaintive letter to friends, poet Allen Curnow and his wife, Jeny. It concludes ‘And here I am with Algernon, who has suddenly become wildly affectionate.’
With Khura gone, Denis fretted over who would look after him. Meg and Alistair Campbell stepped in, and we spent a few wonderful days with them at Pukerua Bay; a kind of homecoming for me. Around tthen, Denis befriended a young man, Mark Douglas, at the Paekākāriki Hotel, offering him lodgings at 66 Ames Street. But, in February 1970, Denis was admitted to Wellington Hospital with influenza followed by a long recuperation away from Paekākāriki. He wrote to his friend scholar-librarian, Olive Johnson, ‘..I’m like my dog Algernon – when sick you don’t inflict yourself on others but crawl under the house and sit out the supper dance solo.’
This was the beginning of the end for me. Little did I know, but I was just a whisker away from the chop. On 20 March 1970, Denis wrote to his friend the publisher, Janet Paul, to pass on Mark’s shocking update: my demise! ‘Bad News for you Denis. With the local police officer asking if I would assume responsibility in your absence…’ In his inimitable words, Denis continued:
In short, they had Algernon killed. So be it. He was biting and frightening old women going about their shopping. He missed me, after missing Khura. Both his parents were hanged for sheep-stealing, and there was some atavism. I resisted earlier suggestions that he should be done in, even though he savaged me twice. Although I sensed it coming, I would have resisted to the end. ‘Put away’ the old women. I’m only glad I wasn’t there – not because of the decision but because of a protective impulse not born of ownership or possessiveness. Heavens, he and Buffy would have produced some problem children indeed.
Surely more might have been done to save me. Savaging old ladies was neither in my nature nor my code of honour. But with Khura dead and Denis gone, I was orphaned at the tender age of three. And as for that poncy pooch, Buffy, never in my wildest dreams did I view her as a romantic prospect.
‘I feel strange without kids and company – not even a dog – but I look out on the island and what I call Tasman’s Great Bay and feel comforted,’ Denis wrote to Janet Paul a few days later. No Khura, no Ida, no Lyla, and no me, Algernon. Perhaps my absence came as a relief: Denis was free to begin the last phase of his life. He sold the Paekākāriki cottage he had sworn never to part with, entered a new relationship, a marriage, and enjoyed several more productive writing years. But he never owned another dog. Looking back from the afterlife, I guess you can’t expect a genius to be a responsible dog owner. But I’m pleased that Rupert, his son, owns a much loved Havanese dog, Frida.
Left illustration: Denis Glover, Attentive dog. Turnbull Library Collection Ref. C-078-002. Right photo: Frida Glover (Havanese dog) who features in Rupert Glover’s 2026 memoir ‘In the Company of Great Names.’
Bob Zuur’s beach photographs from the 2021 Covid-19 lockdown show how dogs continue to be central to Paekākāriki life.
