Buster Fleabags by Rolf Harris

‘His name was Buster Fleabags. He was my dog, and I was his human.’

The happiest times in Rolf Harris’s boyhood were spent with Buster Fleabags – a bouncy little dog with stuck- up ears and a curly tail. Buster Fleabags was as much of a character – and a bundle of energy – as his owner, and this is the story of a very special dog.

Ten new Quick Reads are published on 4 March 2010, World Book Day. They include:

The Perfect Holiday by Cathy Kelly (HarperCollins) Last Night Another Soldier by Andy McNab (Corgi Books) Traitors of the Tower by Alison Weir (Vintage) The Perfect Murder by Peter James (Pan) Doctor Who: Code of the Krillitanes by Justin Richards (BBC Books) Hello Mum by Bernardine Evaristo (Penguin) Life’s Too Short: True Stories About Life at Work with foreword by Val McDermid (Bantam Books) Buster Fleabags by Rolf Harris (Corgi Books) Money Magic: Seven Simple Steps to True Financial Freedom by Alvin Hall (Hodder) We Won the Lottery: Real Life Winner Stories by Danny Buckland (Accent Press)

The books cost just £1.99 and are available from supermarkets, bookshops and to download as an e-book via www.quickreads.org.uk

Quick Reads is a World Book Day initiative. Find out more at www.quickreads.org.uk

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Enter Buster Chapter One

His name was Buster Fleabags. He was my dog, and I was his human. Buster came into my life in 1942, when I was twelve years old. He was a mongrel, and the same sort of shape as the small Australian sheepdog called a kelpie. His alert ears were always sticking up to catch the next exciting sound. His tail curled up and round to one side and was always ready to wag. In colour he was mostly black, with blurred bits of brown and little white highlights sprinkled here and there. One of the things I loved about him was that above each eye, where you would expect to see eyebrows on a human, he had a little round light brown spot. From a distance, you couldn’t see his eyes among the black fur. You only saw those two pale brown spots. They looked for all the world like they were his eyes, moving up and down as he looked this way and that. We lived in a house by the Swan River in Bassendean, which is a town about seven miles from the city of in . The house had a long driveway. It was really only a track, just wide enough to take a single car, and it came down to the house from Bassendean Parade. Parade was a very grand name for what was in fact just an unpaved dirt road. On either side of our drive Dad had planted New South Wales box trees and jacarandas. The jacarandas only started to bloom after they were about seven years old. From then on they blossomed with beautiful mauve flowers, and each year the drive was a carpet of fallen purple blooms. The house, which Dad had built himself, stood in more than an acre of land. At the end of the house the land sloped steeply down to the River Swan. Our family consisted of my mum and dad, my brother Bruce and me. We two lads slept in separate beds out on the veranda. Our family always seemed to have a random collection of animals. It was well known locally that we would take in dogs, cats, any animal really, and throughout my childhood our house was home to all sorts of creatures, large and small. There was a stupid old collie dog named

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Puppledy who, as her name suggested, was always producing puppies. There were cats and kittens wherever you looked. We had one cat that lived to the grand old age of twenty, producing kittens every year. And there was my brother’s favourite dog, Poochie, who sort of became my dog when Bruce went off to join the army. Whenever I went out on my bike, dear old Poochie loved to trot alongside. He was such an obedient dog that if he drifted away, a sharp word from me would always bring him back. Instinct wrecked all that. One fateful Saturday I decided that we would go and have a look at Guildford airport. It was quite a trip, as we had to cross to the other side of the river. We went over the Guildford road bridge, then turned right at a T-junction onto the main road. Finally Poochie and I got to the turning for the airport. This was wartime, and there were all sorts of soldiers guarding the airport entrance, but that just added to the excitement. With luck the soldiers might let a kid like me go up and talk to them. Then maybe I would get a bit of chocolate from one of them. Wartime rationing meant that ordinary folks like me hardly ever saw chocolate. On that Saturday, Poochie and I had gone over the bridge and reached the main road. I was waiting for a break in the line of cars so that we could cross over and turn right. Poochie had been quietly trotting alongside me until then, but suddenly he spotted another dog on the far side of the road. Instantly the hackles on his back went up and, before I knew it, he’d dashed at full speed across the busy line of traffic to get to the other hound. There was a squeal of brakes and an awful dull thump. The next thing I knew, Poochie was lying dead in a pool of blood in the middle of the road. The driver of the car, to give him credit, got out as soon as he managed to stop. He came running back towards me, his face as white as a sheet. He picked up dear Poochie and laid him down in the gutter at my feet, shaking his head and saying something. But I couldn’t hear anything he said. I was like a zombie. I couldn’t hear a thing. The whole world seemed to have gone silent. I pretended I was in a sad film, playing the role of the brave hero who undid his faithful dog’s collar and walked away. I never saw the driver leave.

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The next thing I knew, I had left poor Poochie’s body by the side of the road and walked all the way home, pushing my bike. It seemed too uncaring to ride. I was determined not to cry, as that was seen as a sign of weakness in a boy when I was a youngster. I knew Dad was at work and Mum was practising for one of the plays she loved to appear in. So when I got home I walked straight into the house – no one locked their doors in those days. I wrote a highly dramatic letter, telling them what had happened to our dear dog. I left his collar sitting on top of the letter on the table and crept into my bed fully clothed. Once curled up and hidden safely under the bedclothes, I finally let the tears come and sobbed myself to sleep. It wasn’t long after that dreadful day that a man from up the road came round to our house, and said that their dog had just had a litter of six puppies. He wondered if we could take one when the litter had been weaned. I was still deeply upset by what had happened to Poochie, but here was the chance to have a brand-new puppy of my own. I’ve always loved the breath of a tiny puppy. It’s all warm and creamy from taking in its mother’s milk, and I love the way a puppy snuffles around your ears. Mum and Dad didn’t take much persuading. As soon as the pup was old enough to leave his mother, which was about four weeks, he came to live with us. I loved cuddling the tiny little bundle of fluff as the puppy, soon to be known as Buster Fleabags, licked at my hand. The first thing the new arrival needed was a name. Ross Latham was my best mate. We went everywhere together and talked about everything, and we came up with the idea that the new puppy should have the longest name of any dog in the history of the world. After a great deal of talk we ended up with a name that sounded like a poem with its sing-song rhythm. That name in full was:

Buster Fleabags Chop-Chop Aldi Boranto Fosco Fornio Poochie Acka Flipp Flopp Pie Cruncher Biscuit Basher Bumble Puppy Pimple Head Hambone Harris!

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That’s some name, isn’t it? And to this day I can still recite it in full at the drop of a hat! You’ll have noticed that Poochie’s name was included right in the middle of Buster’s flowery title. We did this as a sort of loving link, but of course we didn’t often address the new puppy by his complete name. He was just Buster Fleabags for short. If I was calling him in from anywhere, ‘Buster! Buster! Buster!’ worked wonders, as it was an easy name to shout out loud and fast.

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Other resources

The BBC runs an adult basic skills campaign. The first chapters of this year's books are free to download and listen to on the raw website. Go to www..co.uk/raw

Free courses are available for anyone who wants to develop their skills. You can attend the courses in your local area. If you’d like to find out more, phone 0800 66 0800

A list of books for new readers can be found on www.firstchoicebooks.org.uk or at your local library.

Publishers Barrington Stoke (www.barringtonstoke.co.uk) and New Island (www.newisland.ie) also provide books for new readers.

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