Cats hate Thomas Hardy

I didn't want to go to Dorset. Having instructed Mr Brain to book a holiday I had visions of the Italian lakes or Kenyan beaches and had dusted off the pareo and sunnies. I had forgotten, and hoped he had, that earlier in the year he had suffered a fall at Cairo airport and had sat, a sorry little figure, his shoulders shuddering with ill-suppressed sobs crying, 'sell my passport on ebay.' I was still kicking and screaming as we crossed the border into Dorset to stay at a bed and breakfast. Bed and breakfast! I have never stayed at B and B in all my life and imagined Blackpool and being thrown out of a cramped room at 6.00 in the morning and locked out until 10.00 at night to wander the windy streets or huddle in a bus shelter. I have a dramatic streak.

Wrong again. Some incredibly grand people have taken to opening their sumptuous houses to a few select guests. Everything from the occasional night to rampant orgies, all with total discretion assured, though this owner did tell me that the risk is all theirs because, he said, many bookings are made on the internet 'without benefit of headed notepaper'. Confident in our suitably engraved writing paper his house was ours. And very nice it was too. Which was just as well given our packed days.

Dorset is a county of contrasts. There is the rural idyll so beloved of Hardy but the Wags and rich chavs have discovered that they can buy flashy villas, cheek by cheek with each other (we know from our experience of Portugal that minor celebs hate privacy and, perhaps in some nod to their humble roots, prefer to huddle together closer than on a council estate) for 5 million pounds in Sandbanks. Well, we did it all. Not a stone left unturned.

The idea was for me to explore my relationship with Thomas Hardy. I give talks on Victorian writers. Dickens, of course...Ruskin..Wilkie Collins..Arthur Conan Doyle..Trollope..Carlyle. It would be quite useful to add Hardy to the list. I have read his books and poems, all biographies, and as many commentaries as I can get my hands on. It shouldn't be too difficult. Except I hate him. I know this shouldn't matter. After all I can 'do' Ruskin who reminds me of my first husband, and not in a good way. Ruskin is a horribly unpleasant character who contested his wife's claim that he was impotent by declaring in court that he masturbated 30 times a day. This, I should add, is not why he reminds me of 1st Husband. (Incidentally I do not think that John Cleese's sniping at his ex-wife, however cleverly done and however justified, does him much credit. It simply draws attention to his poor choice in the first place.) My problem with Hardy, as opposed to Ruskin or Husband no1, is that I can't really work out why I feel so strongly about him. I need to explore the man more so that I can reach a stage where my talk stands some chance of coming alive.

Taking a lateral view we start at Monkey World, an ape rescue centre. It is a beautiful 65 acre park in the countryside where endangered apes and monkeys can live in luxury and safety. Many have been saved from terrible cruelty, from labs here and abroad, or kept in totally unsuitable conditions and neglected. Some are glamorous, others are not. Personally I was drawn to the macaques who came from a British laboratory where they were used for asthma research. Previously they had been caged and alone. Now they have the free run of a natural and generous wooded area as well as a splendid bungalow and plenty of company and entertainment. Obese, spotty and balding they huddle instead together in a corner. It is hard to tell if they are happy. One can only hope but, captivated by their ugliness, it is their sad and unresponsive eyes that get me reaching for my chequebook. I can at least rest assured that Beryl, despite her manky scabby face, will spend her last few years as a Trustafarian.

It is the chimpanzees who are the most captivating. They are split in to three groups, each headed by a dominant male. The girls are given contraceptives but since these are usually in-plants they can occasionally be picked out during grooming. Eight and half months later A Mistake may be the result. Since the girl chimps are chavvy and, unlike human chavs, have no idea or desire to have motherhood thrust upon them the Baby Mistake is removed and the girl is returned to her chavvy friends and they can carry on loafing around and fighting over blankets and throwing empty bottles. There is a chimpanzee nursery run by a one-armed Lulu, rescued from a travelling circus in Cyprus, and Sally, a Spanish beach photographer's prop. These girls know about mothering and appear to be of a distinctly more responsible and intelligent nature which is just as well. The unwanted baby is given to Lulu and Sally and some other older, more sensible chimps who make for wonderful foster parents. We saw one such little lad who was having a great time having full-time playgroup facilities and being taught complex social skills by this socially superior group. A lesson here for mankind.

All this – plus a trip on the only sea-going paddle steamer in the world to the Isle of Wight which at one time held the record for unmarried mothers per head of population and was the capital of porn film making, but I'm going back a bit here – and a visit to the Liberal Democrats party conference to meet Vince Cable – and a party at a house next to Harry Rednapp's at Sandbanks – and visits to T.E. Lawrence's house, where I told the National Trust guide that Lawrence of Arabia was the same height as I am and should more accurately have been played by Ronnie Corbett than Peter O'Toole, though I conceded it would have been a very different film (he wasn't amused or even interested because if you are a Fan, whether it be Lawrence or Cheryl Cole, facts can be a dreadful nuisance) – and copious quantities of stargazy pie which is Dorset's version of fish pie and is delicious and is decorated with a miniature lobster scrambling out of the pastry lid, but I refused to eat him as I felt a clever vet could resuscitate him – and we are back to Thomas Hardy.

None of this is irrelevant to my search for Hardy. There are many anomalies about Hardy. He came of modest stock and rose through the sale of Jude the Obscure to wealth. Although he owed his material to his country background he was never comfortable about his builder father and the little house where he was born. He claimed to be a socialist but was snobbish and, the worst crime for me, deferential. He wrote about sex and the consequences of it but it is unlikely that he was comfortable with his own sexuality. Certainly his first marriage was dangerously unhappy. Mrs Hardy died of an overdose in a tiny attic room that she had retreated to as an escape from her unhappy marriage. Although he was an unsatisfactory husband Hardy indulged himself in excessive grief and remorse as a widower. After a year aged 74 he married his erstwhile secretary who he set to work collating his dead wife's bitter and angry diaries while he wrote maudlin poems in her memory. She should have told him to piss off.

Having visited his childhood and youthful home, and then the house he had built for him by his father ('pretentious then but comfortable now' pronounced Mr Brain, always rather sharp about someone else's designs) we stood in the pets' cemetery in the garden. There were an awful lot of little gravestones which Hardy had engraved himself. It seems that with his pets, like his wife, he was more solicitous in death than in life. There was 'Wessex', the terrier who bit everyone except T.E.Lawrence who he wisely deemed not worth the trouble and was beaten to death by a passing tramp – Wessex, not T.E. Lawrence, who simply fell off his motorbike. Tears came to my eyes. Tears of anger tinged, I must confess, with some satisfaction. Not in either case about Hardy's death. His body was buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart, having been cut out and stored in a biscuit tin (rumour had it that it had fallen from a shelf and a dog had got at it but that was just Dorchester humour because Hardy was unpopular locally for being mean, allegedly) was finally buried in Dorset. No, the tears were for Snowdove, Hardy's cat.

What a ridiculous, pretentious name for a cat. No wonder Snowdove, like so many of Hardy's cats, left home never to return. I thought of the cats we had seen at an animal sanctuary the day before. Each cage had a little sign giving some background of the inmate. Except that they had not been found wandering but 'wondering' and I was left to wonder what they wondered about. Greek philosophy, perhaps, or if the new girl in Sugababes will be any good...who can say? Though we can only guess at Snowdove's thoughts as she trudged off to lie in dramatic fashion on the railway track to be sliced in half by the Bournemouth Express. Unlike Hardy, her unsatisfactory owner, she was buried in one grave.

I now know why I don't like him.

Copyright of website, photographs and text Lesley Brain