Bel Ria by Sheila Burnford

First published: 1977

Type of work: Historical fiction

Themes: Animals and war

Time of work: World War II

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: France and England

Principal Characters:

• Bel Ria, a small performing dog that begins as part of a gypsy caravan
• Donald Sinclair, a corporal in the Royal Army Service Corps, who is given shelter by gypsies and later shelters their animals
• Neil Maclean, a sickberth attendant, who assumes the responsibility for Bel Ria
• Alice Tremorne, an elderly arthritic lady, who provides Bel Ria with his final home

The Story

Although this book begins as a story of Corporal Donald Sinclair, it is a small dog that will become the focus of Bel Ria. As Sinclair is retreating from France after the Battle of Dunkirk, he repairs a broken wheel on a small one-wagon gypsy caravan operated by an unnamed woman and an old man with their animals: a horse, a dancing bear, a young donkey, a tiny monkey, and a small performing dog. In return, the gypsies nurse him when he is injured and hide him during an encounter with German soldiers. As he lies wounded and concealed, he sees the dog dancing for the Germans, directed by the unseen hand of the woman.

After Sinclair leaves the caravan, making his way to the coast, the gypsies are attacked by a German plane. Only the monkey and dog survive, and they follow Sinclair, seeking their last connection to their former life. Sinclair reluctantly, but with a sense of obligation, allows the animals to remain with him as he boards the evacuation ship, which is bombed and sinks. Through the long ordeal in the water, the animals provide Sinclair with the motivation to cling to life until they are all rescued.

When Sinclair is transferred from the rescue ship to a hospital, he extracts a promise from sickberth attendant Neil MacLean, a fellow Highlander, to care for the dog. The monkey is soon adopted by the entire ship’s crew, while the unhappy MacLean woodenly provides for the dog’s needs but gives no affection or love. He names it Ria, which was the name for every succeeding sheepdog on the farm of his youth. Almost grudgingly, MacLean finds his relationship with the dog changing. His rather mechanical treatment of Ria, a legacy of his experience as a caretaker at an experimental station, disappears. He comes to appreciate Ria’s dancing and the dog’s pleasure in performing, reflecting on the joy it might have given his now-deceased wife. In the process of caring for the dog, MacLean discovers things about himself he has never known. The attachment becomes so strong that when he receives a letter from Sinclair with instructions to send the dog from Plymouth to Glasgow, a fellow sailor must bring the dog to land.

On Ria’s first night in Plymouth, before he can be shipped to Glasgow, a bomb destroys his temporary home, and Ria returns to gypsy life, but this time alone. Three days after the bombing, he wanders into a garden and investigates a garage tumbled down from the recent bombing. Inside, he discovers a woman trapped in the rubble and stays near for three days until his bark finally brings rescuers. The story enters a new phase as the rescued woman, Alice Tremorne, a crotchety, arthritic elderly lady, devotes herself to the dog she chooses to name Bel. Both she and her companion, Janet Carpenter, are changed by the dog’s love and their attempts to understand him. Bel, too, adapts to his new surroundings and the attention he receives, joyfully entering into the tricks and games he learns.

Two years later, MacLean appears, attempting to find the dog. Although Mrs. Tremorne is initially reluctant to acknowledge his claim, his relationship with the dog cannot be denied, and MacLean takes up residence nearby. Bel and Ria are now united into one name. After the war ends, Donald Sinclair visits to tell his story with the remarkable dog. In the excitement of the merging of the parts of his life as Ria, Bel, and the only link to his past in Europe, the animal dances his final dance.

Context

By the time she wrote Bel Ria, Sheila Burnford had established herself as a successful children’s writer with The Incredible Journey (1961) and had written a number of successful works for adults, including a book of autobiographical essays. Like The Incredible Journey, Bel Ria reaches back into the author’s own history. Yet this novel differs from her first book in several ways. Her first dealt with animals and their interrelationships, almost in the absence of people, while Bel Ria deals with animals and their interrelationships with humans. A major difference lies in the audience addressed; while The Incredible Journey was recognized immediately as a children’s book that adults can read with enjoyment, Bel Ria is clearly for an older, if not an adult, audience. While most critics have been positive about the emotional tug of the book, occasionally Bel Ria has been considered too sentimental for all but the greatest animal lovers. Yet, the translation of the novel into twelve languages during its first year suggests a more universal appeal.

Although Burnford had chosen, in Bel Ria, to work in a form she had mastered, the novel seems to show her also communicating to readers experiences of her own, in the form of stories about war for an audience that perhaps had never known one. She had served as an ambulance driver in England in the early days of World War II; the scenes of confusion at the front and the depiction of the bombing in England itself are well portrayed as a result. In two respects, Burnford succeeds here even better than most storytellers of the war; she shows the dislocation of individual lives and, by focusing on the experience of the dog, even heightens the confusion and unfocused anxiety the experience of war produced. The adoption of this perspective may make it appealing even to a middle-school audience.