All Creatures
Great and Small

Here's another excerpt
from Deborah Curtis's Touching From a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division (1995). Click
here for part one (Deborah and Ian get a dog).

*****

Sadly our dog had become a costly luxury. Owing to our lack of funds, even Candy wasn't getting proper food and her fur had begun to fall out. As Ian was away so much I was faced with the dilemma of needing to walk her at night-time and not wanting to leave Natalie alone in the house while I did this. Sometimes, my parents were able to help out, but eventually they offered to find somewhere else for Candy to live. Ian was very distressed at this suggestion, though it didn't persuade him to come home any more often. My discovery that he carried photographs of Candy around, rather than photographs of his wife and child, made me realize how foolish I had been to carry on running his home. I knew Ian would be upset to hear that Candy had gone, but thought it cruel to keep an animal we could no longer afford to feed. Ian had ceased to make any contribution to her care and did not want to discuss or understand the problems I was having. A place was found for her on a farm in Rochdale and my parents drove her there so that I would not have to say goodbye.



Endnote: Control opens in Seattle on 10/19. Deborah is played by Samantha Morton, Ian is played by Sam Riley (who portrayed Mark E. Smith in 24-Hour Party People). Image from The Guardian. Click the link for Peter Bradshaw's review. As he notes, "Corbijn's movie is shot in a stunning high-contrast monochrome, perversely turning Macclesfield's grimness into grandeur. It effortlessly revives a British cinematic style that you might call beautiful realism, reaching back to Christopher Petit's Radio On, and further back to Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and A Taste of Honey." Click here for part three.