Of course, not everybody likes them. Some people prefer cats. My friend Jane wore her cat round her neck like a comforter; as for my erstwhile friend, Andrea Newman – one of whose characters remarks that friends are like pot plants: both have short lives – her kitchen, was festooned with litter trays, no more objectionable to her than are a baby’s nappies to a doting mother.
But, for us, it has always been dogs, starting with the little mongrel bought at the local pet shop the day after my then husband moved out.
Patch
Patch, for so we named the puppy, remains for my son and me the dog of dogs, a paragon of doggy virtue, and he gave us immeasurable pleasure. We still remember the day he jumped out of the car window when we were stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the seaside, and his dazzling smile when we opened the front door to let him in after his trips to the dustbins on the local estate. We knew so little about dogs then that we used to let him out on his own. His cast-iron stomach and happy temperament kept him with us for eighteen years, a longevity also, and more surprisingly, achieved by Topsy, who came next: a sweet-natured, neurasthenic Australian Terrier, whose owners didn’t want her because her legs were ‘too long’. Topsy was shaking life a leaf when I met her and for weeks never left my side. She did not seem long for this world.
With Topsy
I hadn’t thought Jean Rhys had long to live either, when I met her at the door of that wretched little bungalow in Cheriton Fitzpaine. I had been sent down to try and get her novel out of her: the novel that became The Wide Sargasso Sea. But, like Topsy, Jean was a survivor. Frail and neurotic though she was, her glory years were still ahead. As for Topsy, it was not until she started bumping into the wall and circling the table legs in advanced dementia that we stopped spoon-feeding her chicken and rice (her diet for her last five years) and accepted it was time to let her go.
That should have been the end of it. We were no longer young and we were also spending part of every year on a sheep farm. But fate (in the person of Ira Moss of All Dogs Matter) intervened and, before long, we had adopted a stumpy little Patterdale terrier with no social graces but a big, big heart. More important still, she had been trained by the farmer who raised her and then, alas, died on her, not to chase sheep.
We only had Choci for eight years. The animal hospital reckoned that she was probably quite old when we got her. But what spirit! What speed! The rabbits on the North Yorkshire moors were getting a run for their money.
And the greed! For months after she died, I was still moving all edible food out of reach. She had jumped up onto the kitchen table and downed a bowlful of radishes, scattered the kitchen waste bin all over the floor to achieve quite a respectable ‘installation’, and also eaten an entire box of chocolates, without suffering ‘muscle tremors, irregular heartbeat, internal bleeding, or a heart attack’.
But even Choci, though she was built like a little tank, wasn’t indestructible and one day her back legs gave out. It was only thanks to a wonderful man-and-wife team who live near Bridlington and fitted her with the made-to-measure contraption seen below, that we had her cheerful company for another two years.
Choci on her wheels
But nothing lasts for ever and nor did Choci, now buried in that Yorkshire farmyard. But we never forget her and she and the whole doggy tribe were brought to mind the other day when I heard from a prisoner friend – 30 years into a 68 year sentence – that he has become part of a dog programme in the not-quite-so-high-security American prison to which he was recently moved (a feisty Scotsman with the nerve to take on the Aryan Brotherhood) for his own safety.
Tom’s description of the relationship that develops between the prisoners and their dogs – ‘ I have seen many an otherwise cold hard man sink to his knees voicing nonsensical babble while a tail swishing dog licks the smile from his face’ – and his conclusion, for the dogs are released for sale to the public when they have been successfully retrained, moved me to tears. ‘As each dog is set free, a part of me is freed with it.’
If only we could be as loyal, trusting and non-judgemental.
That’s the thing about dogs.