Not to be outdone, his father joined in, suggesting with gentle mockery that Bonnie was ‘not a proper dog’.
‘Is the wren any less of a bird because he’s small?’ I demanded, drawing myself up to my full height (without heels) of 5 feet 3 inches.
‘Aren’t we allowed to tease you over your dog?’ he asked, dryly.
I made a measured so-so movement with my hand and the subject was dropped.
One day in Bath a pierced and tattooed man in his late twenties said loudly to his big dog, who was pulling menacingly on its string towards Bonnie, ‘Leave it! It’s not a dog, it’s a rat on a lead!’ I was filled with a protective fury which took me by surprise. This new feeling was one of many signs that I too had entered into an ancient transaction, known to all owners of small dogs throughout the centuries. What else is this but an example of Darwinian survival? Survival, of course, will gradually unfold as the subject of this book – and so it is fitting to introduce it here, in the destiny of the small dog.
Of course Bonnie, like all canines large and small, is descended from wolves and somewhere – way, way back in her genetic blueprint – a part of her soul is roaming the forests and hills, filling the night with mournful howls to others of her kind. But I admit there is little of that behavioural memory evident in the animated powder puff on my lap. Now I am her kind, the leader of her small pack, and it is I to whom she calls, in those unmistakably shrill tones. She knows I will hear, swoop, soothe, hold fast. Out there in the wild the small dog would certainly perish, and therefore it has evolved an effective method of survival: being loveable. The transaction says, ‘I will adore you and, in exchange, you – my very own human – will protect me. Where you go I shall go, when you are full of sorrow I shall comfort you, and in return you will be my shield against the world.’
Or, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it when she fell in love with her small spaniel, Flush, who became her consolation and saviour: ‘He & I are inseparable companions, and I have vowed him my perpetual society in exchange for his devotion.’
Those who dislike small dogs on principle sometimes ask, ‘What are they for?’ The acutely intelligent Border collie is bred to herd sheep and when not trained to do so it will neurotically round up anything it can, as if to be deprived of your function is to lose identity. Working dogs have a purpose. The veterinarian Bruce Fogle explains that the domestic dog (Canis familiaris) has the same number of chromosomes as the wolf, 78, and that over eons different canine cultures emerged. There were hunting dogs, herding dogs, guard dogs and, later, breeds to ‘flush, point, corner, retrieve, or sit quietly on satin cushions’.
Later Fogle asserts that the chihuahua ‘was bred to act as a hot water bottle’, which contains some truth – and yet I suspect that two references to cushions in his book The Mind of the Dog indicate a man whose love of dogs grows in proportion to their size. Many men proclaim a dislike of small dogs. Is the opposite of a proper dog a fake dog? Or might it be an ‘improper’ dog, carrying with it a sense of scented, snuggling, sensual, stroking intimacy, such as would make any man jealous? In the sixteenth century a clergyman named William Harrison included in his Description of England a satirical assault on women and lapdogs:
They are little and prettie, proper and fine, and sought out far and neere to satisfie the nice delicacie of daintie dames, and wanton womens willes; instruments of follie to plaie and dallie withal, in trifling away the treasure of time, to withdraw their minds from more commendable exercises, and to content their corrupt concupiscences with vain disport, a sillie poore shift to shun their irksome idleness. These Sybariticall puppies, the smaller they be the better they are accepted, the more pleasure they provoke, as meet plaiefellows for minsing mistresses to beare in their bosoms, to keep companie in their chambers, to succour with sleepe in bed, and nourish with meet at bord, to lie in their laps, and lick their lips as they lie in their wagons and couches.
I wondered, from the tone of this, if the Canon of Windsor’s wife had taken up with a toy spaniel. In fact, I find he was plagiarizing a scientific work published seven years earlier by John Caius, MD, court physician to Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth I and President of the Royal College of Physicians. Our Western concept of breeds was first recorded in his Short Treatise of English Dogges in 1570. In this useful work I meet Bonnie:
There is, beside those which wee have already delivered, another sort of gentle dogge in this our Englishe soyle … the Dogges of this kind doth Callimachus call Melitoeos, of the Island Melita, in the sea of Sicily, (which this day is named Malta, an Island in deede famous and reoumed …) where this kind of dogges had their principall beginning.
He continues, ‘These dogges are little, pretty, proper, and fine …’ and so on, although the magnificent phrase ‘Sybariticall puppies’ is the Revd Harrison’s own. Dr Caius goes on to make a perceptive point about lapdogs, which I would not have been able to understand in 2002, when Bonnie was so new, as I do now. Criticizing a female tendency to delight in dogs more than in children, he guesses at mitigating circumstances: ‘But this abuse peradventure reigneth where there hath bene long lack of issue, or else where barrenness is the best blossom of bewty.’ The small dog as child substitute? Of course – for there are many ways to save a life, and this is one to which I shall return.
That summer we took Bonnie to stay on our new boat, a Puget Sound cabin cruiser which was moored at Dittisham, on the river Dart in Devon. J bought the dog a tiny ‘pet float’ and each morning he would rise early, dress her in her red life jacket and row to the shore so that she could relieve herself. My lack of rowing skills was a good excuse, but in truth, he never once complained. I would stand on deck and watch him, remembering our honeymoon in that very village (so cold in February 1968, while this July gave us the hottest day of the year) and loving the fact that he was so at home on the water which scared me, a non-swimmer. By now he loved my dog; why else would he have agreed that she should come on holiday while Billie and Sam and all the cats remained behind on the farm, taken care of by my father? The dog came everywhere with us and when, after a few days, I developed an inexplicable pain in my right arm, my daughter suggested it must be a repetitive strain injury, caused by clutching Bonnie so tightly. Of course.
Bonnie was sitting between us as J and I heard Devout Sceptics broadcast at 9.00 a.m. on Radio 4, Amy Tan’s voice filling the cabin as the waves made their soft slapping sound against the blue hull and J listening with his characteristic intensity. I imagined those tiny Yorkies on her knee, her long fingers held carefully out of reach of their tongues, as she talked about her belief that there is a benevolent spirit in the world, larger than any individual. ‘That works with the concept of a god,’ she said – and went on to link it with the idea of, not so much forgiveness in the Christian sense of the word, but compassion. Her voice was quietly firm as she told me that her aim was to learn about ‘this notion of compassion’, about empathy with her fellow human beings – which she defined as ‘another way of saying Love’.
She added that of course you cannot measure love – it cannot be scientifically proven, no more than the idea of an afterlife. Yet she could say, ‘Yes, I believe this,’ because she finds ‘intuitive emotional truth’ in the idea each day of her life and in the writing of her novels.
As I re-read her words today (the interview was printed in my book, Devout Sceptics) I realize how much Amy Tan’s philosophy informs my own life, and that the meeting with her and her small dogs was significant in more ways than one. Everything that has happened to me since Bonnie arrived from nowhere has at once tested and confirmed it. What’s more, the entirely serious lessons my little dog has taught me confirm her optimism. There is no doubt in my mind what small dogs are ‘for’.
But it was still so new. My diary entries record the process of dog intoxication – for that is indeed what it was. As the American genius Amy Hempel wrote in her short story collection The Dog in the Marriage, ‘… you don’t just love the
