rushed home after work, brimming with excitement at the thought of bundling David into the car, driving to Salisbury and coming home with my new best friend in my lap. Happily for the continuation of our relationship, he expressed no objection whatever to the acquisition of a dog. I’m not sure we would have survived had he said he hated dogs and couldn’t envisage coping with the responsibility. It would not have boded well for his future reliability as a hands-on father.
* * *
There are, in my experience, two types of dog breeder. There are those who do it not for the love, but the money. The bitches and pups are kept in cages and have little or no human contact. Then there are those who live in utterly disorganised and far less than hygienic chaos, but their animals – no matter how many they have – are part of the family. They’re petted and cuddled and any small indiscretion in the toilet department is either ignored or dealt with swiftly and without fuss.
This breeder, Diana, was of the latter variety. They had owned a farm in the path of the as yet unbuilt M27 and had been compulsorily purchased in favour of the road. They had bought the land in Salisbury and were in the process of building their own house, brick by laborious brick. The caravan housed husband and wife, two strapping sons and several giant and numerous miniature Schnauzers. We were reluctant to take the proffered grubby seats and worried what we might catch from the cups of coffee which appeared immediately, but the puppies were bright, healthy, friendly and affectionate. The one I’d seen at the show appeared to recognise me. He leaped on to my lap, licked me profusely and promptly fell asleep. He was perfect. His colour was grey, known in the trade as pepper and salt, and a boy, which was what I wanted.
Another, a more unusual black colour and a bitch, jumped on to David. There was some discussion about which we would take. I won. We paid £200 – a colossal sum in those days, which meant no dinners out and probably no holiday abroad that year – and drove home with William, who seemed to suffer no separation anxiety from his mother or his siblings. He was William from the moment we saw him, named after the character in the Richmal Crompton books we’d both loved as children. Our dog was ‘Just William’ from the word go – cheeky, naughty and irrepressibly amusing.
David was clearly delighted with him, but couldn’t stop talking about ‘the little black one’ we’d rejected. The next morning we took William into the garden for his first lessons in house training – it was a Saturday, so we didn’t have to worry about going to work – and David kept on going on about her.
‘You know,’ he finally came up with the clincher, ‘it’s all very well keeping a dog when you both have to go to work, but it’s not really fair. It would be much better if we had two dogs and then they’d keep each other company when we were out.’
We rang Diana immediately, found another £200 we didn’t really have and went off to Salisbury to collect her. She, it turned out, had already been named as Diana had half intended to keep her for breeding. She was known in the family as Hairy Mary. So, William and Mary. Names that went so well together. It seemed to bode well.
And so, for the next eighteen years, William and Mary were the best companions anyone could wish for. They took the arrival of two boisterous boys in their stride and were as playful and as gentle as any dog could be. William’s only fault was a tendency to be the canine equivalent of Houdini, able to escape from any confinement and take himself on a date. I recommended castration, as advised by our vet. David would hear nothing of it. He had no objection to Mary being spayed to avoid any unwanted inbreeding, but the thought of emasculating William was beyond the pale.
Quite how he survived the move from Hampshire to Clapham is a mystery to me. We were super careful about keeping him in as we lived dangerously close to the South Circular. Nevertheless, there would frequently be phone calls from the other side of Clapham Common asking us to pick up our dog, usually after I’d opened the door a mere crack to pass a cheque out to the milkman or the paper boy and William had managed to squeeze through a gap that wouldn’t have accommodated a mouse. We did, though, discover from a neighbour that he had a surprising degree of road sense. He was spotted trotting along our road to the zebra crossing, waiting on the pavement for a gap in the traffic and then scurrying hell for leather across the Common. He should never have lived for so long, but he did.
Just as I had grown up with Taffy, my two sons, Edward and Charlie, enjoyed the fun of the long walks a dog forces upon your daily routine and the comfort of a live and loving cuddly toy. The boys learned to care for an animal and treat it with respect, as I had. On Ed’s first trip to the vet for annual booster jabs – he was two – he left the surgery announcing that was what he would do when he grew up – become a dog doctor. He’s now 27 and a qualified vet.
The dogs were endlessly tolerant with the rough and tumble created by two small boys. Mary was patience personified – never minding when the ball sailed over her head to be caught by a giggling boy on the other side of the garden during a game of piggy in the middle with a dog as the piggy, chasing a football out on the Common like a mini Maradona and resigning herself to any tickling or ear tugging a toddler might choose to inflict. William’s policy was to teach an over-enthusiastic tease a little lesson. He would growl and grab a flailing arm, crossly, in his mouth. The boy would squeal, I would rush to the child in fear of a bite and find not so much as the tiniest tooth mark in the delicate skin.
We were a family of six and the dogs went with us everywhere. We rarely went abroad for holidays as we hated leaving them, even with a house sitter. Our best vacation ever was a tour around the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland in a horse-drawn caravan. No space at all in the caravan, so boys and dogs were deliriously happy at being able to share their beds – William and Mary were usually confined to the kitchen at night – and tons of space outdoors on exquisite, long, isolated, empty, golden beaches. The four of them would chase each other in and out of the sea, barking and squealing with absolute delight at the freedom they were able to enjoy.
It was Mary who began to deteriorate first. We had moved to the Peak District when Ed was 11, Charlie 7 and the dogs already in their teens. David and I were two Northerners born and bred, drawn home and wanting to give our sons the benefit of a similar Northern Grammar School education to the one to which we had access.
For William and Mary it meant a few traffic-free years of nothing but garden and fields and the occasional run after a rabbit. Eventually, at the grand old age of 18, Mary became so ill and incontinent, we took her to the vet who said senility was simply shutting everything down and it would be better to put her out of her misery. We held her close whilst the lethal injection was administered – the boys, bravely trying to conceal how heartbroken they were by sitting in the waiting room rather than watching the ghastly final act – and eventually David and I wrapped her in her blanket and we carried her lifeless body home and dug a grave at the bottom of the garden.
We laid her to rest with due ceremony. The four of us stood at her graveside, crying and laughing at happy memories of her skills as a footballer, insatiable appetite for anything sweet that might fall at her feet and love of rolling in anything unspeakably smelly she could find. William stood at my side, erect, like an old soldier, paying his own solemn and silent tribute.
William was a picture of utter misery without his lifelong companion. On the following Sunday night I had to leave home to travel to work in London, my weekly commute, knowing he might not be there when I got back. On the Wednesday, David called to say William’s breathing was laboured. Should he take him to the vet? I begged him to hang on if at all possible until I got home the next day.
When I arrived my beloved little fella hauled himself out of his bed and dragged himself across the kitchen to greet me. It was obvious he was in some pain and distress. We wrapped him up in his bed and he sat on my knee in the car whilst David drove. The boys were at school. Now, if there was one thing William hated above all others, it was the vet. He detested his annual jabs and it was the only time he
