up above a veterinary clinic, I had more than my fair share of encounters with a wide variety of breeds. To be honest, growing up, I loved all dogs – irrelevant of breed, but I knew three Labradors in my childhood, two of which belonged to my late friend Alice Benkert. Alice lived in Esher, and the two dogs, Poppy and Oscar, would come with her parents to collect her from school. I would spend hours with them. I remember the time we came back to her home and the dogs had found several boxes of freezer bags that they had scattered like confetti around the kitchen.
The other Labrador belonged to an English teacher at my school, called PJ. He had a beautiful black dog and a Land Rover – and I coveted both. Now I think about it, I wonder whether getting to know Labradors at the same time that I went to boarding school and was separated from my childhood Golden Retrievers was the seed of my obsession. I cried for a year when I left home. My homesickness was debilitating. It wasn’t just that I missed my home, but also the dogs, Liberty and Lexington.
Lib and Lex, as we knew them, were my best friends and my confidants. They were what really made our house a home. They soothed and settled me. I decorated the walls around my bed at school with photographs of the dogs, but that only made things worse. I would sob into my pillow each night, wishing, longing for that warm, hairy body stretched out on my bed.
When my parents finally understood how much I missed the dogs, they decided it would be a good idea if they came along with us when it was time to drop me off at school. But the fleeting appearance of Lib and Lex only made matters worse – tears would stream down my cheeks as I watched my parents drive away, a small tuft of blond fur visible through the back window.
I’m getting homesick just thinking about it!
Lib and Lex were the first constants I really knew in my life. Both my parents would come and go, depending on work commitments, but the dogs were always there – tail wagging at the door, tongue lickingly happy to see me.
Throughout the term I would find their blond hairs stuck to my clothes. A reminder of my two friends waiting for me at home. Boarding school was the only time in my life when I was forcibly separated from dogs and it was then that I promised myself I would get my own dog at the first opportunity. Young naivety assured me this would be on the day that I left school, but then travel and girls got in the way and my plans got put on a back burner.
Until now. This was the perfect opportunity. The problem was that neither the production company nor the BBC wanted me to take a dog. To be honest, I never really understood why. I think it might have had something to do with the landowner who was leasing the island. While there weren’t many ground-nesting birds on the island of Taransay, there was plenty of livestock.
The makers of the show argued that there were already three dogs, all Collies, coming along, and that a fourth dog would tip the balance. Not only would it be a drain on our limited resources, but it would also affect the fragile human-to-dog ratio.
I set about on a campaign to change their mind. I found as many cute pictures of Labrador puppies as I could and then got my father to draft a letter outlining the human benefits of having a puppy within the community.
We argued that a puppy would be a cohesive addition, helping to bond strangers and bringing peace and harmony to the newly created community. Bringing 36 men, women and children together in the extreme circumstances of a windswept, uninhabited Scottish island was bound to create tensions but, we argued, the presence of a young puppy could help to diffuse any emerging conflict and arguments. Maybe that’s why they didn’t want the puppy …
I promised that I would train the puppy to be a working dog so that she would be an asset to the community. I was sure she could be trained to work with the sheep. And as for a drain on resources, I argued that she could quite reasonably live off scraps. She would be a Labrador, after all. They eat anything, I reasoned.
I’m not sure what clinched the deal for me, but the programme makers eventually relented and I set about finding my perfect puppy. A Labrador, of course.
Dad offered to help. For more than a week, we toured the country looking at litter after litter.
We drove as far north as the Scottish borders to look at puppies. Too thin, too fat – none was quite right. Eventually, detective work led us to a tiny kennel near Heathrow airport. There we saw a litter of black Labradors that stuck in my mind, in particular one of the puppies who was the last to be picked, probably because she was a rather scrawny-looking thing with a large swollen eye.
‘Wasp sting,’ the woman explained.
I examined her carefully.
‘No thanks,’ I said, rather heartlessly, handing her back.
As we pulled away from the yard, I caught a glimpse of her sad, dark eyes. Why was I turning my back on this lone pup? Suddenly I wasn’t sure, but as with love, I wanted to be certain. How would I know she was the one?
For the next few days I couldn’t stop thinking about her. It had been more than a week and I was certain she’d be gone.
‘She’s still here,’ said the woman down the phone.
I raced back. We pulled up to the house and were led into the living room, where the puppy was alone. She had been weaned from her mother, which meant separating the dogs. Immediately she ran up to me and licked my face. The swelling on her eye had subsided and, away from her greedy siblings, she was now much rounder, with a bulging pink belly.
She gazed up at me with her hazel eyes as I ran my fingers through her thick black hair. I nuzzled my nose behind her ear and inhaled her scent. It was instant love. I had always been told that I’d find her, and now I really had found ‘the one’. I named her Inca.
I held her close as we walked out into the crisp winter night, but as we approached the car I heard a commotion in the background.
‘Get back here!’ cried a voice.
The puppy’s mother had broken free and came bounding over. She jumped up and licked Inca clean across the face, then lifted her ear. I am not one to over-anthropomorphise our animals, but I swear she was wishing her luck. She was whispering something into that little dog’s ear, and I’d like to think she was telling her to look after me.
As quickly as she had appeared, Inca’s mother vanished back into the darkness. Her owner looked on in astonishment, a tear in her eye.
And so began a friendship that would change things forever. Little did I realise then how much this little dog would form, shape and create my life. She would change it in ways I never thought possible. The story of Inca is, ultimately, the story of me.
Inca and I became inseparable. I was still living in my childhood bedroom in my parents’ house, and I can vividly remember setting up her little crate at the foot of my bed, feeling both fear and excitement at the journey that lay ahead.
My life of blissful selfishness was over and a new one of selflessness was beginning. I genuinely think that those two words separate dog owners from non-dog owners.
I guess, on the face of it, it is a little strange that we invite this hairy animal into our homes. We share our lives with a creature that was once undomesticated and wild. I’ve always been fascinated as to why we keep dogs. Why we love dogs. Why we mourn our dogs when they go. Of course, it varies from culture to culture and from country to country. Some argue it is a sign of development; the more developed a country the higher the number of pet dogs. The sharp spike in the number of pet dogs in China,
