My dogs

"All your blog posts are about animals," said my housemate Alex, in a slightly accusatory tone.

"No they're not," I replied.

"Yes, they are," he insisted.

"Of course they’re not," I said.

This could have gone on for some time in a perfectly circular fashion, had he not jumped in with "The last five posts have been about animals."

So I checked, and he has a point, actually. There have been rather a lot of posts recently about animals.

"I think," said Jamie, my other housemate, who had been standing in the doorway with a beer in his hand, observing the exchange, "that you should write a post on English cocker spaniels. That’s what my dog is. An English cocker spaniel. And I don’t mean to be biased, but my dog is exceptionally good-looking and well-behaved.”

Given that I have no particular affinity for English cocker spaniels, I have modified the job spec and prepared a post for you on my dogs, who were also exceptionally good-looking and well-behaved – even more so, I would venture to suggest, than Jamie’s.

When I was about 5, we moved into a big house with a big garden, and decided we needed a guard dog. So off we went one day to a house on the other side of town, painted rather daringly in varying shades of green (several years later, this was modified, even more daringly, to various shades of pink), where we acquired two labrador-cross-ridgeback puppies.

In the car on the way home, we discussed names for our new acquisitions.

“How about if we call them Tom and Jerry?” suggested my mother.

“No, no,” my brother and I objected.

“Well, what about Shaka and Zulu?” tried my mother.

“No, that’s silly,” we scoffed.

After five minutes or so of my mother suggesting names and my brother and me pooh-poohing her suggestions, she threw her hands up in the air (or perhaps just one hand, since she was driving at the time) and burst out, “For goodness’ sake! What do you want to call them then? Doggy and Woofy?”

It was meant sarcastically, but we immediately said, “Yes. Yes. Doggy and Woofy.”

So Doggy and Woofy they were.

Doggy didn’t last long in our family. He was a bully, and would scoff down his own food and then scoff down Woofy’s too, while poor Woofy sat miserably on the sidelines, steadily growing thinner and thinner. The day came when Doggy had to go, and he went to live with another, hopefully more tolerant, family.

(Incidentally, I have a vivid memory of my mother saying to the dogs one day at feeding time, “Where are your bowls? Go and get your bowls!” And off they scampered, reappearing a moment later bearing their bowls in their mouths.)

With Doggy’s overbearing presence out the way, we sat back and waited for Woofy to blossom and become the ferocious guard dog we had employed him as, but this never happened. He was, in truth, a bit pathetic. He never even learned to bark at people who approached the gate. In fact, having developed a mortal terror of white coats, following a few traumatic visits to the vet, he would go skittering off to cower in a corner every time the milkman came round in his white coat. 

In his later years, Woofy had a stroke and acquired a curious lopsided appearance. One side of his face collapsed, and he ran with a gait more usually observed in the inhabitants of rock pools. But he never ceased to be the sweetest, gentlest, most good-natured dog ever to sit in a corner while burglars scaled the wall.

When Woofy was about 12, we acquired a black labrador puppy from some friends whose dog had produced. The new addition to our family was called Bagel, and he was the most gorgeous, bouncy, happy, enthusiastic dog in existence. When he was a puppy, he was cute in the way that all puppies are, and when he grew older, he continued to be cute just by virtue of his undampable zest for life.

Woofy was less than impressed by this turn of events. As Bagel was petted and cooed over by everyone, Woofy would shoulder his way in, in an uncharacteristically aggressive way, and demand attention. Bagel was delighted to have a readymade playmate, and would constantly go bouncing up to Woofy, calling him to come and play. Woofy steadfastly refused to acknowledge him. He would turn over and pretend to be asleep, or he would turn his head in the other direction, or go stalking off somewhere else.

Woofy did eventually get used to Bagel and accepted him as part of the family. He never had the energy or the enthusiasm to play as much as Bagel would have liked, but he was a staid and trustworthy father figure. Where Woofy went, Bagel followed. My mother was out one day, some distance away from home, and she saw the two of them trotting along the road. Normally, they never went beyond our block – they knew where the boundaries of their territory were. But here they were, out in uncharted territory, and Bagel was trotting along after Woofy, placing complete trust in him to keep him safe and lead him home at the end of it.

They always knew when we were going on holiday. They would see the suitcases coming out and packing being started, and they would start to mope. It was heart-rending. We would come back from holiday two weeks later to find them sitting at the gate waiting for us. And then we left Zimbabwe for good. And it has always been terribly painful to imagine them sitting at the gate, waiting for us to come back, not knowing that we weren’t going to.

Woofy will have died a long time ago, and if Bagel is still alive, he will be old by now. But I still remember them as clearly as if I had just seen them yesterday.