A Small Dog Saved My Life. Bel Mooney

charities … But through it all he never lost his yearning for a real country life: the deep desire to plant hedges, husband good soil, stride out on land that is your own.

      Whenever I welcomed him back home to the farm from London, where he would have been interviewing politicians for his eponymous weekly television programme, he would throw off his suit to pull on old clothes and stride to the sheds to help with the lambing, like a true Renaissance man. When he bought a horse (then two, then three) and was still (in his fifties) able to vault straight up without even putting a foot in the stirrup, I knew that the most accomplished gaucho in Argentina would nod approval at his prowess. Women like men who straddle more than one world.

      Gradually I became tougher, although my brother-in-law once said I was the least likely farmer’s wife he had ever seen. I bought rubber boots – but rarely wore them. Learned to layer big sweaters over thick skirts. Even once drove the huge, ancient Land-Rover in the snow, because otherwise I would have been marooned. Alone on the farm (as I so often was), I learned independence. Once, with a coat over my nightdress, I even rounded up the escaped cows who were destroying the garden, placing Billie and Sam like troops on the flank and advancing fearlessly, shouting ‘Garn!’ and thwacking with my stick, driving them up to the barn, so that when the stockman and his wife arrived at last I was in charge. J was immensely (and disbelievingly) proud of me. The story of how the urban writer tamed the herd went up and down the valley. ‘Field-cred’ I called it.

      One spring morning, not a year after we had moved, I experienced the epiphany which leads – in a way I can now see but could not possibly have known then – me back to the subject of this book.

      It was late April and I was alone. The light woke me very early and from the window I glimpsed a morning of such limpid perfection it was impossible to remain indoors. I dressed quickly, afraid to miss the glitter of the dew, and released Billie and Sam from the laundry room where they had their beds. No need for leads. Out into the watery gold of the day with the dogs bounding and snapping at the air in exhilaration.

      I walked past the well, across the wide circle of gravel, past the handsome barn and thence right into the fields. And then I saw them. The Herefords were crowding near the fence, their chestnut flanks gleaming in the sunlight as they bent their creamy topknots to tug at the grass. There is a sweetness about cows I had never noticed before: their gentle, wary eyes in big white moon faces. That heavy, grassy smell and the rhythmic, chomping sounds they make, between low, faintly protesting moos. Because it was still chilly their breaths came out in little clouds, like ectoplasm hanging in the air – the whispering spirits of their beefy herd. What had they witnessed since the seventeenth century, those pedigree Herefords, what breed memory looked out through those rolling eyes?

      They ruminated and inspected me. I leaned on the fence and looked back and we were not afraid of each other. The air waited. And it was with a sudden leap of the spirit that I said aloud, ‘Good morning, girls. You’re looking so beautiful this morning! Aren’t you gorgeous?’

      To speak to them like that, to acknowledge their presence as I would a fellow human and admire their individual, curly-topped, four-square magnificence, was to put us on a level. To take my part in the wholeness of things. I now realize that it was at that precise point that I allowed myself to be affected by the genius loci – the spirit of the place. And it was the animals – rather than the trees or the distant sweep of the land, or the astonishing sense of worship I felt before the first primroses and the swathes of cowslips – which eased my heart finally into love. It was my humility before the universal beauty of which the animals were a part. In making me see the truth of their existence as on a par with my own within the greater Whole they were exerting a moral power over me which I had never experienced before.

      This is not what you feel when you look at an animal in a zoo, even though you might marvel at the size of the giraffe or the intricacy of the markings on a snake. Nor is it what you feel when you take the lid off a tin and allow dried food to rattle down into your big dog’s metal bowl, smiling fondly as he gobbles his supper. You may come near the sensation, though, when you watch your cat unfold its limbs and stretch – and realize that not in any universe could you ever hope to move with such indifferent grace.

      I was learning from the cows.

      The joy they gave me, in that brief exchange of looks and breaths that crystalline morning, when the brevity of the sunlight, the dew and all our lives, human and animal, made me catch my breath, was something I would never forget. It was as sustainable as J’s method of farming. It set me on a journey. Lolloping Billie and Sam were on it too, but it was Bonnie who would – in a future I could not have then predicted – be the truest companion.

      One of my favourite writers is Edith Wharton – she who, in late middle age, would so annoy her friends by the fuss she made over ‘the damned Pekingese’. Her first biographer, Percy Lubbock, wrote: ‘There is always a dog or two about Edith in her home, a small dog of the yapping kind, a still smaller of the fidgeting and whining breed – dogs that had to be called, caressed …’ But writing an autobiography in her seventies Edith Wharton recalled the walk with her father in 1865 (when she was four), down Fifth Avenue in Manhatten, when a friend of her father’s gave her a spitz-type puppy she called Foxy, the first of her cohorts of little dogs. Near the end of her life, after an unhappy marriage but a brilliant career, when many people she loved had died and many dogs too, Wharton located the beginning of her imaginative awareness: ‘The owning of my first dog made me into a conscious, sentient person, fiercely possessive, anxiously watchful, and woke in me that long ache of pity for animals, and for all inarticulate beings, which nothing has ever stilled.’

      The first couple of months of 2003 were (as always for J and me) extremely busy. What made us like that – both driving ourselves hard, always taking on extra projects, charity work and so on – and therefore unable to find much peace on our farm? The too-easy psychological answer might be that he was ever striving to emulate a famous father as well as an older brother who was himself a distinguished broadcaster. Yet the Protestant work ethic played an important role, over and above family history. I always thought that the last words of The Woodlanders summed J up, Marty South’s passionate elegy over the grave of her beloved Giles Winterborne: ‘… you was a good man, and did good things!’ Doing good things demands time and energy.

      As for me, I was always striving to prove myself (girl from humble background makes good etc.) yet always worrying that I would be found out: the achievement of a distinguished degree, the marriage, the beautiful homes, the successful journalistic career, the careful glamour, the books, the programmes, the immense jollity of the parties we gave – all of it discounted when I was found out to be a fraud. To keep fear and boredom at bay, to prove myself as a multitasking, perfectionist alpha female, I – like so many women – took on too much. I also had to keep up with my husband. Had I not done so over the years of his success as an international reporter, writer and political journalist, I would have gone under. The key to our marriage was the meeting of minds in friendship. For all the flaws (what union does not have them?) I do not know what better can be said.

      The pond was thickly iced, with a dusting of snow on top. In January and February 2003 I was struggling with the book of my radio series, Devout Sceptics, re-reading Daniel Deronda (because it was time to), brooding over structural problems in my sixth novel, The Invasion of Sand, taking on the chairmanship of a £2.2 million appeal to build a new children’s theatre in Bath, moving our daughter into her first London flat and supporting her through the intimidating start of her new job at the London Evening Standard and arranging all the detail of a 30-minute programme for Radio 4 to mark the 100th anniversary of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Kitty and I were writing a joint article for the Daily Mail, J was off to Iraq to interview the Prime Minister amidst ominous rumblings from the United States and in my diary I wrote, ‘The world is such a terrible place at the moment – a cloud over all things.’

      Yet amidst all that, the diary also records consolations:

      11 January: Bonnie and I return in the frost-bound midnight to the empty farmhouse. Her companionship is so precious to me, so essential now. Who would have thought that I would become so dependent on a little dog?

      13 January: It’s good to have