A Small Dog Saved My Life. Bel Mooney

a ‘public’ figure who is really somebody disreputable, who wants to hang out and do nothing. Yet the desire to flee fights with my need to give something back – for if you lead a life full of blessings you need to keep them topped up. This is karma: the meals on wheels of a good life. That day it was taking me nearer to my soulmate dog.

      The committee met in the hospital’s charity office and we were all sitting around waiting to start when the door opened and Lisa (one of the younger committee members) came in, holding something in her hand. Because of the table, I couldn’t see properly; she came further into the room and I realized it was a dog lead. With something on the end of it. I craned my head and glimpsed a flurry of white. It was the smallest dog I had ever seen.

      Lisa was the head of fundraising for the RSPCA’s Bath Cats and Dogs Home. Strangely, J and I had been there for the first time ever, just two days earlier. We went to recover his beautiful Labrador Billie, my fiftieth birthday present to the husband who had everything else and therefore needed a dog. Here I must explain that I was never a dog lover – not as a child when my grandmother got a snappy corgi called Whiskey, nor at any other time in my life. Yet when J and I first met in our second year at University College London and went to visit his mother, I was entranced by his way with the family Labradors, Bill and Ben.

      That was the end of 1967; I was 21 and in love and all was new. Everything that the 23-year-old philosophy student did entranced me: the way he hunched his shoulders in his navy pea coat, strode out in his green corduroys and whistled to those sleek black animals, his voice dipping and elongating their names – ‘Biiiiill-eee! Bennn-eee!’ – with musical authority. I was awkward and nervous as I stroked their velvety ears, making up to the dogs because I wanted to impress him – the cleverest, funniest, sexiest, most grown-up man I’d ever met. Those ‘real’ dogs seemed an extension of his capability. But I was incapable of seeing the point of his mother’s precious little dachshund.

      Twenty-seven years later, in January 1994, I knew that if I chose to buy him a black Labrador for his July birthday I would have to learn to look after a dog, for the first time in my life. It was a serious decision, for since J was away a lot, the main care would fall to me. And so I, who had resolutely set my face against our son Daniel’s pleas for a dog all through his school days, finally capitulated to the reality of dog hairs, dog smells and tins of disgusting mush. I chose Billie (named by me after Billie Holliday. A control freak will even name a man’s birthday dog) and liked her, but I didn’t know how to love her. Naturally J was delighted by the surprise, and equally happy when, 18 months later, I gave him Sam, a scruffy Border collie, for Christmas. Anyone might think that I had turned myself into a dog lover, but it wasn’t true. I liked them, but that’s not enough for dogs. They aren’t satisfied with being liked. I was a dog minder, that’s all.

      This is partly a story of home, for dogs know their place in the pack, and the pack needs its lair, its fastness, its refuge. In 1995 we had moved to our farm, J’s dream home, in about 60 rough acres of pasture which we would farm organically. It was a mile down a track, just outside Bath’s city boundary, and hung on the edge of a valley like Wuthering Heights, with winter weather to suit.

      J briefly employed a girl to exercise his horses and one day, somehow when she was riding with the dogs near the road, Sam came home with her but Billie did not. Nor did she come for supper.

      She was missing.

      This was June 2002. In the warm night, pierced by the sharp cries of foxes, J roamed the fields with a torch, calling her name, fearing her stolen – for Billie-of-the-velvet-ears was a beautiful bitch. He was in despair. The next day I wrote a round robin letter, got into the car and posted my note through every letter-box within a radius of about half a mile. An hour later the telephone rang and a couple living up on the main road along the top of Lansdown (the ridge which saw one of the decisive battles in the Civil War) told me they had found a collarless black Labrador on the main road and called the dog warden. Billie was safe.

      We left the house at a run and went to the RSPCA home to collect her. One of the many glorious things about dogs is that you need no proof of ownership – not really. Of course the microchip is a failsafe – but the point is, your dog knows you. When she was brought from her holding pen, Billie’s face showed relief and joy to match our own. This is something non-doggy people do not understand: the expressiveness of the canine countenance. Dogs’ faces change, just like their barks and body language; they may not be as evolved as our primate cousins but human love serves to ‘humanize’ them in the most expressive way.

      Holding tightly to her lead, we saw rows of cages and heard the mournful sounds of dogs wanting to be found homes – a desire of which they could not possibly be cognizant, in the sense that we know, all too painfully sometimes, our own innermost wishes and needs. Nevertheless the desperate wanting was there in those barks and yelps, in the lolling tongues and mournful eyes of the homeless dogs, the pets who were not petted, the working dogs with no jobs. The dogs who wanted to be known as much as Billie knew us.

      ‘Let’s have a quick look,’ I said to J.

      We wandered about, but it was too sad.

      ‘Let’s go home,’ J said.

      So we did. Sam welcomed Billie with bounds of joy and lolloping tongue, snuffling his welcome. Even the cats, Django, Ella, Thelonius (Theo for short) and Louis, looked faintly pleased, because cats like the world over which they rule to be complete.

      Then, just two days later, Lisa is entering that office with a dog on a lead, but not just any dog. My dog.

      ‘I have never seen such a small dog,’ I said. ‘What on earth is it?’

      ‘I think she’s a shih-tzu’, Lisa replied. ‘She’s in the dogs’ home. I’m keeping her with me tonight – that’s why she’s here, because I’ll go home after the meeting. These very small dogs get quite distressed in the home overnight and so if one comes in all of us take turns.’

      My first assumption was that the small white dog was lost, as Billie had just been lost, but that was not the case. Lisa explained, ‘She was abandoned – left tied to a tree in Henrietta Park.’

      Henrietta Park is a pleasant patch of green but very central in the city, and I simply could not believe anyone could abandon such a small dog in a place where – who knows? – drunken oafs might make a football of her.

      ‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘No way! Somebody must have had to rush off for a dental appointment or something, and forgotten her for a while.’

      Lisa explained that it had happened two days before, and nobody had telephoned, and if the dog remained unclaimed in seven days’ time, ‘We’ll be looking for a new home for her.’

      By now I had the anonymous shih-tzu on my lap, but she was eager to get off. She wriggled and looked for safety in the person who had brought her, but I was overwhelmed by a need for her to settle down – to like me. This was the magical moment of rescue.

      ‘I’ll give her a home,’ I said.

      ‘Are you sure?’

      ‘Quite sure.’

      Looking back, I know that moments of rescue cut two ways.

      I gave no thought to the muddy farm (no place for a white lapdog), or the cats (one of which, Django, scourge of rats and rabbits, was certainly bigger than this miniature mutt), or to J, a lover of ‘proper’ dogs. Real dogs. Big dogs.

      Couples should discuss decisions together – I knew that. But in that second of saying ‘I’ll give her a home’ – that spontaneous, expansive welcoming of the small white dog – I knew instinctively that the personal pronoun was all that mattered. This was to be my dog. If I were to mention the idea to my husband, son, daughter, parents or friends they would all shake heads, suck teeth, remind me of hideous yapping tendencies and say it was a Bad Idea. They would talk me out of it, and this small dog would be taken by somebody else, who couldn’t possibly (I was sure) give her as good a home as I would. So I would stay silent. This was nobody else’s business. I who had never had a dog of my own because I had never wanted a dog