A Small Dog Saved My Life. Bel Mooney

commotion behind a 10-inch barrier which penned them in. I gaped at the dogs – at that time, the smallest I had ever met. But they made me feel better, for when Amy Tan herself glided into the room, astonishingly beautiful in green pleated silk and soft leather ankle boots, I was able to disguise my discomfiture at being less than elegant by fussing over her pets. This much I knew – all people like to have their pets fussed over.

      What I did not realize was that Bubba and Lilly were far more than dogs to Amy. We settled down for the interview and Malcolm fitted out microphones, noting with approval how quiet the condo was, the acoustic deadened by thick carpets, drapes and all that furniture. The little Yorkies nestled on her lap and Tan’s slim fingers played with their ears as Malcolm took a sound level. Then he stopped.

      ‘Er … Amy … I’m picking up noise from the dogs.’

      ‘Oh really? Doing what?’

      ‘Licking your hands – and snuffling. Er … do you think they could wait in another room while we do this?’

      There was one of those moments of silence when the temperature drops a fraction and you know, as an interviewer, that this faux pas could spoil things. I caught the corner of Malcolm’s gaze, knowing how much he (a man of great sensitivity, especially to women) wished he could recall the impertinent suggestion.

      Then Amy Tan said coolly, ‘The dogs have to stay. The dogs are essential.’

      ‘Of course they are!’ I cried.

      Malcolm backtracked. ‘Yes, I absolutely understand … Uh … but maybe they don’t have to lick your hands?’

      Pause.

      ‘Sure.’

      The novelist kept her hands out of reach of her pets’ pink tongues, and the dogs settled down to sleep amidst the folds of her green silk, except for the occasional moment when I would intercept a beady gaze asking me what the hell I was doing there. Or perhaps sourcing that slight odour of perspiration. They yapped once during the next hour, but the interview was going so well by then it didn’t matter. And when it was over Tan (more relaxed now) told me how she hates to travel in Europe since she can’t take her dogs, how she loathes being in hotel rooms alone and how she dreads the thought of anything happening to her beloved pets. Her words intensified my impression of fragility wrapped in self-contained eccentricity.

      As Malcolm and I walked to the restaurant she had recommended for lunch, I delivered myself – solemnly and with a certain degree of patronizing pity – of the opinion that those ‘teacup’ Yorkies were surrogate children for Amy Tan and her husband, Louis. Oh, statement of the obvious! What did I know? In the same way, years before when we were young, I had found some pathos in the fact that J’s elderly aunts, who lived together, posted birthday cards to each other signed from their toy poodles, Lavinia and Amanda-Jane. Later I would shake my head in disbelief on reading, in a magazine profile, that the novelist Jilly Cooper kept a picture of her dead mongrel in a locket. I was smug in my refusal to acknowledge true value in that level of affection for an animal. How fitting it was that hubris would arrive on my horizon shaped as a small dog.

      Malcolm was to tease me a few weeks later, when he was editing out those yaps and one or two small dog breaths for the finished programme, and I had already fallen in love with Bonnie. He laughed that the day in San Francisco had turned me into an aspirational copycat who realized that real literary ladies must have dogs. I huffed and puffed at the joke against myself – still resisting the notion that I could be perceived as one of those women with a handbag dog.

      What matters is how profoundly I’ve come to understand what it meant to Amy Tan to have those comforting dogs on her lap as talismans and as inspiration. And now it is I who, with no irony, describe myself as my dog’s ‘Mummy’. She is as necessary to me now as Amy Tan’s two were to her, and just as restricting of the impulse to travel, or even go to restaurants. I send cards from her and expect them back. Just three weeks after the encounter with Amy Tan and her dogs my diary entry reads, ‘I adore Bonnie. She has transformed everything.’

      But even then I could not have known that the real transformation would be a work in progress. The dog would make me take myself less seriously – changing me into a foolish woman who would later buy a cushion saying ‘Dogs Leave Paw Prints on your Heart’ in Minnesota; a petit point of a Maltese in Portland, Maine, as well as a lobster-patterned macintosh, lead and collar set; a Navajo jacket and turquoise suede collar and lead complete with silver conchos in Santa Fe; a pink outfit in Brussels; a red set in Cape Town; cool Harley-Davidson accessories in Rapid City, South Dakota; ‘bling’ sparkles from a shop in Nice; and more. Not to mention purple mock-croc from an internet site for her bridesmaid’s outfit … but that was much later. Small-dog madness, I was to discover, is a worldwide phenomenon.

      I concentrate on the trivial deliberately. These are necessarily small steps towards the big jump into that unknown which Bonnie brought with her but which was to drag me, too, into a pit of unknowing.

      Smallness, I began to discover, fills some people with an irrational hatred, when they see a chihuahua, a Pekinese, a Yorkshire terrier, a Japanese chin, a shih-tzu, a pug. ‘What’s that?’ asked a young man I know when I took Bonnie to his parents’ house for lunch. Not to be outdone, his father joined in, suggesting with gentle mockery that Bonnie was ‘not a proper dog’.

      ‘Is the wren any less of a bird because he’s small?’ I demanded, drawing myself up to my full height (without heels) of 5 feet 3 inches.

      ‘Aren’t we allowed to tease you over your dog?’ he asked, dryly.

      I made a measured so-so movement with my hand and the subject was dropped.

      One day in Bath a pierced and tattooed man in his late twenties said loudly to his big dog, who was pulling menacingly on its string towards Bonnie, ‘Leave it! It’s not a dog, it’s a rat on a lead!’ I was filled with a protective fury which took me by surprise. This new feeling was one of many signs that I too had entered into an ancient transaction, known to all owners of small dogs throughout the centuries. What else is this but an example of Darwinian survival? Survival, of course, will gradually unfold as the subject of this book – and so it is fitting to introduce it here, in the destiny of the small dog.

      Of course Bonnie, like all canines large and small, is descended from wolves and somewhere – way, way back in her genetic blueprint – a part of her soul is roaming the forests and hills, filling the night with mournful howls to others of her kind. But I admit there is little of that behavioural memory evident in the animated powder puff on my lap. Now I am her kind, the leader of her small pack, and it is I to whom she calls, in those unmistakably shrill tones. She knows I will hear, swoop, soothe, hold fast. Out there in the wild the small dog would certainly perish, and therefore it has evolved an effective method of survival: being loveable. The transaction says, ‘I will adore you and, in exchange, you – my very own human – will protect me. Where you go I shall go, when you are full of sorrow I shall comfort you, and in return you will be my shield against the world.’

      Or, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it when she fell in love with her small spaniel, Flush, who became her consolation and saviour: ‘He & I are inseparable companions, and I have vowed him my perpetual society in exchange for his devotion.’

      Those who dislike small dogs on principle sometimes ask, ‘What are they for?’ The acutely intelligent Border collie is bred to herd sheep and when not trained to do so it will neurotically round up anything it can, as if to be deprived of your function is to lose identity. Working dogs have a purpose. The veterinarian Bruce Fogle explains that the domestic dog (Canis familiaris) has the same number of chromosomes as the wolf, 78, and that over eons different canine cultures emerged. There were hunting dogs, herding dogs, guard dogs and, later, breeds to ‘flush, point, corner, retrieve, or sit quietly on satin cushions’.

      Later Fogle asserts that the chihuahua ‘was bred to act as a hot water bottle’, which contains some truth – and yet I suspect that two references to cushions in his book The Mind of the Dog indicate a man whose love of dogs grows in proportion to their size. Many men proclaim a dislike of small dogs. Is the