A Small Dog Saved My Life. Bel Mooney

so dangerously. Yet those first flames still had the power to warm, and the showers of stars still hung in the sky, even if sometimes behind clouds.

      In 1994 he had published his much-admired biography of the Prince of Wales, a considerable achievement which came not without stress – largely due to the fact that J’s simultaneous two-hour documentary about the Prince on ITV had included a short admission of adultery. The world seemed to go mad. J, a political journalist who was initially dubious about taking on the Royal project, knew that he had to ask the Prince about the state of his marriage to Princess Diana and his relationship with the then Camilla Parker-Bowles. He felt that the boil of sleazy gossip and tittle-tattle had to be lanced – and so, under firm but gentle questioning, the Prince revealed to the watching millions that once his marriage to Diana had irretrievably broken down he had started a relationship with Camilla. He would have been damned if he hadn’t but was damned for telling the truth. At the same time, many people said that J ought not to have asked the question, although had he not he would have been pilloried for failing to do his journalistic job.

      It was an exhausting time. Side by side we faced it all down but, seasoned journalists as we both are, we were unprepared for the tabloid feeding frenzy and the level of vitriol that was unleashed upon the heir to the throne – a much-misunderstood man whom J called in the closing words of his biography ‘an individual of singular distinction and virtue’. I recall J standing in our garden or sitting in the library at the farm doing endless interviews with CNN, ABC, Sky, etc. and for a while it seemed as if he was almost the only one who would analyse and interpret not just the Prince of Wales but the British monarchy to the rest of the world. Although he did it with cool insight it was not a role he relished – not at all – but it was to be repeated after that terrible day at the end of August 1997 when Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris with her lover, Dodi Fayed.

      Looking back, the era of his biography and TV documentary seems oddly innocent. It is astonishing to remember that the Prince of Wales had wished to protect his estranged wife by not revealing all the detailed information J had in fact discreetly accumulated about Diana and her many problems. A few years later a slurry of cheap, gossipy books, prurient television programmes and mean memoirs by seedy staff would ensure no compassion or respect whatsoever for the dead Princess or for her living sons and ex-husband. Britain was turning into a pit bull of a nation.

      The Prince loves dogs and in J’s documentary one of his two Jack Russells appeared, jumping about in a Land-Rover as Jack Russells will, and being told in no uncertain terms, ‘Get down, Tigger!’ Tigger had puppies; one went to Camilla Parker-Bowles and the Prince kept another, which he called Roo but Prince William renamed Pooh. In April 1995 Pooh vanished at Balmoral. This became an instant news story, the animal-loving British public responding with all the interest a beloved lost dog deserves. Jilly Cooper wrote a heartfelt piece about ‘poor little Pooh’ in the Daily Mirror, while the Daily Mail ran photos of the dog captioned ‘Pooh: loved and lost by a prince’. The Jack Russell had been on a walk with her owner and her mother, when she ran off into the woods. Charles’s whistles brought no response, and a three-day search by estate workers was fruitless. Neither an advertisement in the local paper nor the Daily Mail’s offer of a good reward brought forth anyone who had seen the dog. As a heartbroken Prince headed back to London on 21 April there was no shortage of theories about Pooh’s fate. Some suggested that the dog had become stuck in a rabbit hole, as Jack Russells will, while a psychic asserted that she had ‘a very clear picture’ of Pooh stuck in a sewer. The News of the World gleefully theorized that she was devoured by a feral cat dubbed the Beast of Balmoral.

      Such a fuss about a dog. Yet the true dog lover – the person I was metamorphosing into in 2002 – understands it. Once you love a dog you cannot bear the thought of losing your pet and you will torment yourself imagining your dog being kidnapped, or dying. No wonder the Prince of Wales put up a memorial to Tigger at Highgrove, when, in 2002, his beloved dog had to be euthanized because of old age.

      That same year, Bonnie accidentally went to Highgrove and met the heir to the throne. For most human beings this would have been exciting, but it was quite an event for a nobody, a dog from nowhere who, just months earlier, had been left tied to a tree – a progression surely worthy of Eliza Doolittle. Yet like Eliza, she took it in her small stride.

      Needless to say she had a royal welcome.

      For centuries the Royal Family has embraced dogs as their favoured pets. Formal portraits from the seventeenth century onwards show kings, queens and their children happily posing with their beloved animals, from pugs to greyhounds, King Charles spaniels to corgis. Although we associate the British aristocracy with hunting dogs, big dogs with a serious role in life, the Royal Family has always loved smaller hounds too. Some pets have even merited their own portraits, and (as in many households) were considered members of the family. Photographs from the Royal Collection prove how much dogs were valued. A photograph of Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of York, shows him with his pug and is full of a playful humanity we can all recognize. The dog is wrapped in a greatcoat and its royal owner has tied a handkerchief around its head. The dog looks at the camera, the Prince looks down at the dog, full of mirth.

      In 1854 the total cost of photographing the dogs in the Royal Kennels and mounting the prints in a special handsome album came to £25 19s. – the equivalent of around £1,650 today. When Queen Victoria’s beloved collie Noble died at Balmoral in 1887, he was buried in the grounds of the castle and given his own gravestone, which reads:

      Noble by name by nature noble too

      Faithful companion sympathetic true

      His remains are interred here.

      A terrier named Caesar belonging to Edward VII was given even greater status when, having outlived the King, he walked behind His Majesty’s coffin in the funeral procession.

      Elizabeth II favours the corgi. The breed was introduced to the Royal Family by her father, George VI, in 1933, when he bought a corgi called Dookie from a local kennels. The animal proved popular with his daughters, so a second corgi was acquired, called Jane, who had puppies, two of which, Crackers and Carol, were kept. For her eighteenth birthday, the Queen was given a corgi named Susan from whom numerous successive dogs were bred. Some corgis were mated with dachshunds (most notably Pipkin, who belonged to Princess Margaret) to create ‘dorgis’. The Queen’s corgis travel with her to the Royal residences, and Her Majesty looks after them herself as much as possible. Other members of the Royal Family own dogs of various breeds. The Duchess of Cornwall owns two Jack Russell terriers, Tosca and Rosie.

      The day Bonnie went to a Royal residence the country was tossed by storms, with gales of up to 90 mph which screamed around our farm on the hill. Branches cracked from the beech wood and the trees groaned as if in agony. In my diary I wrote, ‘I feel overwhelmed by all I have to do, but Bonnie is such a consolation’, but on that day it was hard to walk out with the three dogs and not be blown sideways by the power of the gale. Looking at Bonnie you would have thought she could be blown away, like a tuft of thistledown.

      Earlier in the week we had been at the Booker Prize dinner, to see the outsider Yann Martel awarded the plum for The Life of Pi and to mingle with peers and swap gossip. When at such events I always feel two people: one at home within the glitz, the literary glamour, but the other detached, wanting to be at home – especially once the Maltese came to stay. The diary captures this feeling, recording, rather than a desire to be in London, ‘I want to be home to see Bonnie. The little dog ties me to the farm emotionally more than ever.’ I also wrote, ‘Home, home, home’, with no explanation, as if the repetition of what gave me security would fix it for ever. Now I see that scribble as a litany of faith. It was the only faith that possessed me completely.

      On Sunday night J and I were due at Highgrove for dinner, and our friend and neighbour Robin offered to drive us. The journey is only 35 minutes’ drive from where we lived, yet it would have been less than convivial for J to refuse a glass or three of wine, and even less wise to exit past the policemen having done so. So we left the dogs and barrelled along past fallen trees to arrive at the handsome Georgian house, just outside Tetbury, in Gloucestershire. I loved going there. The house is not overly grand; nor does it have an intimidating atmosphere.