We make the journey to the National Canine Defence League (NCDL) dogs’ home at Snetterton, in Norfolk, with the intention of looking for a retired greyhound. Helping a sporting refugee would be an act of kindness that would also provide Trezza with the opportunity to enjoy a little light walk everyday. Her sedentary occupation as a writer, and her disdain for the gymnasium and new-fangled faddish ideas of the like, means she doesn’t take much exercise. Moreover, a dog of our own will help her to cope with the melancholies that Mingus’s departures herald. It is me who suggests this. In a sense, the whole dog project is mine.
There are false starts on the road to Snetterton. We begin by conducting idle conversations about what sort of dog we’d have, if we were to have one. First off, we would not consider a Dalmatian as any other Dalmatian would not be Mingus. Next, we eliminate certain other breeds for being too small, or too big, or too hairy, or too stupid, or too stupid-looking (which is often the same thing), or just the kind of dog we don’t like for no good reason we can explain.
While queuing for a coffee in a concession within a DIY Superstore one morning, I notice a pile of books in an aisle. The book pile is that of a coffee-table title called The Giant Book of the Dog. I browse The Giant Book of the Dog over a cappuccino. It looks as though it could be helpful, and at £4.99 it’s a bargain. At night-time, in bed, I study the pages at length. I come to the conclusion that what we need is a Hungarian Vizsla. The Vizsla is short-haired, slightly taller than average, well-proportioned, and purposeful-looking with a noble bearing and silky ears. If it were a horse the Vizsla’s colour would be described as a chestnut. To me this animal seems to epitomise the essence of what a dog should be.
Additionally, the notes state that the Vizsla makes a first-class pet and is good with children. Not that we regularly have children about the place, but you’re bound to come across them while you’re out. Whether or not The Giant Book of the Dog is to be entirely trusted in its assessment of breed character/child suitability is a moot point, however, as in my lengthy study I note that there are very few breeds which are not first class pets who are good with children.
The Hungarian Vizsla is a gundog, developed by Magyar noblemen to pick up game and geese and ducks and so on. We have no need for this in our lives. But then Britain’s most popular breed, the Labrador, or Labrador Retriever (soon, for a time, to become my least favourite), is listed under the same category. These classifications are surely meaningless, I think, when it’s a pet you’re looking for: like the people who carry the Labrador to the DIY Superstore in the four-wheel SUV, the animal within is no more likely to be put to its use than the bull-bars welded to the front of their vehicle.
This could be why so many Labrador retrievers are fatter than their irritating owners, but this is a subject for ranting about later, once I have an animal of my own, when I have experience, when I have formed views. Back then, lying in bed looking at the pictures of all the child-friendly dogs, I knew nothing, and it was in this happy state that we visited a specialist Vizsla lady whose bitch was carrying a litter.
The lady lived near Reading, a hundred and seventy miles away. I found her through the Vizsla Society who have a website, as do practically all breeds. I phoned the Society, and was put through to the Puppy Secretary who advised that the Reading specialist had a litter on the way. Good news, but first of all I put my most pressing concern to the Puppy Secretary: I asked if Vizslas were nice to stroke; I had read on the website that their coat was ‘oily’ and I did not like the idea of this.
‘Think of velvet,’ she said, ‘it’s rather like that.’ Velvetiness sounded altogether different, a huge improvement on oiliness, and set my mind at rest concerning the matter of coat-feel. I could tell by the her tone, though, that the question I’d asked gave the game away just as effectively as commenting on the colour of a second-hand car does if you’re a female buyer.
Reading in Berkshire is not near to Norwich in Norfolk, but we could at least tie-in a viewing (of the mother, not the puppy itself, which was not yet born, this was how the matter was to proceed) with a football match or a race meeting.
We arrived at the Vizsla lady’s house and met her two Vizslas – the pregnant mother, and the grandmother-in-waiting. I already knew a good deal about these animals because the telephone call to arrange the visit had lasted for over an hour. The dogs were bouncy and enthusiastic in their welcome: I don’t like being licked on the face, I find it a bit much coming from a creature which, though it won’t go to the toilet in its own garden, will do more or less anything else that is unspeakable.
The expression ‘the dog’s bollocks’, for example, is entirely obvious in its origination, and as I came to spend more time in their company, I noted that dogs rule out absolutely nothing (with the exception of oranges) in terms of what they might put in their mouths – the first time I saw Ollie nibbling at a pile of horse manure I was appalled, though not as much as when I first caught him trying out his own vomit as a between-meals snack.
My initial impression was that the Vizslas didn’t look all that much like the picture in The Giant Book of the Dog. To begin with, they were smaller and slighter. This was because they were bitches, not dogs. I had read about this difference regarding size-relative-to-gender, determined by the highest point at withers (shoulders), but I had not seen it in real life until now; in fact, this was the first time I’d seen a Vizsla in real life at all. They were a different shade to the picture too, more dun. I looked at them like I would look at a rare animal in a zoo; I found them fascinating, and beautiful, and slightly unnerving all at once, and equally out of keeping with their environment. They lived in a very tidy, small modern house in a cul-de-sac.
After we had made friends with ‘the girls’(we were given treats to feed to them), we all went out for a walk in nearby woods, a walk which lasted for a good hour and a half. This struck me as pretty stiff, not to mention a huge amount of time to be blowing on anaerobic exercise.
During the walk we were quizzed about our home, our surroundings, our backgrounds and our lifestyle. Trezza is a regular smoker, but I knew for certain she would not be mentioning this, nor lighting up, during the critical period of scrutiny. The Vizsla lady was interviewing us to see that we were fit people to own a dog from her lineage; it went without saying that an environment that endorsed passive smoking would be unsuitable. Occasional asides were made about the girls themselves who disappeared in and out of the bushes and trees, though never too far out of sight. They were well behaved, if not a little reserved. They cantered very stylishly as each had an excellent ‘hip-score’. I considered pretending that I knew what this meant, but curiosity got the better of me.
Hip-scoring is to do with the way in which the ball joints at the top of the hind legs sit in the pelvic girdle, and the knock-on effect this has on leg-alignment and associated matters. Vets can issue hip-score ratings according to how much fractional deviation the hind legs display compared against an ideal norm. A low hip-score is the one to have if you intend to show your dog; otherwise it’s of little consequence unless it’s so far out that the dog is bandy, but I guess you’d notice that yourself without the need for the hip-score.
While I was learning about this I picked up a stick, a broken branch, which I made to throw for these girls with great hips. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the lady freeze.
‘Do they chase sticks?’ I asked, arm cocked, stick unthrown.
‘It can be a little dangerous,’ she replied, ‘If they catch them in their throats, you know, they could choke, or do untold other damage.’
We walked on, and, when the girls were not looking, I quietly abandoned the hazard. Although I hadn’t actually hurled it – and imagine if my aim had been off – I wondered how badly the suggestion would count against us. The lady helped ease the atmosphere by saying a ball might be all right, in a nice big field, or similar. I mentioned that Norwich was near to the coast, which would be lovely for walking and for throwing a ball for a puppy to fetch. This sounded good. I remembered that we both work from home so the little animal would have company all day long. This sounded good, too. I watched the girls closely now. I was much taken with the way they moved in and out of the trees; they were athletes. Their owner began making various toots on her whistle to which the girls did, or sometimes did not, respond, according to whether or not they had a scent, but their behaviour was generally exemplary – at the end of their walk they stopped well short of the road to have their leads put on, and over in the carpark they made graceful jumps into the back of the car.
Returning to the house, we watched as the Vizsla lady washed and dried the dog’s paws and ‘little bellies’ in a bucket outside the front door, before they were allowed back inside. I glanced around hoping nobody would see me taking part in this activity, and in so doing I glanced at Trezza. Trezza had visited dog breeders before, when she was finding Mingus. My glance said, ‘This isn’t normal, surely?’ Her return glance confirmed that it wasn’t.
In the kitchen the girls were fed individual diets of hypo-allergenic food; I was unsurprised to learn that, even given this diet, one of them was a faddy eater. We had not been into the kitchen before the walk. The walls were obliterated by rosettes, medallions and certificates, which the girls had won at shows all over the country.
Crufts was mentioned. A Vizsla notepad on the fridge was secured by a Vizsla fridge magnet. I should know better, because, at a price, anything is available in the world, but I was astonished that such accessories existed. I studied a certificate. It was for first prize. I studied another certificate. That was for first prize, too. I hadn’t realised that we’d been walking with aristocrats – I thought they were just pedigree. It appeared that this pair were even posher than Mingus.
‘Tea?’ said the lady. While the kettle was boiling, she talked to the girls and explained their differing characteristics and special ways to them for our benefit, a history which was interspersed with some bitter asides concerning her ex-partner.
Together with our tray of drinks and the biscuit tin, we rejoined the animals who had heard enough about themselves and had withdrawn to curl up in their separate baskets in the lounge. I fed one of them a piece of digestive before I’d had time to think better of it but the lady didn’t seem to mind, she was more relaxed now she had taken her exercise and her girls were safely back home unharmed with clean paws and bellies, and that the visitors seemed to approve of the family. Finally, after a further half-hour of Vizsla stories, we excused ourselves from the viewing.
We had arrived nearly four hours earlier, not long after lunch. It was now officially time for a drink. But first things first. We drove round the corner and I stopped the car so that Trezza could get out and have a fag, and I even had one myself. As I rolled it I conjured a picture of the lady’s ex, and considered how difficult it must have been for him to compete with the girls. Would that be my fate if we went through with this? Hopefully not, because there was a specific question that I needed to raise right away:
‘That woman was mad, wasn’t she?’ I said.
Trezza nodded and carried on inhaling.
‘Are all dog breeders like that?’
‘A little bit, yes,’ she replied. ‘But she was…’ Trezza exhaled enormously while searching for the mot juste ‘…she was unique.’
‘What d’you think of the dogs, though?’ I said. They’d seemed pretty nice to me.
‘Lovely,’ said Trezza, ‘Very sweet. Quite normal, considering.’
Following the viewing we stopped over at Fawlty Towers, Reading, in order that we could watch Stoke City the next day. Stoke played one of Icelandic manager Gudjon Thordarson’s late-period 5-3-2 away formation experiments – a system that might well have been devised by Manuel – and lost the match, throwing away their last slim chance of automatic promotion in the process. A sorry situation, but one I was well used to.
Back in Norwich we phoned the lady and said that, if it was all right with her, we’d really like a puppy. She assured us that we were top of the list of suitable parents. We broke out the champagne. The price agreed was six hundred pounds.
Though we were invited back for ongoing viewings of the bitch during her pregnancy, we considered this above and beyond the call of duty, and, as it turned out, we never did acquire an animal from this source because the mother delivered only one pup in a difficult Caesarean operation. Her owner could not bear the thought of it living as far afield as Norfolk, and I think we understood.
There was a further false start involving a visit to a Vizsla breeder in the South Downs. This woman was also idiosyncratic in that she had fourteen dogs of her own which carpeted her kitchen wall-to-wall. Half were Vizslas and half were Labradors. She impressed me by addressing them all individually when, to my untrained eye, each set of seven looked very much alike. She had a litter of eight for us to see, and if we didn’t fancy any of them there was another lot coming along straight after that from another of the thirteen bitches in the kitchen. The pups we were taken to look at were kept in a special whelping shed in the grounds of the farmhouse. They were a few weeks old, and for the same six hundred (Vizsla price-fixing appeared to be organised by an effective cartel) we could take our pick and collect in a few weeks’ time. We selected a dog, the one that had the nicest ears and the most in the way of personality, we admired all the certificates and rosettes on the kitchen wall, and, as we took our leave, the next client exchanged parking spaces with us. She was a young woman driving a new Porsche.
The word ‘Wiemaraner’ had come up in the breeder’s kitchen. Wiemaraners are those rather beautiful soft grey dogs that are fetishised by the art photographer William Wegman, and often appear in television adverts. They became a yuppie accessory in the Nineties and something of that image has stuck (I have yet to meet a Wiemaraner owner who has managed to lower themselves far enough to speak to me). The arrival of the young woman in the new Porsche made me wonder whether Vizslas might be about to become the new Wiemaraners. Still, that wouldn’t be my problem, because I live in Norfolk where owning a gundog is an obvious and natural thing to do, not in South Kensington, where it isn’t.
On the drive back from Sussex, I began to do sums in my head along the lines of eight times 600 equals roughly five grand a litter, five grand times 14 dogs equals £70,000 even if they’re only in season once a year – when in fact they’re in season twice a year – so, if all goes well, you can call that £140,000 per annum, gross. Like most writers, I waste a huge amount of mental energy considering more profitable ways of spending my life.
In the middle of this mental arithmetic, an argument began in my left ear concerning the overloading of my time-table. I had sprung the visit to the breeder on Trezza as a surprise bonus after some activity we’d been doing in the capital, for which I had also given inadequate warning.
Suddenly, from nowhere, I found myself on the receiving end of an extended lecture about how I had no time for puppy training and all the rest that went with it, did I, and that the poor dog would never be out of the kennels, would it, or was the plan that she looked after it while I continued with my lifestyle regardless – football matches, games of squash, race meetings and so on – not to say all the activities I’d arranged without any consultation and then forgotten to mention. We concluded the discussion in a Little Chef where I sat unhappily listening to more of these facts concerning time and motion, all of which were true. I am not fond of true facts about myself when I have a bee in my bonnet and have decided I am going to do something.
On a television screen in the corner, Tim Henman was losing a tennis match. Outside it was beginning to trickle the warm, claustrophobic rain of summer. The covers were dragged over Wimbledon’s centre court as Henman made his exit. Sporting events are the easiest way for me to mark time. This is how I can calculate that six months elapsed before I felt it was time for another crack at the subject.
***
Trezza had let the matter rest, it was me who was agitating. I would flick The Giant Book of the Dog occasionally in the spirit of provocation, but still nothing was said. And then one day I had the obvious lateral thought: what was needed was not a Vizsla puppy or a puppy of any other sort. Rather, instead, we should seek out a mature animal. I decided that a pensioned-off greyhound would be perfect.
The retired racer, I had learned, from a conversation I’d had with a fellow dog walker while I was out with Mingus, does not require too much in the way of exercise. After the life it has known, it is more than delighted not to have been shot by the barbarian who has previously ‘cared’ for it, and is content to restrict itself to an easy stroll once or twice a day. For the rest of the time it is happy to mind its own business and lie in the comfort of an old blanket doing absolutely bugger all.
I had come up with a scheme, and I rehearsed my case: a greyhound would allow the new owner an opportunity to take some fresh air once a day while appreciating the changing scenes of nature, a subject about which she actually gives a fig. Otherwise she can continue to enjoy a quiet life at home while her partner is who-knows-where doing who-knows-what, but whatever it is, at least he will not be abandoning his puppy-training duties.
From his point of view, a greyhound is something of a thoroughbred: It is only over recent years that I have come to really love horse racing, and by extension, racehorses. They are a new but consuming passion. I form attachments to them, sometimes I video a race where I haven’t even placed a bet just for the pleasure of seeing, say, Azertyuiop and Moscow Flyer – the two fastest chasers around at the time – do battle over two miles and a dozen fences. On those fabulous occasions where I’ve taken the bookies to the cleaners I rewind the final fences or furlongs and re-watch the finish. But, unless I move into Vizsla breeding, I can’t see myself owning a racehorse.
There’s no way I’m going to get into greyhound racing either: first, I know next to nothing about it, but, second, I know enough about sport to take an informed guess that the dogs is not something you ought to consider dabbling with in mid-life. The pros will identify you as a clueless amateur in less time than it takes the hare to complete a circuit; it’s odds on you’ll be bankrupt faster than you can tear up a betting slip.
Additionally, the little I do know about dog racing leads me to the view that it is an activity involving a sizeable number of persons who are not very nice. I have popped into a bookies once in a while to monitor the performance of my considered investment in the 2.35 at Folkestone and found myself in the company of the weekday gamblers, those stalwarts who bet on race after race after race. The dogs go off somewhere around the country every five minutes and, as they do, men gamble and smoke while fixed on television screens.
They seldom celebrate a success (because they are always chasing losses, of course) and with the dogs you will only ever hear the animal referred to by number, never by name, except when it gets called a piece of shit, or worse, simply because it has cost someone another fiver.
It’s pretty distasteful. As far as animals go, I’m a sentimentalist and, as far as horse racing goes, there’s a lot of that about – it’s one of the few sports in which, at the track at least, you can see a loser welcomed back home with as much affection and appreciation as a winner. So here is the ulterior motive in the new scheme: owning a retired greyhound will allow me a stake in a surrogate racehorse whose every run will be virtual, who will always win, who will delight the crowd as he makes all up to the post, adding another victory to his great unbeaten sequence.
This part I don’t mention to Trezza. The rest of the ‘plan’ I sell without too much resistance.
***
There are three greyhounds at the NCDL rescue centre when we visit on the winter’s afternoon. They live together in a single pen, but two are spoken for and the third is away being seen by a vet. They live along a bright corridor, together with many other dogs in many other pens. Here I learn something about Trezza: she had a specialised lunatic streak. She wants to take them all home with her.
I was much more circumspect as I regarded the assortment of desperados banged up doing porridge. The scars, half-tails, missing ears and sometimes missing legs, told their own stories. And you could certainly see how some of them had been abandoned, too – you’d put your hand down and they’d have a go at biting it off even through the reinforced glass of the pen. But, alongside the hard cases and the lifers, there were also the pensioners, the wallflowers, the abandoned débutantes; and alongside these were the aristocrats fallen on hard times, the pedigree for which you’d normally expect to hand over the six hundred quid.
It was a pair of Deerhounds to which Trezza gravitated. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she said. I wasn’t prepared to go along with this, for while they may or may not have been attractive animals, their pre-eminent characteristic was their height. No doubt The Giant Book of the Dog would say they were first-class pets who were superb with children, and no doubt for a certain sort of child they would be worth trying out for a donkey ride. I made no reply concerning the question of beauty, I simply pointed to a little sign which said that, in a perfect world, you would need a paddock or a small field in which to keep them as they had previously belonged to a gamekeeper, and had lived the outdoor life. At home we have a side passage with a bit at the back. The best you could say for this area is that it is a yard.
We were about to leave, having failed to agree on the ideal candidate, when one of the women who worked at the centre approached. She had been observing us and the animals beside which we had lingered longest and she asked if it was a hound we were particularly looking for. We considered this question and said yes, we supposed we probably were.
‘I’ve got a very deserving case in the back,’ she said. ‘He’s four months old. Would you consider a lurcher puppy?’
Notwithstanding the dispute at the Little Chef, it was one of those situations where you cannot say, ‘No.’ No, I do not think we would consider a lurcher puppy. What sort of callous bastards would come out with that? We sat on seats in the foyer waiting for the deserving case to arrive.
His entrance was sudden. He came from a side door pulling the woman along behind him. How he managed this I could only guess. If Giacometti made a sculpture of a new-born deer, this animal could easily have been his model. His coat was predominantly black with off-set fawn highlights down the fronts of his legs and the back of his tail, as well as on either side of his nose, under his chin, and along his chest.
The effect of all this chiaroscuro was to make him look like his own shadow. His face was equine with fawn eyebrows. His tail was ridiculous, longer than his body. He scrambled onto my lap and gave my face a wash before jumping over to provide the same service for Trezza.
‘What’s his name?’ we asked.
‘Ernie,’ said the woman. ‘Cute, isn’t he? Would you like to take him for a walk?’
The light dusting of snow was frosting over, so Ernie was issued with an extra-small dog-jacket in order that he could cope with being outside. We were given a plastic bag in case he had any ‘little accidents’, and together we set off down the lane. Ernie did not seem to be very experienced at going for a walk. He would head in any direction; sideways, backwards, onwards, it was all the same to him. His pronounced legginess made him very gangly; he was something of an expert at getting tangled up in the lead. The NCDL woman had said that the vet had thought he might have rickets when he first arrived, which was a couple of months earlier, but that once he’d been put on a high protein diet he seemed all right in this specific respect. With the way he walked, though – as if he’d never really tried it before – it must have been difficult to tell.
Ernie had been delivered to Snetterton in the dog wardens’ van; they had found him in Thetford Forest. He was reckoned to be about eight weeks of age then (not much older than those Vizsla puppies we had visited) and was lucky to have survived at all: it was November when he was picked up – a month when the weather is not ideal for a puppy to be out and about taking care of itself, particularly one built along his supermodel lines.
Not far into our walk Ernie paused and took a dump which could have been nominated for Most Stinking in East Anglia and was not pleasant in appearance either.
‘That’s a bit much, coming from a boy of his size,’ I said. ‘Fuck me, what will they be like when he grows up?’
‘They’ll be fine,’ Trezza replied. The way she said this, I could tell that she had unilaterally over-ruled her objections to puppy ownership.
We walked on a little further until Ernie began to look nervously over his shoulder as the smells and sounds of the rescue centre receded. He concentrated more now on pulling backwards than he did sideways or onwards. It was getting colder and dusk was falling so we turned him round, not least to assuage his evident fears. He caught himself up in the lead many more times on the way back, tripping me more than once; at the gates of the centre I picked him up to return him into the care of the woman by hand.
This was in order that I might not look like the sort of rank outsider who was incapable of taking a puppy for a walk without flattening him. As I made to pass him over he squirmed back towards me. I took him and tried tickling his ears but he squirmed towards my face in order to resume the job of giving me a wash.
‘Are you interested?’ the woman said. We had discussed this matter as we retraced our steps.
‘Yes,’ Trezza replied, ‘We are.’