“Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a dog again?” Lena suggested. “I loved Lady and Bran.”
“They were great,” I agreed.
“Your favourite was Captain,” she said.
“He was indeed,” I agreed. “I loved Captain.”
An elegant black Doberman with the brains of Einstein and the bodywork of Naomi Campbell, Captain was so smart he could almost figure out what you were thinking. But he had one big weakness: he loved Flakes, those crumbly chocolate bars in yellow wrappers. He would sit in wait behind the back door of our shop, and when one of the staff unwittingly left it ajar he would nose in quietly. Then, fast as black lightning, he would sneak straight up to the chocolate stand, very delicately picking up a Flake and vanishing out the back door in a flash. Then he would go up into the garden where he would hide behind a shrub and open the wrapper so expertly that he did not even tear the paper. There he would chew away happily, and later the wrapper would tell its story.
One day on going into the shop, I met a startled customer, looking down the shopping aisle with a confused expression on her face.
“I’m not sure if this actually happened or did I have a hallucination,” she told me in amazement. “Could a big black Doberman have darted in here and whipped a bar of chocolate?”
I assured her that she was not hallucinating. If it happened today, I might probably tell her that she was, because “health and safety” would close us down if they heard of such an occurrence.
Captain was king of the backyard; all the delivery men treated him with great respect and kept him at a safe distance. But Captain considered himself a superior animal and would not contaminate his jaws by biting a mere mortal. He was a gentleman and we all loved him. But one day he got very sick and Gearóid took him to the vet who thought that he had parvovirus and referred him to a vet in West Cork who was an expert on the disease. Despite all efforts, Captain died. He was buried in the grove with all the other dogs and cats who down through the years had passed through the house.
Hughie, who collected waste from the shop for his harriers, told me one day: “My collie bitch is in pup and when the pups are hardy, I’ll bring you down two.” On a cold January evening, the pups arrived, two absolutely adorable balls of black and white fur. We christened them Lady and Bran.
Lena was two at the time and an instant love affair burst into full bloom. They grew up with her, and wherever she went, they went—sometimes upstairs, where she hid them under her bed. Lady was a light-boned little bitch with a small, pointed, intelligent face, while Bran was a much bigger and stronger male but not as clever. They were inseparable and worked as a team, Lady constantly on red alert and Bran the solid back-up. When they became sexually active, steps had to be taken and, on the advice of Jim the vet, we took them to the veterinary clinic to have them neutered. After an examination, the vet on duty said to me, “Now, when these two are done, she will be the same dog but he will put on weight and become far less active, so maybe we might let him.”
As I drove home with Bran relaxing on the back seat and my poor Lady behind in the clinic, waiting for her operation, I looked back at Bran and told him, “It’s a man’s world.”
Later there were times when I regretted not having had Bran neutered because trying to keep him under restraint when a bewitching bitch was sending out signals of compliance was often a tug of war between two bitches. Philip, who lived in Bóthar na Sop and was the owner of a gorgeous Labrador that was any dog’s fancy, would ring up and patiently inform me: “Bran is here again.” Then I had to run over and drag the ardent lover, jumping with hormones, reluctantly home. Eventually we erected a wire fence along the penetrable part of the garden boundary, and that curtailed his ardour.
Within the fence, however, another problem raised its muddy head. Lady was a rooter, and any plant that went into the ground by day, she decided to uproot that night. As well as that, she slept in a different tub of flowers each night. She was a very clever dog and I could never understand why I could not get it into her brain cells that this was unacceptable behaviour. My father had an old saying: “O man of learning, thou art wrong, for instinct is more than wisdom strong.” It certainly applied in Lady’s case. When I decided to bark mulch all the flower beds, my gardening neighbour advised covering the earth beneath it with layers of old newspapers to improve its effectiveness. It sounded like a good idea but I discovered that we had two dogs who loved their morning papers. Before breakfast each day, the lawn was covered with discarded shredded newspapers. Gardening with Lady and Bran was a constant battle of wits—which they usually won.
They had one big terror in life, which they never overcame: thunder and lightning scared them senseless. When a thunderstorm came, they went berserk and sometimes ended up in the press under the stairs, and once when we were out during a thunderstorm, Lady took up residence inside the counter of the pub next door. In the end, a thunderstorm was Bran’s undoing because one summer’s night they were out in the garden when a sudden storm broke; Bran disappeared and we never again saw him. In his terror, he must have cleared the wall, and, despite intensive searches around the parish and ads in the local paper and on radio, we never found him. In his flight he could have run under a car or truck because it was as if he had disappeared into thin air. For months afterwards whenever I saw a dog with his colouring I had a second look in case it was Bran. But we never again saw or heard of him.
Lady pined after him and never again went into the doghouse they had shared. When she died later, she too was buried in the grove at the top of the garden. I wrapped her in one of Lena’s long-abandoned baby blankets and put a little headstone over her; that evening, when Lena came home from school, I had to tell her, and we both cried. But then Lena announced, “I never saw you crying since Nana died.”
“Well, Nana wouldn’t think much of that,” I assured her, and we both laughed through our tears.
Lady and Bran had been with us for about fifteen years. Lady was my last burial in the grove and I sometimes smile to imagine that if on the last day a resurrection of animals takes place, there will be a big uprising at the top of our garden and a large army of dogs and cats will march out of the grove. Then we will find out what happened to Bran, because surely he will be reunited with his best friend Lady, and Lena will finally know the answer to her dilemma—“Did Bran go to heaven?”—because after he disappeared, when any friend or neighbour died, her first question was, “I wonder did they meet Bran?”
For many years after Lady and Bran, we remained without a dog. Lena and the boys had left home and I had turned into a gardener; the thought of a dog rampaging through Gabriel’s green lawns and uprooting my plants, not to mention flattening my flower tubs, was more than I could entertain. On her regular holidays home, Lena sometimes said plaintively, “I miss the dogs”, and one son would occasionally comment: “’Tis hard to get used to this place without a dog.”
When Lena returned home, the talk of a dog resurfaced and I began to think that it might not be such a bad idea. It would have to be a smart dog, I thought, and the concept of a collie or a Doberman began to blossom in my head. We had loved Captain and the thought of another Captain appealed to me, but Lady and Bran had been great as well, so I dithered around with no final decision on the breed. We visited dogs’ homes in Clonakilty and Cork, but a dogs’ home is the wrong place for a ditherer, and I came home more confused than ever and decided to forget about the whole idea. Then the thought would resurface and I would look up the dog pages in the Evening Echo; I even made a few phone calls about Doberman pups but never quite got around to deciding anything.
Then fate stepped in: one morning at breakfast, Mike asked, “Have you given up on the dog craic?” and with my usual clarity of perception I replied, “Not sure I have or I haven’t. Saw nothing that hit the spot in the dogs’ homes or the paper. I think that I’ll forget about it.”
“Ever think of checking out Buy and Sell?” he asked.
“Buy and Sell?” I said in amazement. “Do they do dogs?”
“They do everything,” he told me.
“I’ll bring one in out of the shop,” I decided and did just that. I went through it and found the dog pages, and there was an ad for two Dobermans, a year and a year-and-a-half old, with a telephone number for contact.
Before I could get second thoughts, I rang the number and a very polite English voice answered. When I asked about the dogs, he said that the family was emigrating and wanted a good home for them. I explained that we were an all-female household and wanted manageable dogs. He replied that that was exactly what he was looking for: he would prefer a female owner and did not want his dogs to be used solely as guard dogs as they had been reared as part of the family. Also he wanted them to go as a pair because they were used to being together. I told him that I’d ring him back and then sat down and had a cup of tea. What would I do? Instead of one dog, we could finish up with two. I had another cup of tea and then I rang Gearóid and told him my story.
“Where are they?” he asked.
“Waterford,” I told him.
“I’ll be down to you in ten minutes,” he said.
I made a quick phone call to Lena, who was speechless with delight at the prospect of not one, but two, dogs. But I was not so sure.
It was a lovely May day and it took about two hours to get to Waterford; we followed directions and arrived at a beautiful lakeside house with a shining black Porsche parked outside.
“These dogs are going to move down the social ladder if they come home with us,” Gearóid decided.
As we edged it open, we saw that a “Beware the dogs” sign was posted uninvitingly on the front gate. “Guard dogs on duty” was on a black door to our right that I assumed accessed the garden. Again on the front door: “Guard dogs on duty”. These dogs were certainly making their presence felt.
I swallowed hard as we waited for the front door to open. A dapper young Englishman invited us in and led us along a wide corridor into an impressive, ornately furnished room. The Dobermans had a lot on their plate. We had a few minutes of polite conversation and then the owner decided to let in the dogs so he left the room and a few minutes later two streaks of black lightning tore in the door. They circled the room a few times and then each one leapt on to a separate leather couch and viewed us with great suspicion. They were big, beautiful and intimidating.
We spent about two hours getting to know each other and, by the end of it, I knew that these two smart dogs sensed that we were up to no good. Their names were Kate and Lolly and they were two classy ladies—the fact that Kate’s full title was Queen Kate came as no surprise. Even though I was a bit apprehensive of the undertaking, I had a feeling that they would probably come home with us. Their owner produced their papers, and their lineage was impeccable, with blue blood flowing through every vein in their bodies. They were virginal, untouched and immaculate.
Eventually the time came to make a move and the owner put their blanket on the back seat of our car and the two dogs jumped in on top of it. They were obviously accustomed to this procedure. He gave me a training video and a Doberman manual and a box full of medical details and papers. I slipped into the back of the car, past the smaller of the two—which was Lolly—and sat between them; then we were on our way.
Sitting up on their haunches on either side, they towered over me like two black pillars. If they felt like a feed of Pedigree Chum, I was a sitting duck. After a few miles, Lolly decided to sit down and relax but Kate sat upright in frozen apprehension. Soon afterwards, she covered me and the seat in smelly vomit, and because we were in traffic Gearóid had to keep moving, so we were in a bit of a stinking puddle on the back seat. Further out the road, we were able to pull in and do a bit of a clean-up, always conscious of the fact that these two ladies—if given half a chance—could make a dash for freedom.
We finally arrived home with two very nervous dogs and one very apprehensive new owner. Gearóid drove into the backyard and shut the gate before releasing them from the car. They darted around, full of nervous apprehension, and then Queen Kate shot in the back door and, in very un-regal fashion, promptly deposited a huge pooh on the cream carpet in the front room.
Oh my God, I thought, what am I after letting myself in for?
“Don’t mind that; it’s just nerves,” Gearóid assured me, and then, to my horror, added: “I hope that she’s not marking her spot.”
My misgivings about this new enterprise were growing by the minute. But when Lena came home an hour later, she had no such reservations and greeted them with whoops of joy, to which Lolly responded with open-hearted abandon, while Queen Kate stood apart in an attitude of regal disdain. She was going to be a harder nut to crack, despite her queenly deposit on my cream carpet. When, in conversation on the phone with the now ex-owner, I told him that Kate was not settling in as well as Lolly, he assured me, “It will take Kate a while to settle. She’s a one-owner dog whereas Lolly loves everyone. When Kate has sized everything up, she’ll then decide to whom she will give allegiance.”
So we would have to await queenly approval from Kate and see on whom she would confer her royal patronage!
We decided that they could lie on the rug-covered couch in the kitchen but would not have access to the couch and armchairs in the front room. So, after dinner, when we moved into that room, I draped myself along the couch and Lena and Ellen took over the two chairs; the dogs looked at us in disbelief and patrolled the room. These ladies were accustomed to royal treatment. Then it dawned on me that maybe they sat only on blankets and, when I laid one on the floor, they promptly took up residence. However, when Ellen leaned forward on her chair to explain something to Lena, Lolly immediately shot into the empty space behind her. But by the end of the evening, they had got the message.
That night, they slept on the couch in the kitchen and I got up during the small hours to check that all was in order. It was like being back on baby night-feeds. Their previous owner had instructed us that in the morning they were to be put on the lead and taken to a specific place in the garden and told “Toilet”. But either I did not have the right accent or they were just challenging my new role; so, when after half an hour nothing had happened, I decided that there had to be an easier way and left them off. They hit the garden like a hurricane and, having done a few laps of the lawn and knocked down a little stone man, they tore up into the grove and decided that this was the place for their private ceremony. That was the big issue decided, but the water outlet proved to have a more long-term effect because within weeks my lawn took on the appearance of Joseph’s Technicolor coat.
Gradually they settled in and a routine developed. At night, they slept on the kitchen couch with the door open, so they had the run of the hallways, and one night when Lena forgot her key she found out that they were not very hospitable to strangers in the night. During the day, they had the run of the yard and garden but were tied up while deliveries were coming through the yard to the shop. Customers passing the open gate viewed them with surprise and felt happier that they were at a safe distance.
Kate and Lolly had a huge curiosity about their new surroundings and soon discovered that the big store to the back of our shop had a flat roof which then led them on to the flat roof of the pub next door. Part of the pub roof was glass, and they loved to go up there and watch the action below. One evening, an inebriated customer looked up to see two Dobermans looking down at him and promptly decided that he was not as sober as he had thought. After that, we had to bar them from pub visitations.
The neighbours called to see the “two girls”—as they were christened—and, once over the initial surprise at their size, everyone thought they were beautiful. Kate had decided that I was worthy of her patronage, or else she was smart enough to know that I was the source of the food, but in any case she followed me around like a shadow
All was going well until sex came into the picture. These were two well-bred bitches with royal connections, whose mothers and grandmothers had blue blood, and the fathers’ contributions were also impeccable. They were not of the same litter but both had papers to impress. I had no interest in breeding or rearing litters of royal pups. I planned to get them neutered or spayed or fixed, though I did not even know the correct terminology. Gearóid, however, vehemently opposed this plan. We had head-on arguments with no solution. During these arguments, the word Nazi even came into play; I have been described as many things, but this was the first time that Hitler was invoked. So I decided to go underhand and booked them in with the vet without telling Gearóid, praying that he would not call during the recovery days. What he did not know would not bother him. Or so I thought.
When I visited the vet, I found a big shock waiting in the wings. She inspected the fasting dogs, and then told me that Kate was in heat. So I left Lolly, and an unhappy Kate came home and ran around the yard crying for Lolly. But she had more to cry about than missing Lolly. The previous week, there had been an incident that at the time had been of little consequence but in the light of Kate’s condition could be nothing short of a canine disaster.
Around our village rambles a geriatric mongrel, Jack the Lad, himself the product of a long line of one-night stands. He could be a cross between a greyhound, a terrier, a sheepdog and a Labrador; his bloodline would confuse any DNA test. Over the years, when he ambled around the village, eyeing the local talent, it was a case of lock up your bitches. Now he could hardly walk but the big question was, how geriatric was Jack the Lad? Because the previous week, while the gate was open for deliveries, he had come into our yard and had gone up into the garden and hidden in the bushes until the gate was locked and the girls were let loose. An hour later, I had glanced out the window and there, to my horror, between my two beautiful girls was Jack the Lad. I nearly fainted! I shot out the back door and booted Jack the Lad out the gate with every intention of damaging his artillery. Now the burning question was, had he or had he not? I rang my sister Ellen, who had returned to Canada.
“Ah, Alice,” she assured me, “Jack the Lad is too old; he couldn’t rise to any occasion.”
But how old was too old? I rang my friend Mary and explained my dilemma, adding, “But he wasn’t in the yard very long.”
“Long enough for Jack the Lad,” she informed me.
I rang Paddy who, as a farmer, could be expected to know everything about sex in animals.
“Oh, there’s a morning-after pill for cows now,” he assured me cheerfully.
“Paddy, this morning after was five mornings ago,” I told him apprehensively.
“Oh, Alice, you don’t need a morning-after pill,” he told me regretfully. “You need a miracle.”
To add to my troubles, Gearóid called unexpectedly and, when I heard his voice out in the yard asking Kate where Lolly was, I felt like running for cover. But I had to face the music, and a raging son went in to the vet to collect Lolly, who arrived home in a prone state, much to Kate’s consternation. But her consternation was nothing compared to mine. When I looked at my beautiful Kate and thought of the geriatric mongrel who could have polluted her well-bred elegance, I came out in a cold sweat.
The following day, after a veterinary consultation, I was told to bring Kate in the following Monday and he would do the needful. The days passed slowly and I watched Kate for signs of morning sickness but she was in fine fettle. Maybe dogs don’t have morning sickness. I was so relieved when the day came and she went into the veterinary clinic; later that day, the vet informed me that all was well and that Jack the Lad could no longer pose a problem. But I wanted the answer to one question: had Jack the Lad invaded virgin territory or had he not? The answer was, he had.
That evening, I waited at my front door with murder in my heart and watched Jack the Lad drag himself down the street. He was fifteen years old, which in human terms is one hundred and five. Slowly easing forward his front right leg, he gradually pulled that half of his body along and then, gradually pushing forward his left leg, he painfully dragged his second half along. Very slowly he came down the street. He had to stop every few seconds to draw a laboured breath, and I could hear his lungs rattling from ten feet away. As I viewed him, I found it difficult to believe that there was life in that old dog yet. He certainly had to be the oldest swinger in town.