Extracts from my diaries
When we lived in the Peak District, we were on a car journey from Bristol on 12 May 1968 when we stopped at a very traditional-looking Welsh farm (possibly Ty-pellaf) on Clyro Hill, in what was then Radnorshire, and bought a small black and white collie puppy, whom we called Bessie. She lived as part of the family throughout the childhoods of all four of our children until 28 January 1983, when, old and ill, she was put to sleep by the vet at home at South View. She was aged 14 years and 10 months, and had travelled with us all those years and many, many miles.
On 28 January Bessie reached the end of her days. For months she had been staggering round the house, covered in lumps and smelling dreadful, but not in pain unless she moved suddenly. On 27 January she collapsed on her side and could not get up, nor would she be helped, so we had to call the dreaded “Mr Hopkins”, as the vet was always known (though the real Mr Hopkins had died some years before).
When I arrived home from work the next day, instead of the usual yelp and thump of her tail, there was only a fat shroud by the sideboard, where her body had been rolled in an old green eiderdown that she had used as a bed. I looked at her head, at peace in death. Nearly fifteen years earlier, in 1968, we had bought her as a small black and white Welsh puppy who was promptly sick in the car. She had accompanied us on many travels, lying on the back sill of our little Fiat 850 when the girls were young. In Little Hayfield she was part of the gang of local children and ran wildly through the fields with them, a scrap of leaf quivering excitedly in her mouth.
Often she would come with me onto the frozen tops of Kinder Scout or Bleaklow and, without map or compass, I could follow her home through cloud and snow. She used to sleep under our bed and, when we had a tame wild rabbit that did the same, was constantly sneezing when his whiskers tickled her nose.
When we moved to Luton, life was less good. After every walk she would come home with her paws cut from the broken glass on the streets. Sedlescombe was better, though I fancy she was never quite the same away from the hills. She hated cats, lawnmowers, babies, and being touched, but she never hurt a soul (except for once biting Dobby’s fingers, which she must have thought were small pink animals as he poked them under the door from his bedroom).
In her old age she was cantankerous and much pestered by young Anna, our Old English Sheepdog. She was by then, in many ways, a nuisance, but we were all sad to say farewell, because in her doggy way she very much loved and trusted us, and thought she protected us.
I dug a grave for her by the rowan trees at the far end of The Meadow in the garden at South View, and put some bricks around it and a piece of local Purbeck limestone at the head. This small memorial will remind us of an old friend, but her spirit will be racing black and white across the wind-torn turf and heather moors of our northern hills, rounding up a ghostly troupe of laughing, shouting schoolchildren.
