Bel Mooney - A Small Dog Saved My Life

For Gaynor and Ernie

(and Bertie too)

I worry.

I have to because nobody else does.

Some strange car comes up the driveway –

They go right on talking. They trust,

I don’t. Threat crosses my nose

Twenty times a day.

No wonder I bark and menace,

Who knows who it could be at the door

’Specially in these times.

Arthur Miller, ‘Lola’s Lament’

How to resist nothingness? What power

Preserves what once was, if memory does not last?

For I remember little. I remember so very little.

Indeed, moments restored would mean the Last Judgement

That is adjourned from day to day, by Mercy perhaps.

Czeslaw Milosz, ‘On Parting With My Wife, Janina’

You were never masters, but friends. I was your friend.

I loved you well, and was loved. Deep love endures

To the end and far past the end. If this is my end,

I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.

Robinson Jeffers, ‘The Housedog’s Grave’

Epigraph

Introduction

One: Finding

Two: Losing

Three: Moving

Four: Rebuilding

Five: Growing

Six: Understanding

Seven: Seeking

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in

the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Address,

Republican National Committee,

USA, 31 January 1958

When I look in the mirror I see quite a small person: not tall and quite slight. My skin bruises easily and as I grow older I notice more and more weaknesses, from wrinkles to stiff limbs to hair that is no longer thick and beautiful, as it once was. This is, of course, all inevitable. I can do no more about it than I can change all the experiences, good and ill, which have shaped the mind and spirit within this vulnerable, mortal frame. In this respect I am exactly like you, the über-reader I always imagine as a friend when writing. We can (men and women alike) anoint ourselves with unguents in an attempt to keep time at bay but the most useful exercise for the soul is to square up to your life, no matter how much it terrifies you, and try to make sense of it. That is the true business of self-preservation and it is what I try to do in this book – in the hope that this small, individual journey, one woman’s personal experience of love, loss and survival, may (quite simply) be useful. Most of us have endured, or will endure, pain in our lives. If this book has any message it is that recovery and salvation can come from the most unexpected sources, and that largeness of spirit will most equip you for your personal fight.

Working in my study one summer day, writing the journalism which pays the bills but wondering if I would ever return to fiction and slightly desperate for something – anything – to break that block, I flexed a bare left foot which touched my Maltese dog, Bonnie. She sleeps on a small blue bed, patterned with roses, which sits beneath my home-made work surface. All day she waits for attention, rising to follow me wherever I go in the house, longing for the moment when, feeling guilty, I at last suggest a short walk. At which point she leaps up, races up the stairs from the basement and scrabbles wildly at the front door, like a prisoner incarcerated in the Bastille who hears the liberators outside and screams, ‘I’m here! Save me!’

On that day in 2008 I suddenly realized how great a part my dog had played in my own salvation, and that I wanted to write about that process. I was encouraged by the experience of an artist I admire very much, David Hockney, whose paintings and drawings of his two dachshunds, Boodgie and Stanley, show the pets curled on cushions, lapping water, rolling on their backs. You don’t have to be a lover of small dogs to be delighted by these works, and yet they should not be underestimated, despite their simplicity. What looks like a set of speedily executed images of two faintly absurd, brown sausage dogs adds up to an idiosyncratic statement about love.

In the introduction to Dog Days (the 1998 book which collects this work) Hockney writes, ‘I make no apologies for the apparent subject matter. These two dear little creatures are my friends. They are intelligent, loving, comical and often bored. They watch me work; I notice the warm shapes they make together, their sadness and their delights.’

What does he mean by ‘apparent subject matter’? He’s painting his funny tubular dogs, isn’t he? End of story. Yet not so. In an online interview the artist explained, ‘I think the real reason I did them was as a way of dealing with the recent deaths of a number of my friends … I was feeling very down. And I started painting the dogs and realized this was a marvellous subject for me at this time, because they were little innocent creatures like us, and they didn’t know about much. It was just a marvellous, loving subject.’ Asked (mad question!) if the dogs had any sense they were the subject of Hockney portraits, the artist replied, ‘The dogs think nothing of them really. They’d just as soon pee on them. They don’t care about art since they’re simply on to higher things – the source of art, which is love. That’s what the paintings are about – love, really.’

So, on an unconscious quest to deal with loss and celebrate love, one of the most popular artists of our time stayed at home and ‘saw the nearest things to me, which was two little dogs on cushions’. Similarly, on my own quest to understand how love can survive even an ending, how a marriage can go on reverberating even after divorce and how the process of reinvention in a human life reflects the very movement of the universe and must be embraced, I stayed at home and stroked the nearest thing to me, which was a tiny white dog with a feathery tail who needs me as much as I need her. I had so much to learn from the force of devotion within that minuscule frame.

Dogs are patient with us; they have little choice. They continue with their dogged work of saving our lives, even if we don’t know it’s happening. Long before my foot reached out to rub her soft white fur that day, my lapdog was asking me to regard her as Muse. She was demanding proper attention, as well as instinctive affection. She was saying, ‘I’m here!’ And it worked. Since then my ‘animal companion’ (as the modern phrase insists, implying equality rather than ownership) has inspired my ‘Bonnie’ series of six books for children, which stars a small white dog from a rescue home who, as the saga progresses, helps to cheer and restore one unsure, unhappy boy and his family.

Now she is the beginning, middle and end of this book’s story too – and, like Hockney, ‘I make no apologies for the apparent subject matter.’ I am writing about what happened to me between 2002 and 2009, using my dog as a way into a painful story, and a way out of it too. During that time my marriage ended and life was turned on its head. What do dogs know about marriage? Probably a lot – because they are in tune to our feelings and it’s hard to hide things from your dog. As I get older I want to share more, hide less. That’s why I’m willing to invite others to come along on a walk with my pet, in the hope that the activity might act as ‘therapy’ for them, as it has for me. Dogs are good at therapy – so mine will help me tell this story of a love (affair). Or, rather, a tale of many loves.