The way some members of the family treated their dogs appalled me. My mother’s brother Uncle George had a dog called Bruce, a white German shepherd they had got from Battersea Dogs’ Home. I remember George used to lay out small penny bars of chocolate on the kitchen table in their wrapping and tell Bruce not to touch them. He used to think it was marvellous that he could come back half an hour later and find the chocolate still intact. Bruce would sit there looking at the chocolate and drooling, with the saliva dripping down his mouth. I thought this was wicked, it was torment. I used to cry when they put the chocolate on the table.
All the family used to say, ‘Oh don’t be so stupid, the dog’s got to know what’s what.’ They would have a go at me for feeling like this. But my stomach hurt. I would sit in the chair and curl up and say nothing. I felt like running away, but I also felt I couldn’t leave the dog because I would be abandoning him. I knew what it was like to be left alone with pain, to suffer on your own.
The more I learned about dogs, the more convinced I became of their intelligence and sensitivity. And the more determined I became to spare them such treatment.
No dog did more to convince me of its smartness than Shane. That dog was so clever he could tell the difference between the noise my father’s lorry made when it was full and when it was empty. Dad often used to take Shane out in his cab if he had a full load and a delivery to make. If Shane detected an empty lorry he would lie quietly. If he sensed there was a day out in it for him, he would get very excited.
He also had an amazing sense of direction. One night he went missing. My father had said that he was going to take him for a walk but had been distracted. Suddenly we realized Shane wasn’t there. We panicked. Then Dad said: ‘Hold on a minute.’ He went out, following their regular walk to the local Labour Exchange. There lay Shane. A woman came out and said he’d been lying there for an hour. That was his walk. He was so well trained we never bothered putting him on a lead, so he had gone there and waited.
For the next few years, Shane and I became utterly inseparable. It was literally a case of love me, love my dog. I went absolutely everywhere with him. Everyone knew that if they invited me to a party then Shane would come with me. I used to go to a youth club and I would take him there with me. I was the only one who did this, yet the amazing thing was that nobody ever questioned it. All the teenagers loved him and he loved all the attention. We were a couple, he was my best mate. If people thought it was odd, I didn’t care. Shane had shown more loyalty and affection to me than any other creature I’d come across. And by now he’d proven that he would defend me to the death if necessary.
The first time I saw Shane in full flight was one Saturday afternoon.
We lived within a short walk of Craven Cottage, home to the then mighty Fulham Football Club. Every fortnight Fulham would be playing at home and all the roads around the ground would become crowded with traffic. Visiting fans used to park down our street, so if my dad was away, it was me and my mum’s job to protect the parking space outside our house.
It wasn’t a particularly scientific process. We’d just set two chairs down and then put brooms across them. On this particular day, sometime during the early 1960s, my mother was putting the chairs out. I was upstairs playing The Beatles. I had a little grey portable record player. One of my uncles worked at EMI so I used to get records early. Suddenly I was aware that Shane was going ballistic through the window next to me. When I leaned out I soon saw why.
Some men had pulled up in a car and one was trying to remove the chairs. My mum was hanging on to them and one guy was trying to separate her from them. There was a real commotion. The men were using unpleasant language and my mother was shouting for help so I ran downstairs. As I went through the door, I sensed that Shane would be behind me and that I should keep him in the house. So I shut both the front door and the gate behind me. But I had underestimated him.
Suddenly Shane appeared out of nowhere. He cleared the gate in one bound, launching himself from the step. Somehow I grabbed him, put my arms around his chest and held on to him for dear life. He was fit to kill. But I sensed these guys weren’t nice people and might hurt him badly.
Shane’s arrival had the desired effect, however. They jumped into the car and drove off in a hurry. The wheels were spinning, leaving tyre tracks. As the car disappeared down the road, neighbours came running out. Mum was in a state, Shane was panting like crazy in my arms. Everyone was full of praise for Shane. What a great dog he was, and how loyal. ‘No one’s going to hurt you or your mum while he’s around,’ they said.
I was on my own with Shane when he underlined how true that was.
Ron and the family had moved near Olympia and I had popped over to see them one Saturday afternoon. Shane and I stayed there until early evening and set off home at about 7 p.m. It was a measure of how safe the streets of London were in those days that there was nothing unusual in this. I thought nothing of walking three miles across a busy part of the city unattended. No one would allow a young girl to do that now. We were walking down a short cut off the North End Road when we passed two lads sitting on a wall. They started whistling at me as lads do. ‘All right, darling.’
As usual Shane was quite a way ahead of me. That was the way it was. He knew the way home. I did what I knew I should do, which was ignore them, keep my head down and just keep going.
Unfortunately these two weren’t so easily shaken off and they started following me.
‘What’s a matter with you then, sweetheart?’ said one.
‘Don’t run away, darling,’ the other shouted when I started to walk faster.
I was just beginning to panic, sure that something unpleasant was going to happen, when Shane appeared from nowhere, snarling. He went straight at the two lads, who just turned and fled the other way, one of them with Shane hanging on to his bottom. I called him back and we ran all the way home.
Later on that weekend, funnily enough, I went to see my nephew in Fulham again. I looked down at Shane playing with the kids, the boys dive-bombing at him. He was rolling around on the floor letting them do whatever they wanted.
This was the wonderful, kind, dopey dog that would let children do anything, that would play with squirrels. But in a moment he could be transformed. To us and the family he was the perfect dog. He was obedient, he was full of playfulness. Yet he would have protected us to the death.
Like most people I thought a dog was part of the family and therefore under the family’s protection. It would be many years before I realized how misconceived an idea that was.
By the time I was in my mid-teens other members of the family had sensed the problems that existed between me and my parents.
The loneliness I felt at home was hard to bear at times. Sometimes I would feel physically sick. I regularly cried myself to sleep. I felt a sense of abandonment. Often I felt there was no hope. My unhappiness was all too obvious when we visited relatives. I did my best to appear the dutiful, polite and pleasant young woman, but it didn’t convince many people.
Things came to a head one Christmas with my cousin Doreen. We had begun spending Christmases with her and her husband Reg at their home in Welwyn Garden City. Doreen had always been the kindest of all my relatives. She’d seen the way my mother treated me and had decided it was time to raise the subject of adopting me. But it was only years later that I heard the story of what happened that day.
The air must have been bristling with electricity. ‘You obviously don’t love her,’ Doreen had said to my mother when the two of them were alone, clearing up after the Christmas