In his wedding speech, Andrew talked of our shared challenge of reaching Everest and how important it was to us. We spent our honeymoon in Venice. Not that I realised it before we left – the trip was to be a surprise for me. All I knew was that we nearly missed our ferry: that morning over a leisurely breakfast Andrew suddenly remembered our passports were with his best man, who was rowing on the Thames. A worried phone call (still no mobile phones) brought the news that Adam was too hung-over to row. Instead he met us at a service station en route to hand over the passports. Phew!
With balloons and decorations flapping from the car, we arrived at the ferry terminal and were motioned on across an empty boarding area. Talk about last minute! We stayed one night in a small village in France and then another on the banks of Lake Geneva in a small, eccentric Swiss guesthouse; I still didn’t know where we were headed. Eventually, we ended up in a sleepy little village called Chioggia over the bay from Venice, in a fisherman’s tavern, and were wonderfully spoiled by the locals. We then moved on to Sienna, Giglio (a lovely island) and Florence.
Marriage suited us. Andrew and I are both children of strong marriages. My parents (Robin and John) met when they were teenagers and despite their differences have sustained a commitment that’s still going strong; my in-laws’ marriage I often imagine as a rock in stormy seas.
After the excitement of the wedding and all the travelling the return to reality came as a jolt. That autumn Andrew bought a new suit, had a haircut and started work as a surveyor looking after investment property portfolios in London. The job was interesting and meant that he could follow his dream of working in the City. After working eight weekends in a row at the Hospice, however, I was tired of shifts. No stranger to change, I applied and got onto a health-visiting course. This included practical and theory tuition in affiliation with a GP’s surgery in Lewisham, which was around the corner from where we were living in Catford (otherwise known as Forest Hill). It started as soon as we got back from our honeymoon. In fact, I missed the first week of the course.
By the time I was five, I’d lived in four different houses. Since I’ve been married to Andrew (21 years as I write this), I’ve lived in just three: I like the permanence of home, I like feeling settled. Our first flat was a two-bedroom conversion in a large Victorian house in Catford with high ceilings and a mantelpiece. A little bit of back garden was accessible through the front door and down the side alley. We completed at the height of the property boom and were seriously hit by negative equity but it was all ours. I purchased oddments of carpet and some second-hand blue velvet curtains and filled the window boxes with peonies, geraniums, trailing lobelia, fuchsias and marigolds.
On Christmas Eve we bought a Christmas tree that I decorated with red bows and white fairy lights. Andrew sat down. I sat on his lap and immediately fell fast asleep.
‘We need a dog.’
It was Saturday morning. We were drinking tea and deciding whether to do the South Downs or more decorating. The best thing about weekends in London was being able to head out to the country or go into town to visit the museums and the theatre.
‘I agree,’ said Andrew.
We had reached the dog-owning stage of our lives. Both of us were dog lovers. Growing up as an only child, I’d always been grateful for their company. For my sixth birthday, Mum and Dad gave me Sandie, a gun-shy Gun Dog, who proved to be a great companion and partial to crisps. I was eating a packet of crisps when we went to get her. Unsurprisingly, she came to sit at my feet and obviously I thought, she knows I’m her owner and that she’s mine. What a clever girl! She also loved hill walking as much as the rest of the family.
Sandie’s way of expressing her displeasure at being left at home was to collect all the shoes in the house and leave them in a pile, mercifully undamaged, in the middle of the living room. She also disgraced herself almost immediately by eating the gingerbread house that Mum had baked for my birthday. Six months later she made a foray into the Christmas cake. We soon learnt about Labradors and food!
When I was 13 years old, Mum found a stray outside my school. We took the dog to the police pound but in the ensuing conversation with the on-duty policeman decided to keep him. Mum wasn’t normally spontaneous but something about Shep made us fall in love with him. All black, he was possibly a Greyhound/Labrador mix, desperately thin and scared out of his wits; he had scabby paws, burns down one side and his ear had clearly been cut with scissors. The vet reckoned he had walked for miles. He might have been an unwanted Christmas present, living rough until he showed up outside school. Once we’d taken him home, he slept for three days and ate everything we put in front of him. He was so malnourished the vet warned that he could die if he wasn’t carefully and gradually introduced to food.
Shep was a real rascal. Dad was convinced that had he been human he’d have worn a trilby and had a fag hanging from his mouth! He was also the most accident prone dog you could ever hope to meet: he caught his eye on the hook of the seat belt and ate a kilo of walnuts, which meant that he had to drink pints of liquid paraffin to get things moving. Mum reckons the South Downs haven’t recovered from the mounds he deposited there – he had serious bellyache for weeks!
Shep and Sandie became firm friends. This was surprising given Sandie loathed every dog she met. In retrospect, it was good old-fashioned respect for his elders on Shep’s part. The only exception to the rule was the single floor cushion that both dogs liked. If Shep happened to be on it, Sandie would charge to the front door, barking. This would lead to Shep getting up to investigate what all the noise was about. In a flash, Sandie would sneak over to take up residency on the coveted cushion.
Sandie died aged 14. By then, I was living away from home but I was devastated, as were my parents. Shep also went through a long period of mourning: he moped around the house, lost his appetite and generally looked glum.
Now that Andrew and I were committed to the search for a dog, autumn weekends were spent contacting local rescue charities. If you’ve ever been to a rescue centre or homing charity with the intention of getting a dog, you’ll know exactly what I mean when I say it’s an emotional rollercoaster: your heart races and the hairs on your arms stand on end. The chorus of lonely barks and whines, all those desperate faces, is like a magic formula – there’s no way you’ll be going home empty-handed.
A few weeks into the search one of the charities phoned to let us know that they had a suitable dog. He was living with a family who couldn’t have him anymore. Jet was a year old and black, with grey eyes. He was part Black Labrador. Oh yes, and he had only three legs. Now you might think he wasn’t an ideal dog, but again gut instinct told us he was the one. Jet was the first dog we met in our search and we knew he was right for us. He soon learned we loved him: he was our joker, he brought a lot of humour into our lives. We used to walk him in Beckenham Place Park or go for longer trips on the South Downs. His favourite game was playing tug. He could run so fast, he made heads turn. My God, was that a three-legged dog? You should have seen the expression on people’s faces. Often we’d take him up to the Isle of Harris to visit my parents. They had a new dog called Lucy (Mum had given him to Dad for his birthday). Lucy was the most timid of the litter but with my parents’ encouragement, she soon grew in confidence. She was an amazing dog, who knew the ways of the Island. Whenever we visited, Jet and Lucy played tug o’ war with a long piece of rope that they had found washed up on the shore.
Life was settling into a routine that felt familiar and safe.
It was around this time that Andrew and I began volunteering for the Salvation Army Soup Kitchen. I can’t remember who thought of it first but we ended up joining the team together. In the early nineties homelessness in London had become a huge problem and prejudice against the homeless was rife. As we soon learnt, there were lots of different types of homeless people: there were