Since we got married
dogs have always had a special place in my life. First we lived in a caravan 7’6”x 22’ not big
but we were young, in love and needed to be together. But it wasn’t long before
we wanted a dog, husband Mike’s parents had always had one and I had always
wanted one. Fairly soon we had a near Labrador/gundog not that we wanted a
gundog but we were poor and ‘Andy’ was cheap. He was naturally wilful and full
of testosterone and we had little idea how to train him but unaware of our
ignorance at the time. An added complication was that Mike was in the Air Force
which meant we eventually moved into married quarters where all the other dogs
seemed to be bitches but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The caravan
(trailer) was pitched in an open farmer’s field where Andy could exercise
himself; in our ignorance we used to just let him out of the caravan and he
would bark some time later to be let in. Naturally he completely failed to
understand the situation when he was put on a lead for a formal walk and when we let him off would
fail to come near enough to be put back on his lead when called. Our attempt at training him out of this embarrasment came
too late, the strategy was to tempt him near enough with a biscuit (cookie) to
catch him. However he developed a technique of taking the biscuit when my arm
was at full stretch and would be away again before I could lay a finger on him.
We lived by the side of a disused airfield and my father once walked round it
twice getting through a large pack of digestives on the way before arriving
back at the caravan by himself. Andy followed in a few minutes later much
entertained by the exercise.
By the time we had
moved to the official park on the base we had bought a bigger caravan 7’6”x32’
and had a baby daughter. The need for baby sitters led to a new situation, a
delightful girl was the first of these volunteers before we left we were
relieved to find Andy found her quite acceptable. After our evening out we
found our baby sitter stood in the middle of the lounge. It appears after we
had left Andy had decided that where ever she sat was just the spot for him and
had got on the seat behind her and edged her off. He repeated this no matter
where she sat until she gave up and had stood for the whole evening. Later to
foil his attempts at dislodging baby sitters we used to suggest that they lay
on our bed next to our daughter’s cot and keep the door closed. Naturally this reduced the volunteers and
raised the pay rate.
As I inferred at the
beginning Andy was a very badly behaved dog, our fault I freely admit but then
we paid for our failure. When we went to bed Andy would wait till we were
asleep then creep up between us and go to sleep, he never woke us by getting
in but in the morning there he would be
with his head on the pillow. When we changed the caravans we had to move all
our stuff out of the old one while they sited the bigger one, during this
manoeuvre we tied Andy to a tree by the clothes line. There must have been
about 25 to 30 feet of line naturally Andy thought he was free and ran off at
top speed accelerating until the line which was slightly elastic stretched to
its limit and snapped back flinging him into the air. He was most surprised and
unhappy by this performance, returned to the tree and barked for the rest of
the afternoon.
As he got older he
quietened down only his attention to bitches remained. Much to our
embarrassment he would disappear and an irate neighbour would come round and
complain that our dog was lying on his front door step or trying to get in
their back door. Eventually Mike was posted to Germany and his parents offered
to look after Andy for us. I wonder if they really knew what they were taking
on.
So why am I writing
about our dogs? Well my new book, being written at the moment, will be about my
Newfoundland dogs and I thought it would be fun to trace my life experiences
leading up to our ownership of these well behaved (trained) monsters. Nice monsters though.
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