Brindle

The following is a slightly edited extract from my autobiography. It's about Brindle, our first dog, a spaniel/labrador cross ruled by her stomach and virtually untrainable.

    I’m not sure why I’m publishing it here, now, but it came to me while I was showering this morning, perhaps as a result of yesterday’s post (in which I mentioned the words that arrive in the head, seemingly automatically).

    Anyway, for what it’s worth, here it is.

 ‘In front of you,’ said Cheryl, ‘you will see some stairs. Climb the stairs and you will see a door. Your spirit guide is waiting for you the other side of the door. Go through the door . . .’

    Cheryl was leading half a dozen of us through a visualisation in order for us to meet our spirit guide for the first time.

    Nothing much happened to me that evening but the next day when I was out walking and sat down for my usual meditation I decided to try the visualisation again on my own.

    To my astonishment, even though I had no vision of a person, information flooded into my mind in response to my questions. I asked questions about everybody – Frog, me, my parents, friends, relatives – and about Brindle.

    ‘She was human in her previous life,’ said my informant, ‘but reincarnated this time in dog form in order to learn continence and obedience.’

    I couldn’t keep up with the information, I started to doubt it, I grew a little alarmed at what was going on, and the communication stopped. When I got home however I passed on to Frog the news about Brindle. I wasn’t quite sure how he would take it, whether he would scoff, but he surprised me, accepting it without question and summing up the situation in his usual pithy way.

    ‘Well, she hasn’t learnt much of either,’ he said.
    The year before Brin died I was working frantically on New Age Encyclopaedia. The project was much bigger than I had anticipated and I’d had to ask the publisher to extend the deadline by three months. Even so, I was still pushed. Then Brin fell ill. She looked drunk. She couldn’t walk straight and she kept being sick.

    ‘A stroke,’ said the vet.

    'Please, please, don't let her die,' I prayed.
    I didn’t have the time or the energy to deal with her death at that moment.
    She rallied, climbing the stairs with her legs collapsing underneath her, getting back to her normal routine within a few days.

    Her last few months coincided with a foot and mouth outbreak when the countryside was out of bounds. She and I trudged the lanes. She was deaf now as well as disobedient so I had to keep her on a lead. If she had run into a field I wouldn’t have had a hope of getting her back and she might have been shot.
    She didn’t like the situation any more than I did. She would stop in the middle of the road and look at me.

    ‘Why are we doing this?’ her eyes said. ‘I’m an old lady now. I’d much rather be at home.’

    ‘I’m sorry,’ I would reply. ‘We’ve got to get our exercise and it’s as far now to go home as it is to go on.’

    Frog and I went on holiday to a Greek island, leaving Brindle with neighbours. Because of a storm we couldn't get off the island at the end of our holiday and it looked like our return was going to be delayed at least three days. Ben, our neighbour, sounded worried when I phoned him.
    'I just hope Brindle will last,' he said.
    Eventually we made it home and the next day Frog and I took Brindle out for a walk. This was most unusual as normally I went out alone.

    Halfway up the steep lane behind the house, she collapsed. She couldn’t move, her tongue was hanging out and she was panting. Frog raced back down the hill to get the car so that we could take her home, while I waited with her by the side of the road.

    Thank goodness Frog had been there, I thought. What would I have done on my own? I had no phone. I couldn’t carry her. I would have had to leave her alone in order to go and get help.

    Back home we laid her on her bed and called the vet. Because of the panting we thought she was hot so we put a fan on her while we waited.

    When the vet arrived he looked serious.

    ‘It’s a pulmonary embolism, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘There’s no hope. She’s slowly suffocating.’

    Brin got up and staggered outside only to collapse again on the grass. We followed her and watched the vet administer the injection. As the plunger went in I saw her spirit burst from her body like a puff of steam and streak away northwards over the shed. It couldn’t wait to leave.

She had waited for me to finish my book. During the foot and mouth crisis she had walked round the lanes with me even though she hadn’t wanted to. She’d waited for Frog and me to get back from holiday. She’d made sure we were both there when she collapsed.

    Perhaps, in the end, she did what she came here to do.
    

Photograph by Sam Baker http://www.sambakerphotography.co.uk/