After we bought a place on my father’s hill farm in 2000, I’d study the notices pinned to boards in post offices-cum-stores across Exmoor in a glazed trance. If we got a puppy, I reasoned, as I studied a blurry Kodak photo of a Cadbury-coated labrador gun dog’s melting mega-litter, I’d stop wanting another baby. The children would sally forth into the great outdoors without complaint at the word ‘walkies’. Our love of the dog would carry us through the ups and downs of family life and – here was the kicker – render the five-hour schlep from London to Exmoor, to an unimproved farmhouse sans TV at the end of a two-mile track, non-negotiable.
And then, driving down a steep hill outside Exford one day, I screeched ‘STOP!’ just past a five-bar gate. I’d spotted a tumble of black puppies romping in the yard.
Ivo slipped the surprised farmer £40 for the quietest lab-collie-cross bitch and the children held the black bundle until we got a crate and all the other canine impedimenta in Dulverton. From that day, it was regime change. It was Dog First.
Dog ownership is not without its ‘challenges’ as we say now, and puppies are… a lot. Coco shredded our Turnell & Gigon curtains. She chewed Ivo’s Lobb brogues.
Then there was the time I’d ordered new linen for the children’s bedrooms. The very next day, Coco had ‘an accident’ in the back of the Volvo, self-basted in the liquid muck, ran into the house before I could catch her and rolled it off on the crisp, snowy beds fresh-dressed by the White Company.
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