MY FRIEND, THE GOLDEN RETRIEVER

This is the story of a dog. A dog getting on in years. A Golden Retriever. I didn't even know its name. I think it was a she. I’m not particularly clued-up on dogs. She was about eight or nine and she lived in the village. She’d had a miserable sort of life for the last few years, at least. Her owner didn’t care. I can attest to that for, as I sat eating my breakfast one morning, a woman, ugly as a bluebottle, drove up in a blue Peugeot cabriolet, screeched to a halt outside the cottage window and gesticulated to the dog to get a move on. She then did a three-point-turn and drove behind the dog as if it were a steer and she a cowboy. Mr Gliddon told me more.
“Steer clear of that darg,” he said in his slow Wessex drawl. “She been full o’ lice and nits. We don’t like her round here. Folks on halliday here don’t like it.”

It turned out that the bluebottle’s husband had come to his senses one day and pushed off out of it, to live with someone marginally less ghastly, and thenceforth the woman had ceased to care for the dog.
“She hasn’t ‘ad a happy life, that one,’ said Mr Gliddon (of the dog).
I had already made friends with the canine and she had taken me for a couple of walks. When I heard all of this, I was extremely upset, surprisingly so, for a man who had once renounced the benefits of all animals as pets. I wanted to take this forlorn animal back to Scotland, but I couldn’t with Minky the cat waiting to carve his initials on her broad golden back.

When we drove back from Sparkford one afternoon, she was standing in the main road of the village, all alone, looking pleadingly in the direction of the car. I stopped and wound down the window. “It’s alright, old girl. I’ll put this car away and keep you company for a while.” The silky tail wagged and the pink tongue lolled out optimistically. I parked the car and went back to look for her. When I arrived back in the main street, she wasn’t there. I believed that she must have been forced back into the house by that dreadful woman. I walked around for twenty minutes, whistling and calling softly ‘Here,old girl,’ but she never came.

I went back to the cottage, determined to make her as happy as I could in my remaining couple of days there. Later that evening, she ran up the dirt track to the cottage, outside of which I was sitting writing, and put her great paws on my arm. She looked at me with sad, appealing eyes which said: “I really need a friend right now, would you please take me for a walk?” We strolled for half an hour together along the lane, past the electricity sub-station and the tiny culvert where the damsel-flies danced. She was as happy as could be, trotting ahead of me and waiting for me to catch up. I had to go back, eventually, because we got too near the main road and the old girl didn’t like that. I left her at the fork in the lane at the western edge of the village. She walked back, most reluctantly it seemed to me, towards the Cider House, where she lived, and I drifted off back to the cottage.

I never saw her again. The malevolent old witch must have kept her in, fretting and lonely, for all of the next two days. It was with a heavy heart that I packed the car to go home. How could anybody treat such a noble animal with such callousness and contempt? All she wanted was a bit of company and attention. Was that too much to ask, or too much to give?