I...Had a Dog...In Alkrington: For 8 Great Years

By Keith Brocklehurst

My book is a personal, perhaps parochial and anecdotal, but nonetheless sociological consideration of the pleasures and pains of having a dog in your life. It is a story that every dog-lover will surely find empathy with. But it isalso anattempt to explore some of the common-thread factors....of relationships, attachments, and the inevitable and developmental changes and stages....that affect us all on our journey through life.... through a focus on the life, lossand bereavement of our family pet.

The title is taken from the famous Meryl Streep 'I had a farm in Africa' line, as she playedthe central character, Karen Blixen, in the film, 'Out of Africa'. That was an intimate andmoving story of unexpected attachment......and, hopefully,this is another......

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 25, 2009
• ISBN: 9781467886642

Keith Brocklehurst

KeithB was born near Glossop, in North Derbyshire, in 1951; and lived, was educated, and worked there (in engineering) until he was 24; when he went to study for a degree in Sociology at Salford University. It was there that he met his partner, Sue; with whom he has since resided..... in Alkrington. In 1988, their partnership was momentously enhanced by the arrival of their daughter, Kate; and in 1999 of course, by......Jasper.....and the rest, as they say, is his-story...... 

Book preview

I…Had A Dog…

In Alkrington

Keith Brocklehurst

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AuthorHouse™ UK Ltd.

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© 2009 Keith Brocklehurst. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/23/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4490-3651-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8664-2 (ebk)

PREFACE and SYNOPSIS – this book represents a personal, perhaps parochial and anecdotal, but nonetheless sociological consideration of the pleasures and pains of having a dog in your life. In it, through a focus on the whole life of our family pet, (squeezed into just eight, middle-aged, years of mine), I have tried to explore some of the fundamental, common-thread, factors…. of relationships, attachments, and the inevitable and developmental changes and stages…. that affect us all on the journey throughout our lives….but underpinning it, running throughout, and perhaps most fundamental of all, it is a personalised (but hopefully not too subjective) study in dealing with loss and bereavement…..and in searching for the long-term positives from such a difficult journey.

The title is a play on Meryl Streep’s famous interpretation of the central character, Karen Blixen’s, ‘I…had a faarm…in Aafrica’ line in the film ‘Out of Africa’…….that was a moving and intimate tale of unexpected attachment……This, hopefully, is another….

My thanks to each and all who shared in and contributed to an incredible dog-owning experience…..(you know who you are), but especially to my partner, Sue, and daughter, Kate, and, of course…….Jas, without whom none of it would have been possible……

In memory of a great little dog.

Thanks Jas….

For 8 great years.

Contents

1.THE DOGS HOME

This opening chapter describes how we came to acquire Jasper, in the Spring of 1999; it first sets the scene at our dog-free home; the home that fate had deemed that he was about to come to; then how that came about; how we found him, nearly new-born, at the home, and in the litter, that he had been born into, and was about to join us from.

2. THE END

This describes the other end of his life; just eight great years later. It tells of the slow creep of the Cavalier King Charles’ ‘Achilles heel’, the dreaded Mitral Valve Disease (MVD); and how we, or at least I, dealt with the trauma, and managed it right to Jasper’s very sad end…on the 10th of April 2007.

3. THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES

This chapter is set in three parts; each looking back reflectively to an aspect and appreciation of the joy that Jas brought into our family unit, and life…..and particularly to mine….

a. In the beginning…..describes Jasper’s arrival one May Sunday in 1999; and his early days settling into, and changing, our home and our lives .

b. Walking back to happiness….describes the wide variety of life-enhancing walks that brought me so much outdoor pleasure, with, from and through this simple canine companionship, over those eight great years.

c. Magic moments…..remembers the equally wide variety of other memorable and fantastic moments.…all typical character-shaping, smile-bringing, relationship-forming, and just sheer joy-giving interactions between Jas and I; and describing how a small 20lb dog could give such a jaw-dropping lesson in relative contentment, and so many basic aspects of …..well, of the important things in life, really.

4. LETTING GO

This chapter essentially describes the effect of being bereaved, of feeling the initial trauma and acute sense of loss, and of slowly coming to terms with it, over time, and finally moving on; whilst at the same time learning to appreciate the lessons that Jas taught me, and how to make his brief life, sad loss, and unmovable memory , a long-term positive and uplifting experience.

5. Legacy

This short chapter simply attempts a final, and philosophical, time-enhanced summary and reflection on the long-term effects of Jas’ time in our family….and in my life.

About the Author

I….

Had A Dog….

In Alkrington….

A personal and sociological consideration of the pleasures and pains of owning a dog.

By Keith Brocklehurst.

1.THE DOGS HOME

Alkrington is divided neatly into two by the busy main road connecting Rochdale with Manchester; the ubiquitous Garden Village and the posher ‘Woodside’; and each side has its own distinct character.

We knew our place…and were grateful for it.

Alkrington Garden village was populated by mainly decent, mainly working-class-made-good folk, a few equally decent indigenous lower middle class folk, and a liberal smattering of professional and public sector workers like Sue and I, looking for a local but safe haven from which to earn their average-wage corn in the sprawling conurbation of Greater Manchester, without actually having to touch base too often with our more difficult ‘clients’ out of office hours.

It’s a predominantly mid-1950s –built patchwork estate, of mixed and mazy streets of mostly private brick-semied, boxy detached and neat-bungalowed folk; with a small but significant attachment of public, council stock; a goodly accumulation of older, and retired folk who had worked hard in the commercial and industrial heart of Manchester and the surrounding Lancashire towns like Rochdale, Oldham and Bury in order to flee the poorer, inner, areas for semi-detached suburbia, and lower middle class status on the borders; relatively new and middle-aged folk (like us) looking for decent, and affordable private housing and decent state primary schools from which to grow families; that wad of council patrons…..and, for all of a dog’s life, a couple of would-be celebrities, like the late Bernard Manning!

Ours was one of the ‘left-hand’ semis; positioned about a third of the way up, on a road of some sixty or so more or less identical ‘twinned’ red-bricked, front-bayed, three-bedroomed semis that wound its way from, at ‘our’ end, a point almost opposite and not too far from Bernard Manning’s modest pile on the busy, grass-central-reservationed main Alkrington carriageway, up around the left-hand bend, passing my daughter, Kate’s primary school after about 300 yards on the opposite side, to, at the other end, a 4-way, grassed and small-bushed roundabout some 150 yards further on, that gave way to two other similar residential streets to left and right, and on to another main estate road straight ahead.

And ours had the dubious distinction of having perhaps the least made-over, and poorest tended front garden, and probably the tattiest, wood-grained, front door on the whole street!

We always meant to do something about them; especially the door, honestly; but local government isn’t exactly a high-roller in the remuneration stakes, and we had hitherto managed to identify, and divert all our spare finances into apparently more pressing priorities… such as nearly-new, work-reliable cars, a couple of essential, stress-relieving holidays each year, a costly loft conversion, a child-minder, more-comfortable interior fixtures and fittings, and a seemingly regular and endless run of bad-luck incidences of emergency replacements of essential household white goods; so, whilst our neighbours appeared to have no such bad luck with their cars and white goods, and also seemed to have access to sufficient spare monies for all their holiday needs, and enough left over to have all but completed an impressive UPVC window and front-entrance whitewash on our road, our own cracked mahogany-grain woodstain continued to stand out for all the wrong reasons, and to ‘let the side down’…. well, both sides really!….I (too) often joked with our long-suffering neighbours that they would soon be getting up a petition to have us shape up, or ship out!….but I’m not sure they always saw the funny side!

Behind the peeling varnish of the front door, though, the typically muted, matt, (mostly magnolia) walls, and ‘light’ Laura Ashley fabriced furnishings were arguably kept in a rather better state of repair.

Immediately behind it was a generous-sized hall and stairwell that, in design, arguably took more room from the ungenerous living room adjacent to its left than was absolutely necessary. Straight ahead, beyond the hall, was the door to our regular, squarish, but just about adequate kitchen, with its fitted, oak-grained doors, and small incorporated laundry room, and adjacent and far left was our equally small-proportioned ‘back’/dining room; with its pleasant window view onto the compact rear garden. From halfway down the hall, two stairs rose and lead off right to a third, yard-square, platform-step, brightened by the light from a small, opaque- glassed stairwell window; then eight more steps climbed sharp-right, hugging the wall, to another platform-step, before another two steps, to the right, doubled things back to the upstairs landing immediately above the hall.

Upstairs then largely mirrored below; with the two main bedrooms set directly over the two downstairs (living and dining) rooms, and Kate’s small ‘box’ bedroom, and the separate bathroom and toilet vying to cover the kitchen and stairwell; and all topped off with that relatively recent roof-space conversion.

With a rather ‘natural’ back garden, that was ‘in sympathy’ with our front fragment, and a slightly more than car’s-width flagged space between the side of the house, and that of our neighbours’, and onto which our ‘back’ door opened, and which connected our two would-be Titchmarsh territories, this was our humble Alkrington domain.

I haven’t known any other ‘garden villages’ (though Welwyn Garden CITY must surely be pretty impressive!), but what struck me most about Alkrington’s design, from the very outset, was the liberal smattering of enclosed ‘green areas’…not only does every single private house have some sort of private garden of it’s own , but every now and then on the estate (sorry, ‘in the village’), there would also be an acre, and sometimes more, of mostly enclosed, but patently public and apparently communal ‘vegitation’….of supposedly council-kept, but often rampant, grassland, edged with variously maturing trees and rambling bushes and brambles; every now and again, amidst and betwixt every few streets; and discreetly positioned….but what were they for?

Well, mostly, these open spaces appeared to be potentially attractive, but hardly-used and badly tended islands of natural greenery, acting as occasional counterbalances in a sea of pleasant-enough, but otherwise rather samey, uninteresting and extensive residential development, and, realistically, to be usable oases only for the local wildlife. Yes, a few kids played mess-about football or cricket there, depending on the season, and sometimes late at night a few hardy teenagers saw them as brief, undisturbed, opportunities for an elicit lager or two, smoking God-knows what, and perhaps even a bit of hot-summer canoodling under the convenient cover of the leafy undergrowth, but mostly, the untended ground underfoot was too rugged and retained water, and needed pretty stout shoes whatever the season, and would not normally attract enough passing, and certainly not staying, punters to even ruffle the feathers of the average resident blackbird.

No-one with a clear conscience, I was convinced, would surely choose to linger alone, or even as a family, around or upon these verdant and often overgrown pastures without feeling a little conscious of their lack of purpose there, and of therefore feeling slightly ‘weird’; would they?

Hitherto, I had always assumed that it would be a bit like standing alone in the middle of a half-ploughed farmer’s field, or (for the thus inexperienced townies) like wandering into an accidentally left-open gate at Oldham Athletic’s Boundary Park football ground on a quiet but soggy Monday morning, and standing alone in the centre of the pitch in a completely empty stadium. An interesting view, perhaps; but what are you doing there? You’d feel self-conscious wouldn’t you? …. and weird or what?

No, these greenland swathes, it seemed to me, were surely only meant for, and best suited to, people with wellies…….and DOGS!

Put a dog in the mental picture and it all starts to make some sort of sense. Bring a pooch with you into your bounded public greenery and, ‘hey presto!’ the self-consciousness and felt ‘weirdness’ disappears immediately, doesn’t it? Suddenly, I suggest, you have found a purpose and a sort of validity there.

I put it to you that you can now stand there for as long as you like, and so long as you are wearing a mack and appropriate waterproof footwear, and call out Come on Fido to your furry canine companion at regular intervals, you will feel fine and entirely at ease amid any such grassed and tree-fringed plots; and would not then be considered remotely weird by even the most critical of local public commentaters.

Try it. I did.

And that, I was about to find out, was how it worked best…..because…I.…HAD a dog…….in Alkrington.

II

Sue and I weren’t indigenous to Alkrington; but after more than a dozen years in full residence, we felt that we’d ‘served our time’, and now just about ‘qualified’ as locals.

I grew up in North Derbyshire, some 15 miles away on the edge of the beautiful Peak District, and Sue was originally from the London Borough of Hammersmith….and you might think that ‘ne’er the twain might meet’; but we did. That’s surely fate! Yes, we’d met at some common (psychology) lectures on our respective social science courses at Salford University, and had subsequently found paid public sector work in Manchester and Salford respectively; and then along came our daughter Kate….and, despite being mortgaged up to the hilt, Alkrington fitted the work, housing and schools ‘bill’ to a ‘T’…. and such is fate……so now we considered ourselves adopted ‘Alkringtonians’.

And we’d lived in Alkrington, for all of the 10 years of our lovely daughter’s life; and we now numbered several equally ‘qualified’ Alkringtonians amongst our friends; and for good measure had kept contact with a handful of still relatively local university-met friends, too.

Kate attended the local primary school at the top of our road, and she had established her own peergroup friends, and we inevitably made regular, if varying, degrees of local and school-gate acquaintance with other parents and their offspring, and then found ourselves being bonded further by attendances (usually rather reluctantly on my part), at the obligatory school ‘shows’, ‘sports days’, and the like. (Well you wouldn’t choose to attend them if you didn’t have your own child there, would you? And you certainly wouldn’t want to pay for the privilege of watching the little dears; would you? When did you last turn up at a show at a school you had no forced associations with, then?)

Additionally, we were, by now, regular attenders at the local church; trying to seek extra work-strength from weekly in-house appeals to ‘his nibs’, and to discretely curry favour with the nice resident vicar, in order to make a more successful application for a sought-after and well-connected Cof E secondary school with a particularly good reputation, and for yet further enhancement of our social circle…..

And we had made good strides towards those objectives.

For example, Sue and I had also been cajoled into learning ‘brass’ in the church’s recreational brass band, and played and performed socially and seasonally with the group, for both fun, and occasionally for the dubious benefit of our own and other unsuspecting congregations in the area. Sue had also been invited onto the parochial church council, whilst Kate took part in the church’s brownies’ group, and its associated outings and activities, and our social diary and calendar was generally, and sufficiently, well stocked.

So, the miscellaneous hotch-potch of local ‘greenlands’ were not of much influence or attraction in our lives….and dogs were even less so……and then….without warning…. fate took another hand…..and they were.

III

I was working as a busy social worker in the inner city, with dysfunctional children from even more dysfunctional families. It was the sort of employment that advertisements for it always described as challenging. Sometimes it was very challenging, and often very stressful, and unbeknown to me it had been slowly taking its toll. Perhaps my brain and body were just reacting to being called ‘fuckin’ knob’ ‘ed’ once too often, or had absorbed one too many threats to have my ‘lights punched out’, but my migraines suddenly became more unmanageable, more frequent, and then more intense. My concentration levels dropped to the point where I would have to read the most simple of reports several times, and slowly, before I eventually took any of it in. I felt out of control, and my anxiety levels began to rise accordingly. I took the occasional day off because of all this….and then 2 or 3 days in a row….and then a week…..and then I realised I needed to consult my GP.

He was great; very understanding; diagnosed stress, and gave me a sick-note for 3 weeks.

By the end of 3 weeks I’d begun to relax again. I’d got into a comfort zone of not going to work, the garden had never looked more ‘Titchmarshed’, the house sparkled, after my blitz with the ‘Mr. Sheen’ and ‘Cillit Bang’, and there was Brilliant White Gloss everywhere; and when the day dawned for me to return to my employment……….I woke with the most intense of migraines, and found myself back at the doctors, and pleading for more mercy.

Again, he was an absolute star. He diagnosed stress again, gave me another sick note, and for longer, and suggested that I take plenty of fresh air and exercise to try and alleviate the problem, and focus my mind elsewhere for a while. I skipped all the way home; and chirpily conveyed the doctor’s prognosis and advice to Sue. She concurred.

I started to walk everywhere whilst I was off work; and made more, and increasingly frequent, contact with the neighbours, and, coincidentally, with more of the ‘greenlands and gardens’, as I casually criss-crossed Alkrington’s meandering terrain in search of better mental, through better physical, health.

Then, one May day soon after I’d started my new ‘fresh air’ programme, and it had certainly not crossed my mind before, Sue suddenly suggested that we get a DOG!

It appeared to come from nowhere. Completely out of the blue.

We hadn’t had it on any agenda, and I couldn’t recall ever really discussing it; but…..

She’d always secretly wanted one, she said. Had never been allowed to have one as a child, and had always hankered after a particular breed of dog….the cute and cuddly Cavalier King Charles Spaniel…..and a colleague at work had one, and had brought it in; and it was, apparently, adorable, so sweet and just gorgeous. And there was the fateful trigger.

The opportunity was before us, she argued. Whilst I was off work for a few weeks, there was the chance to house-train one….in 6 weeks?

She had certainly got a ‘bee in her bonnet’, (or should that be a dog in her kennel?) about it and over the next few days she really did her ‘homework’…..and did me up like the proverbial ‘kipper’.

The breed, she persisted, was intelligent, affectionate, sweet-natured, very people-centred, and extremely child-friendly, not too big, and a generally good-looking dog. It was a dog you could both enjoy a good walk with, and yet cuddle easily, and, on both counts, would be great for (my) stress. (In our college days, we’d both read a couple of articles on successful ‘animal-assisted recovery’ in cases of ill health, and on the supposed and age-old calming, recuperative and generally therapeutic benefits to be derived from the owning and stroking of a pet….and Sue was craftily choosing to play the canine ‘card’ now).

She’d also bought a book on the breed, to back up her claims. (The ‘Pet owners Guide to.….’ Cavalier King Charles Spaniels). And she made sure it was always lying around…. and open to best show off the typically long ears, and the attractive, slightly snubbed-nosed faces, and calm, doleful eyes peering out from the glossy pages.

And she worked on Kate, too. (Not that she needed to do much there, really). And again the fates conspired to support their mischief……

Look Dad! she piped up, one Friday evening, after school, as we sat together watching a childrens’ TV programme called ‘Diggit’……a King Charles Spaniel!

And there, before my very eyes, on Diggit, was a lovely black and white Cavalier King Charles Spaniel; and it was an absolute cuty; handsome, yet attentive; compact, yet very dignified; the camera zooming in for best effect.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a dog like that, dad? she went on, enthusiastically. Its called Jasper, you know…..I’d like to have one, dad…a Jasper….a King Charles, like that one….or the ones in mum’s book. Aren’t they just cute, dad? Can we….? Please, please, pleeeeease, dad?

Children are notoriously fickle, aren’t they? And I was never going to succumb to buying any pet on the Friday-night whim of a 10 year old, was I? So, drawing on all my professional training and experience, I umm’d and aah’d