I have a photograph of Ollie pinned on the notice board outside my office at
the University of East Anglia. A student comes by to ask who this dog is.
“That's my Ollie,” I say. And then I have to finish the story: he was put to
sleep a fortnight ago. He was only 6.
The student opens her wallet to show me a picture of a boxer that she “rescued
from the parking lot of a pizza place in LA”. She says: “I lost him a year
back. I don't think I'm even beginning to get over it.” Just weeks after
Ollie died, I'm starting to get used to this. Everybody has a story about
the death of a dog; everybody's eyes fill up when they tell it.
My partner Trezza and I were turning 40, we had been together for two years
and were ready to step up our commitment. For me 40 is too old to be having
children: sleepless nights and the school run are a young man's game. A pup
would surely be less trouble than a baby and for Trezza there has usually
been a dog in the family, though I was new to it. I bought The Giant Book of
The Dog and I studied its pages closely. After several false-start
encounters with dog-breeder maniacs we found ourselves at a Dogs Trust
rescue centre. It was here that we met Ollie. He emerged suddenly from a
side door, pulling a member of staff behind him, some feat for an animal
that looked like a newborn fawn. He was five months old, he had been at the
kennels for ten weeks. They had been feeding him up, they said. If this were
the case, there must surely have been nothing of him to start with. He had
been found by a dog warden in Thetford Forest, East Anglia, and at first
there had been doubts about whether he would survive.
It was love at first sight
Ollie took us out for a walk to see whether we would get along together, but
this was a formality; it was love at first sight. Even as a rickety example
of a dog, Ollie was a beautiful creature. But looks aren't everything. It
was when he came home that it started to go wrong. He had been used to the
outdoor life, doing as he liked. He was opposed to confinement as
represented by a house. On top of this, there were many things that
frightened him: shopping bags, flies, the apron hanging from the back of the
kitchen door. I think the apron reminded him of a scary man, and within
weeks this was how he came to regard me. As far as I knew I had done nothing
to provoke this, but from the minute he took fright, Ollie and I had no
relationship apart from a dysfunctional one. I would come indoors, he would
cower and urinate in a corner. I wished he could go back to the Dogs Trust;
a non-starter because Trezza adored him.
Ollie was a lurcher, a category which means that one parent is a greyhound. In
Ollie's case the other was a saluki, a notoriously aloof and perverse Arabic
version of a greyhound. In short, Ollie had inbuilt psychological issues
plus a pent-up energy that could be released only by hard running. Letting
him off the lead, though, inevitably meant that he would not return. I would
find myself standing in fields calling his name while he flitted about at a
distance, taunting me and driving me insane.
But finally, after long months that included an episode where he broke his
leg, we managed to arrive at some sort of detente. It was while the leg was
recovering that he crept, unbidden, into my office, sat under my desk, and
licked my bare foot. Here was the breakthrough moment. We had to build our
relationship from scratch and reaffirm our fragile trust every day, but, at
last, we could begin work on that. In due course we arrived at a more
typical master-dog relationship: he trusted me completely; I worshipped him.
Had there been something worth recording in the early horror period of
canine-induced stress and trauma? I wondered. Walking Ollie came into being.
In hardback it sold modestly, like all the other books I'd written, but in
paperback it entered the bestseller lists. For the first time in my life my
work was making me a living. I kissed Ollie on the head for this every day
and fed him steak whenever he liked, though, in truth, I did that anyway.
After a while of him behaving “normally” (a relative term, when dealing with
rescued saluki-crosses), we decided that he needed to be among his own kind.
A pup, Dylan, came along. There were teething problems, but they were
getting on beautifully when, one night in autumn, Ollie went lame while
larking at the beach. The diagnosis was: it looks like bad news. The first
time I heard the word “cancer” I thought I was all right. Which I was, for
about 20 minutes, and then I started to cry. What I had imagined had been a
routine “Ollie accident” turned out to be oesteosarcoma: a bone tumour, a
common culler of dogs, I have since discovered. When it spread to his lungs,
it signed his death sentence. A friend who has been through this advised me
to hold him in my arms at the end. As he was injected with a lethal dose of
sedative I held my boy against me and I felt his heart stop in my hand. We
lay him on the floor, where he looked as beautiful as ever. At the time I
could neither think nor speak, though Trezza finally found her voice and
told him she loved him. Before we left the room I stroked him and arranged
his ears to look tidy.
Dylan knew his companion had gone
We drove home. In the kitchen we hugged and Dylan got in between us. He never
does that. How he knew that his companion had gone I don't know, but he knew
all right. He misses him of course and he has had to learn to look after
himself a bit: like any big brother Ollie had exclusive rights to duff Dylan
up at home, but outdoors, Ollie was his minder.
We had him cremated and a week later we picked up his ashes. I thought this
moment would make me feel better, having him back, but it didn't. It was not
Ollie, it was a box of ash. It sits on my desk, though we have plans to
scatter him in his favourite place.
The thing I hate doing most is breaking the news. Fellow dog walkers always
look pole-axed when they hear. He was a popular character, with his rags to
riches tale. We will get over it, but for now, as Trezza says: “I even miss
his toxic breath.”
Stephen Foster is the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of
East Anglia. His blog address is http://walkingollie.wordpress.com
Walking Ollie (£6.99, Short Books Ltd), by Stephen Foster, is available for
£6.64, free p&p, Times Books; tel 0845 2712134, timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
