My Boy Butch: The heart-warming true story of a little dog who made life worth living again. Jenni Murray
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making sure their shoes still fit.
As they reached 17 and passed their driving tests we looked forward to a little more free time. It was not to be. My parents became increasingly needy of support as my mother’s Parkinson’s worsened, and one day out of every weekend was taken up with the hour and a half drive to Barnsley and back to offer whatever care and cheer we could. By the time the end came for them and I had to face the loss of my parental rock – a gaping emotional hole that still, four years on, I find difficult to rationalise – I was forced to deal with my diagnosis of breast cancer.
People often ask me how I coped with it all, and the only answer is that you just do. Up to that point I had led something of a charmed life – lovely family, great job and the rudest of health, but always, in the back of my mind, there had been a sense that somehow, some day, this presumptuous little working-class lass from Barnsley would be caught out. Life had no right to be this good. I can’t say I was surprised when all hell appeared to break loose at once. Both David and I were permanently overwhelmed and exhausted, falling into bed at night with barely a word exchanged between us and waking the next morning, dreading whatever new trial fate might dish out.
Slowly, but surely, the pressures eased. The grief was less acute as the months passed by. The children did well in their exams and were all but up and off to university, work and travel. The chemotherapy ended, my hair grew back thicker and bouncier than ever and the brilliant doctors who treated me declared my prognosis good. I felt well, and some of the old energy reasserted itself. The empty nest was not the disastrous cavern I had feared.
I began to get used to (and secretly rather enjoy) it, when that Titanic pile of shoes cluttering up the hallway came to an end; when the strains of drum and bass no longer emanated from the bedrooms; when there wasn’t the constant need to be shrieking ‘Turn that music down, will you’; and we could finally choose not to cook tonight’s meal if we didn’t really feel like it. But we were in no way fulfilling the promise we made to each other to take advantage of our lack of responsibilities and get out more – maybe even embark on some travel ourselves. We were becoming middle aged and more than a little staid.
Perhaps it was a necessary period of regrouping after the chaos of the hectic years that we had now tried to put behind us. There is a point in middle age when you realise you are not invincible. You’ve watched your parents deteriorate and are only too well aware that you will be next. Some days we sat opposite each other at the kitchen table and wondered whether, without the children and their future to discuss every day, we would ever again find anything to say to each other that wasn’t depressing. What, we wondered, could replace the youth and energy they had brought to our lives? Of course, we were still occupied by phone calls, emails and the occasional visit, the requests for help and advice and sporadic donations from the bank of Mum and Dad, but it became increasingly apparent that an injection of something we were at a loss to define was necessary to re-invigorate us.
My thoughts, inevitably, turned towards canine companionship. Quite what put the idea of a Chihuahua into my head I’m not sure, as I’ve found myself strongly disapproving of the Chi celebrity culture that seems to have gripped Hollywood. I doubt there’s ever been a dog that’s enjoyed so much publicity since Lassie popularised the collie in Lassie Come Home.
The Taco Bell talking Chihuahua took America by storm, advertising Mexican Fast Food. Reese Witherspoon carried Bruiser – dressed in pink – in her designer handbags in Legally Blonde. In 2008 Beverley Hills Chihuahua was a hot success at the box office. Paris Hilton was rarely seen without Tinker-bell or Bambi. Madonna had Chiquita, Britney Spears sported Lucky and the movie hard man, Mickey Rourke, is said to own seven of the breed.
It’s Rourke with whom I feel most sympathy. A reporter from the London Times described arriving at his small house in New York to be greeted by ‘seven dogs, yipping, yapping and woofing and gleefully tripping over each other’. Rourke talks of the company his animals provide in what seems to have been a lonely and difficult life and his sense of responsibility even towards Jaws – a mean-spirited dog he took home from a rescue centre after it bit him on the lip. It had, he said, been ill treated by its previous owner. And he was clearly broken-hearted when his first dog, Loki, died at the age of 18 just before he was due to appear at the Oscar ceremony after his nomination as best actor.
Rourke says he chooses such small dogs because they tend to live longer and he becomes very attached. There is nothing of the designer doggie in its Gucci bag about him that’s become such a feature of the Paris Hilton school of ownership that’s had such a profound influence on the popularity of the breed.
The purchase of Chihuahuas in recent years has rocketed, despite the ever-escalating cost. You can expect to pay anything from £500 to £2,500, depending on the quality of the animal’s pedigree – the average price seems to be around £1,000. But the British Chihuahua Club’s Rescue Association reports more small dogs in need of rehoming than ever before. The internet small ads sites are full of notices for ‘my cute little Chihuahua … 1 year old … genuine reason for sale’. In other words – ‘Oops … this is a real dog. It’s not a toy. It makes messes in the house and I couldn’t be bothered to train it properly.’ Small dogs are notoriously difficult to housetrain in the early days without constant supervision.
Alternatively you can read into the advert, ‘Oops, it snapped at my two-year-old’ … Chihuahuas are too small themselves to withstand the sometimes casual cruelty of a small child. Or, of course, it could simply be ‘Oops, oh dear, he grew too big to fit in my handbag.’ Britney is reported to have got rid of Lucky after he snapped at her then partner, Kevin.
Strangely, the more I read about the ‘problem’ Chihuahua the more intrigued I became. How could such a little animal be so fêted on the one hand and so demonised on the other? An article in the Guardian newspaper’s G2 section headlined ‘LA’s Chihuahua problem? Blame it on Paris’ reported that Chihuahuas are now replacing pit bulls as the breed most often left at Californian shelters, with one San Francisco home telling the LA Times that, at current growth, the shelter will be 50 per cent Chihuahuas within months. ‘Animal welfare workers are calling it the “Paris Hilton Syndrome” after the celebutante whose obsessive acquisition of handbag portable dogs has inexplicably encouraged their popularity among people who don’t actually house the mutts in chandelier-hung scale models of their Beverley Hills mansions.’*
For me, living an oddly itinerant lifestyle that involves my weekly commute from the home in the Peak District I call Wuthering Heights to Wuthering Depths, the slightly grim, somewhat Bohemian basement flat in London, a small dog is essential for ease of transportation. Nor have I ever really been fond of big, powerful dogs, and Rottweilers and Alsatians really rather scare me. My son Ed the vet (I always feel slightly ashamed when I say that; it’s like the old Jewish mother joke: she’s in the swimming pool watching her boy and shouts, ‘Help, help, my son, the doctor, is drowning!’) goes by the old Barbara Wood-house mantra – ‘there are no bad dogs, only bad owners’, but the only nasty experience I’ve ever had with a dog was during my childhood and the dog was an Alsatian.
Our local vicar, his wife and children lived in a huge, imposing Victorian vicarage, reminiscent of the scary house on the hill in Hitchcock’s Psycho, and he began by owning one Alsatian as protection against intruders which eventually, as seems to happen with real dog lovers, became two, then four and eventually they were the proud owners of six of the breed – all brought up around their children and seemingly well trained and with the most gentle and accommodating temperaments.
I became involved with the family as a result of my loosely Church of England mother – she never went to church herself, but seemed to think it essential for my moral development. She insisted I go to Sunday school and be confirmed. I doubt she ever predicted I would be drawn to a short period of religious mania – I adored the drama of the High Church services and revelled in the bells, smells, music, intoned poetry of the services and the delicious cadences of the King James Version of the Bible – but she was patently delighted that I began to ally myself as a friend with the vicar’s children rather than with the somewhat scruffy, ‘common’ (her word, not mine) oiks who raced around our