Clare Allen and Meg

MY LUCKY STARS: A heart-warming tale of canine companionship

Last updated: March 27th, 2019

The following article is an excerpt from My Dog, My Friend: Heart-Warming Tales of Canine Companionship from Celebrities and Other Extraordinary People, edited by Jacki Gordon.

I wouldn’t advise anyone to do it, but sometimes these things just happen. One New Year’s Eve, a few years ago, I went to the park with one dog and came home with two.

It was a horrible day, dank and drizzly. Head down, hunched against the cold, I never even noticed the man until he seemed to appear quite suddenly, standing across my path. “I’ll give you £100,” he said. “If you’ll take this bloody animal and keep her.” In his hand was a lead and attached to the lead was the closest thing I’ve ever seen to misery in canine form. She was trembling, ears pressed flat to her head, a long, skinny body, crouched low to the ground, and at the far end a tragic stump of a tail. She’d been brutalized; that much was obvious, but there was something about her, a certain defiance, a flicker of spirit that refused to go out. The man began to list her transgressions, reeling them off like a criminal charge sheet. I caught her eye and the stump of a tail started barely perceptibly to quiver.

“Stop,” I said. “Keep your money. I’ll take her.”  He gave me the lead, and so began the most demanding, stress-inducing, labour-intensive, exasperating and deeply rewarding relationship of my life.

They say dogs are good for mental health, and undoubtedly they can be. My first dog, Billie, I got after being sectioned, and she effectively served as a mental health guide dog, leading me back out into the world and quite possibly saving my life. Dogs provide structure and routine, social contact, acceptance, affection; you’d be hard put to design a care plan more conducive to mental well-being. Dogs are good for mental health, in general, but it must be said, in those first few months Meg was very bad for mine.

I have never encountered anyone with Meg’s capacity to get into trouble. Whether this stems from her early experience, her genes or my own ineptitude (I suspect an element of all three), within the space of six months she had had me arrested, been rescued by the fire brigade, knocked a child off his scooter, locked herself in the car (it took the AA to get her out), and leapt in a raging, flooded river, out the far side and over a wall to round up a flock of pregnant sheep and park them by the farmhouse.

A more cunning and curious, agile, athletic, tenacious and downright exhausting creature it is difficult to imagine. Not that she meant any harm, of course. The most heartbreaking thing was how badly she wanted to be loved. Indeed, it was often this very desire that got her into trouble. If a passer-by so much as smiled vaguely in Meg’s direction, she would hurl herself at them joyfully. One morning I was chatting to a neighbour at her door, when Meg snuck past her into the house, raced up the stairs and climbed into bed with her somewhat startled husband.

We saw four different trainers. My library of dog books, already substantial, trebled in size. Everyone knew what I needed to do, but nobody agreed with anyone else. She needed less exercise, one woman said; she was overstimulated. She needed to mix with sheep, said another, so I took her to a farm and she mixed with sheep, special dog-resistant sheep. “They won’t run,” they said. “You can let her off.” So I let her off. They did.

In the end what Meg needed was time and patience, lots and lots of patience. I’m not a particularly patient person but getting annoyed with Meg was pointless: she simply blanked it out. And if she asked for patience, she showed it, too. We both made plenty of mistakes but neither of us ever gave up, and gradually the trust between us grew. Until, one day, I realized a week had gone by since she’d done anything truly awful. And then a month, then several months (it does depend a little, of course, on how you define “truly awful.” Thankfully, I’ve learned to be flexible).

I wouldn’t advise anyone to do it, but have I ever regretted the decision I made that New Year’s Eve in the park? God, yes! Dozens of times! But not a fraction of the number that I’ve thanked my lucky stars—the strange constellation that brought us together, and gifted me this remarkable dog who has driven me to utter distraction and filled me with unabashed joy.

[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]Clare Allan is the author of Poppy Shakespeare. Her second novel, Everything Is Full of Dogs, will be published in 2014. She writes for The Guardian on mental health, and lives with two dogs, a Staff called Elsie, and a dog of indeterminate heritage called, among other things, Meg.

Excerpted from My Dog, My Friend: Heart-Warming Tales of Canine Companionship from Celebrities and Other Extraordinary People, edited by Jacki Gordon. All royalties from sales of the book are donated to the Samaritans. Buy the book>>