Sample Chapter

Lettie

The first thing we had to do was choose a dog from a selection of videos online, and Liz wanted to look at them all so that took a while but really, it was a bit pointless because we were just looking at videos of dogs, as a form of entertainment if you like, which is not the same thing as looking for the dog, you know, THE dog.

And there she was, a scrawny thing, black and tan, with a shaggy coat, but those are only physical characteristics. There was something else, don’t ask me what, and we both felt it. This was our dog. Which was pretty surprising because the list of characteristics we had in our minds suddenly were irrelevant. She was our dog. Love at first sight. We had seen her for two minutes, and if we hadn’t been able to have her we would have been bereft.

First, though, she had to have a cat test, which sounds like a CAT scan but is nothing like it. The people at the dog rescue kennels put her in a room with a cat to see if the dog would attack the cat. I don’t know how many cats they lost doing the tests but I have a feeling it was something that seemed OK in Romania but would seem less OK here. However, we need not have worried. The cat wasn’t fazed at all by the dog (perhaps it was a really laid-back moggie they used specially for these tests), but the dog was clearly afraid. A dog that was afraid of cats might seem strange but it suited us if we were going to bring her into George’s home.

So that was that. Well, not quite, because we had to pay some hundreds of pounds for veterinary checks and rabies vaccination and pet passport and shipping, so it was I suppose a bit like adopting a Vietnamese baby except that it isn’t and that’s not something I’ve ever done so who am I to say?

It was our good fortune that the van driving all the way from Romania, across half of Europe, was arriving at Newhaven on the ferry and its first drop-off was in Brighton. We could only imagine how stressed a large van full of dogs was going to be after all that, and we were just pleased that ours was the first off.

They carried her in and put her on the floor in our living room and then they were gone. No messing around, places to go, dogs to deliver. We peeked around the door of the living room, and there she was, shivering with fear, trying to push herself into a corner, clearly scared witless. If we hadn’t loved her before we surely did now.

The paperwork said her name was Lettie, and the first thing we did was change that to Lottie, so that it was almost the same in case she was used to it, although I suppose that was unlikely as she had been living in a kennel with hundreds of other dogs. Lottie sounded just a bit more recognisable than Lettie, anyway.

What had this animal been through, we could only try to imagine. Had she been scooped up from the streets of Targoviste by some brutal man whose job it was, who had no idea what that might feel like and would not have cared? Not knowing where you were, not understanding what was happening to you, not knowing what might happen to you next.

How long she was there for we couldn’t know, but at some point she was scooped up and shoved harshly into a van, pulled out again, snarling in fear, and dumped into a cage with hundreds of other dogs, strange dogs she didn’t know, howling in fear, or anger, or probably both. How much later we couldn’t know, but at some point she was shoved into a room with a cat and she shouldn’t have been but she was afraid of everything. Then back in the cage, perhaps fighting for food, maybe winning some fights or maybe losing them, who knows?

Then came the time she was dragged out and shoved into a van full of cages, each with a dog as scared as she was. Perhaps they were crying, perhaps they were silent, probably a bit of each. And then the long journey, days, across Romania, across Germany, then Belgium, cowering in the cage, getting out at stops for a few minutes of fresh air, then back in the hated van. What were those dogs thinking all that time, on the road, crossing the Channel in a van filled with the smell of frightened animals?

And then a stop, an open door, hands reaching in, and there she was, in a house where she couldn’t recognise any smell, any sight. Was this filled with more fear for her, or was there at least some relief that the pervading smell of frightened dogs was absent? That the movement of the last couple of days had stopped? Well, of course we would never know, but she was now in our home, our life, and now we were inextricably part of her life and she was similarly part of ours. She didn’t know it then, but she had landed on her feet, with people who already loved her, who were going to devote themselves to healing her scars and giving her the life they knew she deserved.

Copyright R S Brynin 2022