JAN FENNELL
Friends for Life

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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Published in paperback 2004

First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2003

Copyright © Jan Fennell 2003

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Dedication

To all those who have helped make mewho I am

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Preface

1 Beautiful Girl

2 Family Values

3 A Secret Happiness

4 Arrivals

5 Love Me, Love My Dog

6 Departures

7 Calls of Duty

8 The Edge of Nowhere

9 The Good Life

10 Soft Touch

11 Circle of Friends

12 A Carnival of Animals

13 A Broken Dream

14 Rock Bottom

15 The Three Musketeers

16 Newshound

17 Educating Janice

18 Breaking Through

19 Parting Company

20 Happy Chappies

21 ‘Every Dog Deserves a Fireplace’

22 ‘That’s a Turn-Up’

23 Miracle Worker

24 The Flying Flags

25 Radio Waves

26 Doubting Thomases

27 ‘A Little Under the Weather’

28 Pets Behaving Badly

29 Restoration Work

30 ‘It’s Making a Fool of Me’

31 Law and Order

32 New Horizons

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

Preface

The past decade has seen my life transformed in constantly surprising ways. Since I began developing my ideas about understanding the inner language of dogs, I have been granted experiences I would never have imagined possible.

It may sound strange, but as I have travelled around both the UK and other parts of the world, the most striking difference has been the interest people have taken in what I have to say. To appreciate how significant that is, you must understand that for much of my early life, the idea that anyone would be interested in anything I had to say was unthinkable to me. So the fact that people wanted not only to listen to my ideas but to go deeper and to know about the experiences that had led to their development took quite some getting used to, I can tell you.

From the outset, I noticed that a handful of questions recurred again and again. When and why did I fall in love with dogs? What made them so special? How did a Londoner like me end up living in rural Lincolnshire? How did I come to look for a better, kinder way of living with our best friends? What gave me the strength and conviction to persevere with those ideas when the world seemed full of people ready to knock them down? It never ceases to surprise me how curious people are to know these things.

As I began to tell the stories that provided the answers to such questions, new, even more unlikely ones arose. Was I going to turn those stories into a book? When was I going to write my memoirs? My response to these was a hearty, genuinely incredulous laugh. I simply dismissed the idea.

It was during the period I was completing my second book, The Practical Dog Listener, when I’d been asked about my early days for what seemed like the thousandth time, that I was forced to think again. I realized that perhaps, after all, I should write something that provided the answers to all these questions.

The result is this memoir, the story of my journey from London to rural Lincolnshire, from girlhood to motherhood, from ignorance to enlightenment – and occasionally, in all three cases, back again.

It has not been an easy undertaking. Subconsciously I know one of the reasons I put off doing this was a fear of awakening the ghosts of the past. On more than one occasion I was taken aback by the power and potency of the memories I revived.

The process of writing this book has confirmed several important things, however. One of them is that – for good or bad – I would not have reached the point I have in my life, without the experiences I have had. Nor would I have got here without the special friendships I have made along the way. There have been friends and family who have played their crucial parts. I have been blessed with two wonderful – at times inspirational – children. I hope I have done them all justice in the pages that follow.

Yet no one has made a greater contribution than the canine companions who have shared my life. I have known and loved so many of them over the years. They have come in all shapes and sizes, in every shade under the sun and from all manner of breeds and backgrounds. There have been short ones, shaggy ones, pedigree ones and some of deeply dubious parentage.

Since as far back as I can remember, dogs have been a constant in my life. From an early age growing up in the London of the 1950s, I was drawn to them like a magnet. Wherever I went a dog would appear. It was as if some irresistible natural force was pulling us together. Family and friends accepted it as a fact of life. Back then no one stopped to analyse why we formed such deep bonds, least of all me.

As a child, all I knew was that while other children felt wary and afraid of dogs, I somehow felt safer in their company. To me they were the most unthreatening creatures in the world, the most affectionate too, certainly more so than most humans. As my life moved on, I found nothing to alter that view.

Now I believe dogs hear voices we don’t hear, possess senses we simply can’t understand. They have an emotional sense so highly tuned it is beyond our understanding. Everyone who has ever lived with a dog knows what I mean. What else can explain the way that, at times when you are low emotionally, your dog always seems to be at your side? Dogs sense vulnerability and weakness. They have a gift for knowing when to provide the uncomplicated, unconditional companionship and love their human friends need.

It wasn’t long after I set off on the voyage of self discovery that was the writing of this book, that I began to understand why, from the very start, dogs had played such a prominent role in my story. Now that journey is complete, I can see why they have remained friends for life.

Jan Fennell

Lincolnshire, January 2003

Chapter 1
Beautiful Girl

I was born of a loving relationship. The only problem was that where my mother and father were concerned, they reserved most of that love for each other. I was the only child, the little nuisance who got in the way, the living embodiment of the old saying that ‘two’s company but three’s a crowd’. I often think I spent my childhood as an outsider looking in on their private happiness. I bear no resentment towards my parents. I have tried to understand how hard life was for them, and to a large degree I have succeeded. If I am brutally honest, however, there are still times when I ask myself why they bothered having me.

Until I came along, their story could have come straight off the pages of a slushy romantic novel. My mother, Nona Whitton, met my father, Wally Fennell, in London a year after the end of World War II, in 1946. It was a time of hardships, and the war still cast a long shadow over life in England.

My dad’s war seemed like something out of Spike Milligan’s madcap accounts of life in the Army. Dad always said ‘war was a joke’ and his experiences proved it. During his six years in the Army he was charged with desertion by one regiment when he was already fighting with another one altogether and reported dead when he was still very much alive.

The desertion charge was laid by the Royal Engineers, his second regiment, who called him up in 1941, two years into the war. They charged him when he failed to reply to his call-up papers, then discovered to their embarrassment that he had volunteered to serve with the Gloucesters when the war had first broken out.

Dad was a practical man and his talents suited the Royal Engineers. He was often sent behind enemy lines to prepare the way for the fighting divisions and it was during a mission somewhere in Europe, in 1943, that he was reported missing in action. The telegram that broke the news had a terrible effect on his father, George Fennell, who had already lost three of his six sons in tragic circumstances. The news that another was missing presumed dead was too much to bear. He died of a heart attack days later. My father never really forgave the Army for that; he had not been killed or captured at all and he turned up safe and well just in time to travel back to England for his father’s funeral. What a happy homecoming that was for him.

My dad always believed in what he was fighting for, in serving King and Country. But he also believed war was a series of mishaps. Anybody whose job is to blow things up and then put them back together again doesn’t feel very constructive in a war, he used to say. His philosophy seemed to have been that if you didn’t laugh you’d go mad.

His nickname in the Army was ‘Crash’ because of all the scrapes he got himself into. He was obviously a good soldier, being ‘busted’ as a sergeant, that is to say promoted then demoted again, seven times. His final promotion came in the field and was given by a Canadian officer who saw that my father was the one organizing everything. The officers didn’t know what they were doing, according to my father; it was up to the ordinary enlisted men to sort out the mess the officers made.

The low point of my father’s war came at Arnhem. His unit was moving forward with an escort of tanks into an area just recaptured from the Germans. They had been told the area was free of enemy troops and had been sent ahead to clear the path. No sooner had they set off than the German tanks came over the hill again and my dad was fleeing for cover.

It was a close-run thing, shells going off all over the place, men falling to the ground. Most of Dad’s unit made it but when they reached safety in the trees someone said: ‘Crash, look at your knee.’ It was in bits. He had also badly damaged his elbow. But it wasn’t the end of his war. The Army surgeons put his knee back together with a piece of silver wire. He went back to Europe and stayed on with the Royal Engineers, building bridges in post-war Holland until early 1946.

My father had been twenty-one when he left home. Six years later he returned from the war with a bad limp and the feeling that he had sacrificed his youth, his health and probably his chances of happiness. He often said the war took the best years of his life.

My mother, on the other hand, looked back on the war with feelings of nostalgia. I think the period between 1939 and 1945 provided her with the best time she ever had. For her life afterwards was an anticlimax.

Like my father, she was from west London. Without knowing the full details until much later I was aware that her childhood and teenage years had been tough. Her father had died relatively young, when her mother was expecting the fourth of their children. So when war broke out my mother, like many other young women, found it a liberating experience. She had a job working in a munitions factory, earned a good income and suddenly found herself part of a group of independent girlfriends who were determined to live every day and night as if it were their last – which in the London of the Blitz it might easily have been.

For Mum life was made all the more exciting by the fact that, at twenty, she was a really beautiful-looking girl. We never talked about that period much, for deeper reasons that would eventually reveal themselves. But I think she was engaged seven times. The one story Mum would recall, ad flippin’ nauseam, was of the New Year’s Eve party when Stewart Granger danced with her.

At the time he was one of the country’s great matinée idols and everyone had been excited at the prospect of him coming to the party. He arrived late, close to midnight, and immediately announced he couldn’t stay. ‘I’m sorry I can’t stop, but before I go I must dance with the most beautiful woman in the room,’ he announced with a film star’s sense of the theatrical. To Mum’s delight he fixed his eyes on her, took her by the arm and whisked her around the dance floor. At the end of the dance he plonked a kiss on her – then bade her farewell. Well, that was the highlight of my mother’s life, pretty much. Everybody who ever knew her knew about that. And it reinforced her view of how the world worked.

My mum, bless her, really believed that there was a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. But her problem was that she never found the rainbow. Whenever it appeared it would vanish again abruptly, a little like Stewart Granger. She was one of those people who, having been told she was beautiful, didn’t think she had to do anything else in life. She thought being beautiful was enough.

What she needed was someone to worship her. And in my father, she found the man to do it.

It was my father’s sister-in-law, Elsie, who brought them together. She had worked with my mother at the munitions factory during the war. At work she had kept telling Nona that she must meet ‘our Wally’. At home, she had kept telling my father he had to meet ‘my Nona’.

When the war came to an end Elsie and Nona found jobs at a biscuit factory together. Elsie had just given birth to a baby boy and Nona had popped round to see her with a supply of free biscuits. Now my father came from a very musical family. He could play the ukulele, guitar, harmonica and concertina, but the day Nona visited he was playing the mandolin. She always remembered hearing it as she walked up to the door of Elsie and Uncle Bill’s house. When she walked into the sitting room she saw my dad stretched out across a chair playing this beautiful instrument.

Violins might have been more appropriate. He said he looked at her and thought, ‘I’m going to marry you.’ Apparently she thought the same. He serenaded her into marriage.

My father truly believed that the stars had shone on him when they brought my mother into his life. ‘I’m so lucky to have her,’ he would always say. She was, he discovered, a demanding woman. But from the outset he would do anything to make her happy.

My father worked as a driver. When I was a little girl he drove the No. 73 and the No. 11 bus through central London. By day he was a pretty ordinary guy, but by night he was transformed. He was a handsome man and in the evening he ‘trod the boards’, usually with his brother Bill. The brothers had inherited much of their talent from their father’s family, who worked in Variety and could count Marie Lloyd as a family friend. In the family tradition they also mixed in a bit of vaudevillian playfulness. Their funniest sketch was something called ‘The Ballsup Ballet’, a spoof of the Bolshoi Ballet in which they dressed up in tutus. Singing, however, was their strong suit.

Dad had a wonderful voice. He would walk into a pub or a club and the shouts would go up straight away: ‘Come on Wally, give us a song.’ He used to do Bing Crosby and Maurice Chevalier numbers and had entertained dreams of making it as a professional singer. But when he had gone to see a West End agent he had been knocked back. ‘There’s already one Bing Crosby and we don’t need another one,’ he was told. Within a year a British singer called Michael Holliday, who Mum said was nowhere near as good as Dad let alone Bing Crosby, became a huge hit. That hurt Dad badly, I think.

During their courtship, Nona used to go to his concerts and he would sing a song from the musical Singin’ in the Rain called ‘Beautiful Girl’. I think it began: ‘You’re a gorgeous picture …’ Such attention was music to my mother’s ears. She thought she’d finally found the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. She fell hopelessly in love with him.

They were married in 1947. By the following year, I had joined them in the small upstairs flat they rented in Rosaline Road in Fulham, south-west London.

The Fulham I grew up in bears little resemblance to the trendy, cosmopolitan community it is today. One or two Greek shopkeepers apart, the area had few immigrants. The West Indian and Asian influxes of the late 1950s and 1960s had yet to happen.

Times were generally hard. Large parts of the area were rubble-strewn wastelands from the Blitz. We all lived in flats, most of them cramped. Ours consisted of a sitting room, a tiny kitchen, a toilet and one bedroom. It was the same when we moved to a home at the Clyde Flats on Rylston Road when I was three. For the first ten years of my life, my single bed was squeezed into a corner alongside my parents’ double divan in a sleeping space ten feet square. Luxurious it wasn’t. I understand now that those were difficult times. I also know a lot more about my parents’ lives and the pressures they were under than I did then.

The war and its effects dominated everyone’s life, of course. Rationing was still in existence, although if I’m honest, I was never aware of any real hardship in that sense. The most vivid reminder of the events of 1939 to 1945 lay out on the streets. You only had to walk outside our front door to see the damage the Blitz had inflicted. There were open bomb sites on almost every street in Fulham, including our own. As a child, of course, I had no concept of how these strange spaces had come to exist in the midst of such a built-up area. All I knew was they made great playgrounds.

For my generation the war was simply something that people banged on about a great deal. For the generation who had survived it, however, it had been a life-changing experience. And for men like my father the peace was almost a greater challenge. He found it hard readjusting to work. He had a succession of jobs, all of them involving driving but none of them well-paid by any stretch of the imagination. For my mother too, the end of the war brought her back to the grinding reality of life. By the time I was three or four she had left the factory for a clerical job with a wealthy local businessman, Sydney Smith.

They didn’t have much money but they remained very social animals. Much of their amusement revolved around family – my father was one of eight children, my mother one of four, so there were lots of aunts and uncles around to visit. Everyone seemed to have a piano in their house. Singalongs and performances were very much part of the family’s way of letting their hair down.

My father’s music provided another escape from the daily grind. When I was three or four I was incorporated into the band my dad had now formed with Uncle Bill, his two kids, Maureen and Barry, and his older sister, Auntie Ivy, on piano. We used to do shows at old people’s homes, village halls and places like that. I can remember travelling to suburbs like Pinner, though I can’t recall how the act was billed.

We used to bring the house down with versions of things like ‘Carolina in the Morning’, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, ‘Que Sera Sera’ and a song called ‘Get Out Get Under the Moon’. Dad and Uncle Bill were good at slapstick too. They would pretend to be acrobats, but would deliberately mistime their stunts so that they continually bumped into each other. They also loved dressing up. Uncle Bill performed a blackface version of A1 Jolson singing ‘Mammy’. They also used to do a variation on the popular ‘Egyptian Sand Dance’ routine. They would dress up in costume for it, even putting on panstick colouring. I’ll never forget the first time they did it. My father had gone to town on the make-up and he’d plastered his hair in Brylcreem and combed it down over the front of his face. He looked great, totally crazy. My mother was in the audience; she asked one of her friends: ‘Who the hell is that?’

‘It’s your Wal, Nona,’ she replied.

My mother nearly choked.

Our motto was to make them laugh, make them sing and make them cry occasionally too. It was my job to encourage the last of these in the routine that eventually became my major contribution to the show.

When he wanted to change the atmosphere my father used to sing a sentimental song called ‘Daddy’s Little Girl’. It was a lovely, lyrical song that showed Dad’s voice off to the full. As he started singing it would be the cue for me to stand up in the audience, walk to the stage and sit there while he sang this tribute to me. Audiences loved it, naturally. It was tear-jerking stuff. If only I had felt as if I was Daddy’s Little Girl.

Chapter 2
Family Values

It was inevitable that the first dog I called my own existed only in my imagination. My mother disliked animals intensely. As far as she was concerned dogs were messy, smelly creatures that moulted, left unpleasant odours and generally spoiled her spotless home. She had an uncanny ability to sense when I’d been within touching distance of a dog. It was as if she was equipped with a special radar. ‘You’ve been playing with those dirty creatures again,’ she’d scold me. If there was a golden rule in our home it was that my mother got her way. And so for the first fourteen years of my life, denied a dog of my own at home, I made friends with other people’s pets – and made do with an imaginary one of my own.

I can still picture her now. She was a lovely, long-haired little thing, with huge, doe-like eyes. Whenever she saw me her ears would prick up, her tail would wag and her face would break into a broad smile. I sometimes wonder whether Walt Disney had adopted her as his own imaginary friend. She could have been drawn by him.

Sometimes I called her Lady, more often than not I simply referred to her as My Little Dog. She used to appear whenever I felt hurt or lonely. As my childhood progressed, that meant she was an almost constant companion.

With my mum and dad it was always as if the world revolved around the two of them. I was filled with a sense that I somehow didn’t fit into their plans – or indeed anyone else’s.

We’d go to places then I’d be left sitting in a corner, with nobody to talk to. On holiday my mum would begin suggesting she and my dad should go off somewhere or other then say: ‘Oh we can’t, we’ve got Janice.’ They’d always want me out from under their feet. I was a nuisance because I stopped their fun. I was always made to feel I was in the way.

Even within the family I felt left out. I had cousins, but because my dad was the second youngest of his brothers and sisters, they were all much older than me. I can remember watching them and envying the way they played with each other. It always seemed that there was no one for me, I was always the person on the outside looking in. Whenever there was a family do, my mum and dad would be together, my cousins would be together and I would be on the sidelines.

My mother’s only interest in me lay in dressing me up.

Mum thought she wanted a child but what she really wanted, I believe, was a doll. She kitted me out in frilly, patterned dresses and fussed endlessly over my hair. I’m sure it pleased my mother that I was always being admired for my clothes or my hair; I had beautiful, tumbling ringlets. But to me it was a source of sadness that I was always admired for something else, never for myself.

So, from an early age, I had no choice but to make friendships elsewhere.

We used to spend a lot of time with my father’s brother George. He had a dog called Rex, a lovely, gentle creature. Back in those days nobody had pedigrees, they had mutts. Rex was a mutt, a mixture of all sorts of influences. He was black and tan in colour, not very big; he had a curly tail, long pointy ears and a slightly foxy look. He probably had some German shepherd in him. But he was a hugely affectionate dog, and he loved directing that affection towards me.

He’d always make a beeline for me and fuss over me. I can recall how, whenever I arrived at their house on the edge of west London near Heathrow, Uncle George would say: ‘Oh Rex, your friend’s here.’ Then, while the rest of the family were talking about their important lives, I’d sit stroking him or playing ball. It didn’t stop me feeling something of an outsider within the family. But it did stop me feeling so lonely.

If my passion for animals had a source, it was inherited from my father’s side of the family. My father liked animals himself. He had owned a dog called Gyp when he was younger and had worked with horses before the war. He used to say that he missed the old horse that pulled the cart on his bread round as a young lad in the 1930s. It had been replaced by a lorry. ‘No matter how hard I whistled it wouldn’t come to me like my old horse,’ he would joke.

But it was my grandmother and my Great-Uncle Jim Fennell who really made an impression.

My paternal grandmother, Mary Ann Till, was a remarkable woman. She had grown up as part of a traditional travelling Romany family in the latter stages of the nineteenth century. Although she had said goodbye to that life a long time ago, she still wore a traditional Romany cap and smoked a pipe. She always seemed to have a cup of black, piping hot tea cradled in her hands. I can recall sitting on her knee listening to the tales she told of what, even then, seemed like a lost age.

Her parents toured the country making and selling lace and working as knife and blade makers. It was a seasonal life. The men spent the winter looking after the horses and making blades and the women made lace. Then when the spring came they would tour the stately homes of England.

The image of the wandering gypsy has always annoyed me. My grandmother recalls a life where they were welcomed by the well-to-do ladies of the manor, who would buy the lace while her father worked on all the knives and scythes.

Animals played an important part in their life. Horses and dogs were crucial members of the family business and were treated with respect. In fact, horses played their part in bringing my grandparents together.

When my great-grandparents died, the family wagon was burned according to the ceremonial traditions of the Romany nation. My grandmother and her sister were allowed to keep some of the family’s possessions. But they themselves were passed on to another family for adoption. The sisters were deeply unhappy with their new family and kept running away. They never made it very far and were returned to the new family, where each time they were treated worse than before. Eventually their shoes were taken away from them to prevent them from breaking away again.

I didn’t know my grandmother’s sister very well, but I know my grandmother was a determined character. It was the middle of winter when they made their final, successful break for freedom. They found themselves outside London, in Middlesex, but they didn’t know precisely where. They just ran, barefoot, carrying their few possessions bundled up. A blizzard was blowing and they were close to collapse when they stumbled across a horse-drawn cart on a pathway. Two young men, wrapped up in big coats, were driving the horse home through the snows. One of them shouted: ‘Come on, girls, get up here.’ The two men were my grandad, George Fennell and his brother, my Great-Uncle Jim. The pair ran a fruit and vegetable delivery business and had been out on their rounds when they were caught in the snow themselves. They were making sure the horse was looked after.

George and Jim took the two girls home to their parents; it turned out they had been lost in Hammersmith, then a village outside London. The girls stayed, and they and the brothers were eventually married.

My grandfather’s family had an equally great respect for animals. My gran used to tell me a funny story about him. He had pulled up outside a pub, The Redan in Grafton Road, at the end of a working day. There were several horses and carts outside. My grandfather walked into the pub. Going up to one of the men at the bar, he asked him: ‘Are you enjoying your beer?’

The man had hardly said yes when my grandad punched him in the face. ‘Go on, put a coat on your horse,’ he said. ‘You look after your horse first.’

They tended to hit first and ask questions afterwards back then. But the man hadn’t put a coat and nosebag on his horse. My grandad was right – the animals were their livelihood.

Like many Romany women, Nan Fennell had the ability to foresee the future. She didn’t always regard it as a positive attribute. Whenever anyone told her she had a wonderful gift she’d always say: ‘It can be, but it can also be a terrible curse.’

It was easy to see why. Her family had suffered more than its fair share of tragedy. She foresaw the deaths of two children. The first was Uncle George’s youngest, Ellen, the baby. Her older brother, the eldest of the grandchildren, was Johnny. When Ellen was born she was taken up to see my nan, who held Ellen in her arms for only a few moments before asking: ‘Where’s Johnny?’ She was in a real state. ‘Just get me Johnny.’ When Johnny appeared, she said to him: ‘We love you, and we always will, no matter what happens in your life.’ The year after Nan died, Ellen was run over in a freak accident. Johnny was at the wheel of the lorry when it happened.

She foresaw tragedy again when her youngest son, Bill, and his wife Elsie had a son. When the baby boy, Trevor, was put in her arms all she said was: ‘You love this baby, you make the most of this baby.’ At the age of three the baby fell into the River Mole at Walton in Surrey and drowned.

On both occasions, people recalled my grandmother’s words after the tragedies occurred. She didn’t spell out what she had seen. Her philosophy was that you tell someone good news but you don’t tell them bad. She had a happy knack of being able to tell her daughters and daughters-in-law that they were expecting babies – sometimes weeks before they’d even conceived. But on other occasions my father would just say: ‘She’s seen something.’ She would see things then that would upset her deeply.

While I sat on my grandmother’s lap, she would often tell me things. For instance, when I was six she predicted that I would have two children. ‘But there will be more,’ she said obliquely. It would be many years before that made any sense.

If Nan Fennell was a powerful force within the family, so too was my grandfather’s brother, Jim, by far the most colourful of the clan. I remember vividly the day I finally summoned the courage to ask him about the awful lump he had on the back of his neck. How could I ever forget the story he told me?

As a thirteen-year-old boy growing up in Fulham at the end of the nineteenth century, Jim had headed off to see Buffalo Bill Cody’s great Wild West show at Earls Court in 1896. He was so overwhelmed by what he saw that he went home that evening and promptly announced he was joining the show and heading off on their European tour.

He was the little boy who ran off with the circus – and a memorable time he had too. His experience working with horses stood him in good stead and he was put in charge of Buffalo Bill’s stable.

Great-Uncle Jim was the family’s natural performer, however, and he soon persuaded Buffalo Bill to give him a place in the show. While driving the famous Deadwood Stagecoach around the arena one night he was hit on the back of the neck by an Indian tomahawk. The blow was accidental but it split his neck wide open. ‘That’s where the hatchet hit me,’ he told me.

It was Jim who introduced me to the first important animal in my life, his horse Kitty. Kitty was a typical Thelwell pony, as wide as she was tall, black with a long mane, her tail trailing down to the ground.

Great-Uncle Jim kept her in stables in Battersea Park, where he also kept the cart from which he sold his fruit and vegetables. I vividly remember Great-Uncle Jim placing me on her back and feeling the warmth and softness underneath me. Together we spent hours padding around Battersea on his horse and trap, talking about his adventures – and his love of horses.

Great-Uncle Jim had learned a lot from the native Americans he had worked with during his time with Buffalo Bill. He remembered one of them coming up to one of the horses one day before a performance, looking at it and saying: ‘That horse is lame.’ The cowboy who was due to ride the horse wasn’t having any of it. ‘To my shame I got the horse ready and let it go out into the arena. When it came back it broke down,’ Uncle Jim told me. ‘Bill Cody asked, “Didn’t anybody spot it?”’ Great-Uncle Jim said: ‘He did,’ and pointed to the native American.

Great-Uncle Jim had a huge respect for the quiet courage of those men. He disliked intensely the way they were presented as the ‘baddies’ in Buffalo Bill’s show, in which the white men were always being rescued from the redskins. But from the stories he had heard the native Americans tell of their time back in the West, he wondered who needed rescuing from whom.

In that sense he was the first person who made me think about injustice. He gave me another important idea too.

His relationship with Kitty was almost telepathic. I remember Great-Uncle Jim used to be able to lay down the reins, put his arm around me and whisper a gentle, ‘Take us home, Kit.’ In London in those days there was hardly any traffic. Kitty would take her time going home at her own pace.

At the stables where he kept Kitty he would sit me on her, bareback, and tell me how important it was to become one with the horse, to become part of it. He didn’t like the way ‘the nobs’, as he called them, used to ride, with a saddle and a whip. He would say: ‘You must breathe at the same rate as it. Until you can take in every breath that it takes you’ve got nothing.’ Again this was something he had picked up during his time with the native American horsemen.

Looking back on it now, I realize it was Great-Uncle Jim and Kitty who first instilled in me the idea of animals and humans working in harmony. As a little girl I saw them working together instinctively, as a team. There was no coercion, they understood each other perfectly. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Chapter 3
A Secret Happiness

In 1951, as a three-year-old, my mum and dad took me to the Festival of Britain celebrations, just across the river in Battersea Park. The images of that day are burned indelibly into my memory.

I was too young to understand the wave of optimism the Festival had inspired. But I do vividly remember the sheer joy of the occasion. I remember my father and Uncle Fred were both wearing white shirts. In the sunshine they seemed dazzling – just like everything else in the park.

Battersea Park was filled with people. I recall the carousels and the candy floss, the sounds of the hurdy-gurdies and the fairground hucksters inviting people to ‘Roll up, roll up’. But the thing that created the greatest impression was the little grey-white pony that was giving children rides in a special arena.

I immediately asked my parents for a ride. But, just as quickly, my mother made her opposition plain.

‘You don’t want to go on that nasty smelly thing,’ she said. I was dressed in a smart new plaid dress, I remember. ‘You don’t want to ruin your nice dress.’

It was my Uncle Fred who conspired to help me. My mother wandered off at some point. I remember Uncle Fred bending down, beckoning to me and whispering. ‘Come on, come on. Now’s your chance,’ he said.

I ran over to the pony arena with him. Before I knew it I was being lifted on board the beautiful grey-white pony.

I’d yet to meet Uncle Jim’s Kitty so this was the first time I’d sat on a horse. I can still remember the pungent smell. It was lovely then and remains so to this day. Forget your Chanel No. 5. As I was led around the arena on horseback I remember feeling on top of the world. I felt like a princess, it was so special. I would have stayed there all day.

One of the attendants led the pony round in a slow circuit of the arena. As he took me back to where I’d started I saw my time was up. I could see my dad and Uncle Fred with big beaming smiles but behind them was my mother with a face like thunder.

‘I thought I said she couldn’t, Wal,’ she snapped at my father as I was led away from the arena a few moments later. ‘What’s the point of putting her in nice clothes if they’re going to smell of filthy animals?’

The incident confirmed something that was already becoming clear to me. There was a clear hierarchy in our house. And I was at the bottom of the pecking order.

My parents’ attitude to children was a throwback to the Victorian era in many ways. I should be seen and not heard. My opinion wasn’t of any importance to anyone. All that mattered, to my mother at least, was that I present a happy, polite, smiling face to the world. Unless, that is, she wanted to show off my singing and dancing abilities at a family gathering. Even then, the only words I got from her were chastisement if I hadn’t done something to the standard she expected.

At the time this upset me deeply, but I no longer feel that way. I understand now that she was merely reflecting the values passed on to her. She and my father were trying to provide a better life for me than they had enjoyed themselves. But it was as if they had had me out of a sense of duty, and then resented the duty that came with it.

There was no doubt they gave me the best they could afford. They bought me lots of toys, for instance. But then they would spoil it by not allowing me to play with them because they got in the way and messed up my mum’s house. I was only allowed to play with one toy at a time.

There was no point arguing about things like this. I was expected to accept that they did things for my own good. If I ever upset the apple cart, they’d say: ‘After all I’ve done for you …’ And if I protested too much, my mother was very quick to smack.

If I was at the bottom of the pecking order at home, my mother was very much at the top.

My father would literally wait on her hand and foot. He would say that he was so lucky to have her, he would do anything for her. He would protect her from being upset, even if it meant hiding the truth.

If anybody said anything she didn’t like or upset her, the waterworks would start and she would just cry. He couldn’t cope with that, he’d fall to pieces. Of course if I tried a similar tactic, it didn’t work. They would tell me: ‘We’ll give you something to cry for.’

So when I started showing an interest in animals, I sensed there would be problems from the beginning. Mum didn’t like me being near them, it was as simple as that. To her it was more important that I look immaculate and well turned out. And animals didn’t fit in with that.

As I have said, my mother’s feelings always came first. She always got her own way. But she was asking too much in this instance. And fortunately there were members of the family who were willing to conspire with me.

It was my grandmothers who best understood the closeness of the bonds I was forming with animals.

The family had a number of dogs and by the time I was five or six I had formed a mutual admiration society with all of them. Wherever I went a dog would appear. My cousin Doreen, to whom I was very close, had a smashing dog called Tinker. He was ever so playful, a lovely long-coated creature, and I would spend endless hours playing with him. As a family we used to go on camping weekends to Walton in the Mole Valley. I recall there was a dog called Bunty in the tent next to our regular spot. My job was to go and get water from the standpipe but I always ended up playing with Bunty, a big shaggy dog like a mop. Playing with Bunty was the highlight of the weekend for me.

Nan Fennell knew how lonely and unhappy I was at home and encouraged me to cherish these new friendships. I will never forget what she said to me once. ‘They are a part of your life that is magic, that is special,’ she told me. ‘No one can spoil that. When you have the love and trust of an animal, nobody can ever spoil it. That is your secret happiness.’

She also defended my love of animals in the face of my mother’s hostility. Whenever my mother had a go at me in her presence she used to say: ‘She’s got a love of animals. It’s in her and it always will be, you can’t change that.’

But it was my mother’s mother who did most to conspire with me. Nan Whitton, as I knew her, lived nearby. She was a lady, in the very real sense of that word. She came from landed gentry in Northamptonshire but had become estranged from her family, the Thorneycrofts, after marrying a sailor named Edward Whitton. The family thought he was ‘beneath her’ and made no secret of it. Tragically he’d died during the flu epidemic of 1922 and she’d been left to fend for herself with four children. It was a tough life, yet despite the hardships she’d remained a dignified, gentle woman. I never once heard her swear or even lose her temper.

She had a real air about her. She was six foot tall and always immaculately turned out. She’d always dress up, even to go to the shops, putting on matching accessories and carrying an umbrella with a bow. Whenever I went out walking with her I’d see workmen doffing their caps to her as if she were a member of the aristocracy. She’d return the compliment with a gracious nod.

At home she’d spend hours doing embroidery and reading – something not many of my family did. I can also remember painstakingly polishing her silver with her.

This may well have been where my mother got her airs and graces from. But whatever their roots, Nan Whitton knew her daughter’s moods better than anyone, so she provided me with a source of affection that was a real life-saver at times. ‘I’m always here for a cuddle,’ she’d say. And she saw how fond I was of her cat, Smokey.

Smokey, bless him, was the ugliest cat you’ve ever seen. His head was lop-sided. He was a big black moggy. Yet that cat was so affectionate. He had a purr like a traction engine. I lay on the landing looking at Smokey one day. Nan was in the kitchen. I said to her: ‘Why do you love Smokey?’ I was confused because my mum used to tell me you could only be loved if you were beautiful, that ugly didn’t get loved.

My nan looked out of the kitchen and said: ‘Only me and his mother could love him.’ To her the fact that he was ugly didn’t matter. To her ‘beautiful is as beautiful does’. It was a thought that would have been lost on my mother. But it made a big impression on me. Mum didn’t like me playing with Smokey, of course. I’d try like mad to brush the hairs off but as soon as I took one step into the flat she’d say: ‘You’ve been near that cat again.’

So Nan Whitton taught me to carry two cardigans with me. I always used to have a little bucket bag in which I put a spare cardigan. I used to wear one while I was with the dogs or cats then change over. I would take the cardigan covered in hairs around to Nan Whitton. She must have been a magician, because somehow she always got the hairs off.

And it was she who helped me spend time with Digger, the first dog I really considered my own.

Digger belonged to our friends Peggy and Eddie, who lived in East Molesey. He was a little sandy-coloured Cairn terrier, a great little dog, hardy and a lot of fun. He and I got on like a house on fire. Whenever I went there, he was as pleased to see me as I was to see him. He would be up on his hind legs. He was my boy. He was there for me. Every time I looked at him or spoke to him his tail wagged.

With Digger, as with all the dogs I met at the time, I felt there were no conditions, I could be myself rather than the person that other people wanted me to be. He didn’t make me feel as if I was in the way.

I was so fond of Digger that I went to great lengths to orchestrate time with him.

Once I feigned sleep in order to stay the night at the house rather than go back to Fulham. I lay on a sofa with my eyes closed and heard my dad saying: ‘She’s exhausted.’

My mum said he should carry me out to the car. Finally Peggy said: ‘Oh, let her sleep here the night, we’ll run her back tomorrow.’

I thought: ‘Yes.’ Isn’t that pathetic?

I had to go along with the charade now and it was very odd lying there as my dad carried me up to a strange bedroom. Of course, as soon as the house was quiet I slipped down to give my canine pal a cuddle and I was up at the crack of dawn the next morning playing with him.

It was during a summer holiday that Nan Whitton helped me to effectively adopt Digger. Uncle Eddie used to work in Munster Road in Fulham where he had a workshop. Every day I went round to collect Digger from him, then took him to my nan’s house. Of course my mother knew nothing about this. It only lasted a few weeks but I still look back on it as a great time.

My secret friendship with Digger taught me much. Being with him seemed to change the world around me. Confined within my mother’s world no one spoke to me. Out walking Digger that summer I found people stopping for no apparent reason and talking away to me. I saw that dogs were great icebreakers.

I can remember how people used to tell me stories about their dogs. I could see the happiness they brought into their lives. By the end of the holiday, my nan and I had our own favourite memories of our time with Digger; we nicknamed him Digger Doughnut because of his love of the buns we’d slip under the tables of cafeterias we visited together during that long summer.

It only strengthened my determination to form more lasting friendships like this.

My mum had her secrets too, hidden parts of her life that only increased the distance between us. It was while we were out shopping one day around this time that I got a glimpse of a darker and more dangerous aspect to her life.

Shopping was the one subject my mother was happy to talk to me about. Her love of clothes was great. And it formed the centrepiece of our weekly expeditions down the North End Road.

We would start with a meal at Manzi’s, the famous eel and pie shop. I would have pie, mash and liquor, she would have eels, mash and liquor. Then we’d head off to pick up the week’s provisions at the local stores. My mother would always look in Madam Lee’s fashion house. She’d spend what seemed like hours there, looking at things and trying them on. She’d ask the proprietor to put things by for her until the following week. She bought a lot from there. When we’d finished our expedition we’d head to Dawes Road and a bus back home, laden with shopping.

While we were waiting for the bus home one day I became aware that my mother was angry. We had seen two large men walk by us and head into a doorway. As they had done so they had recognized my mother and said something to her.

I knew who they must be, but – as I had been taught – I said nothing.

The London of the 1960s was run by gangs. Fulham’s leading gangster was Charlie Mitchell, or King Charles as he was known locally. The men who worked for Mitchell were enormous gorillas; their hands looked like bunches of bananas. Bits of their ears were missing, they were gruesome. But you didn’t ask questions. That’s what I was always told: ‘Don’t open your mouth, their business is their business.’

My mother’s connections with Charlie Mitchell were shadowy but I knew they were mainly through her brother George, who was his book-keeper. Mitchell had a number of legitimate businesses – things like money lending and bookmaking – and George looked after the books for him.

I would continue to be given glimpses into this murky world in the years that followed. A friend of my Uncle George, Mickey Salmon – Mickey the Fish – took a dive for Charlie Mitchell for dog doping. He came out of prison when I was about fourteen, and we all went to a club for a party for him. Prison hadn’t been good to him; he looked terrible. It was a private party and I remember the owner asking me to fetch some glasses. I went over to a table and I can recall a man with terrifying eyes looking at me, smiling and saying: ‘Hello, love.’ I replied: ‘Thank you.’ When I asked my Uncle George who they were, he just said: ‘You keep away from them, just keep away.’ It turned out to be one of the Kray twins.

After Uncle George died unexpectedly in his early fifties, leaving his second wife and their four young children, my mother went to see his widow and asked her if she was going to be OK. She just told my mum to go upstairs. My mother went up to the bedroom and found rolls of money strewn on the bed, hundreds and hundreds of pounds.

It was George who was at the root of her anger that day, it turned out. Being a child I only heard part of the story, but I do know that my Uncle George’s personal life was a bit of a problem. He used to take off every now and again, just disappear. He would take time out.

It seems that on this occasion the rumour was going around that Uncle George had absconded with some of Charlie Mitchell’s money. It was absolutely untrue but the situation was complicated by the fact that Mitchell’s colleagues needed George’s signature to actually get to their money. So for a while all their businesses were tied up.

The two men my mother had seen that day worked for Mitchell. Something they said to her must have set her off, because suddenly she grabbed me by the arms and said: ‘I’ve had enough of this.’

Charlie Mitchell’s main offices were right opposite the bus stop. She went through the front door and barged straight in. There were five huge guys around a desk. My mum said: ‘Now look, I’ve had enough of this, my George is as straight as the day is long and you know that. Any more of these lies and I will bring the law into this office, I know enough to have you put behind bars.’ I stood there and thought to myself, ‘What’s she doing? She’s lost her mind.’

I was thinking, ‘Someone’s going to pull a gun.’

Charlie Mitchell sat behind the desk. He was scary. Instead of standing up and threatening her, however, the mood was conciliatory. Mitchell said: ‘Nona, come on, sit down, let’s talk about this.’

But my mother was having none of it. She stood up with her shopping and stormed out again, leaving me in the room. It was only when she got to the bottom of the steps that she shouted: ‘Janice, come on.’ I was still shaking when we got home that night.

Looking back, it was a terrifying yet intensely revealing moment in my young life. It showed me a woman I had never seen before.

She loved her baby brother and was prepared to go to any lengths to protect him. In some ways I admired her for doing that. Yet in others it made her seem an even more distant, almost unknowable figure. I felt I knew her less well than ever.

It was the one and only time I came across Charlie Mitchell. Not long after that incident he survived an attempted shooting in Stevenage Road, near Fulham Football Club. Some time afterwards, like so many of London’s gangsters, he fled to Spain and the so-called Costa Del Crime. His exile in the sun didn’t get him far enough away from his enemies, however. He was shot dead there in the 1970s.

Chapter 4
Arrivals

At the age of five I began attending the local school, Sherbrooke Road Junior. It was little wonder I didn’t warm to the place. From the very beginning, it had painful connotations for me.

I had been looking forward to starting school for one reason: my cousin Les was due to start at the same time.

I had come to know and love Les when my mother returned to work. Mum’s absence meant I spent most of my time at Nan Whitton’s flat in Alistree Road. For the first time I got to know her niece Joan and her son Les, who lived on the second floor of the same block.

Les was two months younger than me. His father, Uncle Alex, was an ex-Army man and very strict and austere. We weren’t allowed to play together often, but when we did we really got on like a house on fire. He was as close as I had to a brother and I treated him with all the affection I would have shown a brother.

I can remember that in the run-up to my first term, Les and I had heard a lot of talk about us starting school. We both fully expected not just to be in the same school but in the same class.

On the first morning of term we discovered our parents had made other plans. I was being walked to school by Nan Whitton while Les was being taken by his mother, Aunt Joan. I have a memory of the two of us skipping along, tugging excitedly at the adults’ arms, hardly able to contain our excitement at getting to the school gates. Our mood changed when we reached a zebra crossing on Munster Road.

‘Say goodbye to your cousin Les,’ my nan said to me.

‘Why?’ I replied, baffled.

‘He’s going to a different school to you,’ she explained.

I was devastated, as he was. We both started crying. As he headed off in one direction and I went in another, we were both tugging again, but for different reasons. I can still see Les looking back at me, tears in his eyes.

It was only in the ensuing years that I learned what had happened. Les’s father Alex had very clear ideas about what he expected for his son. From the beginning the family had plans for him. He was to study hard and go to university. He was to get a profession and get on in the world.

When he and I had reached school age, it had apparently been decided that it was ‘for the best’ if we were separated. Basically I was considered a ‘bad influence’ by Uncle Alex and Aunt Joan. Apart from anything else, I was a girl, and the family’s expectations for me were zero. This could only mean that I would be a distraction for Les. So while he was put down for the better school in the area at Munster Road, I was to be sent to Sherbrooke Road.

My early memories of Sherbrooke Road school are dominated by that moment. All I can remember feeling is a mixture of anger and confusion. I felt as if Les had been taken away from me.

I fitted into my class well enough. The teacher, a Welsh lady called Miss Davies, took a bit of a shine to me and treated me well. But, if I’m honest, my heart wasn’t really in it. I made few friends, probably because I was afraid of losing them like I’d lost Les. I settled into the routine of being an average student in an average school. I began fulfilling my family’s expectations of me by achieving precisely nothing.

As I set off on what was to be an unhappy school life, the one consolation was that my parents’ resistance to my having a pet had finally begun to crumble. My father in particular sensed my desperation. I think he knew I needed something living and breathing to take care of and to keep me company at the same time. So it was that he and my mother agreed to get me my first pet, a hamster, which I called Bimbo. His brief stay with us set the precedent for what was to become a depressingly familiar pattern over the following years.

Mum had only agreed to the hamster on strict conditions. She really objected to the mess, so it was Dad’s job to clear up. It was soon clear that Mum’s requirements were more important than mine. My parents hadn’t thought that hamsters are nocturnal creatures. So Bimbo would sleep all day then come out to play when I went to bed. I barely saw him. At the time, of course, I wondered whether this was deliberate but there was no point in my complaining. ‘You’ve got a pet, what’s the matter with you?’ I’d be told in no uncertain terms.

As it turned out, it didn’t really matter. One evening my mother decided she should get to know Bimbo a little better. I have no idea why she did this. She hadn’t shown much interest in him until now. And she approached the cage with gritted teeth.

Animals sense things and Bimbo, it seems, sensed my mother’s disdain. So he nipped her on the finger. I can still remember the yell. Before I knew it, Bimbo had been banished to school. My father had a word with the headmistress and so Bimbo became the school’s hamster.

This only served to make my sense of loss even worse, of course. It wasn’t just that I could see him in his cage every day at school. Every weekend and holiday a child had a turn in taking him home. Every child, that was, except me. I wasn’t allowed to take him home.

It is only now, looking back on that time, that I realize just how desperate and pathetic my desire for company must have looked to other people. Soon after Bimbo’s departure I headed off, in cahoots with a friend of mine called Eric, to the graveyard at the local Catholic church, St Thomas’s across Escort Road. Armed with a bucket, Eric and I snuck around the gravestones scraping off snails and had soon collected hundreds.

I took them home. I hadn’t thought about where I was going to keep them, I had only thought to myself that I had some pets. I seem to remember I had even started giving each of them names. My hopes were soon dashed, though. I got to the front door and my mother opened it. She just screamed.

She went absolutely mad. ‘Get rid of them, don’t you dare bring them into my home!’ On reflection, slimy snails are not the most natural domestic pets, but that’s how desperate I was.

So I had to take them back to the churchyard. I can remember tipping the bucket and the snails just sticking there. They wouldn’t budge. Suddenly I heard a voice behind me: ‘Can I help you?’ It was the priest. I was ever so scared. ‘I think we can help them on their way,’ he said and he took me and the bucket over to a tap where we poured some water in. He was ever so gentle and kind. And he tipped them out into the grass.

‘One day you’ll have a pet of your own,’ he said.

‘One day I’ll have hundreds,’ I said with a trembling lip.

Perhaps inspired by the snails, my father’s next gift to me was two tadpoles, Alfie and Georgie, as I had soon christened them. Again my mother had accepted this under extreme duress. She let me use one of her best fruit bowls, a boat-shaped glass affair, as Alfie and Georgie’s home. I can still see the constant pained expression she wore whenever she passed anywhere near them. It was saying: ‘Do I have to have this in my living room?’

She must have been quietly delighted that their stay was so brief. Once more, things hadn’t been very well thought out. Georgie died just as he was metamorphosing into a frog. His tail had begun to shrink, some rear legs had grown and a set of front legs had begun to develop too. Then Alfie died at the same stage. We didn’t realize they needed a pond. It had been another disaster and I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Especially when I found out my dad had flushed them down the toilet.

When my father suggested a budgie, I thought my wait for a proper companion was finally over. The green hen bird he brought home, Bobo, quickly reduced my mother to a state of nervous agitation, however. Bobo wasn’t the friendliest of creatures, it turned out. Every night she’d be allowed out to fly around for a while, with my mother following her around sweeping up wherever the bird had been. She was petrified of Bobo defecating on her best china, I think.

Their relationship was clearly doomed. And it came to a head one evening, in unforgettable circumstances.

I can still see the scene. Dad was in the kitchen and Mum was in the living room in front of the mirror getting herself ready to go out, which was a regular sight. She was putting on her make-up and Bobo – out of his cage for his evening exercise – was sitting on top of the mirror. To this day I don’t know why, but all of a sudden Bobo flew down and got hold of my mother’s lip.

Pandemonium broke out. My mother screamed in agony then started leaping and running around the room with Bobo swinging and flapping as she clung on to her lip. Blood gushed and furniture was sent crashing over. My father came flying into the room shouting. ‘Stand still, Nona!’ Eventually he prised the bird free, leaving my mother sobbing uncontrollably. Luckily the damage was only cosmetic, although – naturally – my mother failed to appreciate that.

Throughout it all I sat there, consumed by what I knew would be the inevitable consequence of what was occurring. I kept thinking: ‘Bye bye, Bobo.’

Bobo went next door to the neighbours, who had their own budgie, Pippa. When they bred I persuaded my dad to let me have one of the babies, a tiny lump of fluffy blue.

It took some doing, I can tell you. My mother, of course, was adamant that it would have to have a cage large enough to exercise in and could never be left free to fly around and wreak the kind of mayhem poor Bobo had inflicted. We agreed.

But as it turned out, Bluey, as the new arrival was christened, turned into my mother’s personal favourite.

He was an absolute character, a real gold-plated star. He used to talk to me in the morning; he’d say: ‘Janice, come on, get up.’ He’d recite nursery rhymes but say them upside down. ‘Hickory dickory dock, up the Queen’, was one of his favourites. He would dive into the lettuce bowl. What a character he was. My mother loved him, she was absolutely besotted by him, probably because he lavished so much attention on her. He’d say, ‘Oh, you’re beautiful,’ and she loved that. Mum even deigned to let him fly around the house in the evenings.

We used to take him everywhere we went. He even came camping with us. I remember we once stayed next door to a family who had a bird called Bobby. One day the two birds were out in their cages and we heard ours talking. My mother’s face turned scarlet when she heard her bird say: ‘Bobby’s a bugger, Bluey’s beautiful.’ We all burst out laughing. That bird was the light of our lives.

The time we had with Bluey was wonderful to me. To be honest, despite all my love for animals, until then I hadn’t realized an animal could be so loving in return. And the fact that he was the first successful pet I’d had made me love him back even more.

I was about to let Bluey out of his cage one November night in 1958, when there was a knock on the door. I opened it to discover a couple standing on the landing outside. They were an odd-looking pair: she looked nervous and was quite clearly heavily pregnant, he was a cocky young man in his twenties with the biggest Teddy Boy quiff I had ever seen. Whenever I see Woody Woodpecker I remember him.

‘Is your mum in?’ he asked.

I went to the sitting room to get Mum and was surprised when she recognized the Teddy Boy.

‘Oh, hello, Ron,’ she said, seemingly quite pleased to see him.

‘Hello, this is my wife, Anne,’ he replied, gesturing to the woman.

My mother ushered them into the sitting room and I, well-trained young girl that I was, headed to the kitchen to put the kettle on for a cup of tea.

I had been there for a minute or two when my mother reappeared. We didn’t get many visitors at that time of the night. They weren’t encouraged. Yet she seemed almost excited that these strangers had turned up out of the blue. I, on the other hand, had a dozen questions flying around my head. I only got to ask one, however.

‘Who’s that?’ I said.

‘That’s your brother,’ Mum replied breezily.

I’d always dreamt of having a brother or sister. I used to look enviously at my cousins playing, fighting and doing all the normal things siblings do together. I saw that when one got told off there would be huddles and muttered secrets would be shared. They were together.

But there was no prospect of me having one. Cousin Les had been the closest I’d had to a relative of my own age, but since our separation for school I’d seen less and less of him. Whenever I asked my parents, ‘Can we have a baby?’ they replied, ‘No, we can’t afford one.’ And that was it, end of story. There was no discussion after that.

So to say the discovery that I already had a brother was a bombshell would be the understatement of the century. As my mother rushed back into the living room that night, I felt as if I’d been punched in the head.

The strange disorientation I felt was increased by the fact that my ‘brother’ seemed such an unlikely candidate to be my mother’s son. I could hear him laughing in the sitting room. He was very loud and he spoke in a strong London accent. He was the sort of person my mother would normally have crossed the road to avoid. ‘Common’ would have been the word she used, most likely.

Eventually I took the tea tray in, but I might as well have been invisible. Anne was quiet because she’d just met her in-laws. I just sat on the floor listening, trying to take in what was going on.

I don’t know whether I was pleased or hurt. In truth, I didn’t know what I felt.

He’d say things like: ‘I remember you when you were a snotty-nosed kid.’ But that didn’t add up. I had no memory of him at all. And besides, if I had a cold my family had the fastest hankies in town.

They backed him up though. They kept saying: ‘You’ve met him before, you know Ron.’ And I thought: ‘No, I haven’t. When? Where?’

There was no helping me to come to terms with the situation. There were no child psychologists around then to tell them ‘This is a traumatic occasion for a child, a major event in her life, and you should proceed this way …’ You just had to get on with it.

As I sat there listening it dawned on me that he was indeed my mother’s son. He was calling my mother Mum and my father Wal. The only thing I could focus on that night was Anne’s bump. I was thinking, young as I was, ‘Maybe there’s hope there.’ I thought, ‘I’m going to be an auntie.’ Which would possibly give me a chance to be close to another human being.

I wasn’t allowed to hang around for long. They obviously had important things to talk about, so I was sent to bed. I lay there in my bed with the door partially open. I can remember looking at the pattern that the paraffin heater left on the ceiling.

I heard them laughing. And eventually I heard them go, full of ‘See you soon’ and ‘Pop round anytime’.

I went to school the next day telling everyone I had a brother. They did what they’d done when I said I had an uncle who worked with Buffalo Bill. They called me a liar again.

The aftershocks of that night continued for days and weeks. I couldn’t help myself asking my mother questions. Who had she been married to? Where was he now? Why had she and Ron been separated? My mother really didn’t want to discuss any of it. She’d get cross whenever I raised the subject. Divorce was not the done thing at that time and she clearly felt shame. A week or so after Ron had called round she snapped. I’d asked her another question about her divorce.

‘I don’t know why it’s only me you’re pestering with all your questions,’ she said. ‘Your father was married before too.’

This was another bolt from the blue. At least when I asked my father about it he was willing to talk to me. I sensed that he’d been expecting the question. He just sighed, shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘Well, it was just one of those things love, there’s not much to say really.’

It turned out that he had married before he’d gone off to war. His wife’s name was Doris and she was a local girl. While my father was being blown to pieces in Europe, Doris did what a lot of young girls did and started becoming a little too familiar with some of the American GIs who were stationed in and around London. It had been when my dad came home for his father’s funeral that he had discovered what she was up to. As if the pain of having to come home to bury his father hadn’t been traumatic enough for him, he had walked into their home and caught her in flagrante. After the funeral he’d gone straight to the servicemen’s charity, SAAFA, and asked them to organize a divorce. It wasn’t particularly unusual for something like that to happen during the war, particularly to couples as young as my dad and Doris. They were both nineteen or so. But it still hit him hard. Looking back on it now it explained a lot about my father. It explained why he decided to stay on in Europe after the end of the war. He obviously didn’t want to come home to be reminded of his heartache. It also explained why, having been given a second chance with my mother, he was absolutely determined not to let history repeat itself. No wonder he made her the centre of his universe, no wonder he rarely took his eyes off her.

My father’s story was sad, but my mother’s turned out to be even more poignant. It was many years before I got to know the full story. There were questions I needed to ask my mother when I became a mother myself. It was then that, slowly, she revealed what had happened.

It turned out that my mum had been just sixteen when she’d had Ron. The father was a local boy of the same age, Dan Godbeer. Mum told me she had been so naive she didn’t even know she was pregnant. She didn’t know the facts of life. She got married two days before he was born. The marriage didn’t last, however. Dan went back to live with his mum and dad, my mum went back to live with her sister and her mother. Dan’s mother was a poisonous woman and was determined to keep the baby in her family. The case went to court and the judge sided with her, saying in essence that a little boy couldn’t be brought up by three women living in the poor, cramped conditions my mum and grandmother had to cope with. So Ron was taken from her.

The loss was terrible, but it was made even more painful by the fact that she would see him regularly. And when she did he was always dirty and badly dressed, sometimes in clothes that were one step removed from rags. Sometimes he was barefoot. She would spend ages making clothes for him and would then leave them in parcels on her mother-in-law’s doorstep. But the packages would be sent back to her unopened. She was rejected. When he was about seven she gave up. She said it was the war that changed it for her. She adopted the same attitude as everyone else: ‘We’re going to die, let’s make the most of the time we’ve got left.’

The story never came out in its entirety. I was given bits and pieces, which I had to put together. I eventually learned that it was my nan who reunited them. Sadly for Ron his father died when he was just nineteen. My dad took my mum to the funeral, but Ron didn’t want to know her because he felt she’d abandoned him. Ron had joined the RAF as soon as he was old enough and my nan, bless her, invited him round for tea, because he was still in touch with her. She engineered it so that my mum would be there too, locked them in a room and said: ‘Talk to each other.’

This, apparently, was soon after I was born. But I knew nothing of it. Even then, sadly, Ron fought against it. His grandmother was still bitter and made sure he thought the worst of my mother. But, as so often happens, when he was about to become a parent himself for the first time he finally came back. That strange, bewildering night in November 1958 was their reconciliation.

Again, with the benefit of hindsight I can see that it would have been a hugely significant night in my mother’s life. I can only guess at some of the emotions she must have been feeling. But I can see how it must have affected her relationship with me. Her coldness, her distance from me, was perhaps her way of insulating herself from the pain of suffering a loss again. Maybe she daren’t form too close a bond with me for fear of losing me too. It would also explain her possessiveness and over-controlling nature. She didn’t want me to run away. And I can see now why she was so determined to dress me well and keep me immaculate at all times. She was not going to have me walking around the way her son had done. Part of me wonders, too, whether she felt angry still and took some of that out on me. Who knows?

Time has allowed me to realize why she reacted to Ron’s reappearance in her life the way she did. In the immediate aftermath of that night, I watched her unleash all her money and affection on Ron, Anne and the new baby, David. Almost the next day she went out and bought Anne a lovely expensive necklace. When the baby arrived, they moved in near us. I was besotted with the baby too. It was the closest I had come to having a real brother myself and I spent every spare moment I could with David. Mum was around there all the time, however. It transformed her beyond all recognition into a loving, warm-hearted mother.

Now I understand she saw this as her second chance, a God-given opportunity to put things right between her and her son. As a ten-year-old, however, I perceived none of these things. I remember lying in bed that night thinking to myself: ‘There isn’t much love here for me as it is, am I going to have to share that now?’

Chapter 5
Love Me, Love My Dog

One bright summer’s day when I was fourteen, I was driving through the suburbs of west London in the cab of my father’s lorry. This was something I often did during the school holidays. I enjoyed being out and about with him, getting to see different parts of London and the surrounding countryside. At that time he was working on the new runway at Heathrow Airport, so there was an extra excitement to the trips we made. We were driving through the town of West Drayton in Middlesex when, without any warning, he suddenly pulled off the road and into the drive of a house. There was a small sign hanging from the porch. It read: ‘Mrs Stephens’ Boarding Kennels’.

At first I just sat there, unsure what was going on.

‘Come on, are you getting out or not?’ my father said, swinging open the driver’s door.

‘Why?’

‘You wanted a dog, didn’t you?’

I thought my heart was going to jump out of my mouth.

As I’d entered my teens, I had increasingly found the affection I needed in dogs and the pets we had at home – even if they brought as much heartache as comfort at times.

By now we had moved out of the Clyde Flats on Rylston Road into an upstairs flat in a property on Rowallan Road. It was bigger than the old place, but still cramped. There was only one bedroom; the front room doubled up as a bedsit for me. We had a sitting room and a scullery.

Bluey came with us but soon after we moved he became ill. The talkative charmer of the past disappeared and he became a quieter, sadder creature. He developed the habit of picking at his coat, which left him looking in a terrible state. It was soon clear that his days were numbered, but the end – when it came – was still poignant.

Bluey had been sitting on the bottom of his cage for three days, becoming quieter and quieter. Then one day he got up and seemed chirpier. We let him out of the cage and he was his old affectionate self. He climbed up my dad’s arm and sort of nibbled at it as if he was kissing him. Then he hopped around, performing the same routine with each of us. Thinking he was better, we put him back in his cage. He died that night. He had obviously wanted to say goodbye. I was mortified.

By then my father in particular had realized I wouldn’t be settled without a pet of some kind. I really did love the companionship. That same week he suddenly appeared with a black and white old English rabbit I called Domino.

But my run of bad luck hadn’t ended. Domino soon became sick. One day I was carrying him to the vet, covered in a blue blanket. I can still remember the blanket, it had white swallows on it. Suddenly he screamed. I had never heard a rabbit scream before and before I knew it he had died in my arms. It broke my heart. I was nowhere near the surgery and was just as far away from home so I ended up running to the nearest house I knew, that of my mother’s in-laws the Cowpers. Nora Cowper was related through marriage to my mother’s brother Sonny and lived off Lillie Road with her three daughters, Jacquie, Geraldine and Debbie. They were a lovely family who meant a lot to me. The moment Nora opened the door I burst into tears. She took me under her wing and dealt with poor Domino. ‘Give her to me Janice, I’ll lay her to rest here,’ she said. With the girls we went to the garden where we conducted a little burial service before placing her in a box in a hole in the corner.

We never found out what had killed Domino so suddenly. The poor thing may have caught an infection, but we simply didn’t know.

For a time, I can remember feeling I was a curse to these animals. As I scampered after my father towards the doors of Mrs Stephens’ Boarding Kennels, however, all that was forgotten.

We rang the bell and a woman appeared. It was clearly the owner, Mrs Stephens.

She was expecting us. ‘Mr Fennell, hello. Would you like to come with me and I’ll show you the puppies,’ she smiled.

There were all manner of dogs in the kennels at the rear of the house. But Mrs Stephens made a beeline for a pen where I saw three black and white Border collie puppies leaping around in a cage.

I’d fantasized about having my own dog for years, of course. Usually I imagined myself having a Lassie dog, a collie. Now all I wanted was a Border collie – one of these Border collies.

‘Two of them are four guineas, one of them is five,’ Mrs Stephens said, brisk and businesslike.

My dad asked me to choose. I knew already which one I wanted. One of the trio had a lovely tricoloured little face – black with white and little bits of tan. From the moment I’d walked up to the kennel he hadn’t stopped staring at me.

‘That one please, Dad,’ I said.

‘That’s the five-guinea one,’ Mrs Stephens replied.

‘Oooh, she’s got expensive tastes like her mother,’ he smiled.

He was a beautiful dog. Mrs Stephens picked him up and offered him to my father.

‘It’s Janice’s,’ he said gently, counting out the money. ‘Give it to her.’

He was about eight or nine weeks old. Mrs Stephens told me to put him on the floor to see how he moved; his little legs wobbled and his tail was wagging. I wanted to pick him up and love him. I couldn’t believe he was mine.

We got back into the lorry and drove home. I was nervous as well as excited. The poor little puppy was traumatized at having been separated from his litter. No matter how much I cuddled him he cried all the way home. Dad understood this better than I did. ‘He’s frightened. He’s got to learn to trust us,’ he said.

When we got him home he ran around the flat like a dervish then peed on the floor. My dad and I looked at each other with horror. We were both thinking the same thing. Mum.

‘Perhaps we should have put him out in the garden,’ I said as I went to get the cleaning materials.

For once, however, Mum confounded us.

When she came home from work that evening she didn’t worry about the fading patch of damp on the carpet. Instead she seemed genuinely interested in the new arrival. ‘Hello, you’re nice,’ she said to the puppy.

Her interest didn’t extend to being affectionate to the dog, however. He started climbing up and she stepped back. ‘Don’t jump up at me, dear,’ she told him firmly. She then ignored him for the rest of the evening.

Shane, as I had soon christened him, brought me and my father closer than we’d been for a long time. Dad loved him too and training him became our joint project.

Dad sorted out his vaccinations. Then we did obedience training in the traditional way. He was very concerned that we should be responsible about it all. ‘We want him to be a well-trained dog, a happy dog,’ he would say to me. And in that respect, we succeeded brilliantly.

Soon we had taught him to walk to heel and to come. And soon both Dad and I were taking him out for walks around the neighbourhood. Dad also used to take him out in the lorry during the daytime. He became a member of the family in a way no other pet had, apart from Bluey.

Mum treated him like another child. She wasn’t nasty to him; she thought he was cute, although she never warmed to him. She fed him and let him out into the back garden. But her main concern was that he always wiped his feet and didn’t get things dirty and kept the house clean. We had to groom him too so that there were no hairs anywhere.

In effect she behaved towards Shane as she had towards me – to such an extent that she wouldn’t let him go out on the street with the other dogs from the neighbourhood.

Mum disapproved of me mixing with the rest of the kids from the street. If I was sitting out on the coping she would appear at the top of the stairs: ‘Janice, come in here, don’t do that, that’s what common people do.’ She was a snob. She couldn’t see that we were ‘common’ too.

Shane was soon being treated the same way. She said once she didn’t want him being a street urchin. She didn’t want him mixing with a lower class of dog!

Mum was too wrapped up in her own life to keep a constant eye on us, however. And soon Shane was very much integrated with the other dogs on the street.

The leader of the local ‘pack’ was Bobby, an old mongrel, a foxy type of dog with pointed ears. Bobby was the street’s guard dog. When Shane first arrived as a puppy, Bobby was very protective of him whenever I took him out. We used to giggle because if any other dogs came near Bobby would adopt a stance, growling and staring aggressively. He was fourteen years old, slow and frail looking. But it was a convincing act nevertheless.

As Shane grew, however, old Bobby was relieved of the duty. The passing of the torch came one day when Shane was about nine months old and a big black dog appeared around the corner. Bobby growled at him as usual but it had no effect. For a moment it looked as if there was going to be trouble, but it was Shane who drove him away. Afterwards Bobby licked Shane’s face, as if thanking him for what he’d done. From then on Bobby and Shane became a duo.

Like Digger, Shane opened doors for me. In many ways he allowed me to become a part of the community for the first time. I became friendly with the children who owned Bobby and another dog, Lucky. We’d all jump on a bus up to Putney Heath together where we’d let the dogs run free at the weekends.

My mother disapproved of this, of course, but less because of the friends I was making than because of the mess Shane used to come back in. I recall one Sunday lunchtime when we went to Putney Heath but got caught out by a wet mist that came down. The ground became very heavy and the dogs got clatted up. We were lucky to be allowed back on the bus to Fulham.

The dogs were sweating heavily, too, and the smell they gave off was terrible. We went upstairs, giggling whenever a passenger clambered up the steps only to return to the lower deck when they were hit by the stench.

As we drew closer to home, however, the laughter faded. My mother was having friends around for tea. I thought to myself: ‘She’s going to kill me.’

I tried to sneak Shane in so that I could give him a bath straight away. My mother wasn’t there but my father was. He loved Shane and helped me get him in the bath. We were having great fun and games cleaning him when my mother reappeared.

I remember she turned absolutely white with rage. The fact that Dad was laughing only made things worse.

The respect for animals I had inherited from my grandmother and Great-Uncle Jim deepened as I grew older. But it also brought me into conflict with other members of the family who had a different outlook.

At first my sensitivity to the feelings of other living creatures showed itself in small ways. My dad liked cowboys and he used to take me to see westerns. I would get upset when the horses were brought down. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were using potholes or tripwires. To me there was nothing clever about killing animals. My nan and my Great-Uncle Jim had taught me to respect and care for horses and such activities went against this principle.

And by an early age I had begun to rebel against the idea of eating animals. I can vividly remember that when my mother used to take me to Manzi’s eel and pie shop, I would watch the wriggling eels and think, ‘There is no way on earth I am going to eat them.’ But when I voiced my feelings she didn’t like it.

On one occasion at the butcher’s my mother asked for veal. I asked what it was and was so horrified when they explained how it was produced that I blurted out the words, ‘I’m not eating that.’

‘You’ll eat it and like it, my girl,’ my mother snapped.

‘Sounds like you’ve got a revolution on your hands,’ the butcher smiled as she dragged me out of the shop.

That night at home I sat at the table, the veal on my plate in front of me, locked in a war of wills with my parents. I knew if I put it into my mouth I would be sick. I was eleven. It seemed so cruel.

I paid the price for that one. My father didn’t stop chastising me for days afterwards for having upset my mother. It was a small victory, however. Elsewhere I was powerless to impose my feelings about animal cruelty – especially when it came to dogs.

The way some members of the family treated their dogs appalled me. My mother’s brother Uncle George had a dog called Bruce, a white German shepherd they had got from Battersea Dogs’ Home. I remember George used to lay out small penny bars of chocolate on the kitchen table in their wrapping and tell Bruce not to touch them. He used to think it was marvellous that he could come back half an hour later and find the chocolate still intact. Bruce would sit there looking at the chocolate and drooling, with the saliva dripping down his mouth. I thought this was wicked, it was torment. I used to cry when they put the chocolate on the table.

All the family used to say, ‘Oh don’t be so stupid, the dog’s got to know what’s what.’ They would have a go at me for feeling like this. But my stomach hurt. I would sit in the chair and curl up and say nothing. I felt like running away, but I also felt I couldn’t leave the dog because I would be abandoning him. I knew what it was like to be left alone with pain, to suffer on your own.

The more I learned about dogs, the more convinced I became of their intelligence and sensitivity. And the more determined I became to spare them such treatment.

No dog did more to convince me of its smartness than Shane. That dog was so clever he could tell the difference between the noise my father’s lorry made when it was full and when it was empty. Dad often used to take Shane out in his cab if he had a full load and a delivery to make. If Shane detected an empty lorry he would lie quietly. If he sensed there was a day out in it for him, he would get very excited.

He also had an amazing sense of direction. One night he went missing. My father had said that he was going to take him for a walk but had been distracted. Suddenly we realized Shane wasn’t there. We panicked. Then Dad said: ‘Hold on a minute.’ He went out, following their regular walk to the local Labour Exchange. There lay Shane. A woman came out and said he’d been lying there for an hour. That was his walk. He was so well trained we never bothered putting him on a lead, so he had gone there and waited.

For the next few years, Shane and I became utterly inseparable. It was literally a case of love me, love my dog. I went absolutely everywhere with him. Everyone knew that if they invited me to a party then Shane would come with me. I used to go to a youth club and I would take him there with me. I was the only one who did this, yet the amazing thing was that nobody ever questioned it. All the teenagers loved him and he loved all the attention. We were a couple, he was my best mate. If people thought it was odd, I didn’t care. Shane had shown more loyalty and affection to me than any other creature I’d come across. And by now he’d proven that he would defend me to the death if necessary.

The first time I saw Shane in full flight was one Saturday afternoon.

We lived within a short walk of Craven Cottage, home to the then mighty Fulham Football Club. Every fortnight Fulham would be playing at home and all the roads around the ground would become crowded with traffic. Visiting fans used to park down our street, so if my dad was away, it was me and my mum’s job to protect the parking space outside our house.

It wasn’t a particularly scientific process. We’d just set two chairs down and then put brooms across them. On this particular day, sometime during the early 1960s, my mother was putting the chairs out. I was upstairs playing The Beatles. I had a little grey portable record player. One of my uncles worked at EMI so I used to get records early. Suddenly I was aware that Shane was going ballistic through the window next to me. When I leaned out I soon saw why.

Some men had pulled up in a car and one was trying to remove the chairs. My mum was hanging on to them and one guy was trying to separate her from them. There was a real commotion. The men were using unpleasant language and my mother was shouting for help so I ran downstairs. As I went through the door, I sensed that Shane would be behind me and that I should keep him in the house. So I shut both the front door and the gate behind me. But I had underestimated him.

Suddenly Shane appeared out of nowhere. He cleared the gate in one bound, launching himself from the step. Somehow I grabbed him, put my arms around his chest and held on to him for dear life. He was fit to kill. But I sensed these guys weren’t nice people and might hurt him badly.

Shane’s arrival had the desired effect, however. They jumped into the car and drove off in a hurry. The wheels were spinning, leaving tyre tracks. As the car disappeared down the road, neighbours came running out. Mum was in a state, Shane was panting like crazy in my arms. Everyone was full of praise for Shane. What a great dog he was, and how loyal. ‘No one’s going to hurt you or your mum while he’s around,’ they said.

I was on my own with Shane when he underlined how true that was.

Ron and the family had moved near Olympia and I had popped over to see them one Saturday afternoon. Shane and I stayed there until early evening and set off home at about 7 p.m. It was a measure of how safe the streets of London were in those days that there was nothing unusual in this. I thought nothing of walking three miles across a busy part of the city unattended. No one would allow a young girl to do that now. We were walking down a short cut off the North End Road when we passed two lads sitting on a wall. They started whistling at me as lads do. ‘All right, darling.’

As usual Shane was quite a way ahead of me. That was the way it was. He knew the way home. I did what I knew I should do, which was ignore them, keep my head down and just keep going.

Unfortunately these two weren’t so easily shaken off and they started following me.

‘What’s a matter with you then, sweetheart?’ said one.

‘Don’t run away, darling,’ the other shouted when I started to walk faster.

I was just beginning to panic, sure that something unpleasant was going to happen, when Shane appeared from nowhere, snarling. He went straight at the two lads, who just turned and fled the other way, one of them with Shane hanging on to his bottom. I called him back and we ran all the way home.

Later on that weekend, funnily enough, I went to see my nephew in Fulham again. I looked down at Shane playing with the kids, the boys dive-bombing at him. He was rolling around on the floor letting them do whatever they wanted.

This was the wonderful, kind, dopey dog that would let children do anything, that would play with squirrels. But in a moment he could be transformed. To us and the family he was the perfect dog. He was obedient, he was full of playfulness. Yet he would have protected us to the death.

Like most people I thought a dog was part of the family and therefore under the family’s protection. It would be many years before I realized how misconceived an idea that was.

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