London - It is almost the Eleventh Commandment: “A dog is for life, not just for Christmas.” The implication is that any puppy unfortunate enough to be given as a present will be adored for a few hours but then beaten, starved and consigned to Battersea Dogs’ Home.
Breaking this rule is like drink-driving, committing murder, or putting kittens inside microwave ovens. It’s almost as bad as smoking, for goodness sake.
Yet I have committed this terrible sin not once, but twice. Please don’t whisper a word to the RSPCA, but my Christmas present to my husband Shaun this year is the most adorable Great Dane you’ve ever seen.
Eleven years ago, our eldest child Serena told me just as she was entering the sixth form that unless she had her own dog, we would have deprived her of a real childhood.
It was a conversation that was to have a huge effect on our family life. Owning a dog makes a difference in so many ways. It can test existing friendships and unexpectedly act as a catalyst for new ones. It can make you focus on the important things in life. It can stretch your patience to snapping point and beyond. But as any dog owner knows, it can also bring companionship, laughter and love.
Of course, there are dogs and dogs. The breed makes a huge difference. Buying a toy poodle is a very different undertaking from acquiring a St Bernard. Serena dropped into our conversation the fateful words “Great Dane” and “harlequin”, so I carried out some research. Great Danes love people, not exercise. Well, that seemed fine. We could do “people”: Shaun is a vicar and we lived in a working vicarage. And harlequin, I discovered, meant that the dog’s coat should have “torn black patches on a white background”.
More specifically, the harlequin turns out to be the most eye-wateringly expensive colour Danes come in. And you will spend the next ten years of your life hearing people say: “What a big Dalmatian!” The last time I saw a Dalmatian I said loudly: “What a small Dane.” I found a farmer’s wife who had bred harlequins by mistake, so the price wasn’t too exorbitant. Or rather, not quite as exorbitant as it might have been. And the dogs would be ready by Christmas. What a wonderful present for my daughter - the realisation of her dream. I would give her a puppy for Christmas as a surprise.
Now, giving a diamond to your loved one is easy. You wrap up it in tissue paper, put it inside a cracker, and just hope that it doesn’t get scrunched up with the paper crown and tossed into the fire. If you buy a car for someone special, you can park it out of sight. And presumably, you could hide a horse in a meadow.
But keeping a dog as a surprise until the big day is a challenge, especially if you live with the recipient. Luckily, Serena was going on a school camping trip in December (that’s PE teachers for you), so we decided to collect the dog then.
It turned out that the farmer’s wife lived in the Lake District and that travelling there by train is an expensive business. At the time, my son Ben was only 12 so his ticket was half-price. The plan was for him to spend Sunday on the train, select the best puppy and bring him back to our home in West London.
Trouble was, there was a rail strike and only one train heading north for about a week. And Serena’s school trip was on it. We discovered this during a whispered phone call from Ben, who was hiding under a table watching his sister’s feet making their way along the carriage.
Happily, subterfuge is all part of a day’s work to a 12-year-old boy. We had a few more calls, along the lines of, “The dog’s peed his cardboard box to bits” but Ben completed his mission superbly, and returned that night with a big bundle and little leather collar and lead which the breeder had bought two days earlier, and which no longer fitted. Our new puppy was visibly bigger each evening than in the morning.
Serena rang home a few days later and asked about the odd squealing noise in the background. “It must be the neighbour’s dog,” we replied. A parishioner whom we had never met called to see Shaun and admired the puppy. She agreed to look after him until Christmas Day.
At 8am on Christmas Day, I brought him home. For days there had been a large, wrapped and ribboned empty box under the piano with Serena’s name on it. My idea had been to lay the sleeping puppy in it, seal the box again and then call Serena into the room.
But you know how it is with animals. If you’re frightened of horses, they dismount you. Hate cats, and they aim for your lap. Excited about a puppy falling asleep? Obviously, he will stay awake to find out why. It took me more than an hour running up and down the corridor trying to get him tired enough to give in.
“Serena! Everybody!’ I called upstairs. “You can open one present before church.”
Her astonishment, if not her delight, was feigned. Serena - not quite as “blonde” as her hair - had known about the dog for some time.
Ben gave her a tiny present - a bone-shaped brass tag with Hamlet engraved on it. Too late, we realised we should have called him Milosevic. Everyone he met got Slobodan.
Thus began a relationship which brought years of joy, pain and expense. I estimated he cost a pound a day to feed, which feels like more than I spent on my children.
Serena’s first serious boyfriend was attracted, I’m sure, by her dog. Serena and Hamlet were striking, walking together through Parsons Green: an elegant, beautiful blonde with an elegant, beautiful harlequin. She judged pubs by whether they welcomed her dog.
Once or twice they travelled by London Underground. She stepped on the escalator and suggested he follow. He begged her desperately not to and stayed put.
Serena was borne away, her arm stretching out behind her, until she had to calculate whether to risk her life by dodging back up to the top of the escalator or say goodbye to him for ever. Fortunately, his nerve cracked just before hers and he jumped on, terrified but trusting.
Hamlet wasn’t just costly in terms of food bills. By the time Serena left home to take up her place at Cambridge University, her sister Bink was very ill with obsessive compulsive disorder, and living with a large dog was a challenge.
My kind father, who was nearly 90, said he would care for Hamlet. Inspired by this, a vicar friend in Cambridge said he would love to look after the dog and so we took him up on this offer. His parishioners laid bets on whether the arrangement would last a week.
We drove Hamlet to Cambridge with Serena, installed him in the vicarage, and left. Shortly after we arrived back at our home in London, our vicar friend knocked on the front door. Hamlet had cried so piteously, he put him straight in his car and followed us for 50 miles. A week? He had helped for scarcely ten minutes.
Before the baptism of our youngest child Rosie, Serena gave Hamlet a rare bath. In his excitement at being clean and free, he galloped downstairs and into the garden, not noticing that he had knocked flying in his wake the ironing board, iron, an heirloom christening robe - and my mother. She was in a wheelchair for six weeks.
Dogs given at Christmas are supposed to be unvalued. We valued him so much, the day came when we endured the breakdown of Shaun’s employment for him.
Shaun accepted a “dream” job in Oxford. The church hadn’t yet procured accommodation for his family that is part of a clergyman’s pay, so it was agreed we would go into a furnished house while they bought something suitable. I sent an email to the relevant parties months beforehand to spell it out: we had a very large Great Dane. Two weeks before we were due to move in, the owner rang to talk about curtains and pans.
I checked that she knew that we had both a terrier and a Great Dane. There was silence. Then came the verdict: the terrier was welcome, the Dane was not. The church administrator appealed to me. Surely we could send Hamlet elsewhere? We were adamant: there was no question. Shaun would not take the job after all. Even dog-loving friends queried whether a family pet was more important than Shaun’s work.
But it wasn’t about the dog. As much as I loved Hamlet, I never asked myself whether we would do this for him. It was about Serena. Breaking her heart, for her father’s work, was inconceivable. For all of us.
We had given her a gift: would we deprive her of him again? We had made a commitment: would we go back on it? The Church persuaded the owner to take us after all, and, contrary to my express instructions, signed the lease committing us to going.
The next few years were made far worse by Hamlet through no fault of his own. Of course he scratched the parquet flooring, as I had said he would. This was a dog who could slobber on ceilings.
Unbelievably, after that lease came to an end, the Church did not provide anywhere for us to live for eight months. While we slept on the sofas of relatives, Hamlet lived in the back of our car (after the incident where he knocked over my mother, we couldn’t allow him in my parents’ house). But the nadir came when I looked out of the window one day and realised Hamlet could not stand up properly.
I rang a Great Dane rescue charity to seek a temporary home. Staff said they would take him permanently, or not at all. It wasn’t fair on the dog, they said, to borrow him then give him back. Really? What would you know? A relative offered us shelter but without our animals. It wasn’t meant to hurt but it did - far more than being offered nothing at all. It was as if we had been asked if we would like to move in without one of our children.
By contrast, a friend lent us his gorgeous house in Scotland. He dislikes dogs intensely, and doesn’t allow them in his home, but he understood what we were going through. It still brings tears to my eyes that he welcomed Hamlet there.
After three more awful years squashed into a cottage not only far too small for us but too small for our daughter’s dog, Shaun got another job and we moved to Bedford. To the first home we have ever owned, and the first truly big enough for us all.
One late May afternoon in 2009, I let myself and our two dogs into our very own house. Hamlet went into the large garden, looked around with approval, stretched out in the sun and gave the deepest sigh of contentment.
When, later that same year, Serena was chosen to appear in the BBC television series Peckham Finishing School For Girls, she maintained it was only because the producer wanted Hamlet.
Our Oxford trauma changed us all. Though trained by a police dog handler, Hamlet had become unreliable about food. One day a roast chicken, hot out of the oven, disappeared without trace. On another occasion, he gulped down a whole Christmas stollen cake that Serena had made.
And when dinner guests left a chocolate roulade in the kitchen, we discovered the plate had been licked clean while we ate our first course in the dining room. “Chocolate can kill dogs!” Serena shrieked.
“Good,” I retorted.
At our new home, Hamlet was more relaxed. Instead of terrorising guests arriving at the front door by sticking his huge nose through the letterbox, he would lie on the lawn, eyes shut, diligently barking dire warnings: burglar at the door, about to murder you all...
Alas, within a year we lost Hamlet. My devoted nephew took him for a long walk one day, but the dog came home stiff, and after a day looking at us sadly and being unable to move, died silently in his sleep. He is buried in the garden, where a stonemason friend is to make a small headstone bearing the inscription: “The rest is silence.”
Serena came home and parked in the drive to the sound of nothing. No greeting at the door. No point going for a walk on a lovely day. No one to steal the stollen. A vast Dane-shaped loss in our lives.
I have been putting some money away in an envelope for a while and I have nearly enough now. Horatio, a blue harlequin, is arriving at the end of the week.
Everyone knows except Shaun and Serena. Bink is still struggling to overcome illness, but she loves her sister so much she has agreed to the slobbering again.
Ben isn’t speaking to me because it was his turn to have an Irish wolfhound, to be called Fionn mac Cumhaill.
I am more excited than a six-year- old bursting for a Christmas stocking. Horatio is my present for Shaun. Yes, for Christmas. And for the next dozen years, till death us do part. - Daily Mail