The Cavalier King Charles Obituaries Part I
Annie and Muffin were our first two Cavaliers. Annie was named after Anneka Rice. Don’t ask me why, that’s one of the mysteries of the universe and I fear I may have been to blame. Our parents bought Annie and Muffin from a Cavalier breeder when they were very young. Muffin was underage, only five weeks old (puppies are not supposed to leave their mothers until they are at least six weeks old), and Annie was only a couple of weeks older than that. Annie was a Tricolour – black, tan and white. Tricolours are supposed to be patchy, with a white stripe down the middle of their noses that forms a spoon shape on their foreheads. Annie was more like a screwed up Black and Tan. She was almost completely black apart from her white socks and tail. She had a black face with two furious Scotsman-ginger eyebrows. She was also completely nuts.
Annie was a literal stress puppy. We used to know a woman we called Wailing Aileen, because all she ever did was panic at the top of her voice and wring her hands. That’s what Annie was like too. I’ve never met a dog with a worse temperament. She was in a constant state of nervous panic. She was a complete biscuit freak. The dog needed Valium. She expended so much nervous energy she was as thin as a twig.
Annie’s developmental upbringing with my sister and I was a downward spiral of provocation/reaction. Muffin was as staid and calm as a miniature Buddha, but Annie could be wound up like a spring and shot off in any particular direction we chose. Because she was easy to tease with such rewarding results, we played with her constantly using sticks, balls, and bits of rope. Our favourite game was tugging-ears-and-paws. Tug the left ear, then the right, then the left paw, then the right, make the pattern random and continue ad infinitum. It drove her absolutely insane. She was a gentle creature and she’d yap and growl and mouth our hands as she tried to catch our moving fingers, getting more and more excited until she flipped and gave us a gentle bite. When we tried to play that game with Muffin, she’d just sniff our hands and look bemused.
They say dogs look like their owners, well Annie looked like King Charles II himself. Though the rest of her coat was short and wiry she had the longest black curly ears. They almost reached the floor, and they were always filthy from her dragging them in food and charging around the garden – sticky weed, what a nightmare, and in the winter she used to gather little snowballs in them. My dad took to giving her a haircut every couple of months to keep them under control. It gave her ears a lot of volume; she looked like a dog with a permed bob, late eighties style.
Because Annie was so excitable, the only way she could escape from herself was by hiding under the settee. Of course we tried to drag her out from under there, but she got very adept at manoeuvring away from us at top speed by crawling on her belly. Sometimes she’d steal my sister’s dummy and chew it under there, but when we tried to catch her, she’d turn upside down and propel herself away by pushing her feet against the bottom of the settee. Other times, she’d fall asleep and be so quiet when guests came around they never knew she was there, until she let out a huge rumbling snore that sounded like a fart and ruined any pretensions of class in our household.
Annie talked too. When people came to the door, she’d get so excited and yappy you could barely hear above her noise. Visitors would greet her with a “hello,” and she’d reply in a bow-wow: “haw-oooww!” usually followed by an excited sneeze.
Annie’s defining moment was at Colwick park. My sister and I were playing on the lake edge, and I walked out onto one of the corners of a T-shaped jetty. Annie was bounding around on the grass and I called to her. She came racing over at ninety miles an hour in typical fashion. I expected her to stop at the bank, but instead she leapt – sailed through the air, and damn her she almost made it. But only almost. She executed a resounding belly flop into the lake and swam out to meet me, howling and wailing in astonishment, before turning back and struggling up the bank. I was bent double in stitches. The amazing part was, she’d never been swimming before!
Annie didn’t live very long. She was only around two years old when she died. A classic tragic figure, it was the flaw of her own nervousness that killed her. She’d never been a good traveller. In fact, she wailed constantly and tried to hide under the back seat of the car and it made family trips extremely tense affairs. We went on holiday to Wales, and the journey back was on a hot day. She seemed fine at the motorway services; she drank water and walked around cheerfully enough, wagging her tail. But back in the car, Annie wailed and wailed and stuffed herself further and further under the back seat. The stress must have been too much for her. When we got home she seemed distressed and shaky, my mum carried her up the drive, and she says she just felt her go.
My mum laid her down in the hallway, and she didn’t know what to do, she was just panicking, I came in, Annie wasn’t breathing. I took hold of her and just shook and shook and smacked her back in a terrified attempt to shock her to life, and then my dad came in and told me to stop. He tried giving her CPR. Nothing made any difference. She’d shit herself. She was already dead. A heart attack, an embolism, we weren’t quite sure. We buried her in the back garden the same day. It was like losing a person. For two weeks we were in constant tears, grieving, simply couldn’t believe what had happened.
