The Cavalier King Charles Obituaries Part II
Muffin is perhaps the most underrated of our Cavaliers, because she didn’t make a big statement. She was a gentle, sweet-natured tan and white Blenheim with long silky fur and short brown ears. When you spoke across the room to her she’d pop her ears up like a Mogwai. When she was a puppy she was so cute she looked like a squeaky teddy bear. It was hard not to scoop her up in your arms every time you saw her.
Muffin was simply beyond provocation. She would have been wonderful with small children. She was larger than Annie, with a pear-shaped rear, so we used to think she was fat. How little we knew: she was a sylph compared to our next dog, Holly. Muffin was so cute. She wasn’t very agile and often had trouble scrambling on to chairs. She’d set her front paws on the settee and turn her appealing teddy bear eyes onto passers-by in the hopes that they’d give her a boost up.
Because she was a very good dog when she was small, sometimes we’d let her sit at the dinner table. Her head was only just high enough to see. She was very polite and would never take anything from the table, not even if it was inches in front of her nose. We’d have to push it right up to her. She’d sit and watch every morsel of food going from plate to mouth. When she got frustrated she’d rest her head on the edge of the table and let out a lugubrious little whine: “mooooo….” Of course, we thought this was hysterically funny. Muffin always got very sleepy at the dinner table. She’d sit and sit, and her eyes would slowly close and her head would rock forward when she started to doze. Once she fell asleep so heavily and so fast that she lost her balance completely and I had to catch her as she fell off the chair.
The only time Muffin really got excited was when Annie wound her up. Annie would go outside and bark just for the hell of it, and Muffin would think there was a fox or a cat in the garden and go insane. She’d go on what we called “border patrol,” barking her way around the entire fence and doing double circuits around the garage where the undergrowth was thickest.
When Muffin was very small, one day the newspaper boy shoved the newspaper through the front door at a great speed and it hit her on the head. She never forgave the newspaper, and every day thereafter at four o’clock, without prompting, she would go and sit by the front door and wait for it. Every day we used to have to rescue the newspaper from her before she tore it to shreds. Mostly Muffin would savage the newspaper and leave it intact, but one day we went out and when we returned the newspaper had been torn into a thousand tiny shreds like confetti that covered the hall carpet, the kitchen and the living room. Not a single sheet was left. It must have been a very victorious day for Muffin.
Muffin’s cutest quirk was her ability to attribute life to inanimate objects. One time we heard all manner of whining and yapping and growling in the hall and went to see what was wrong. There was a dried honesty seed case on the floor, with two seeds stuck to it like eyes, and Muffin was stood growling and watching, hackles-raised. She was absolutely terrified of it.
Muffin’s other habit was “speculating.” She had very good eyesight and liked the taste of flies. Unfortunately, she couldn’t distinguish flies from tiny specks of dirt. Whenever she saw the smallest speck, she would pounce on it with a grunt and gobble and lick away in the hopes that it was tasty. The kitchen tiles had a speckled pattern on them. We’d point to little specks and she’d leap at them enthusiastically. She had hours of endless fun, pouncing and grunting and licking away. I remember there was a tiny dried speck of water soluble blue ink on the wallpaper above the settee. Muffin scrambled up the settee back and pounced on it, leaving a big blue smear across the wall for the guests to wonder at. Muffin was obsessive, from the newspapers to the honesty seed faces, to the invisible flies in the window. Apparently this is a Cavalier trait, called Fly Catching Syndrome, and it may be a form of epilepsy.
Sadly, Muffin didn’t live very long either. She was only about four or five when she died of leukaemia. Looking back I can’t help but feel a dog is meant to eat raw meat and bones – not overcooked tins of dog food and wheat biscuits, and I wonder whether it would have made a difference. Muffin lived for quite a long time when she was ill, she didn’t seem in too much pain though towards the end it was apparent she was becoming weak and exhausted. Our parents took her to the vet and she was put down, and when my Dad came back he just sat down and cried.
