The Puppy That Came for Christmas (5 page)

“Seems a shame to split them up . . . I could—”

Jamie looked horrified. “No, no, no—believe me, one puppy is enough for now!”

Emma and her brother carried on sleeping. “And you'll need to buy her a collar and lead—Helper Dogs will reimburse you. Make sure you buy a very soft one—the softest you can find.”

He looked around, as if searching for something more to say or do, some more advice to impart to a novice puppy parent. Delaying the moment that I was both nervously waiting for and hoping would never come.

“Right,” he decided abruptly. “That's about it, then.”

“I can take her home?”

“You can take her home.”

I put the assembled crate in the back of my car along with Emma's comfort blanket and a toy, and then I carried Emma over to the car.

“That's it, there's a good girl.”

She was very calm, although her heart was beating very fast, and she didn't wriggle as I put her into the crate.

I turned into the main road and she started to cry. Immediately, I wanted to cry too. I couldn't bear it. I'd have to stop but not yet: the road was too busy. I'd need to turn off, but where? The crying stopped. Emma had fallen asleep.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled up outside our house and carried Emma up the garden path.

“This is going to be your new home,” I told her, carrying her into the house, fragile and tiny in my arms. As soon as we got in, I took Emma out to the toilet area and she used it. For the next few weeks I was to take Emma to the toilet area after every meal, when she woke up from a sleep and when she'd been getting overexcited.

I phoned Ian. “Babes, I've got the puppy. She's a little girl and her name's Emma, but we need some more things for her from the pet shop.”

I gave him a list of items to pick up on his way home, then carefully measured out exactly the amount of food she was supposed to have and poured it into her bowl. She sniffed at it but didn't eat any, although she did have a few sips of water before curling up and going to sleep.

Emma was awake and full of life by the time Ian came home.

“Hello, little puppy girl,” he said, kneeling down in his best work suit so he could pet her. “Welcome to your new home.”

She snuggled into him and I felt a lump in my throat. She was so perfect and so tiny.

“What have I got for you?” Ian said, and pulled a name tag, a soft blanket and a cushion bed from the pet-shop bags. “They said they could tell I was a new dad!” he said, sounding slightly miffed as he opened the third bag of presents and treats for Emma. “Look—they even had puppy milk.”

Emma immediately pounced on a brown dog toy that was almost the same size as her and started to play fight with it while making little puppy squeaks. The dog squeaked back and she sat down fast, shocked. A few hours later Ian brought the crate in from the car and carried it up the stairs. It was time for bed. Jamie had warned us we probably wouldn't get much sleep during the first few weeks, but I didn't care. We had our puppy—who cared about sleep?

“Night night, Emma,” we said, and put her in her crate at the foot of our bed. She was curled up on the small piece of blanket with the scent of her mum on it.

That night we slept with our heads at the foot of the bed so we could be as near as possible to her.

“She'll probably cry during the first night,” Jamie had said. “But don't worry. It's a big thing for a tiny puppy. It'll be the first night she hasn't spent with her mum and her brothers and sisters.”

But Emma didn't cry. She curled up and went to sleep. I tried to sleep too, but I couldn't. I didn't want to miss hearing her if she needed me, so I listened to her tiny breathing as she slept.

An hour or so later she woke up and gave a whimper.

“It's all right, Emma,” I said. “It's OK.”

I lifted her little warm body out of the crate and hurried downstairs, padding past the Christmas tree and its winking multicolored lights in the corner. We'd only just got out the back door when she did her business.

I looked up at the sky, standing in my dressing gown and overcoat underneath the frosty stars. Emma followed me on a little trip of discovery around our garden before I sat down on our arbor seat, tucked into the bushes, and lifted her onto my lap. No need to rush back to bed just yet. She snuggled into me and I undid my coat, placed her inside and did the zip up, so she peeked out like a baby kangaroo. Pretty soon she fell asleep. I looked down and knew our decision to become puppy parents had been a very good one. I was already totally in love with her.

I felt a cold spot on my face and then another. It was snowing. Just lightly. Probably not enough to settle.

“We're very pleased you've come to live with us,” I whispered.

Christmas Day with a puppy was like none I'd experienced before. For starters, it began much, much earlier. Barely was it daylight than the alarm had already gone and I'd trooped out into the garden so that Emma could do her business on her frosty toilet area. I'd gone back to bed in the hope of catching a few more Christmas winks and a snuggle with Ian, but she was yapping, jumping and eager for fun at the bottom of the stairs. She was full of the joys of only being eight weeks in this world, and, although she didn't know Christmas from any other day, even a normal day dramatically extended her experience of the world and held plenty of surprises and adventures. She trotted behind me as I got her breakfast ready: two-thirds of a bowl of Helper Dogs' food, one-third of the food she'd been eating at her breeder's. She loved her food, but even as a little puppy girl she was very ladylike, eating it delicately rather than wolfing it down as fast as she could as some puppies do.

 

Later, we'd wiped the sleep from our eyes and restored our equanimity with a small glass of bubbly, and thus our small family gathered around the tree together for the first time.

“Open this one,” Ian said, handing me a present.

Inside was a small cuddly smiling Labrador toy.

“I didn't think we'd have Emma yet,” Ian said sheepishly.

The toy Lab caught Emma's eye right away, and she began jumping and begging to play with it. Surely Ian must have bought it for her? As far as she was concerned, all nice things to play with in the world were hers.

“Can I?” I said.

“If you want to. It came from the pet shop.”

Emma already had quite a collection—her small toy box was overflowing—but we couldn't resist giving her more.

“Here you are,” I said, after checking it didn't have any parts that might be bitten off and swallowed by a rambunctious pup. Fortunately, its eyes were made of material rather than plastic buttons. It was cute but didn't look that robust. In Emma's current exuberant form, I gave it about three days. I had already been busy performing emergency surgery on a couple of toys who'd come into the sewing ER, covered in dribble and spilling their insides out after a particularly enthusiastic mauling.

Soon enough, though, Emma abandoned the Lab—whom we christened Spiky, after a peculiar tuft of hair on his brow—and turned her attention to the wrapping paper. She mainly liked the tearing sound, and attacking it as it drifted to the floor and collected in flurries around the sofa.

 

Sometimes I was shocked at how much I loved her already and how protective I was. It was an anxious love too—especially on Boxing Day when I thought I'd lost her. I left the room to answer the phone and then ran upstairs to check something on the computer. When I came back down, she was nowhere to be seen, and the toy Lab was looking lonesome and forlorn on the floor.

“Emma?” I said. She wasn't in the living room. I hurried into the kitchen. She wasn't there either, but the back door was open a crack. I went outside, scanned the garden quickly, but she wasn't there either, and I started to panic, really panic. I felt sick, and a lump rose in my throat that made it hard to breathe. She was so lovely; it wasn't hard to believe that someone would have wanted to take her and who else would be wandering around on Boxing Day except somebody bad? She was so tiny, so vulnerable, so trusting—what if she was lost? Cold and afraid.

There was a small gap in the hedge. Small enough for a tiny puppy to squeeze through if she was determined, and Emma could be very determined when she chose to be.

I ran next door and asked them to look in their back garden. No Emma there, and their back gate was shut, so she couldn't have escaped that way even if she had made it through the hedge.

I was almost crying by the time Ian walked in.

“I've lost Emma,” I said. But I hadn't.

“Look,” he said, and there she was, fast asleep, hidden among and dwarfed by her many toys piled in the corner.

I burst into tears of relief. So much for “the sensible route”—fostering a puppy rather than having one of our own. I was already far more attached than I'd thought could be possible.

 

Soon into the new year, Jack Frost dumped snow all over the East Midlands countryside, and Helper Dog classes were canceled. So, with phone assistance from Jamie and Frank, I began to teach Emma at home.

“How's it going today?” Jamie asked as he picked up the phone to another daily briefing from me.

“Great,” I told him, and filled him in on this and that.

“They can be a handful,” he said.

I looked down at Emma. I was more than happy to have my hands full with her.

“Make sure you fill in her progress chart and hopefully this snow will clear soon. Any problems give me a call.”

Emma was so eager to learn, and my heart melted as I watched her work out what she was supposed to do and tried to do it. I taught her commands for “sit,” “down” and “roll over” (but only on the carpet as I didn't want her rolling over on the shiny new—but hard—laminate floor). Jamie advised leaving her collar on at all times so she would just accept wearing it without becoming stressed.

The one thing I wasn't supposed to teach her was how to climb stairs. A little puppy's joints are easily damaged by overstretching, but sometimes a puppy's need to explore takes over, and one day I came out of the kitchen to find her two steps up. Then, the following day, she was five steps toward the sky and attempting the next when I caught her. At the sound of my tutting, however, she stopped and sat there, and it took me a moment to realize that the intrepid puppy, so keen to go up, hadn't the first clue about how to get down again—except by looking plaintive and being lifted down by Mum. As soon as he could, Ian bought a stair gate. Another few pounds to the DIY store; I felt they should be rolling the red carpet out next time we went.

Jamie had explained to me how the puppies were monitored for their suitability for differently abled partners. If the dog has strong joints, it could go to people who needed tasks doing where the dog had to stand on its hind legs a lot. He introduced me to Denise, a lady confined to a wheelchair with limited mobility in her arms, and her dog, Yogi.

“He'd been so well trained that he fitted in with us straightaway,” she said, “and ever since the first day I brought him home he's been turning the lights on and off for me. Sometimes if it's cloudy he does it without asking!” She smiled at the recollection. “He also presses the button at the pedestrian crossing, no problem. Before, I had to wait until someone came along and ask them to do it for me. Strangers in the street are always amazed when he does it. It makes me laugh to see their shocked faces. I laugh a lot more now I have him with me. He's so funny.”

Yogi put his head on Denise's lap and she stroked him fondly.

 

Never mind the stairs, Emma still had a long way to go in all aspects of her training. She and I picked our way through the snowy garden—and, when it was blizzarding, around the living room—so that she would become habituated to being on the lead and resist the temptation to chew it. Plus there was the continual toilet training on the bark-chip area. She was pretty much toilet-trained within a week of arriving with us, apart from the odd accident, of course. Often, though, these were my fault for not taking her outside when she was most likely in need. Emma loved the beautiful snowy garden, though I only let her out for short stretches of time as I didn't want her to get too cold.

Helper Dogs insists that puppies are only given one minute's walk for each week of their life, so at eight weeks Emma could have an eight-minute walk—but not on the road or the park or anywhere that a dog who hadn't been vaccinated might have been. We had to keep her under virtual puppy house arrest until she was old enough to have her second round of inoculations. I loved the little puppy-dog sounds she made as she ran across the snowy garden or “talked” to Spiky, who was almost her equal in size. Toys were pounced on with delight and dragged through the snow, and always, as tiny puppies do, she needed to be within a few feet of me. If I moved across the garden, she'd be there next to me in a flash.