Endal: How one extraordinary dog brought a family back from the brink

The whole time we were arguing, I kept my eye on the spot where the ring had landed, right in the middle of a snowdrift. I’d wanted to make a point but I didn’t want to lose it.

‘Come on,’ he said finally. ‘Can we kiss and make up? I’m sorry we ruined your evening and I promise I’ll make it up to you.’

I felt safe with him, and life was always fun when he was around, so there was no question that I would forgive him. We both got down on our hands and knees and scrabbled around in the snow until I found the ring, sparkling away in the sunlight. Allen slipped it back on to my finger and we fell into each other’s arms.

We’d planned to wait a year before getting married, but in August 1983 he was told he was being posted overseas. If we got married first, I could go with him and we’d be allocated married quarters, so that’s what we decided to do. It was only after we were already committed that they told us the posting was going to be Scotland rather than some far-flung sunny place as I’d hoped. Meanwhile, I had just three months to plan and organize a wedding for around a hundred people, so it was all a bit frenzied and chaotic.

We wanted to get married in a big Italian church in Wilton, the town where I grew up, and the only date it was available when Allen was also free was 5 November. It was a very traditional wedding, with my sisters, nieces and nephews in the bridal party. My sister Jenny made all the bridesmaids’ dresses and it was so cold in the church that she left room for everyone to wear thermal vests underneath. I saw a beautiful picture in a wedding magazine of some swans made out of choux pastry and asked the local bakery to recreate them but on the day they came out looking like Loch Ness monsters rather than swans. Everyone said how appropriate that was since we were going to Scotland.

The day flashed past for me. We had the reception at the Pembroke Arms hotel opposite the church, and then we dashed off to catch an overnight sleeper up to Scotland just as everyone around the country was enjoying their bonfires and fireworks displays. Allen’s friends entered into the spirit of the night by putting bangers in the exhaust pipe of our car and placing kippers in the car heater, which wafted out intense fishy smells during the journey.

Our honeymoon consisted of a week together in Scotland in naval quarters, where we had no heating, no TV and single duvets on the bed, but it gave us the chance to explore a bit. After that Allen had to go off on a training course and I went back down to my mum’s, so it was 16 December 1983 before we moved into our first marital home together, a lovely three-bed maisonette in Rosyth with views over the Firth of Forth. I found a job working at a local hospital and joined the fitness club for naval wives, and started to get used to my new life.

We decided to get a dog as we both loved them. Allen had had pet dogs as a boy, and our shifts could be juggled so that it would never be left on its own for more than a couple of hours. We went to the Rescue Centre together and picked out a scruffy black Labrador cross, who was about four or five months old. We reckoned he was probably an unwanted Christmas present. No matter how much you tried to tidy him up, he always looked messy and disreputable, so the obvious name for him was Scruffy. He was a spirited and demanding dog from the start, but we enjoyed taking him for long walks in the surrounding countryside, and shared the responsibility for his care with each other.

Around June 1984, they wanted to give me a routine chest X-ray at work and asked if there was any chance I could be pregnant. I had come off the pill and my periods were a bit erratic so I didn’t think there was, but they decided to run a pregnancy test to be on the safe side and, to my complete astonishment, it was positive.

I couldn’t get through to Allen on the phone to tell him, so I went to Mothercare and bought a tiny babygro and when he walked in the door that evening I just handed it to him and said, ‘Guess what?’

He was over the moon – we both were. We thought the Rosyth posting was going to last three years and Allen would be on shore so it was an ideal time for us to have a family. But only a week later we were told that the following April he would have to leave his job there and go to sea on a ship that was based in Portsmouth. I was beginning to experience one of the realities of life as a naval wife: unpredictability! Whatever plans you make for the future, you always have to be ready to change them at the drop of a hat.

Almost exactly a year to the day after moving to Scotland, by now heavily pregnant, I turned around and had to move back down to Portsmouth in the week before Christmas. There was all the palaver of packing up our stuff, finding acceptable accommodation, transporting the dog and changing my antenatal appointments from one hospital to another.

Baby Liam was born on Valentine’s Day 1985 and thankfully Allen was able to be with me. Nurses make terrible patients. As I lay in pain in the maternity unit, I noticed that the nurse looking after me had put the straps in the wrong place and I kept worrying about when they were going to give me the promised epidural. Would they be too late? Then the nurse confessed that she hadn’t delivered a baby for twenty years and was on a refresher course, which didn’t do a lot for my confidence! But all went well and I brought home my beautiful little boy.

Allen was fantastic in those early weeks. I fed the baby and he did everything else: nappy changing, winding, housework, meals for us, laundry, shopping. He was always good around the house, and he obviously doted on Liam as well. He had a real knack with babies.

Sadly, Scruffy the dog wasn’t quite so good. After the move he began chewing things and being generally obstreperous. If I was going out, I had to leave him shut in the kitchen, but the final straw came when I got home one day to find he had chewed up the entire base of the door frame in our rented house. I realized I just couldn’t cope any more. Allen was due to go to sea when Liam was ten or eleven weeks old and I knew I couldn’t manage a destructive dog and a new baby at the same time. We agonized over it but I was feeling very tired and run down after the birth and I didn’t have the energy to try and retrain a boisterous dog. If Allen had been there we would have managed together, but it just felt like too much for me on my own, so finally we agreed that Scruffy would go back to the RSPCA. When we phoned them, they were in no doubt that they would find another home for him quickly, and that settled it.

Allen was quite upset about it, especially since he was away on the ship when the call came to tell me to take Scruffy in to their kennels so he never got the chance to say goodbye. I was sad too, but my overwhelming emotion was relief that I wouldn’t be clearing up the mess any more and could focus on my new baby.

Liam was only a few months old when I discovered I was pregnant again. It was totally unplanned and a huge shock, if I’m honest. I was still learning how to cope with one baby and couldn’t imagine doing so with two. How did other women ever manage?

I put my back out really badly during the pregnancy, while carrying Liam on one hip and wheeling a shopping trolley across a supermarket car park. My entire spine just seized up and I couldn’t even get Liam into his car seat. I had to place him on the floor of the hatchback boot and drive home really carefully, and then get a neighbour to carry him into the house. A midwife came round and told me I needed complete bed rest, which is easier said than done when you’ve got a one-year-old crawling around the house. Allen took some time off to help, but that meant he didn’t get so much leave when Zoe was born, which was very hard on both of us. My sister Marion came to stay for the first couple of weeks, and returned whenever she could take days off work, but I still had to manage most of the time on my own.

Liam had been a lovely lazy baby, who slept through the night at five days old, took his feeds well and was happy to have a nap whenever you put him in his cot. Zoe was more difficult, though. She flatly refused to feed from me after about two weeks. I started to bottle-feed her, but if I took the teat away to wind her she wouldn’t have the same teat back again. Feeding her was a complex business, and she cried a lot.

She’d had a very quick delivery and, looking back, I think she may have suffered some trauma during the birth, so perhaps she was in pain. Nowadays I might have taken her to a cranial osteopath but I didn’t think of that back then. All I knew was that she wailed endlessly and nothing seemed to calm her. At night I’d walk round the house holding and rocking her, then in the daytime I’d put her in the car and take her out for a drive to try and get her to stop crying and go to sleep.

Meanwhile I had Liam crawling round my ankles, having to be watched constantly in case he tried to stick his fingers in an electric socket or bashed his head. Allen was away on a long trip right through this period and I had no idea when he would be back. I was sleep-deprived, my back still hurt, the housework started to pile up and I felt increasingly desperate. I’ve always been someone who copes, who just gets on with things, but I knew I was reaching my limits.

Then one morning, Zoe just cried non-stop. She refused to feed, she didn’t want cuddles, her nappy was dry and I was at my wits’ end. I put both babies in the car and drove round for an hour but still she wouldn’t stop crying. I lifted her out of the car in her car seat to bring her back into the house, and suddenly it all got too much.

‘Will you just shut up?’ I screamed, and I shook the car seat as hard as I could. Immediately afterwards, I put the seat down and sank on to the floor beside it, horrified at myself. What if I had hurt her? She was still crying but not so loudly. It was then I knew I needed help. This couldn’t go on.

I called the health visitor and she came round to visit. At first she tried to be reassuring, saying that it was normal for a new mother to find it difficult to cope, especially with two so close together. She said she thought it sounded as though I had post-natal depression and maybe I should get some antidepressants from my doctor. It was an interesting thought that hadn’t occurred to me. I’d assumed it was all my fault, that I was doing something wrong or I just wasn’t suited to motherhood, but maybe there was a physical cause. Maybe I wasn’t going mad after all.

‘I’m scared that I might really hurt her,’ I said, and told the health visitor about how I had shaken Zoe’s car seat.

She listened quietly and asked me more questions about exactly what happened. I think she must have been seriously worried because she went off to make some phone calls then came back and said: ‘It might be a good idea to give you a break for a couple of weeks so you can catch up on your sleep and get your strength back. How would you feel if we took Zoe into temporary foster care?’

I was shocked to the core. Did that mean she didn’t think I was capable of looking after my baby? Having a child taken into care seemed a terrible stigma.

‘Just think of it as a bit of help with babysitting. You’ll be able to visit her whenever you like, but these people are experienced parents who should be able to get a feeding and sleeping routine established for you. She can come back home as soon as you’re feeling better.’

I was flooded with anxieties. What would Allen say? Would he think I had failed as a mother? Is that how everyone would see me? But I couldn’t think of an alternative, so I agreed.

My doctor diagnosed me as having severe post-natal depression, and said he thought it had started after Liam’s birth and got worse after Zoe’s. I was relieved to have a cast-iron excuse for my behaviour, but still desperately ashamed that I had been unable to cope.

The foster family were very kind people. They lived nearby so I could go round and visit Zoe whenever I wanted. She stayed there for five or six weeks, and after she came back to live with me again they continued to look after her one day a week to give me a break. I genuinely don’t know how I could have got through that period without their help.

Still, it was several months before I could scrape myself back up off the floor and manage to feed both babies, get them in the car and go down to the local shops for some groceries. It was hard even to get out of my dressing gown some mornings. I worried that people would be watching me the whole time for signs that I was cracking up, and that they would be keeping an eye on the kids to look for bruises or signs of malnutrition. I’d lost confidence in my ability to care for myself, never mind these two alien little beings. I felt anxious whenever I had to go out of the house and started having panic attacks over the least little things, but gradually, with lots of help from my doctor and health visitor and those wonderful foster parents, I got back on track again.

Allen came back to work on shore when Zoe was a year old, but he was based in Bath from Monday to Friday and we only saw him at weekends. With that job he was promoted to Chief Petty Officer, and in 1987 we moved to a nicer house in a place called Emsworth, between Chichester and Portsmouth. Once the kids were at nursery school I went to work part-time in a nursing home on Hayling Island, and I really enjoyed it there. You can make a big difference to someone’s final years by finding the time to stop and chat with them, doing their hair and such like, and it was a fulfilling job for me. It helped to make me feel like a capable person again, so was very good for my battered confidence.

When Allen announced in 1990 that he’d volunteered for the Gulf War, we didn’t discuss the possibility of him being killed or injured but I suppose it was in the back of our minds. I resigned from my job and during the last weeks before he left we spent a lot of quality time together with the kids. They’d just got bikes so we taught them how to ride them. We had day trips to London and a holiday in Center Parcs and we had loads of fun, but always with the shadow of the war hanging over us. I’d switch off the TV or radio if the news came on to avoid hearing about any casualties or helicopter crashes or the speculation that was rife at the time that Saddam Hussein might use poison gas against our troops.

Some of my favourite family memories come from that period when it was just the four of us enjoying time together. Allen hadn’t come from a particularly close family, but I always thought it was important to get down on the floor and play with the kids, to take them on outings, and for us all to have special family Christmases and celebrations together. I liked creating a close-knit unit, with our own family jokes and traditions and games. I’ve got lots of pictures in my head of us all smiling and messing about in those last weeks before he set sail, and they’re very precious.

Allen set off in April, but in early July I was invited to go and join him for a holiday in Singapore and Penang. I was reluctant at first because I’d never left the children for any length of time before, but my sister Marion offered to have them and finally I said I would go. I wrapped a little gift for them to open each day that I was away and I phoned them as well, but it was hard for me to leave a five-year-old and a six-year-old. They were still so young. In retrospect, however, I’m so glad I did have that last, very special time in the sun with Allen, just the two of us. The memories are bitter-sweet but I’m so happy I have them to treasure.

We’d talked about the future before, but I remember we had more discussions about our plans while we were in Malaysia. Basically we decided that I would continue to move around following Allen’s postings until the children were at secondary school, at which point I would stay in one place with them so their education didn’t suffer. A lot of naval kids went to boarding school but I wasn’t in favour of that; I wanted to keep them at home with me till they were at least eighteen. Allen would serve his contractual twenty-two years with the Navy; then we would decide where we wanted to live and buy our dream home there. We’d only be in our forties and we could start a whole new life doing whatever we wanted.

It’s ironic, I suppose. I think it was John Lennon who said, ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.’ I knew Allen was going into a war zone but the Navy weren’t supposed to be directly involved in the fighting because it had been a ground and air war, driving the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, and now the main action was over and they were just on peacekeeping duty. It never occurred to me that Allen might be injured because of that. Anyway, he was too good at his job. I suppose I couldn’t even contemplate him being hurt because I needed him so much. He was the stable one, and I was still prone to bouts of anxiety and depression that he helped to pull me out of. That was the dynamic of our relationship at the time.

And then the news of his accident filtered through and everything changed overnight.

CHAPTER FIVE Allen (#ulink_7c9f12eb-a668-5043-a6de-0e8a8739bc05)

It was a huge shock the first time Sandra took me home for the weekend after the accident. I’d overheard them saying that she was a nurse but I was still anxious she wouldn’t know how to look after me properly. Shouldn’t there be a doctor there as well? What if I needed help with things like undressing myself? Would this woman do it? Was she really my wife?

Then, in the car, she mentioned that we had children, and that was most peculiar. I didn’t feel like a person who had children. I had no memory of them, no idea of their names or what ages they were.

When we got back to the house, I didn’t remember any of it, but there were photos of Sandra, the children and me all over the walls so I knew I was in the right place. When would my memory come back?

Then the door opened and two children burst in shouting and squealing. I couldn’t bear the noise they made. I didn’t feel as though I was their father. There was no bond there, no memories of when they were babies; they were strangers, and the two of them seemed to make the noise of twenty children. It drilled into my ears and echoed round my head.

‘Go away!’ I waved my hand, and Sandra came rushing out, concerned. ‘Go away!’ I gesticulated at her as well. My speech was thick and slurred but I could tell they understood me.

I had a horrible itchy rash that was spreading up my body and itching constantly and I fretted about that most of the weekend. Could it be a strange tropical disease? Had I contracted something in one of the hospitals they’d put me in? Was it an allergic reaction to the medication I was on? Or was it a symptom of some serious new development in my condition?

I hated being helped to get dressed, all my food being served for me, and the fact that there was very little I could do. I’d flown all over the world fixing battleships at the drop of a hat, and now I couldn’t make a cup of coffee for myself because my hands kept twitching and it would have spilled everywhere.

I found that I couldn’t remember words. I could bark out an order – such as ‘Coffee!’ – but when I noticed a cake on the countertop and wanted a piece, I couldn’t remember the word for it to ask for some. Sometimes I’d try and I’d confuse Sandra by coming out with the wrong word – ‘kite’ or ‘door’ perhaps. Or I’d just point and growl. I certainly couldn’t speak in sentences, or remember any of the niceties such as ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.

Sandra was incredibly patient that weekend. She tried to jog my memory by showing me photos from a holiday we’d had in Singapore and Malaysia. I recognized myself in the pictures and I could tell that we looked happy in them, but they brought back no emotions. I didn’t remember being in that place. I only felt frustration at the barriers in my brain, huge impenetrable walls that I couldn’t bypass.

A doctor had explained to me that after it’s been damaged the brain favours some types of memories over others. The ‘favoured areas’ are different for everyone. Some might keep their love of music, or sporting prowess, or the ability to do complex mathematical calculations. As for me, I think I retained a lot of my technical knowledge, because I could remember precise details about the weapons systems I’d worked on in my various postings for the Navy, but I’d lost all my memories of the people in my life.