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

He arrived on Friday evenings, sat down on a chair in the corner and hardly moved until it was time to go back on the Sunday. I tried to chat to him about what had happened during the week, about the news on TV, about the children, but I got monosyllabic responses. He only spoke when he wanted something from me: food or drink, or for the children to stop being so noisy.

It was very hard to explain to them why their daddy was so different from the fun, playful daddy they remembered. I just kept the story simple: he’d had an accident and hurt his head; he needed peace and quiet for it to get better again; they had to be careful not to bother him. They seemed to take it at face value. He was still their daddy, even if he was a bit grumpy and didn’t get down on the floor to play Lego as he used to.

Every now and again I would try to set up a game that we could all play together, but Allen had no interest. He wasn’t really capable of much.

‘Do you want to play ball with us?’ I asked once, thinking that he might be able to do throwing and catching with the kids without too much effort while sitting in a chair – but I soon realized that was another skill he had lost. When I threw the ball, he didn’t have the instinct to raise his arms and catch it so it bounced off his chest. I was throwing it at him instead of to him.

After a while the children tended to give him a wide berth in case he shouted at them, or tried to grab them for a hug and squeezed too hard, misjudging his own strength.

There wasn’t a big community of naval wives round our way. Army wives all live together on the base and entire regiments are moved at the same time so they are very close and able to support each other in times of trouble. In the Navy, families live off the base and are moved around one by one so you don’t get to know each other in the same way. However, my wonderful next-door neighbours Julie and Heather or another friend Judy would have the children any time I asked and that was a godsend.

I called Allen’s mum, of course, and his sister Suzanne, but they had their own lives to lead and couldn’t be much help with his care. I later found out that his mum was struggling with the early stages of MS round about the time Allen was first back in hospital in the UK, so that might explain why she didn’t often come to visit him. Maybe the drive would have been too much for her. I was the one who had to take responsibility, along with the staff at Headley Court, and that’s just the way it was.

Even though I didn’t have a job I was rushing around at full stretch, looking after the children during the week, running the house and buying in food so that everything was calm and ordered when Allen got back at the weekend. He didn’t like to see mess or disorder.

I remember I watched news footage of uninjured soldiers returning from the Gulf with smiles from ear to ear, kissing their wives and picking up their children, and I wondered if their lives would go back to normal. I was yearning for my husband and my old life but at the same time I was beginning to lose hope that things would ever go back to the way they used to be.

About two months after the accident, I found out that Allen’s salary had been stopped. I didn’t realize at first because it was paid into his personal bank account, then a direct debit came across to my account to pay for household bills, rent, food and so forth. Most naval wives operate this way. You can’t have joint accounts in case a situation arises where you need a joint signature for something while your husband is away at sea for months. When his income was stopped, the direct debit kept coming but I found out from statements that his account was getting seriously overdrawn.

I rang Collingwood naval base to request his pay slips and found that he had only been paid for the first two weeks of August. His income had been stopped on the 16th, the day he was injured, because when he went into hospital he wasn’t attached to a ship or a base so he wasn’t clocked as being at work. It seemed intolerable that on top of my anxiety about Allen’s injury I had to worry about money as well. I ranted and raved to the authorities at Collingwood until eventually, a couple of months after the accident, they sorted out the problems and got him back on the payroll, although minus the extra supplement he had been getting for being at sea. It was stressful but in a way I was glad to have something practical to keep me occupied since it seemed there was nothing I could do for Allen at the time. Everywhere I turned, I hit a brick wall.

Those early weeks and months are like a thick fog and I didn’t feel I was coping at all. I was frightened and vulnerable but I was angry as well and I suppose that drove me. First of all I was determined to find out exactly what had happened to Allen and see if there would be any kind of compensation for the injuries he’d suffered to help us pay for his care in the future. I consulted a lawyer, who wrote to the captain of Allen’s ship.

A reply came on 1 November and it was only then I found out how the accident had happened and that he hadn’t been on some unauthorized ‘jolly’, as had been implied at first.

Ex-pats who lived in the countries bordering the Gulf liked to entertain service personnel when they pulled into port. I remember Allen mentioning this before. He’d said that none of them were especially keen on those evenings, when conversation could be an effort, but it was considered good PR to go along. On 16 August his ship was moored in Muscat in the Gulf of Oman. Some ex-pats issued an invitation for two men to come to dinner and I’m not sure whether Allen was volunteered in his absence or if he just didn’t step back quickly enough to avoid it, but he ended up being press-ganged into it, along with another Chief Petty Officer.

The ex-pats picked them up from the ship in a four-wheel drive. The captain didn’t know precisely what happened, but it seems that there was an accident, the car overturned and Allen’s head slammed at high speed into the roof. He said that after the accident the driver had made every effort to make sure Allen was all right and had taken him back to the ship, from where he was transferred to hospital. However, he said, no one could recall the names or address of the ex-pats he had been visiting so we couldn’t contact them to try and claim compensation through their insurance company.