by David Michie
In the rough and ready chaos of discarded pizza boxes and crushed cans of Fosters beer, dirty laundry and the ever-present, pungent aroma of kipper, the house was completely given over to corgis. We were everywhere: under the kitchen bench, where cupboard doors had been removed to create kennels; nesting behind sitting room sofas; suckling and scratching under the Grimsleys’ bed.
On the rare occasion I came to the attention of Mrs Grimsley, she’d jab her cigarette towards me in distaste. ‘Still not standing,’ she’d say with a sigh, exhaling a stream of acrid smoke. Mr Grimsley, a very large man in worn, denim overalls with watery blue eyes, would stare at me in slack-jawed silence.
‘You’re going to have to take it down the shed,’ Mrs Grimsley would instruct.
‘Give it time,’ Mr Grimsley might say. ‘Perhaps he’s a late bloomer.’
‘That’s always been your problem, Reg.’ Mrs Grimsley’s voice was brittle. ‘Too soft. Waste of Kibbles, that one.’
None of the corgis knew exactly what happened in the shed. Other dogs were said to have been taken there in the past—all of them stunted in some way. The only thing known for certain was that once a corgi went to the shed, it was never seen again.
On Saturday mornings, the Grimsleys would be transformed. Mr Grimsley appeared downstairs first, having squeezed uncomfortably into a dark suit, followed by pencil-thin Mrs Grimsley, all blonde hair and red lipstick, talking in her Kennel Club voice. ‘Are Tarquin and Annabelle in the car?’ she’d want to know. ‘In their show collars? Where’s Tudor’s pedigree?’
A lengthy and restive day indoors for all the dogs would be followed by an even-lengthier evening, waiting for the Grimsleys to get home from whichever home county they had visited, usually followed by a lock-in at the local pub, The Crown. Being small and vulnerable, I usually avoided the scamper and tumble of the other corgis, only venturing far from the kitchen cupboard in the reassuring presence of my eldest brother, Jasper.
‘Hurry up, Number Five.’ He’d cock his head playfully, trying to coax me out; I was the only corgi without a name in the house. ‘There’s a whole week’s laundry to get our teeth into!’
In the early hours of a Sunday morning, Mrs Grimsley would lurch through the front door, Mr Grimsley stumbling after her in his great, dark, tent of a suit, with Tarquin and Annabelle plodding behind, exhausted by a day trapped in cage and car. ‘Don’t you just love corgis?’ Mrs Grimsley would slump into a chair, grabbing banknotes out of her handbag and tossing them up in the air so that they fluttered, confetti-like, all around her. ‘Eight hundred pounds! And another seven pups as good as sold. Oh, Annabelle, my little darling!’ she’d croon in a way that she never did for me. ‘What a wonder you are!’
One by one, as the older pups reached a certain age, they were taken out to meet their new owners in the nearby park. The Grimsleys avoided having buyers to their home, the front door of which was hard to access on account of the two Morris Minors rusting on bricks in the driveway. They had been a decaying fixture for as long as anyone could remember, awaiting the day when Mr Grimsley would begin to restore them to classic glory.
On the rare occasion that a visitor unavoidably came to the house, I was hastily shut in the upstairs box room. ‘Ruin our reputation, it would,’ Mrs Grimsley used to declare, ‘having this one seen with its ear. We can’t have people thinking we breed bitzers.’
There could be no harsher condemnation than for a dog than to be described as a ‘bitzer’, as the Grimsleys referred to dogs of uncertain breeding—a bit of this and a bit of that.
As the weeks passed, Mrs Grimsley took more and more of the older dogs to the park, returning alone, an unused lead wrapped around one hand and a bulging wallet in the other. Then my own immediate brothers and sisters began to be sold off. The once-cramped conditions under the kitchen sink became strangely spacious, the reassuring crush of bodies less dense.
As I became more and more visible, I was the focus of the same, sinister conversation. Mrs Grimsley’s demand that I be taken to the shed became increasingly shrill. Mr Grimsley dropped all talk of me being a late bloomer. ‘I’ll see to it,’ he’d promise her, darkly.
One day I turned to Jasper and asked what Mr Grimsley meant. ‘Hard to guess, Number Five, but I wouldn’t worry about it.’ He looked away. ‘According to our mother, he’s been saying he’ll see to the two Morris Minors since the time of our great-grandparents.’
I knew Jasper was trying to be reassuring. But I could sense his disquiet.
And Mrs Grimsley wasn’t letting go. Things reached an all-time low the afternoon that she returned alone from having taken Jasper himself to the park, with the rolled-up lead in one hand and an envelope in the other. I realised what had happened, but still stared foolishly at the front door, as though I could somehow will my big brother back to the house. Eventually I looked up. Mrs Grimsley was staring at me with an expression of cold determination.
‘It’s no good, Reg!’ she shouted to her husband, who was coming down the stairs. ‘You’re going to have to take it down the shed.’
‘But . . .’
‘Gone on long enough.’ She was insistent. ‘Today!’
‘I’m just on my way out . . .’
‘Right now.’
‘Alright.’ He flapped his heavy arms in surrender. ‘Alright. When I get back from The Crown.’
‘I’ll hold you to it.’
‘I’ll see to it then.’
Returning to the cupboard under the kitchen sink, I slumped down in a state of abject misery. Even though it was hard being a stunted, unloved corgi in a house filled with bright-eyed pedigrees who were lavished with affection, I preferred staying where I was than to facing the unknown horror at the bottom of the garden.
Mrs Grimsley was watching EastEnders in the front room when there was a knocking at the door.
‘Who is it?’ she called from the hallway.
‘I’ve come about a corgi!’ A woman’s voice and it sounded clear and authoritative.
‘Hang on a minute.’
Finding me in the kitchen, Mrs Grimsley closed the door firmly before going to greet her visitor.
‘I hear you may have a puppy for sale.’
‘All gone,’ interrupted Mrs Grimsley briskly. ‘I can put you on the waiting list. We’re expecting a litter next month.’
‘This particular puppy,’ said the other woman, ‘has a floppy ear.’
There was a pause while Mrs Grimsley inhaled. ‘Don’t know where you heard that,’ she pronounced smokily. ‘The pedigree of our corgis is impeccable.’
‘I’m quite sure it is.’ The other woman seemed altogether unruffled by her reaction.
‘We don’t breed duds,’ insisted Mrs Grimsley.
‘A floppy ear is only a problem if you plan to show. We have no such plans.’
‘Don’t know where this tittle tattle comes from.’
‘Mr Grimsley, actually. At The Crown.’
‘The bloody idiot!’ screeched Mrs Grimsley in a voice that was definitely not Kennel Club.
‘Look.’ The other woman’s voice was firm. ‘I’ll pay you a thousand pounds for him.’
The pause that followed didn’t last very long before I heard the sound of approaching footsteps. The kitchen door opened. For the first time since I was a very new puppy, Mrs Grimsley picked me up. ‘He’s actually our little favourite,’ she crooned in a voice she’d never used before with me—the one she only adopted when cuddling her favourites. As she turned, I found myself looking into the kindly face of a very beautiful woman in her late thirties. I pricked up my ears—well, the left one, and half of the right.
‘Good.’ The woman reached into her handbag and retrieved a clip of crisp, new banknotes, which she held out.
Mrs Grimsley looked at the notes only briefly before taking them in her right hand and thrusting me into the visitor’s arms. ‘Promise not to say where you got him,’ she demanded, in her smoker’s voice.
‘Fine.’
‘You won’t.’
I immediately felt safe in the arms of the visitor. She held me to her chest in a manner that suggested she was used to holding dogs. Along with a faint scent of lavender, I sensed a calm reassurance that couldn’t have been more different from Mrs Grimsley.
‘If you mention me . . .’ Mrs Grimsley was following us out of the house, ‘I’ll deny all knowledge. I’ll say you’re a lying toerag.’
‘Oh, you needn’t trouble yourself on that score, Mrs Grimsley,’ said the woman, stepping across the short front yard and into the street. ‘I’m quite happy to forget that we ever met.’
The drive from the Grimsleys’ terrace house in Slough to Windsor Castle wasn’t a long one. Fewer than twenty minutes in the car separated what was to become my new life from my old. But even though I was in a dog carrier in the back of a car—both unfamiliar experiences—driven by a woman who was a complete stranger, I felt a powerful sense of relief; compared to being taken down to the shed, it couldn’t be as bad. Could it?
I won’t pretend to remember much of my first arrival at Windsor Castle. In the twilight, it was all a confusion of gates and security checks and dark passages smelling of beeswax until, all of a sudden, I was in a spacious, red-carpeted hallway, hung with paintings and lit by chandeliers. My rescuer, who I discovered was called Lady Tara, the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, walked purposefully along the hallway, with me still in the carrier, before making her way up a staircase.
These were nothing like the stairs I was used to. Not only were they very much wider and more luxuriously carpeted, there was not a single pile of unwashed laundry, not even a crushed beer can to be seen. Nor was there the faintest tang of kipper. My first impression of the castle was also how vast the rooms were . . . and how empty of corgis.
I was suddenly startled by a soldier, armoured in ancient chain mail, who was standing at attention on the staircase landing. And I was somewhat surprised that Tara completely ignored him, brushing past him as if he weren’t there.
After walking along another broad corridor, similarly void of dogs, Tara took me into a suite of rooms before coming to a door that was slightly ajar. Reaching into the carrier, she lifted me out, before knocking gently.
We walked across a very large room, at the other side of which a short, silver-haired woman was working at her desk. The room had dark, wood-panelled walls, the only light coming from a desk lamp, which glowed warmly, illuminating the woman’s features. Even at first glance, my fellow subject, I knew there was something different about her—something that set her apart. It didn’t have to do with her appearance so much as an invisible—but no less tangible—sense of presence.
As soon as she saw us approaching, she rose to her feet. ‘So, this is him?’ she asked, coming to meet us.
‘Yes ma’am.’ Him, I noted, not the it by which Mrs Grimsley had always referred to me.
Stepping closer, the lady, who I would soon learn was the Queen, beamed as she reached out to stroke my head. ‘Handsome little chap. Beautiful markings.’
I responded to her attention by pricking up one and a half ears.
‘Oh, I see. Gives him such character, don’t you think?’
Too young to understand exactly what she meant, I knew from her tone of voice that the Queen seemed to be saying that my floppy ear was a good thing. What an utterly amazing and wonderful idea! I was immediately licking her hand. She chuckled. ‘Friendly little fellow.’
‘Hard to believe what they were planning to do to him,’ observed Tara.
‘Yes, but we shouldn’t judge,’ replied the Queen. ‘Not everyone enjoys our circumstances.’
In the pause that followed, I wondered what those plans had been, beyond my being taken to the shed. It would be months before I discovered the full story and how, the moment that Tara told Her Majesty about my impending fate at the hands of Mr Grimsley, she had been dispatched to rescue me.
‘I’m sure he’s going to settle in very well,’ said the Queen.
‘Would you like me to take him down to join the others?’
‘He’s probably had enough to deal with for one day. He can stay with me tonight,’ Her Majesty said with a nod, before turning back towards her desk.
It took me a while to realise that I had a new home. A permanent one. It seemed quite surreal that, instead of the kitchen cupboard, I had been transported to this strange place with its empty rooms and not a whiff of cigarette smoke, much less stale beer.
Taking me to the private sitting room next door, Tara produced a bowl of food more delicious than even the finest the Grimsleys used to serve to their champion pedigrees. I wolfed it down in short order and took a few laps of water. A very comfortable basket was brought for me to sleep in. I gathered that the sitting room was where I was to remain for the time being.
My feelings about this new place were strangely mixed. My initial relief was soon followed by acute loneliness—for the first time in my life I was without a very large and extended family and, most especially, without Jasper. As a very small, underdeveloped pup, on my very first night away from home, I wished I could be back in familiar surroundings—without the threat of the shed, of course.
Tara looked in on me several times that evening, always dependably comforting, as did several men I came to know, both individually and collectively, as ‘security’. Nevertheless, I was feeling quite bereft by the time I heard the Queen saying goodnight to a man called Philip. As soon as she came through the door, I jumped out of my basket and hurried over to her, tail stump wagging. She bent down and made a great fuss of me, before coming over to pick up the basket, which she took through to her bedroom, placing it near the side of her bed.
I watched her return later in her bedclothes. Sitting up against the pillows she closed her eyes, and for quite some time remained silent. Her Majesty, I soon came to realise, is a deeply spiritual person. Not in a way that needs to be voiced, but one that is implicit in her actions. By the time she switched off the light, a peacefulness had descended not only on her, but on the whole room. ‘Welcome to Windsor, little one,’ she whispered in the dark, to reassure me. ‘And goodnight.’
The reassurance worked. For a while. Then, the pitch blackness of the room; the unfamiliar sounds echoing through the castle corridors; the lack of half a dozen other corgis pressed close to me under the kitchen sink; even the absence of the pong of kipper made me feel somehow alone and adrift. I whimpered. The Queen shushed me. I was quiet for a while. Then I whimpered again. ‘We can’t have this,’ said the Queen, getting out of bed, and lifting me up on top of it.
Back at the Grimsleys, only the champion pedigrees used to sleep with the humans. And even though at that point I had no idea who Her Majesty was, I still realised I was being accorded a very special privilege. Snuggling close, I thought about how she had rescued me from the Grimsleys. About how she was giving me a new home. About how she cared for me, even though I had a floppy ear—perhaps even because of it.
Gratitude was surging through me and I showed my love in the way that we dogs know best: I licked her face. ‘Oh, no!’ she chuckled, wriggling away. Thinking she wanted to play, I wriggled after her. ‘If this carries on . . .’ her tone had changed, ‘I’ll have to take you downstairs.’ Downstairs was not a place I had any wish to be so, instead, I settled halfway down the bed. Which was how, my fellow subject, on my first night away from under the Grimsleys’ kitchen sink, I slept with the Queen of the United Kingdom.
In the days that followed, I learned more about the world than I could ever have imagined. I was fortunate to have as my mentor, the lifelong and most faithful companion to the Queen, Winston. I met him and Margaret on my very first morning when we were all fed breakfast in the staff kitchen, where the royal corgis were traditionally fed, and from where we were allowed into the staff garden to answer the call of nature. As it happened, my naivety about royal protocol served me well. Coming from a house full o
f corgis, as soon as I saw them I wasted no time in introducing myself by sniffing their backsides, my tail stump wagging vigorously.
Margaret, who had no time for stand-offish blue bloods who thought rather a lot of themselves, decided on that first meeting that I was a corgi with whom she could do business. Winston, at the advanced age of twelve, saw in me a younger version of himself and had soon adopted me as his protégé. It was he who patiently explained the facts of my new life.
‘Strange name for a person, “The Queen”,’ I observed that first morning at Windsor Castle.
‘It’s not a name, it’s a title,’ he corrected me. Having started the day with a hearty breakfast of biscuits, the two of us were snuffling round our breakfast bowls in the hope of finding a displaced morsel.
‘Title.’ I pondered for a bit. ‘You mean like “Champion Pedigree”?’
‘Indeed.’ Discovering a fragment of biscuit near the skirting board, Winston had quickly licked it into his mouth and was crunching with immense satisfaction. ‘The Queen is the pre-eminent of all champion pedigrees. She is a direct descendent of William the Conqueror—1066 and all that.’
I didn’t know what he meant exactly. Or, even, at all. And a pedigree of a thousand years was quite beyond my comprehension. Up until then I had no idea that pedigrees applied to humans, but Winston assured me that they did. My rescuer Tara was a blue blood, he explained, because she had ‘Lady’ in front of her name. Thinking about the Grimsleys, I came to realise how they were almost certainly ‘bitzers’—an idea that made my head spin.
‘Does the Queen have a real name?’ I continued to parade my ignorance that first morning.
‘It’s “Elizabeth”,’ he said, ‘but no-one outside the family has actually called her that since she became Queen. Well, there was one person.’
I looked at him enquiringly.
‘That African fellow. Margaret . . .’ he looked up to where she sat, ears alert, watching the sous chef whose job it was to feed us ‘what’s the name of that African president, the one who was overly familiar?’