A Lucky Boy - as seen through the eyes of my lovely boy Looki

They call me Looki, which is the way that Spanish people pronounce the English word Lucky, but until I came to live with Mary and Vic I really cannot say that I had a very lucky life at all. 

My earliest memories are very sweet.  I had a lovely Westie-mum they used to call Phyllis, Kerry reminds me of her sometimes.  She was bossy like that and used to lick me behind my ears until the fur nearly came off, but I was clean.  If I stepped out of line with my brothers and sisters she was very quick to give me a clip around that very same earhole, but when we all snuggled into her at night she was the best place to be and somehow she managed to get a paw around each and every one of us even though we were five pups.  She was the best mum in the world. 

I don’t remember my dad at all.  I don’t think I ever met him, but he must have been a handsome fellow because all of us were too, or so everybody said at the time.  I don’t think he ever lived with us but we didn’t miss him, Phyllis was mum and dad all rolled into one and we loved the bones of her.

a handsome boy

All too soon though that life of sunshine and breast milk ended and one day a lovely, happy couple came to where we lived.  They picked me up and chucked me under the chin and said how handsome I was, which I knew already.  Papers were signed, for I had a pedigree in those days, and when they left they took me with them.

For the first couple of weeks I was quite happy although I did miss my brothers and sisters and Phyllis terribly, especially at night.  

My new home was comfortable enough though everything was so big it terrified me.  The garden was huge and there was a large expanse of blue water they called The Pool that looked very deep so I did not go too near the edge.  The house was enormous and there was a big stumbling block called The Stairs which stopped me exploring too far until, that is, I got a bit bigger and then I discovered a whole new world called Upstairs, but I am getting ahead of myself here. 

At this time of my life I lived on the flat.  I didn’t stray too far from the kitchen, which became my home for the first while.  I had a comfy bed there and lots of chewy toys.  The lady who was now my mum gave me kisses and treats and gently chastised me if I did a wee wee or worse on the tiled floor or rug, but gave me very tasty treats if I went on the newspaper by the back door.  The man, who did not smell as nice, used to give me a round slap and stick my nose in my own poo if he found it first.  Then he would shout at me and the lady and put me roughly on the back doorstep where I would shiver and whine until he had finished shouting at my mum.  Then she would come out to get me and clean me up. Her wet eyes glistened while she was bathing me and she would whisper how much she loved me and how much she hated Him so I would lick the slender hands with the long pointy nails and told her that I loved her too and promised to be better in the future.

I learned the ropes pretty quickly.  Me and mummy, he called her the Prize Bitch, used to play together and she would sing to me sometimes too.  She had another much prettier name, Michelle, which she used to use when she spoke on the phone with her friends.  Most days I would hang out while she fixed a sandwich in the kitchen and I usually got a bit of cheese or ham, then we would go out to the pool and she would lie on a lounger while I chased earwigs and imaginary mice.  Sometimes she put me on the water bed and pushed me out into The Pool.  I did not like that at all, it made me feel all wobbly, but she always made sure that I would get off it again safely and she never insisted that I went swimming like she did.  I think she knew that I did not really like water.

When the man came home in the evening the mood would change and I used to pretty much take to my bed as it seemed the safer option.  My bed was just inside the kitchen door and as neither he nor she did much cooking I was pretty safe, as they used to sit in the other room watching telly and drinking.  So I would doze and dream of Phyllis and my siblings.  As the evening wore on they would get louder and louder and eventually there were the usual angry raised voices, perhaps the sound of breaking glass, a slammed door and tears of course.  He would usually storm off to bed first and she would be left crying and clearing up the mess.  I might poke my nose out then and she would be looking disheveled and sad.  The tears streamed down her face taking the lovely black mascara with it.  She would continue picking up the pieces, ignoring me except to let me out for a run before bedtime, which is just as well because I was usually bursting by that time.  Then she would follow her man up to bed.

I grew bigger and bolder all the same and slowly my lovely pretty mummy got smaller and smaller.  Her bones stuck out everywhere and her mascara was always smudged now.  Sometimes she even had great big bruises on her pretty face.  She told her friends, in whispered tones, on the phone that she had walked into the door again, but I never saw her bumping into anything.  She didn’t cuddle me as much and sometimes forgot to feed me, but I still loved her and when she cried I was always there to comfort her.  The man called her something even worse now that sounded like “Stoopid Can’t” It didn’t sound very nice and was always shouted in an angry voice.

One day it all got too bad though.  It was my fault.  I thought I was a big man (I was probably all of six months old) and decided it was time to climb The Stairs.  Up I went, slowly and carefully and when I reached the top I discovered a new paradise of rooms with beds with lovely fluffy quilts on them.  The grandest room with the largest bed had a the most beautiful navy blue throw I have ever seen and it looked so inviting that I could not resist it and jumped up to take a look.  It smelled of mummy and had little white roses embroidered on each corner.  I thought the colour suited me rather well so I decided to close my eyes for a few moments and think of Phyllis.  But of course I fell asleep.

I was awoken abruptly by a heavy boot in the side of my body and I flew like a ragdoll to the other side of the room.  “You little bastard!” the man yelled at me.  “The bed is ruined!”  With that he tore the quilt off the bed and pushed it hard under my quivering nose so that I could see the tiny white hairs, mine, that were stuck on the navy fabric.  Then he threw the quilt over me and I felt myself being lifted bodily.  I could hardly breath, but through the noise of the man roaring and the panic in my body and brain I could hear Stoopid Can’t shrieking and crying and saying “No, No No!”  I had no idea what was happening and have no memory of anything else until I woke up, somewhere, still half smothered in the throw.  I whimpered and called for my mum and then Phyllis, but nobody came.

How long I tussled with the fabric I do not know, but thankfully I finally saw a pinhole of light and wriggled my way toward it.  I crept out blinking in the harsh midday sun.  All around me was grass and weeds and I hadn’t a clue where I was or where my mummy was.  So I sat and whined.

I don’t think I was there very long, which is just as well because I was getting hungry by this time, before a nice looking woman came towards me.  She picked me up and took me to her waiting car.  And thus began a long string of ‘owners’ in my lifetime.

I became like the proverbial hot potato, passed from family to family.  In the first home I wet the floor and got smacked.  Then I was passed to the next home where I bit the little girl.  Well she strangled me…and not just once either.  In the next home I tried to mount the lovely girl poodle that already lived there.  She was asking for it I might say, but her mummy took exception to my behaviour and that was that.

On and on this went until one day my then current owner took me for a drive in her car, she let me out for a run and while I was sniffing about in the grass she drove away again.  I looked up from my work and once more I found myself all alone, this time with nothing but great big airplanes flying overhead.  I was probably around two years old and all I really craved was love, which was the one thing that seemed to evade me, and food, of course, I was always hungry.  Hunger was my immediate problem now and in the distance I saw a building so I walked across the wasteland towards it.  I was pretty certain that I would find food there.

It was a busy place, with people going in and out with big cases and bags.  It turned out to be quite a good place for food too.  As they rushed in and out the people often threw a half eaten sandwich at one of the bins, of which there were plenty.  If I was lucky, they would miss and then I could easily pick up the sandwich and take it to my secret corner where I would settle down and eat it.  Unfortunately if the sandwich went into the bin all I could do was think about it longingly as my legs were too short to get it out again.  But I tried.  There were a couple of other dogs with longer legs and who could jump and they sometimes managed to spill the bins and I would often rush in and try to snatch something from under their noses.  Sometimes I succeeded and other times I got bitten, but I learned to bite back too.  It was, as they say, dog eat dog living at the airport.

I am not sure how long I managed to live this way, but I was not happy.  I was getting thinner and thinner and my fur was getting long and matted and I could hardly see through my fringe.  I am a dog that needs quite a bit of grooming.  But luckily, over time I made friends with one of the airport guards.  He began to bring me little titbits of food and sometimes rubbed my ears, which I adored.  One day he brought a collar and lead and put it around my neck and led me to his car at the end of his shift.

He brought me to a house in the country.  It belonged to an old grisly man with huge hands.  He grunted and took me and tied me up on a long chain outside the back of his house and there I stayed winter and summer except for the odd occasion when he would get out his shears and chop off my matted fur, give me a very rough bath in cold water, bundle me in the car and take me to a place where I would be introduced to some lovely little Westie bitch.  Not the same one every time, but I did get to know one quite well.  Her name was Juanita and she was very welcoming.  She had very pretty eyes and long dangly teats from having lots of babies, but it did not put me off and I always did the business.  After a couple of days larking about with my sweet Baby Jane, as I liked to call her, I was whisked away again and back to the farmyard with the long chain. 

I lived there some years.  I lose count now, until one day the old man fell while going about his farm chores in the yard.  I went over to investigate, luckily my chain was just long enough.  He seemed to be asleep, so I just sat quietly beside him to look after him.  It was getting dark when a man who looked a lot like my owner drove into the yard and when he saw the old man he starting shouting and took his phone out of his pocket and rang someone.  It was all action.  Another car drove up, with a younger man named Juan, who turned out to be the second man’s nephew.  Then a very loud van with flashing lights drove very quickly into the yard.  Two burly men in blue clothes got out and put the old man onto a stretcher and they took him away.  I never saw him again.

Juan and his uncle spent a bit of time at the house.  They fed the hens and they went into the house, where I hard them banging around for a bit.  At least they threw a bit of bread out into the yard for me, which I guzzled down in seconds.  I was very hungry by that time.  I could have done with a drop of water too, but neither of them thought to fill my water bowl.  Finally they came out of the house and talked a bit to each other.  Juan then unhooked me from the chain and tying a piece of string around my neck he led me to his car.  I was off to a new home yet again.

Juan lived with his father in the town.  He took me into a long thin, very dark, house.  Right through it we walked.  I would have liked to have stayed in the kitchen where he sat most days with his father.  They never did much, just watched TV and ate bread and chorizo sausage, but I was grateful for small mercies in those days and that lifestyle would have suited me fine.  Instead, as I say, he took me through the house and out to a very small yard with high walls all around.  The yard was full of bits of metal, broken lamps and flowerpots.  And that was my new home. 

It wasn’t the best of homes.  Juan was not cruel to me, but he never so much as ruffled my ears and that’s all I ever really wanted.  He usually fed me, though sometimes he didn’t get round to it.  He hardly ever filled my water bowl, which was pretty stagnant for the most part, and I got used to living in my own excrement because he was not very good at cleaning up after me either.  But I did not like it as I am basically a clean dog.  He put a kennel in the yard for me so at least I had some shelter when it was excruciatingly hot in the summer or when it was miserably cold and wet in the winter.  Every few months he took me out and I got to service another pretty bitch.  It wasn’t Juanita though and I missed her, almost as much as I missed Phyllis.

And so I lived for over two years, though sometimes in the summer months they took me back to the farm where I used to live and there they tied me up to the long chain again.  At least I could watch the chickens, but the old lady who lived there now was very cranky and often gave me a clip around the ears if she felt like it, which was pretty much every day.  So I bit her.  Not hard, but just enough to tell her to lay off.  She didn’t and very soon I was back at Juan’s, this time with no escape clause.

Over the years I had noticed the people next door.  They used to say hello to me from time to time.  They also did a lot of work on their house and there were often builders in who sometimes gave me the end of a sandwich or even bones, which was nice.  But it was very noisy and very dusty.  Still I used to look for the people as they looked pleasant and smelled friendly.  In any event anything new to look at was interesting, I didn’t usually get a whole lot of excitement in the yard.

One day they even invited me in.  They were having a barbeque and I was allowed to run around their lovely garden.  I tried to get up onto the man’s lap, but I was so smelly that he pushed me down again.  I don’t blame him, I didn’t like the way I smelled either.  Even the lady only gingerly patted the top of my head, but it was all that I wanted, a bit of affection.  That day ended too soon and I was put back in the yard though the lady and the man looked sad when I left them.  I think they wanted me to stay, but I belonged to Juan.  I held onto the memory of that day for as long as I could, but it started to fade like all the rest.

Time passed, it was November again and it was getting cold.  The building next door had grown and now obscured more of the light from the yard and also had taken the back of the house too far away for the people to pop their heads over the wall or their hands through the fence anymore.  So I was starting to feel even more isolated and lonely.  The yard, which was always cluttered, was now even more filled with broken furniture and ladders and things I did not know the name of. I couldn’t see much, only the occasional cat which was brave enough to walk across the wall.  I barked at them, but my heart wasn’t in it and it was not as exciting as it used to be.  Sometimes great big rockets were fired off in the town.  I hated them.  They terrified me, but there was absolutely no point in complaining as nobody came to hug me and say that I would be safe.  All I could do was cower in my kennel. 

I could tell that Juan was getting fed up with me being there as he hated cleaning up my poo, even though he did not do it very often.  I found out later that the lady next door (who is of course now my mum) used to ask him to do it when it had been collecting in the yard for too long.  By this time I could hardly move and there was nothing to do, so I just started to sit staring into space.  I think I was going slightly bonkers if the truth be told because during the day I began talking to the walls and at night I would howl ever so quietly at the moon, even if there was none.  It all felt so hopeless and I was so sad and lonely.

Then suddenly one day it just happened.  Juan came to get me from the yard.  He put on my harness and lead.  I thought I was probably going out to see some nice bitch, though I really needed a bath.  He led me through the house and out to his car.  The lady and man from next door were waiting for us there, which was strange, but nice, and the lady took my lead.  We all got into the car and like a good boy I settled in the footwell at the lady’s feet and we all drove to the Vet’s.

I got a check over and all the people and the Vet did lots of talking and writing and some money was passed across the desk, though I was more interested in the Poodles, the Yorkies and the Bodegueros in the waiting room.  Then we all got back into Juan’s car and drove back to the square.  We got out of the car and joy of joys, this time I went with my new mum and dad, Mary and Vic, into their house and the rest, as they say, is history.

I was pretty scared at first

but soon learned to relax a bit

and now, well I feel right at home

I have been here now two years.  It took me a while to settle in and it was not without accidents, illness and tears, but you have read all about those things in Mary’s other blog posts.  The one thing that is different here, well, there are many things different really, but the one thing that gives me hope and has made me the very happy boy I am today is the thing that Mary whispers in my ear every night.  “You are my Best Boy Looki”, she says to me and then she takes my head in her hands and looks me straight in the eyes and says “As long as there is breath in my body you will have a home here.”  And this time I believe that it will be so. 

I love you mum

And I love you too dad.  I can’t wait for you to come home……

Looki xxx

PS I love my sisters too, though they sometimes sit on mum’s knee before I can.

I love my sisters xx