Buster’s Secret Diaries excerpt - As Discovered by Roy Hattersley

The story, which began in an overgrown Paddington yard, back in 1995, is not yet over. Much has changed with the passage of the years. I am wiser as well as older – not only whiter round the muzzle and longer in the tooth but also a little less likely to leap without looking. In Derbyshire where I spend half my life – I am still able to jump up to the window in the door, like a ferocious Jack-in-the-box when the postman knocks. And I still leap over the sofa into the drawing room when The Man who lives with me decides that, for the good of the postman, we are better kept apart. I still bare my teeth with bogus menace, but I go willingly. I now accept my temporary exile from the hall with tail held high and confidence that, in five minutes, I shall be back where I belong.

The Man has grown old too, but less gracefully. And, if our walks are any guide, he is not as fit as I am. Unlike me, he has not looked after himself. I eat a carefully balanced diet, drink only water, take regular exercise and have my teeth cleaned every night. All I can be sure about him is that he cleans his teeth. But although he finds difficulty in negotiating styles, whilst I bound over them in one leap, he still hobbles along at the other end of the lead. And my feelings about him are the same as they were on that December night when he found me in a basket outside the bedroom door. I knew straight away that he was not just for Christmas, but for life.

I knew that we would be friends as soon as he knelt down beside me and rubbed behind my ears like a man who knew about dogs and wanted to make them happy. And he was very good about the vomit. It was barely on the hall floor before he said that it did not matter. Since then I have been sick dozens of times, usually in inconvenient places. But The Man always says that terriers behave like that and cheerfully cleans it up without complaint.

I think that The Man is kind by nature – a characteristic I admire in others without wanting to exhibit it myself. But he is also immensely competitive. He takes credit for the achievements of others – particularly mine. Whenever he introduces me to a new acquaintance, he always says, “Buster lived wild for a six months, but he’s a friendly enough chap now. A bit difficult at first, but love and bribery did the trick”. The clear implication is that he tamed me. This is not true. I tamed myself.

When the canine care home was trying to get me adopted they told people I “lacked social skills with both people and dogs”. That was true. Now you could take me (almost) anywhere. Then, the best that the dog adoption agency could say about me was that I was “very clean”. That was true as well. But there was far more to recommend me than that. Without strength of character and indomitable courage I would not have ever survived.

Once upon a time, I listened to the wolf who lives inside my head. He is still there. But now, for most of the time, he sleeps. When he stirs, I try to remind us both that no dog in his right mind would want to live rough again – sleeping on wet moss and going to bed hungry – when a sofa and a variety of medically recommended “treats” are available. Certainly not me. In my garden I still chase small furry animals and the wind but only for sport. I have come a long way since the people at the rescue home came to see The Man to make sure that he knew how to look after me. Meeting for the first time the dog I have become, you would never guess that I was an orphan and a foundling.

When my brother and I were only a few days old, my mother was bitten by a rat and the builder, who owned her, tied her to a fence post and left her to die. She fed us as much as she could during her dying days and then we survived on water from a leaky hosepipe. The lady who lived next door tried to rescue us but – being young, frightened and stupid – we ran away. For months we lived on what we could scavenge from waste bins and black bags – still objects of fascination, which I cannot pass without a wishful sniff in memory of my scavenger days.

Then Doris caught me. She was the first person to talk to me. I could not understand a word. But I loved the sound of the noise she made. Doris was old, in human years she was older than I am now. And since I had not even begun to put the wolf in my head to sleep, I was far too wild for her to look after for long. For more than six months, I moved from one canine care home to another. At some places I lived in a cage, I hated that. At others I lived with other dogs which – being a pack animal – I loved. But it also made me sad. Most of the other residents remained for only a couple of weeks. Then they were reunited with their owners or found a family to adopt them. But while they came and went, I stayed. I was kept warm and fed, but I had nobody who had the time to talk to me. And, thanks to Doris, talking was essential to my happiness.

When I was wild, I looked tremendous. My father was an Alsatian and my mother a Staffordshire Bull terrier. The result of that irregular union combined both parent’s characteristics – the lean shape of a small Alsatian and the thick brindle coat of a Staffordshire bull terrier.

Perhaps my brother never lost his good looks. But after a few months in the canine care homes, I went into a decline. My ribs showed through my skin and hair fell out of my coat. Then people who saw my picture thought I must be ill. And nobody chooses to adopt a sick dog. Some visitors to the canine care home imagined that I would grow up to be a fighting dog or a Pit Bull Terrier. The Dangerous Dogs’ Act had just been passed by Parliament – not, it must be said, with any real opposition from The Man. Respectable people thought I might be illegal. So the only people who wanted to own me were undesirables. But I wanted friends with whom I could have the sort of conversations I had with Doris and her friends. When a skinhead came into the canine care home, I tried to look like a Pekinese. Painful though it was to deny my heritage, I did not want to grow up wearing a collar studded with nails.

Did you know that thousands of families get dogs as Christmas presents and then abandon them in the New Year? It is hard to believe, but it is true. And the canine care homes have to make room for the outcasts and rejects in the only possible way they can. As the season of goodwill approached, I sat behind my wire grill and worried. Was it possible? Surely a nation of dog lovers would not allow such a thing to happen? Hearing that I was to be advertised on the “Hard to Home Register” only increased my apprehension. It sounded too much like the last chance of a reprieve. Then She came along, looked at me and said, “He looks like exactly the right kind of dog for a Yorkshireman”.