About my first Puppies
(written a long time ago)
I’d not had a dog before. This is the story of my first dog – and her naughty puppies.
Like many young married couples, we were enjoying a carefree life of joy with great expectations for the future. Life was great and we looked forward to parenthood with excitement. Just before our baby was due, we bought a little puppy from the local pet shop. Lena loved our baby daughter and would bare her teeth in quiet warning if anyone dared get close to the pram without my approval. If all were well, she would show off as if it was her own baby.
We were so besotted with our own offspring that we did not worry about the local visiting dog, until later when Lena was clearly putting on weight.
One night when we put Lena to bed, she was alone, but the next morning she greeted us with her seven little additions! Seven! We were shocked. We named them Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday! In the next few weeks, they progressed to energetic balls of black and white fluff, getting into mischief every day.
One day when I arrived home from shopping, I was in awe as I discovered our backyard covered in white paper as if some sort of bizarre snowstorm had occurred! They’d found a hole into the garage, emptied a carton of toilet paper, and like the advertisements on television at the time, had run to all corners of the yard unrolling it as they went!
On another unforgettable day, I arrived home to find the whole street being dug up by the PMG (the government entity that managed postal and telephone services in the 1970’s). There were trucks, teams of men, digging machines, piles of dirt and great holes being dug along two streets.
A short time later, after I settled my baby in her cot, I ventured into the backyard to check on the canine family. It surprised me to see them darting in and out of a one-metre by 40 cm hole that they had created. They were running around with liquorice-like pieces of cord in their mouths. I picked up one of the black cords and realised with horror, that it was a cable of some sort. Somehow, they had dug their way into the telecommunications system. (I was later to learn that no telephones were working in a large area of our town!)
I located the supervisor of the mammoth excavation project and led him into the backyard where mother dog and her seven little bundles happily romped around our yard with their black playthings. The look on the man’s face told me that my suspicion was correct. It was indeed the cause of the telephone service breakdown in the neighbourhood!
Apparently, many years earlier, the PMG cable installers took a “short cut” by installing the cables across blocks of land instead of along the perimeter of the road. Within minutes a team of workers, who showed no sense of humour, were in our yard digging the hole a little further and working to repair the severed cables.
We had many laughs about it, but for quite some time, we waited fearfully expecting the PMG to send us a repair bill, but it never came.
We only saw one of Lena’s offspring in adulthood. We were light-heartedly accused of mating Lena with a goat. The poor dog was ugly, with a beard like an old billy goat!
Dogs played an important part in our lives for the next forty years with many hilarious adventures, as we bred miniature long-haired dachshunds and had many more great experiences. You do need a sense of humour when you have dogs!
My Best Dog
Sadly I don’t have any photos of Lena and her pups. It was way back in 1969!!
