Adventures in Petsitting
My Shadow Became Fox Red
Some sits turn out to be the stuff of storybooks.
Byline and photos: By Jane Thomas
For various uninteresting reasons, I’ve spent more time in England in the last year than I have in, well, decades. Life these days seems to be terribly serious in this part of the world: everyone is stressed, and they’re worried about money, and there is more traffic than ever before, and people grumble about the weather with even more dogged determination.
It’s meant I’ve looked for excuses to hide away from it all in undisturbed pockets of the countryside, and there is
perhaps nothing so quintessentially English as a thatched cottage on the outskirts of a tiny hamlet – where the sole source of entertainment is a cricket pitch on such an impressive angle that the only way it can be identified as such is the presence of a classic pavilion in the corner. I was somewhere on the border of Hampshire and Berkshire, and it came as no surprise to learn that the homeowners had close connections to the Royal Family and were going on holiday with the daughter of one of England’s most celebrated authors.
The corridors were lined with portraits of previous gun dogs; Pointers, Retrievers and Spaniels watched over my every move. And waiting to welcome me was Nell, a beautiful Fox Red Labrador who was gentle and shy with impeccable manners. The gardens sprawled over a few acres and Nell loved to wander in them – as long as I was there to hold her paw and reassure her when a pigeon flapped unexpectedly or a squirrel gave her a funny look. Fortunately, the homeowners were so elderly that she was never going to be expected to help flush out pheasants and the like; she would have bolted at the first bang and never been seen again.
