My Animals and Other Family by Clare Balding

Author:Clare Balding [Balding, Clare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781594205620
Amazon: 1594205620
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Published: 2013-04-17T23:00:00+00:00

11

Lily

A life without a boxer dog is a life without laughter. I know this because, after Candy died at kennels and age had finally caught up with Flossy, my mother stopped laughing.

She still smiled, she still enjoyed life, but she didn’t laugh the way she used to. She didn’t come home to waggling hips and a slobbering, smiling mouth. We now had two lurcher bitches called Jenny and Polly. Jenny was wild and rough-haired, Polly was timid and smooth. They were graceful and beautiful, like the racehorses, but they weren’t funny, they weren’t cuddly and they wouldn’t jump out of a top-floor window if they thought you were being abducted.

After a period of mourning and due respect for Candy and Flossy, my mother finally felt ready to have another boxer. She took me with her to inspect a litter of puppies in Kent, and I chose the one who sucked my pointy chin with her tiny little mouth. She was dark brindle with a white map of Africa across half her neck and down one side, a tiny line of white in the middle of her face and white around her nose. We called her Lily.

We had to wait a few more weeks before she could have all her injections, but my mother smiled all the way home and kept chuckling to herself. She had Lily to look forward to, while I had the beginning of Lent term to dread.

Going back to Downe House in January 1983 was singularly the most difficult thing I have ever done. I was terrified. A new house, a new group of girls, a new housemistress and the shame that all the teachers knew I was a thief. The one thing I could rely on was that Bear, Snorter and Pickle would stand by me. I was sure that Bear had ignored me on the stairs only because she was annoyed with me for being caught. Now they knew I hadn’t dobbed them in, I would be a hero.

My mother took me back to school and helped me carry my trunk up to my new room in Aisholt Middle East. It was the closest room to the balcony that ran past Miss Farr’s drawing room. I would have to walk in front of her windows at least twice every day, possibly more often. She was true to her word – she would be keeping an eye on me all right.

The housemistress of Aisholt was called Miss Houghton. She had the biggest bosom I had ever seen in my life, bigger even than Grandma’s. Her breasts sat horizontally out of her chest like a tray. She could have balanced a plate and eaten her lunch off them. Quite often, she was eating her lunch or her supper in her study while she held meetings with her girls. I had been brought up not to talk with my mouth full but I was fascinated by the tactic deployed by Miss Houghton. She stored her food in her

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