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On Saturday mornings, the Grimsleys would be transformed. Mr Grimsley appeared downstairs first, having squeezed uncomfortably into a dark suit, followed by pencil-thin Mrs Grimsley, all blonde hair and red lipstick, talking in her Kennel Club voice. ‘Are Tarquin and Annabelle in the car?’ she’d want to know. ‘In their show collars? Where’s Tudor’s pedigree?’
A lengthy and restive day indoors for all the dogs would be followed by an even-lengthier evening, waiting for the Grimsleys to get home from whichever home county they had visited, usually followed by a lock-in at the local pub, The Crown. Being small and vulnerable, I usually avoided the scamper and tumble of the other corgis, only venturing far from the kitchen cupboard in the reassuring presence of my eldest brother, Jasper.
‘Hurry up, Number Five.’ He’d cock his head playfully, trying to coax me out; I was the only corgi without a name in the house. ‘There’s a whole week’s laundry to get our teeth into!’
In the early hours of a Sunday morning, Mrs Grimsley would lurch through the front door, Mr Grimsley stumbling after her in his great, dark, tent of a suit, with Tarquin and Annabelle plodding behind, exhausted by a day trapped in cage and car. ‘Don’t you just love corgis?’ Mrs Grimsley would slump into a chair, grabbing banknotes out of her handbag and tossing them up in the air so that they fluttered, confetti-like, all around her. ‘Eight hundred pounds! And another seven pups as good as sold. Oh, Annabelle, my little darling!’ she’d croon in a way that she never did for me. ‘What a wonder you are!’
One by one, as the older pups reached a certain age, they were taken out to meet their new owners in the nearby park. The Grimsleys avoided having buyers to their home, the front door of which was hard to access on account of the two Morris Minors rusting on bricks in the driveway. They had been a decaying fixture for as long as anyone could remember, awaiting the day when Mr Grimsley would begin to restore them to classic glory.
On the rare occasion that a visitor unavoidably came to the house, I was hastily shut in the upstairs box room. ‘Ruin our reputation, it would,’ Mrs Grimsley used to declare, ‘having this one seen with its ear. We can’t have people thinking we breed bitzers.’
There could be no harsher condemnation than for a dog than to be described as a ‘bitzer’, as the Grimsleys referred to dogs of uncertain breeding—a bit of this and a bit of that.
As the weeks passed, Mrs Grimsley took more and more of the older dogs to the park, returning alone, an unused lead wrapped around one hand and a bulging wallet in the other. Then my own immediate brothers and sisters began to be sold off. The once-cramped conditions under the kitchen sink became strangely spacious, the reassuring crush of bodies less dense.
As I became more and more visible, I was the focus of the same, sinister conversation. Mrs Grimsley’s demand that I be taken to the shed became increasingly shrill. Mr Grimsley dropped all talk of me being a late bloomer. ‘I’ll see to it,’ he’d promise her, darkly.
One day I turned to Jasper and asked what Mr Grimsley meant. ‘Hard to guess, Number Five, but I wouldn’t worry about it.’ He looked away. ‘According to our mother, he’s been saying he’ll see to the two Morris Minors since the time of our great-grandparents.’
I knew Jasper was trying to be reassuring. But I could sense his disquiet.
And Mrs Grimsley wasn’t letting go. Things reached an all-time low the afternoon that she returned alone from having taken Jasper himself to the park, with the rolled-up lead in one hand and an envelope in the other. I realised what had happened, but still stared foolishly at the front door, as though I could somehow will my big brother back to the house. Eventually I looked up. Mrs Grimsley was staring at me with an expression of cold determination.
‘It’s no good, Reg!’ she shouted to her husband, who was coming down the stairs. ‘You’re going to have to take it down the shed.’
‘But . . .’
‘Gone on long enough.’ She was insistent. ‘Today!’
‘I’m just on my way out . . .’
‘Right now.’
‘Alright.’ He flapped his heavy arms in surrender. ‘Alright. When I get back from The Crown.’
‘I’ll hold you to it.’
‘I’ll see to it then.’
Returning to the cupboard under the kitchen sink, I slumped down in a state of abject misery. Even though it was hard being a stunted, unloved corgi in a house filled with bright-eyed pedigrees who were lavished with affection, I preferred staying where I was than to facing the unknown horror at the bottom of the garden.
Mrs Grimsley was watching EastEnders in the front room when there was a knocking at the door.
‘Who is it?’ she called from the hallway.
‘I’ve come about a corgi!’ A woman’s voice and it sounded clear and authoritative.
‘Hang on a minute.’
Finding me in the kitchen, Mrs Grimsley closed the door firmly before going to greet her visitor.
‘I hear you may have a puppy for sale.’
‘All gone,’ interrupted Mrs Grimsley briskly. ‘I can put you on the waiting list. We’re expecting a litter next month.’
‘This particular puppy,’ said the other woman, ‘has a floppy ear.’
There was a pause while Mrs Grimsley inhaled. ‘Don’t know where you heard that,’ she pronounced smokily. ‘The pedigree of our corgis is impeccable.’
