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In the pause that followed, I wondered what those plans had been, beyond my being taken to the shed. It would be months before I discovered the full story and how, the moment that Tara told Her Majesty about my impending fate at the hands of Mr Grimsley, she had been dispatched to rescue me.
‘I’m sure he’s going to settle in very well,’ said the Queen.
‘Would you like me to take him down to join the others?’
‘He’s probably had enough to deal with for one day. He can stay with me tonight,’ Her Majesty said with a nod, before turning back towards her desk.
It took me a while to realise that I had a new home. A permanent one. It seemed quite surreal that, instead of the kitchen cupboard, I had been transported to this strange place with its empty rooms and not a whiff of cigarette smoke, much less stale beer.
Taking me to the private sitting room next door, Tara produced a bowl of food more delicious than even the finest the Grimsleys used to serve to their champion pedigrees. I wolfed it down in short order and took a few laps of water. A very comfortable basket was brought for me to sleep in. I gathered that the sitting room was where I was to remain for the time being.
My feelings about this new place were strangely mixed. My initial relief was soon followed by acute loneliness—for the first time in my life I was without a very large and extended family and, most especially, without Jasper. As a very small, underdeveloped pup, on my very first night away from home, I wished I could be back in familiar surroundings—without the threat of the shed, of course.
Tara looked in on me several times that evening, always dependably comforting, as did several men I came to know, both individually and collectively, as ‘security’. Nevertheless, I was feeling quite bereft by the time I heard the Queen saying goodnight to a man called Philip. As soon as she came through the door, I jumped out of my basket and hurried over to her, tail stump wagging. She bent down and made a great fuss of me, before coming over to pick up the basket, which she took through to her bedroom, placing it near the side of her bed.
I watched her return later in her bedclothes. Sitting up against the pillows she closed her eyes, and for quite some time remained silent. Her Majesty, I soon came to realise, is a deeply spiritual person. Not in a way that needs to be voiced, but one that is implicit in her actions. By the time she switched off the light, a peacefulness had descended not only on her, but on the whole room. ‘Welcome to Windsor, little one,’ she whispered in the dark, to reassure me. ‘And goodnight.’
The reassurance worked. For a while. Then, the pitch blackness of the room; the unfamiliar sounds echoing through the castle corridors; the lack of half a dozen other corgis pressed close to me under the kitchen sink; even the absence of the pong of kipper made me feel somehow alone and adrift. I whimpered. The Queen shushed me. I was quiet for a while. Then I whimpered again. ‘We can’t have this,’ said the Queen, getting out of bed, and lifting me up on top of it.
Back at the Grimsleys, only the champion pedigrees used to sleep with the humans. And even though at that point I had no idea who Her Majesty was, I still realised I was being accorded a very special privilege. Snuggling close, I thought about how she had rescued me from the Grimsleys. About how she was giving me a new home. About how she cared for me, even though I had a floppy ear—perhaps even because of it.
Gratitude was surging through me and I showed my love in the way that we dogs know best: I licked her face. ‘Oh, no!’ she chuckled, wriggling away. Thinking she wanted to play, I wriggled after her. ‘If this carries on . . .’ her tone had changed, ‘I’ll have to take you downstairs.’ Downstairs was not a place I had any wish to be so, instead, I settled halfway down the bed. Which was how, my fellow subject, on my first night away from under the Grimsleys’ kitchen sink, I slept with the Queen of the United Kingdom.
In the days that followed, I learned more about the world than I could ever have imagined. I was fortunate to have as my mentor, the lifelong and most faithful companion to the Queen, Winston. I met him and Margaret on my very first morning when we were all fed breakfast in the staff kitchen, where the royal corgis were traditionally fed, and from where we were allowed into the staff garden to answer the call of nature. As it happened, my naivety about royal protocol served me well. Coming from a house full o
f corgis, as soon as I saw them I wasted no time in introducing myself by sniffing their backsides, my tail stump wagging vigorously.
Margaret, who had no time for stand-offish blue bloods who thought rather a lot of themselves, decided on that first meeting that I was a corgi with whom she could do business. Winston, at the advanced age of twelve, saw in me a younger version of himself and had soon adopted me as his protégé. It was he who patiently explained the facts of my new life.
‘Strange name for a person, “The Queen”,’ I observed that first morning at Windsor Castle.
‘It’s not a name, it’s a title,’ he corrected me. Having started the day with a hearty breakfast of biscuits, the two of us were snuffling round our breakfast bowls in the hope of finding a displaced morsel.
‘Title.’ I pondered for a bit. ‘You mean like “Champion Pedigree”?’
‘Indeed.’ Discovering a fragment of biscuit near the skirting board, Winston had quickly licked it into his mouth and was crunching with immense satisfaction. ‘The Queen is the pre-eminent of all champion pedigrees. She is a direct descendent of William the Conqueror—1066 and all that.’
I didn’t know what he meant exactly. Or, even, at all. And a pedigree of a thousand years was quite beyond my comprehension. Up until then I had no idea that pedigrees applied to humans, but Winston assured me that they did. My rescuer Tara was a blue blood, he explained, because she had ‘Lady’ in front of her name. Thinking about the Grimsleys, I came to realise how they were almost certainly ‘bitzers’—an idea that made my head spin.
‘Does the Queen have a real name?’ I continued to parade my ignorance that first morning.
‘It’s “Elizabeth”,’ he said, ‘but no-one outside the family has actually called her that since she became Queen. Well, there was one person.’
I looked at him enquiringly.
‘That African fellow. Margaret . . .’ he looked up to where she sat, ears alert, watching the sous chef whose job it was to feed us ‘what’s the name of that African president, the one who was overly familiar?’
‘Who?’ She pretended not to have been listening. I could tell she was just being officious and knew exactly who he was talking about.
‘The one with the loud shirts,’ he continued.
‘Nelson Mandela.’
‘That’s him. He called her Elizabeth. Don’t think she minded so much in his case.’
My mind was bursting with questions. ‘Apart from having a title, is she just like other humans?’ Winston snorted. I came to know that this most Winstonian of characteristics—somewhere between a sigh and a cough—could mean any number of things: surprise, amusement, outrage or, as at the moment, a combination of world weariness with a sense of profound wisdom.
‘She is and she isn’t,’ he answered after a while.
