Sam plays football

I cannot remember the day we brought Sam home from Harrods. I was very young. And he was younger than me - even in dog years. He was a pitch-black toy poodle. And home was a brick house that backed onto London's Holland Park in what was then the Royal Borough of Kensington.

The house had a tidy front lawn. And a more substantial garden in the rear. To get to the back garden, you could either walk out of the French doors in the dining room. Or go through the kitchen to the Dutch door just past the breakfast table where we ate when my father was traveling for work.

The family adapted the new arrival to its routine. My parents shared the marital bed on the first floor (second floor to the American reader) while my sister and I had rooms on the second floor. Sam was locked up nightly in the kitchen. An arrangement he hated.

He would scrabble against the kitchen's swing door with all his small might but he lacked the strength to open it against the spring that swung it shut. He left the lowest wood panel so badly scarred my parents had to have it replaced with a metal plate painted to match the rest of the door.

He once ate most of a pound block of butter my mother had carelessly left on the table. I thought the act was quite revolting. But Sam was no worse for it. And as my mother regularly fed him, it was not some last-ditch effort to avert starvation. And life went on.

As the house backed onto a park, it was a short walk to reach the fields where I could let Sam off the lead to run around, sniff other dogs and do all the things dogs do when unconstrained. Pooper-scooper laws were still on the drawing board. And pedestrians had to remain alert at all times. Although accidents did happen.

Sam’s favorite game was football - the kind you play with your feet - not the seemingly misnomered American sport. We played in the back garden, usually with my best friend Edward. And it would be the two of us against the dog.

Let me explain.

Say I had the ball. I would try to kick it to Edward without Sam intercepting it. Of course, there were times when, either through poor execution or a misunderstanding of Sam's intentions, Edward or I would kick a ball directly at the dog.

I was full of enthusiasm and the boundless energy of a nine-year-old. I could deliver the ball with authority. But I was no Christiano Ronaldo. So those times I did hit the dog, I could send him tumbling without dealing a fatal blow.

Sam thought being hit by the ball was about as much fun as was possible. He would stop it and savage it with vigor for perhaps ten seconds. And then retreat with an expectant look waiting for the game to resume.

I had fun. Edward had fun. And Sam seemed to stay in a state of ecstasy for as long as we played. Only my mother failed to appreciate what a good time we were all having.

Once, after I had dealt Sam a particularly authoritative strike, she steamed out of the kitchen with her brow furrowed in consternation. She demanded of me,

"What on Earth are you doing, torturing that dog?"

This was strong language for her as she was a woman raised to remain serene and poised no matter what trials God and nature might send her way. It seems the thought that she might be raising a psychopathic son was the one thing that could disturb her preternatural calm. And the glint in her eyes pierced my soul. But I had an out - logic.

"It's not torture, mum. Look, Sam doesn't have to stand there. He could go hide in the trees or even run back into the kitchen."

This unexpected turn to reason seemed to deflate her. But she was a fair woman and allowed that I might have a point.

Meanwhile, confirming the point I was trying to make, Sam waited expectantly, turning his head from the ball to Edward, to me, and finally to my mother, trying to work out why the fun had ceased.

His English was limited, but I think he could read body language well enough to realize that play had been stopped by the slim blond woman who fed him and took him to the vet for shots and the dog parlour to get his hair cut. But it probably remained a mystery to him why she had brought such a delightful afternoon to a close.

After that, while I knew she had come around to my way of seeing things, I respected her sensitivities enough not to play football with Edward and Sam unless she was out doing the shopping or the various charitable endeavours she spent her time on.

All of us grew up. And I was shipped off to a minimum security institution the English misleadingly call a public school. There I would spend hours daydreaming in endless classes of the time when the drone of education would stop, and the boys, we were exclusively boys - the girls had a separate facility - would be sprung from confinement and freed to play whatever glorious sport was seasonally appropriate.

I was periodically granted furlough from the pokey and would return to the family home. Time had left its mark on Sam. While he was at the height of his intellectual faculties, his body had shed some of the vitality of youth. And the jet black had receeded in front of an advancing tide of gray And, as happens to all of us, he had shelved childish things and now disdained the rough and tumble of sporting life. He was more of a thinker who preferred a steady perambulation over the herky-jerk of a game of football.

One day, when I was back at school, I received word that my father wished to take me to lunch. To most, this might seem like an ordinary event. However, my father had never done the like before. Educational philosophy in English private schools placed the academic authorities “in loco parentis”. And they considered that parents popping in to see their children during a term was grit in the gears of the machine producing fine upstanding men, who the school raised to be a credit to God and the Empire. Although, there was no actual empire anymore. And God was part-time and inflicted on the general population only on Sunday mornings.

Nevertheless, my father was American and thus was not to be bound by custom. So there I was, sharing a table with my old man. It was a warm September day, and we had a good view of Windsor Castle perched authoritatively on the heights that rose from the River Thames.

I was not sure why he had come. And reason suggested that the only matter serious enough to excuse this breach of protocol was an announcement that he and my mother were getting divorced.

It turned out the news was far worse than that.

He explained that we were moving to Paris. Now, if I had to list the three most likely reasons that impelled him to appear at my school, moving to France would have been ninth, right after the news he had taken holy orders.

While I was an indifferent student, a status reflected in my mediocre grades, my brain had a hidden capacity for thinking that I saved for special occasions such as this.

Some background will help the reader to better understand how I arrived at my personal Slough of Despond. Great Britain is an island. It is also rabies-free and determined to stay that way. To achieve that goal there are rigorous quarantine requirements for animals traveling back and forth from the continent and other foreign lands. This led me to ask my father,

“What about Sam?”

“I had him put down,” was the direct and awful reply.

Stunned at the news - and wishing it had been of a divorce or holy orders instead - I let out a cry from the heart so pure in its agony that it still sends frissons down my spine all these years later.

“But I never even got to say goodbye.”

Gentle reader, as I write this, my mind has left the page. In my imagination, there is Edward, my mother, and a small jet-black dog who loved sports. My mother is gone, as is my father. And Edward’s life was cut short by the blast from an IRA bomb.

I am, therefore, the last witness to a time when a small dog played football. It was years ago and only yesterday. And far more vivid in my imagination than many of the good times I have enjoyed more recently. But such is life. You remember your loves and losses - and grief is the cost of caring.

I have four dogs now - I love them dearly. But only one dog will ever be my first.