It's been thirty-four years since I brought Sollee home. When he came into my life I was employed at a local garage as a car valet-come-gopher, working long hours for little cash; a far cry from my teenage dream of becoming a freelance journalist and writing wildlife articles for such magazines as National Geographic, with the aim of eventually penning a wildlife novel that would see me hailed as the new Jack London. In fact I wasn't writing at all in those days. Eight years of caring for my invalid mother had poured a few gallons of cold water on my writing dreams, and after her death I had been too exhausted to even consider pursuing the memory of those dreams. 

My father had retired in January '79 and he wasn't in the best of health and I knew soon he would need my help. I wasn't, at that point, his carer but I knew I might have to take up that role before too long. So I remained living at home and for a few years I took seasonal work on local farms, then after passing my driving test, I moved on to garage work. 

By the summer of '83 it had become apparent that father's health was steadily failing and, fearing something might happen while I was at work, I gave up my job. It wasn't an easy decision to make. I knew what I was taking on (or I thought I did), but there was no one else to care for his needs, so I handed in my notice. I reasoned that I had already cared for mother when I was a teenager, now at thirty-two I should be better equipped to cope, emotionally stronger and more resourceful. Plus, I had my boyfriend Tom for moral support. So I thought I was a lot better off this time round than back in '67 when I had given up my dreams and turned down a place in college to take on a role I knew nothing about and was, because of my age, ill equipped to handle. 

While I was still working at the garage I had sold my car and bought a vintage van from one of my fellow workers. It was a 1967 Ford Anglia 7cwt  model and it was basically sound but much in need of some TLC. Sollee, along with working on the van, went a long way to saving my sanity over the next seven years.

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Father, as I had feared, was taken seriously ill about four months after I gave up working. He was rushed into Hospital on New Years Eve 1983 with pneumonia and a collapsed lung. It was a pretty bleak New Year, for even though I didn't have a really strong relationship with my father this was the first time in my life that he had been seriously ill, and the first time that I had lived alone ... alone except for Sollee. 

The weather had suddenly caught up with the season and daily a bitter wind tore in from the east. It blew for weeks, savage and unrelenting, and at night it wailed about the  chimney's moaning its cold hearted misery and adding to the strange emptiness that enveloped the cottage. Jack Frost arrived and joined forces with the wind. Withered leaves scoured the rock hard ground and were hurled in multi hued clouds through the trees and into the garden, where they finally dwindled in brittle, melancholy drifts into the front porch. Sollee loved the wind and the leaves, his eyes gleamed as he raced and chased with them, hurling himself into the drifts, barking a crazy challenge into the eye of the wind. When the first snow came he was ecstatic, a black dog, young, fit and full of life running free through snow clad woods, across storm blasted fields, leaping and prancing, tongue lolling in his joy. He buoyed my spirits and made the cold fun.

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Father was a month in Hospital and he never fully recovered his former strength. Later that year, during early summer, he developed ulcerative colitis which landed him back in Hospital for another month and then, though under control, it hung around to plague him for the rest of his life. That was when my job as carer really began and I discovered 'doing' for Dad was way more difficult than it ever had been with mother. 

He was very weak when he came home after his second stay in Hospital, the impact of the two illnesses so close together had really taken their toll. He needed help with several things and it wasn't long before I discovered that, for instance, being bath nurse to my Father was no easy task. He was a very shy, modest man, the product of a strict Victorian upbringing and after two failed attempts to give him a good bath the strain of our mutual embarrassment was too much, and I was forced to apply for the weekly services of a bath-nurse. 

And how did Sollee take to the changes in the household routine and the incapacity of the old man? He accepted it all with his usual Airspring humour, continuing to develop the comedic side of his personality. He took to spending much of his time with father, abandoning me to my boring household chores he would sit beside the fire with Dad and soon he became his best mate.   

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After so many years it isn't always easy to recall events in chronological order. Remembering details of happenings can be easier than remembering the unimportant dates upon which they occurred; many of my memories of Sollee are unconnected to special days. For instance, I cannot remember the date when he first went upstairs backwards ... I can, however, remember in detail seeing him do it. He had devised a game of fetch and catch which required he go up the stairs onto the landing and drop his ball downstairs then dash after it and, if possible, catch it before it hit the floor below. Generally he managed this quite easily and coming to a skidding halt on the quarry tile floor of the utility room he would spin round and tear upstairs again. It was a noisy, hell-for-leather game which he, and no one else, loved. He would go on and on, getting more and more excited until it seemed he would burst. His energy was phenomenal, and on the day of the great innovation he seemed intent on catching the bouncing ball before it reached the half way step ... he didn't quite succeed in doing that but as the ball bounced off step nine out of thirteen he reared and seized it with a click of his teeth and suddenly I couldn't believe what I saw..... instead of continuing down the stairs or turning where he was, he scrabbled up onto the landing backwards!  

I didn't have time to analyze what I had seen because the ball was bouncing again. And again he mounted the stairs to the landing backwards. It became one of his several 'party pieces' that he never tired of performing. Another example of his marvelous suppleness and agility was when he ran up the stairs (forwards) and leapt off the landing, over the step into my bedroom and onto my bed, all in a single sideways bound covering a distance of nine or ten feet and a height of maybe three feet. He never missed my bed and watching his prowess as a jumper convinced me he truly was an Airspring ... with a spring in each paw.

There was no doubt about it, Sollee was a dynamo of a dog. His energy was boundless and there were times when he just couldn't contain it and he would set off on what we called a 'mad half-hour' where he would race through the house like a thing possessed; his eyes as black as a mid-night in Hell and deaf to all my orders to behave. When he was flying you got out of his path or suffered the consequences as I once did when we met in the dining room doorway and like a torpedo he rammed into my left shin. We both ended up on the floor, me yowling in pain, him blinking his way back into a state of sanity.   

This exuberant animal brought laughter into my life and comfort into my father's. For nine years he was the cement holding us together, he brought common ground to a relationship otherwise void of anything mutually shared.

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 Photos: Top: The cottage under winter snow.

Middle: Father and Sollee.

Bottom: Sollee takes the driver's seat in my Ford Anglia van.

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