‘Tell me a Jean story, please, Granny. I can’t go to sleep unless Dad tells me a story about her.’

It was the last time I babysat for the kids. I settled on the bed beside Kate, and my mind travelled back to those early days of utter contentment. Our boys had reached the stage in town where they were aimlessly biking around, and complaining that they had nothing to do. Then we heard about the twenty acre block for sale, next door to our friends on Shands Road. We went out to look at it and I instantly knew it was meant for us. Our fourteen year old Dougal’s first thought was, ‘Now I can get a dog.’

We sold our house in town, and fortuitously our neighbours went on holiday for a month and invited us to house-sit for them. It took that month to have a small prefab house built on our bare, twenty acre block, we shifted into it and I was back in my element. I’d grown up on a farm and loved that feeling of space: no close neighbours, and plenty of distance from other people’s gaze. The little house had floor to ceiling windows and glass sliding doors out of every room. It was so well planned that it was plenty big enough for us and our three big boys; Andrew even had room for his piano in his bedroom, and we lived there while our permanent home was being built.

Dougal found someone at Lincoln who had six weeks old, Golden Labrador puppies, so Peter and he went down to Lincoln to look at them, and they fell in love with the most beautiful puppy that you could imagine.

‘What’ll we call her?’ they all said.

‘I thought of the nicest ladies I knew, Kate, they were called “Jean”, and that turned out to be a perfect name for the nicest dog in the world.’

Jean had beautiful manners, loving, gentle, and dignified; she only once wee-ed in the house when she was a puppy. But she could get hurt feelings, like the day Dougal dressed her in his shorts, T-shirt and socks. We split our sides laughing, but Jean was deeply offended at our reactions and she hid under Dougal’s bed for ages.

One day when she was three or four months old, I heard a lot of squawking coming from Andrew’s chookies; I rushed outside and there was Jean tossing a screeching little chicken around, banties flapping everywhere, and the rooster hurtling around the yard. It was hard to believe such a volume of pain could emanate from such a tiny body, or that our gentle Jean was the culprit when she’d always been so good around the fowls. I should have put the chicken out of its pain, only I couldn’t bear to, so I wrapped it up and put it in a box in the hot-water cupboard.

That chicken screeched all day, and Jean lay under the kitchen table with her paws over her ears and eyes. Every now and then she’d lift a paw to peep at me and I’d say, ‘Poor little chicken’, and she’d slap her paw back over her eye. We were both deafened and exhausted by the end of the day when the boys came home from school, and Peter came home from work. Andrew was heart-broken to see his little chicken suffering, but it was a relief to Jean and me when the screeching stopped at last.

‘Did the chicken die, Granny?’

‘Yes, it did, poor wee thing.’

‘Did she ever do it again, Granny?’

‘No, Kate, that was the only time. It seemed so out of character, for her to do it at all, but she knew where Andrew had buried it and blimey! she dug it up again!’

Peter bought ten hoggets to keep the grass down around our little house and, as we couldn’t afford curtains on our floor to ceiling windows and doors, we would wake up in the mornings to find the sheep all standing outside our bedroom door, lugubriously chewing their cuds as they stared in the window at us. As I was at home all day long, I came to know them well. But then the awful time arrived when Peter decided they were big enough to kill to feed to our hungry boys.

Although I couldn’t bear to eat them, the rest of the family relished the tender roasts and Jean relished the opportunity to help round them up and take them to the yards where Peter would choose the next victim for the pot. I couldn’t bear to see him go past with the lifeless body in the wheel barrow, bloodied head flopping over the edge, and Jean running alongside, licking up the drops of blood. She would sit and watch him as he hung the poor lifeless body on the gallows, stripped off the skin, sliced open its belly and emptied the contents into the wheelbarrow.

In preparation for such disposal, Peter and the boys dug a deep offal pit into which he tipped the unwanted entrails, and then he would throw the skin over the rail in the sheep-yards to dry out, regardless of my or the remaining sheep’s feelings. Our boys went from being townies biking around ‘with nothing to do,’ to being country boys, where every spare minute was taken up with helping their father make fences, and chook runs, car-case hen houses and nesting boxes, and even a car-case sleep-out with four bunks and an underground cellar for Andrew and his mates.

They dug a large pond and Andrew added to his chook menagerie with ducks, geese, pheasants, doves, budgies, quail, and two peacocks. He’d hatch out duck eggs under the banties, and the poor little mothers would rush up and down frantic at the sight of their babies floating around the pond. Andrew had an incubator in his bedroom for hatching pheasant chicks, and we all enjoyed watching them chipping their way out of their egg shells. He even had a fish tank in his bedroom in which he kept two axolotl.

After they finished making the fences, Peter bought fifty ewes, borrowed a ram, and in the Spring, the lambs arrived and we had about 110% lambing; not bad for novice farmers. If a lamb was born in the night into pouring rain and freezing wind, when the boys found it in the morning it would be half dead and cold, so they would bring it inside to lie in front of the heater. Jean would lick and lick it back into life again, and then they’d put it out with its waiting mother, and it was like magic to see that little lamb run to the ewe and start sucking milk from her udder.

Our next door neighbours had a black and white spotted Dalmatian dog who had a tendency to wander, especially when Jean came on heat, so when her first lot of puppies arrived, they were born black with white tummies and odd white spots here and there, a dead giveaway as to their other parent. Peter and I were due to go to a conference and Jean’s eight puppies were born while we were away. Dougal rang to tell us, and to my horror I heard Peter say, ‘They’ll be hard to get rid of. You’d better drown four of them.’ Dougal did drown them in the laundry tub which broke his heart to do, and made him spew he told me when we got home.

Kate said, ‘It would make me spew, too, Granny. Do you think Jean minded?’

‘I’m sure she did, Kate, but I don’t think she ever knew what actually happened to them.’

Jean was a great mother for her puppies; she taught them beautiful manners, how to dig for rabbits and how to bury bones. One day when I came home from work, and walked along the passage to the kitchen, I saw earth flying through the air from the rose garden outside the windows of our living room. Investigation revealed four little puppies industriously digging to find whatever goodies Jean had buried there for them. While I approved of her motives, I would have preferred them to be digging elsewhere than amongst my precious roses.

We bought a jet boat and Jean loved going boating. One day we were out on the Waimakariri River on a Club Day with about twenty other boats. As soon as we beached, Jean leapt out of the boat and disappeared into the gorse bushes. We were all peacefully sitting around eating our sandwiches at the picnic spot, when she suddenly flashed past us, stretched out like a greyhound as she raced after a bobbing, little white rabbit tail. People leapt to their feet to get a better view; the cheering and shouting was deafening; even the previously most ladylike of the spectators experienced blood-lust, all screaming with excitement as they raced after Jean.

‘Did Jean catch that rabbit, Granny?’

‘Not that day Kate, but she caught lots of others when she got a bit older.’

When Dougal took the rifle down from where it hung on the wall in the hall, away back in the days when it was still safe to have your guns on display, Jean would leap around with feverish excitement. There was nothing she would sooner do than go out hunting with Dougal. One day he and Jean went for a walk down to Charlie Tilson’s farm to shoot rabbits, and as they were walking past a haystack, Dougal heard a little mewing sound and there was a nest of abandoned kittens with only one left alive, a tiny wee, ginger kitten. He brought it home inside his shirt, and as he came in the door, I heard his father yell, ‘Don’t show it to your mother!’

‘But he was too late; I’d already seen the kitten.’

‘Was that kitten called Charlie Tilson, Granny?’

‘It was, Kate, and I’ll never forget the look of that little ginger face peeping out from between the buttons of Dougal’s shirt.’

‘Dad’s told me stories about Charlie. Why didn’t Grandpop want you to see him?’

‘We already had a cat, called “Cracker”, and Grandpop thought that was enough animals in our little house, because Andrew also had a rabbit called “Thumper”. They used to look so cute, all curled up together in front of the fire in the winter time. We didn’t have TV then Kate, but watching all those little animals playing together was as good as having TV. Jean knew Thumper was a special rabbit, and she didn’t hurt him at all.’

‘Dad said that Charlie was so hungry he always ate like it was his last meal, and he’d crawl away from the plate with his tummy dragging on the ground.’

‘Another thing he did, Kate, was treat Cracker like his mother, and when they were lying together, he would suck and suck Cracker’s tummy which was strange as Cracker was a boy, but he didn’t seem to mind.’

Jean wasn’t supposed to get into people’s beds, but when the boys were still at home and sleeping late in the weekends, I would go to their bedrooms to waken them, and see four tell-tale paws sticking out from under Dougal’s blankets. After he left High School, he started an Agricultural Diploma at Lincoln College. But first he had to leave home to do practical farm work in North Canterbury, and of course he took Jean with him. She was sadly missed, but he came home sometimes for the weekend and he always brought Jean with him.

On one such occasion, we’d had a lovely weekend with them both, and were all sad when it was time for Dougal and Jean to leave and go back to the farm, only she was nowhere to be found. We whistled and yelled into the dark, and suddenly she burst through the gorse hedge and rushed into the family circle. We were all hugging and patting her until the awful truth dawned on us that she stank of pig-shit; she’d been rolling around in it over at a neighbour’s pig farm.

Dougal couldn’t let Jean in his car smelling like that, so he kissed me goodbye and said, ‘She’s your dog now, Mum.’

‘Jean must have spent the whole night licking herself, Kate, because the next day she was as clean as a whistle.’

Dougal had wanted a “proper dog” for some time, a Collie that he could train to help him with his sheep and cattle work on farms. Soon after that he got a Collie sheep dog puppy which he trained to be “a real dog”.

It was about this time we got a donkey. If any little kids came to visit, he’d rush over to the fence, hee-hawing all the way and even if he hadn’t had a child on his back for six months or more, we could put the bridle on him, the kids on his back, lead him around the paddock, and he seemed to love every minute of them being there. He often stood over in the corner of the paddock beside Jean’s kennel, and it was as though they were talking to each other.

Jean was really my dog and she’d get jealous if Grandpop hugged me and she would try and get in between us. She always came out to run with me in the mornings; she would pull me all the way up the road, but I would have to pull her all the way back, because she always wanted to go a bit further than I had time for before I went to work. She always carried the paper home, and one day she hid it from me. I couldn’t find it anywhere, and kept saying, ‘Where’s the paper Jean?’ and she was jumping and cartwheeling all around me, really teasing me. Goodness knows where she had hidden the paper, but she brought it in to me later on.

Andrew’s peacock was always wandering around the garden, and I wouldn’t have minded only he used to pooh on the back doormat and although it was an elegant pooh shaped like a chocolate cream freeze, it didn’t look that great to visitors. One day I skidded in it which, by the time I cleaned my shoes, changed my clothes, and hosed the doormat, made me late for work. We asked Jean to help chase him out of the garden. She tore after him, grabbed him by his magnificent, streaming tail which pulled right out, but without missing a beat she bounded on after him, the peacock in full flight, and his tail gracefully waving up and down like a huge walrus moustache on either side of Jean’s jaws.

‘What happened to all the feathers, Granny?’

‘I think Andrew gave most of them away. The peacock looked beautiful when he fanned his tail out.’

He didn’t come into the garden again, but I was glad when he grew another tail. He used to roost on the carport at nighttime, with his big tail hanging down, and if we had visitors and they were admiring his tail as they were leaving, Andrew would say, ‘Do you want a feather?’ and he’d go and pull one out, but the peacock didn’t seem to mind.

One weekend we went down to Central Otago, jet-boating with our Hamish and Jean. The camping ground at Alexandra had “No Dogs” signs around, so I put a rug over her and told her she had to be quiet and not move a whisker. When the camping ground manager talked to us through the car window, Jean didn’t move, and even with all those other campers walking back and forth past our tent, she stayed quiet under the rug until it was dark and safe to take her into the tent.

We slept in sleeping bags on little, low, fold up stretchers, and that night there was a dreadful frost. I woke up feeling frozen stiff, so I whispered to Jean to get into my sleeping bag with me. She hopped in and lay still as a mouse, until some drunk boys walked past our tent and she woke up and barked. As I stuffed her back in my sleeping bag, whispering, ‘Shshshsh,’ I heard one of them say, ‘Was that a dog barking?’ I put Jean back in the car early the next morning, threw the rug over her and told her to be quiet again, and when we were packing up the manager came along. He looked suspiciously in the car windows, but he didn’t say anything, and nor did Jean.

In 1985 I went to England with my sister, Jeannette, for three and a half months. Peter came two months later for our five weeks “Over 50s Kontiki Tour of Europe”, and while we were away, a Lincoln College student stayed in our house to dog-sit Jean. After we came home, it took her a week or two to forgive me for leaving her for so long; she wouldn’t look at me, or come near me, until one morning I woke up to feel her head poking under my blankets. I lifted them and she leapt up and cuddled in beside me at last.

We decided to plant blueberries to provide an income for our retirement, and for the first two years we couldn’t afford a shade cloth netting roof for them. It was just as well because in the second year we had a dreadful hailstorm with sharp-edged hailstones as big as hens’ eggs; they shredded the little bushes, made dints in people’s cars, broke windscreens, and tore tiles off roofs, so they would have shredded the blueberry netting too, if we’d had it then.

We decided to plant sweetcorn between the rows of blueberry plants to provide some temporary shelter, and Guo Pei Yu, a Chinese friend from Beijing who was studying for two years at Lincoln College, helped me plant the corn seeds. Jean helped too; when we used up each packet of corn seeds, I’d say, ‘Fetch some more, Jean,’ and she would run down to the box of seeds by the gate and bring back another packet.

‘An amazing dog, wasn’t she Kate? I wonder how she knew what I wanted, but she did and didn’t have to be told twice. While we were planting the corn, Guo told me lots of Chinese stories; I wish I could remember them now to tell them all to you.’

‘But I love hearing the Jean stories best, Granny.’

Our friends, Murray and Bev Brown sold their outboard motorboat and bought a jet boat. We had some wonderful trips together with their two boys on lakes and rivers, and Jean always came too. Murray was proud of his lovely new boat, so shiny and clean. When Jean got a bit older, in her fifteenth year, she still loved boating with us, but she got a little muddled about which boat was ours. When we stopped for lunch one day, she jumped out into the river, swam around for a bit, and then, to Murray’s horror, she jumped into his immaculate boat. Before we could stop her she clambered up, her big paws transferring mud from the river bank over the bow, down the windscreens, the dashboard, and onto the seats of Murray’s boat. Then she shook vigorously to get rid of about half the Waimakariri river from her thick coat and, understandably, he was not that happy with her senile behaviour.

‘I think you’re getting tired Kate. I’d better tuck you in so you can go to sleep.’

‘No, no, Granny. I love hearing the stories. Please just give me one more.’

Dougal was working down in Central Otago and farming friends of his had a lovely wee Collie dog called “Lizzie”. When poor Lizzie was kicked by a bullock, she couldn’t run around the hills anymore, so they were going to put her to sleep.

‘Don’t do that,’ said our Dougal, ‘Mum would love to have her.’

‘And that’s how we got our own real dog, Kate. She knew exactly what to do with the sheep.’

Lizzie was as nice as Jean, and a great help to Peter. But she was an outside dog, which was fortunate because Jean was getting old, and as she had twice poohed in the house she was banished outdoors, but typical of her, she didn’t complain; she just accepted her lot in life, and lay on the doormat outside whichever room I was in.

Having Lizzie kept Jean fit; if any bones were thrown on the lawn after a meal, Lizzie was likely to get them first, so as she was always on the lookout for them, Jean had to follow her around all day, just in case... When Jean, Lizzy and I went for walks, most of the neighbouring dogs would join us and there would be half a dozen canine friends trailing along with me: a black Labrador, two Jack Russells, two Rhodesian Red Ridgebacks, Jean and Lizzie.

Our Hamish said, ‘Everyone probably says, “There goes that mad woman with all the dogs”.’

Although Jean developed a painful looking limp, and would sag at her back legs now and then, she and Lizzie still came out walking with me. One day as we were going along the drive, she sat down and looked at me with sad eyes, as much as to say, ‘I can’t do this any more, Mum.’ She was sixteen by then, so Peter took her to the Vet and he put her to sleep.

‘Did you know that for every dog or cat year, human beings have seven years? So if you count that up in human terms, Kate, it means that Jean lived the equivalent of one hundred and eleven years. Longer even than your Greatgrandma Boyd.’

Peter buried Jean in the house paddock, and Lizzie and the donkey watched as Peter filled the little grave. The donkey missed her too, and he and Lizzie hung around scratching at her grave for several days.

‘I was so lucky to still have Lizzie to take me for walks, Kate. We had her for five years, and when she died Dougal buried her in the garden; I’ll show you where one day. Although we have had several dogs since then, and each one has its story, there has never been another one as lovely as Jean. Oh dear, I’ve been telling Jean stories for far too long, and I think you’ve gone to sleep, Kate.’