OVER THE HILL

Illustration: Emma Thrussell.

It had been a month since Bella, my last dog, collected her wings. No longer did the post’s arrival mean a race to intercept her as she hurtled to the door, paws skidding on the quarry tiles, kicking up her usual unholy racket as the letterbox flap rattled. No more toothy perforations in cheques and bills to explain away at the bank. The house was filled with a deafening silence where there should have been the click of nails on the floor, a jingle of collar tags, a noisy lapping at the water bowl, or a gentle snoring.

I sighed, added a delicate final glint to the eye of Morris, my first dog, and then stood back to look at the whole of the painting I was working on. It had been started by my Uncle Ross and showed a landscape, a wildflower-dotted meadow, which led the eye towards a hill with a stand of trees crowning the brow. Ross had succeeded so well in capturing the essence of one of those perfect summer days of the imagination that you could almost hear the hum of bees and buzz of crickets, and feel the warmth of the sun radiating from it. It was Ross who’d first pressed a pencil into my hand during one childhood holiday stay and suggested I sketch his spaniel, Molly. I’d never looked back and, with his encouragement, reached a point where I could earn a living painting animal portraits. You probably won’t be familiar with my uncle’s name, although you’d doubtless recognise his illustrations, which feature in countless books. A quiet, shy man, his two great passions in life were the dogs he surrounded himself with, and what he described as his life’s work — the glorious painting of the meadow to which I now added portraits of my own dogs.