The new garden at Upton Cressett has been making progress with the final installation this week of the new enclosed Yew Courtyard at the rear of the house.
For the last month, we have had Sean Mackay, a former miner from Zimbabwe and his team of local gardeners, digging up (or ‘double digging’ to use the technical term) enormous new borders on the Gatehouse lawn which will hopefully result in a new resplendent Gatehouse Garden. The 3 metre wide borders are inspired by a visit last year to Hampton Court by our garden designer Lindsay Bousfield, who used to run her own nursery for many years.
But it is the ‘enclosure’ of the new English rose garden (roses will be by David Austin) close to the kitchen door that has been the priority following an unfortunare incident that occurred shortly before my marriage to society milliner Laura Cathcart in February. Although referred to on the plans as the ‘medieval rose garden’, it should really be called the ‘pug garden’. Or ‘pug prison’ garden – due to an immediate need to create an Alcatraz environment around the rear of the house for my wife’s new baby pug puppy called Thimble (Thimblina in full).
This is because we very sadly lost her first dear pug puppy called Damson, who escaped from the garden during the Lear-like storms, gales and floods that raged at Upton Cressett – we are an ancient hamlet on top of a giant Bronz Age hill – back in February.
So much did we love little Damson that I think I need to write a brief obituary to set the record straight as to what happened on that fateful Sunday morning in early February that still haunts me every time I close the back door and leave the dogs on thier own in the kitchen.
Until I met my wife, and her family, who live in Norfolk, I had not been aware of the very special magic of the pug breed. My mother in law has two pugs, who rarely leave her side – either in London or the country. It was pretty clear from my first weekend staying with Laura’s parents in the county that having snorting, feisty and mischievous pugs were an essential part of family life. If I was going to make Laura happy, pugs were going to feature, so I had better get used to pug life.
I noted, for example, that placed on by my bedside table in the guest bedroom at Laura’s parents house was a book entitled A Pug’s Guide to Etiquette by Gemma Correll.
‘This manual is an essential item for any pug aspiring to be a sophisticated, civilized citizen’ I read in bed.
‘Pugs play by their own set of rules….When you want them to sit, they stand; when you want them to stay, they go; and when you want them to stop eating that unidentified item on the floor, well…
‘Traditional schools of veterinary thought put these pug peccadillos down to a stubborn refusal to be trained that’s inherent in the breed. They are wrong. This behaviour is, in fact, down to an ancient set of rules, passed down from pug generation topug generation. A Pug’s Guide to Etiquette attempts to help pug owners understand these rules, and by doing so will help advance pug-human relations to spectacular new heights.
Hmmmmm…..I was beginning to get the message. After we got engaged in early September, I told Laura that I was going to give her a new pug puppy as an engagement present.
If I could find one. The only snag is that I had no idea how tricky and exhausting it can be to track down a black girl pug puppies. Not only are they in high demand and rare but they are also expensive. Around £1000 is the going rate. My own black labrador – called Cressetta – came from a Welsh farm house advertising ‘working labrador pups’ in the Shropshire Star at £300 each.
But once you commit to a pug puppy, there is no way out… so we started our pug search. We rang pug breeders; we trawled the local papers and the internet. We even endured a two month ‘phantom pregnancy’ from one pug breeder. Finally, after about three months of looking, we got a lead through a fried of Laura who worked in the private aviation business that a former air stewardess had a litter of five week old black pugs with a girl available.
We drove to Kent almost immediately where the pug was living in the ‘front room’ of a house with about five other dogs. They were another family of pug fanatics and were clearly upset to see her go. Seeing that she did not have all the correct Kennel Club registration papers, and her fur was a greyish black rather than glossy black, I offered £800 on the spot. This was accepted. I paid a £400 deposit, with a view to collecting the little pug in January when the pug was around six weeks old.
After being updated with photos of the pug over Christmas, Laura went to collect the pug in the middle of January. We decided to call her ‘Damson’ – as her coat was a dark fruity near black colour, but definitely not jet black. We have ancient damson trees here at Upton Cressett as well so we liked the connection. Damson soon settled into life at Upton Cressett, bonding with my labrador and spending most of her waking life lying on a pug bed in front of the wood burning stove in Laura’s millinery studio.
Since the floods, storms and rain in Shropshire were incessant during February, little Damson hardly ever went outside – and certainly had no idea or send of the garden or surrounding fields or woods around the house.
Then Laura went away for the weekend for her Hen Night in Essex; and left me in charge of the pug. On the Sunday morning, with a strong gale blowing, I let the two dogs out. They then came back into the kitchen for breakfast. With the kitchen door firmly closed, I then went off to my study to work.
What happened next was one of the traumatic experiences of my life.
About an hour later, I came back into the kitchen to find the door had blown. We had had problems with the kitchen door as the rain water had made the door warp and expand so it couldnt be closed easily. So I had asked our builder to plane it down to fit the door surround better. Alas, it had just blown open because of the wind.
I searched the garden, moat (which was dangerously full of water), th woods and local fields. No sign of either dog. Around lunch-time, in a state of panic, I posted the following on the house website, following Search and Rescue style appeal on BBC Radio Shropshire.
Devastating news this morning. Damson has gone missing
My fiancee’s beautiful little black pug puppy – an engagement present
– disappeared from the grounds of Upton Cressett this morning at
around 7.30am. The little black pug has a white chest is called
Damson. She is so young – around 14 weeks – she cannot survive long
on her own.
She had become very close to my three year old black labrador called
Cressie and normally they are inseparable, cuddling up on their bed
together. They escaped from the kitchen this morning. The black lab has run off and taken the little pug – who is tiny – with her.
Damson doesnt know the local fields well enough- it must have been her first time ever in a water-logged and
muddy Shropshire field. It’s like a human crossing a road for the first time.
The little pug couldn’t possibly have kept up with the labrador, She
couldn’t have gone far – but where? At fourteen weeks she has just
worked out how to climb steps and scamper around at great speed. I am
greatly distressed and appeal to anybody who may have seen her, or any
local farmers – who have shot our pet dogs before – not to harm the
little puppy.
A generous reward is offered for her safe return. As you may have heard, I have appealed for searching help on BBC Radio Shropshire and notified the police. I am now going to resume the hunt in the local fields.
After posting this blog, I rang my friend Lucy Birley who lives nearby. Could she come over with her lurchers? They are hunting dogs with a refined sense of smell. Perhaps they could sniff out the little pug, or pick up her scent.
With my own labrador having returned, and no sign of the little pug, I was now getting increasingly desperate. Not the least as Laura had rung to say she would be home by around 7pm. Various members of the public had heard my pleas for help on BBC Radio Shropshire – but all search parties had found nothing.
Lucy was incredibly supportive and we tramped the fields for an hour or so – the rain sodden clay making our muddy Wellington boots feel like they were weighted with lead. The floods had caused the moat around Upton Cressett to fill with a dangerous level of water – so drowning in the moat was one possibility. Lucy also suggested possibly a ‘hawk’ had swooped down and grabbed the little pug for breakfast; or else it had drowned from being washed away in one of the medieval brooks that surrounded the deserted medieval village. Normally just a trickle of stream water, they were flooded and gurgling away like a ferocious gushing weir.
By around 3.30 pm I decided that the cause was lost and decided to put plan B into action. With my marriage just a few weeks away, the consequences of hr little pug not being at home in her basket when Laura arrived back were just too appalling momentous to contemplate.
Having been tramping across fields for three hours, I went into the kitchen, took off my boots and put ‘Black Pug Bitch Puppy’ into the Google search engine. It had taken four months to find a pug, but such was my fear – and love for Laura that I somehow managed to find a new black puppy with a pug breeder called ‘Mandy’ who lived in the King Stanley area of Birmingham – and managed to drive to King Stanley and back before 7pm.
As I approached her house in a pretty rough housing neighbourhood cul de sac, I saw a large black man standing in front of the gates to her house. So this is how I am going to meet my end, I thought, being the victim of a pug mugging for the £1000 in fifty notes I had in my pocket. Of course there was no little black pug – it was all an internet scam to steal £1000 in cash off a pug mug like myself.
But once I saw the sight of a plastic pug in the front room window, I thought it might be for real. Luckily, the potential mugger turned out just to be a neighbour.
So the story had a happy ending. Although there were tears when she first found out that the pug had been ‘substituted’, (‘What have you done to my pug? She’s lost so much weight! And what’s this white markings on her chest? – long pause – Have you killed my pug and replaced her?’) Laura couldn’t now be happier now.
The mischievous little Thimble is now her pride and joy. But no expense is being been spared in the Alcatraz style new yew hedge courtyard that is now her private garden prison.
William Cash