Tags
321 EOD Squadron, Army, British Army, Cyprus, Dog, Dogs, Troodos Mountains, Vizsla
I found Errol as a starving stray in Cyprus in October 2002, when I was there on a two year posting at the Cyprus Service Support Unit. My Dad was over on holiday and we were driving to Troodos to visit the Kykko monastery. I’m not sure why. Neither of us were particularly interested in the Greek Orthodox Church or its architecture. Moreover, having read a bit of the Island’s history, I knew that in the 1950s, when Cyprus was a British colony, the monastery had been used as a haven by EOKA terrorists from which to attack British forces.
The road to Troodos twists and turns through mountain and forest, but it was much improved from when I first went to Cyprus in 1990. A few months before my first visit, a British army truck had crashed through the barriers on a hairpin bend and fallen over a cliff, killing all eight soldiers in it.
So I was being careful as I steadily climbed the Troodos road. And there, ambling along the white lines, was this dog. He walked slowly, his head hung low and I could see that he had given up. I sounded my horn but he ignored it and I had to drive around him to avoid running him over.
It isn’t unusual to see stray – and dead – dogs in Cyprus. I think most Cypriots see them in a completely different way to us. Very few are kept as pets for their own sake. Dogs are either gun dogs or guard dogs and if it transpires that the dog isn’t very good at its allocated job, it is often taken to the mountains or the edge of the motorway and just thrown away.
Yet, there was undeniably something about this one. I said to my Dad “if that dog is still there on the way back I’m having it”. To this day I don’t know what prompted me to say that, because having a dog when you’re a single soldier is decidedly impractical. My Dad, who had a healthy disregard for all things religious, said “well, the monastery isn’t going anywhere”. On that I executed a U-turn and drove back until we found the dog. As we drew alongside him I pulled over and got out. He just stood there, in the middle of the road, looking at us. He was an emaciated wretch and I could see just about every bone in his body through his skin. I thought he was about six months to a year old and I reckoned that he could not have survived for more than a few days longer.
I extended my hand out to him and, to my surprise, he began slowly walking over to me. He was very weak and timid, yet somehow trusting. He came over to me and accepted a drink of water. Then he let me stroke him and, eventually, allowed himself to be put into the car. I had to lift him in as he was too weak to climb in by himself.
We mused over what name to give him. Naming pets always seems hard to me but eventually we decided on Errol, simply because my horse is called Flynn. I had no idea what kind of dog he was at that point, and it didn’t matter to me. It turned out that he was a Hungarian Vizsla – an ancient breed of pointer. I’d never heard of them. I took him to the stables and I took him to work. It was fascinating to watch his reactions to people change as he realised that the ones he now met wouldn’t hurt him or shoo him away.
Some months later I was assisting a company of the Resident Infantry Battalion on an exercise, and I took Errol with me. One of them saw him and said “there’s that dog again”. I asked him what he meant and the story of Errol’s second abandonment came out. There is an infantry base in Troodos which is manned by companies on rotation. Some soldiers from this company found Errol when he was a puppy. It seemed he had been abandoned at a very young age. They took him in, fed him, had him inoculated and generally took good care of him. But when their company was relieved, the new company commander decreed that there would be no dogs on camp and had Errol and a few others expelled. It was some time after that expulsion that I found him.
Errol soon grew out of being timid. He also just grew. Within a few months the skeletal wreck that I found had grown into a big, beautiful, friendly rambunctious monster. He was very intelligent and strong-willed. His obedience and hearing were selective and he could have taught Houdini a thing or two about escaping. I once took him into an office at 321 EOD Squadron in Northern Ireland. Because it was a large office I let him off his lead. He ran up to a fire escape door, of a kind I know he had never seen before. He sat down, and ruffled his brow as he stared at the door and its handle. Then, after a few moments thinking, he leapt up and struck the door release bar with both paws. The door swung open and Errol was off looking for rabbits.
He performed a similar trick when I was the ATO at Antrim detachment. On the very day of the OC’s quarterly inspection he got out through the fire escape and I was lucky that Brian was the OC and Geordie was the SAT. They could have been justifiably annoyed at me, but instead they laughed at my vain attempts to catch him on the lawn in front of the NAAFI.
He was a consummate hunter. He could find, point and flush game – and cats – even though he was never trained as a working gundog. This, combined with his having very much his own ideas about when he should come back to me, led to some problems.
There was a grassy area behind my house in Lisburn and I would let him off the lead there. This was fine until, one day, there was a cat sitting on my neighbour’s garden fence. The cat saw Errol and jumped off into the garden. Errol saw the cat jump and gave chase, clearing the four foot tall fence like a startled deer. The cat ran into the house and Errol ran after it. I stood helplessly on the other side of the fence. I could hear a commotion going on inside the house and I feared the worst for the cat. But the cat reappeared and then disappeared into a neighbouring garden at a rate of knots. Errol then bounded out into the garden and, seeing no cat, leapt back over the fence again and sat next to me as if he actually was a good boy. Then a woman appeared from the back door. Wrapped only in a towel and still bearing some bubble bath clouds, she looked somewhat confused. I made sympathetic noises as she told me of how she was enjoying a lovely warm candlelit bath, when first a strange cat and then an even stranger big orange dog stormed into the bathroom. But inside I laughed.
I took to using a long length of EOD line as a lead, so that he could have a run about but I still had control of him. This can best be described as a partial success. One night I was stood at the top of the embankment outside the Felix and Firkin, 321 EOD Squadron’s bar in Lisburn, chatting away about nothing in particular to Martin. Errol was by my side – for a while. I was so engrossed in our conversation that I didn’t realise that he had seen something – a cat or rabbit maybe – in the undergrowth somewhere down the embankment. He ran after what ever it was, and didn’t stop when he got to the end of his line. The first I knew about this was when the line went taut and I was picked up bodily and propelled down the embankment into a large and prickly bush.
Despite his hunting talent, he had no killing instinct and was forever letting things go, only to chase them again. Perhaps because of this – and his time as a stray – he never grew out of begging and he could not walk past a bin without putting his head in it in a search for food. I took him on a train once and needed to move down the centre aisle of the carriage. Errol walked in front of me and, as he was tall enough for his head to be at the same height as the tables, he saw the lady’s sandwich before I did. In fact, he saw, snaffled and swallowed it before I could do anything about it.
There were many times like this when he drove me mad, embarrassed me or got me into trouble. But he was my constant companion for seven years, and was beside me every day except for when I was in Iraq or the odd occasion when I couldn’t take him with me. He was loyal, demonstrably affectionate and bursting with character and fun. Most importantly, he made me laugh every day.
On a licensing exercise that I took Errol on – and shouldn’t have – I noticed that he had developed a limp in his front left leg. I took him to the vet and after a series of tests he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma – a very aggressive form of bone cancer. Amputation of the affected leg was an option, but the vet said that by the time the cancer was apparent in the legs, it would have already spread to the lungs.
I have made some tough decisions in my life, but that was by far the toughest, even though there was only one realistic option. No manual approach to an item of unexploded ordnance or a suspect IED was ever as hard as that walk with Errol to the vets – and walking away afterwards, alone, with an empty collar in my hand and tears streaming down my face. Errol was put down on 21st October 2009, seven years to the month after I found him. I miss him terribly.