"The One" Dog and "The Others": A Study of Canine Character

by Frances E. Slaughter

BANDY, the friend and hero of three generations of Marlborough boys, was of the spirit of the age in which he lived. With a decorous respect for the sober business of the classrooms, it was in the playing fields that his prowess was displayed. Cricket was for him the absorbing interest from the early days of his puppyhood to the closing hours of his life. Football and hockey had a lesser place in his affections, and the Racquet Court came in occasionally for patronage. Of the School Rifle Corps he was an enthusiastic and exemplary member, and even illness would not keep him from his place in the corps, when the delights of a Field Day were in prospect.

In private life Bandy was a Dandie Dinmont, who came into the possession of the master of Littlefield, one of the Marlborough boarding houses, when he was only a few weeks old. As there were some fifty boys at Littlefield, and no other dog was kept in the house, Bandy was from the first thrown greatly into the society of humans, and throughout his life he always showed a preference for their companionship to that of those of his own kind.

Bandy made his first acquaintance with cricket in the summer term that followed his arrival at the school. His master, who used to coach at the cricket nets in the school playing field, was in the habit of taking the puppy with him and tying him up in full view of all that was going on. With growing interest Bandy watched the proceedings, and so well did he respond to his early training that the love of the game developed into a passion with him when he had come to years of discretion. He grew to be one of the most enthusiastic and untiring of fieldsmen, and for a long succession of summer terms he was seldom absent, morning or afternoon, from the Littlefield practice net. He generally stood in the long field, and would work himself to a state of complete exhaustion in retrieving the balls.

The Professor
BANDY

In this, his chosen work, Bandy showed a nice discrimination. He only worked for his own house. Balls hit from other nets might fly past him, or even roll to his feet, but of these he took no heed. His fielding was for those of his own house party, though he recognised the claims of the school nets reserved for the XI and XXII, and professional bowlers, and showed his recognition in a manner all his own. He himself was always up to time, and if his house contingent were late he would enter a protest against their slackness by taking his services for that hour to the aristocrats of the cricket field. Yet here the nets had drawbacks from Bandy’s point of view. Being longer and higher than the ordinary house nets, the ball was seldom hit outside them, and in consequence there was but little fielding to be done. But Bandy made the best of things. Taking no notice for the time being of his usual allies, he would stand behind the wicket of his chosen comrades, and leap at the balls, not yet past the bat, or as they struck the net. He would even venture inside and stand near in on the off, with eyes fixed, as a fieldsman’s should be, not on the bowler but on the bat.

This habit nearly brought Bandy’s career to an untimely end. The captain of the XI drove a ball low down on the off right, that came straight at him. Bandy watched its course without flinching, and met it full on his head. As he rolled over, the game was forgotten, and the players rushed to his assistance. As his master was coming on to the field he met the poor little sufferer being carried tenderly home. He was apparently dying. In a few hours, however, he rallied a little, and during the night so far recovered consciousness as to take some nourishment from the hands of a devoted nurse. He was still alive when his master went into school at 10 o’clock on the following morning, but it seemed scarcely possible that he could recover. Soon after twelve, when his owner went into the cricket field, an excited boy rushed up to him with the question, “Have you heard about Bandy, sir?” As there seemed only one possible reason for such a query, the master responded sadly with the one word, “Dead?” “Not a bit of it,” was the astounding answer, “he’s fielding inside the net.”

After this, life without a ball for Bandy was incomplete. Though a cricket ball was his first love, it was not by any means the only one. Any ball not in play he regarded as fair game. In the cricket season, as he sometimes strolled with seeming innocence about the field, he would search the pockets of any coat that had been thrown on the ground in the hope of finding the thing he loved so well. Or from the Fives or Racquet Court, he would carry off any spare balls he might come across, and stoutly maintain his right to them. His master was not infrequently met with a request from one of the suffering owners, “Please, sir, would you speak to Bandy? He has bagged my Fives balls.”

Sunday, a day that never appealed to Bandy, was that in which he often turned his attention to possible balls. In the summer he would spend hours quartering the fringe of long grass that surrounds the cricket grounds in which balls were often lost. If Bandy came across an old one, a useless “pudding,” he would proceed to gnaw it to pieces then and there, but if he found a new one he would straightway carry it to his master’s study, which he always regarded as his treasure-house.

That in the opinion of his Marlborough friends Bandy was “more than brute, if less than man,” the following school story will show. In this case, I fear, I cannot go quite so far as those who knew him better and whose faith in his powers was boundless. While Bandy was an interested spectator of a cricket match he would gradually get nearer and nearer to the scoring board, with the object, as his friends declared, of seeing how they had acquitted themselves. If when the numbers went up they showed that a boy had made a good innings, Bandy would sometimes walk down the steps from the pavilion to meet him, and accompany him back with applauding barks.