The true story of a boy's love for his dog, discovering the loss of death, the unsatisfying attempt at replacement, encountering only further disaster and loss, and controling the pain by making an unbreakable mental rule to never to allow such emotions to be embraced when the lesson was thoroughly learned that it can only lead to great heartache.

I am nine years old and I live in Toowoomba in Queensland. This is the largest town in the state after the capital of Brisbane, and it is perched on top of the mountains that are called the Great Dividing Range. Here it is very warm in summer and quite cold in the winters. My parents moved here to take over a convenience store but in 1960 these were simply called corner stores or referred to as a mixed business by the accountants and tax man.

At the time, I thought that my birthday was on the 4th of December and in 1950 I was very very excited at the prospect of finally making it to my 10th birthday. There was a lot of prestige to be had in achieving double digits in my age, and I was so looking forward to this big event.

However, as the date was drawing near, my mother finally decided that this was the time to tell me that she lied on the original paperwork and that my birthday, as actually stated on my birth certificate was not until 28th or March the following year, 1961. To a child in that place and in those circumstances, this news was devastating. My older brother took full advantage of the situation to ensure that his position as the older and superior brother was fully cemented by this further gap in our ages.

This was the very first lesson that I had to learn that even the most trusted people in my life could lie to me if were necessary to manipulate the situation and gain some advantage. The reason for the deception had arisen 5 years previously when I was in fact only 4, and my parents had taken over their first corner store in Wynnum, Queensland. Both of my parents were needed full time to attend to the running of this corner store business, and a 4 year old child in the house all day was something of an inconvenience. Seems that my actual birthday being in late March meant that I should not start school, starting age being 5 years, until the following year.

The rules were that for a child to start school, he or she must already have attained 5 years of age or that their fifth birthday would fall before the end of February of the year of enrollment. Paperwork was not really required in that post war Australia and the mother’s word on the form would never be challenged.

So I was sent off to school early and that had the effect of making sure that I would be the youngest and least developed of all the kids in my class by quite a lot. But that got me out of the house for my parents so the desired benefit at home was achieved. From that year, my date of birth had become 4th December 1950 to accommodate the process. It was finally put back to right when my 10th birthday in 1960 was postponed until the real date of 28th March 1961.

My life at this time consisted of my attendance at Toowoomba South Boys School, a school that I entered half way through grade 4. I hated it.

Prior to my turning up on the very first day that I was to attend this school, I did not even know that there were some schools where boys and girls were not all in the same class. I never was brave enough to ask the question, but I was very worried about why it was that girls could not be in this school. Where was the problem? Was it that we were doing things in this school that only boys could know about? I was silently confused because discipline was strict, and you just did not dare to say something that could be considered inappropriate. The punishments metered out for not knowing your place were so over the top that they certainly had the desired effect. You shut up and did what you were told and waited for the time when you could escape again and go back home.

From the corner store home to the school was about 2 kilometers, and when my brother and I walked to and from school every day, bitter cold, rain, or shine. There was no such thing as Mum’s taxi to take us to and from, no busses, no bicycles could be afforded from the household budget, so it was walking or “shanks pony” that was the norm. We were constantly reminded of how mum and dad both had to walk many times this distance every day and it never did them any harm. So we shut up and walked to school. This was about normal for most kids anyway and we thought nothing of having to walk to school and actually enjoyed it. There were places and things to see along the way every day and it always was fun to walk along with my brother to and from school.

The highlight of the afternoon walk home was to have our much loved dog Rover (yes, his name really was Rover) run to greet us when we were about 200 meters (yards on those days) from home. As soon as we thought he could hear us, we would call “Rover” as loudly as we could. The dog was always waiting for us and bounded down the block to greet us as soon as our calls were heard. This was the first real pet dog that we had ever had, and one of my favorite childhood photos is of myself and the dog lying on the lounge room floor wrapped in a blanket and Rover was very happily lying beside me.

Then one day, the dog did not come when we called. Clearly something had to be very wrong, because he had never missed coming to meet us and then playfully running home along side us. For him not to come, perhaps he had done something wrong and was tied up? We tried to think up all kinds of scenarios to cover the non appearance of Rover. On arrival home, the dog was nowhere to be found. We were worried. Then I saw the look on my mother’s face and I knew this was serious, but still hoped all would be okay.

My dad had a large old car that he used to take chocolates and snacks that he carried on a tray around the wards of the nearby hospital. This was just part of the business as there were no stores actually in the hospital, and dad could sell a bit more if he took the little things around the wards to sell the patients. As dad would drive out the gate and up the hill toward the hospital, it was the usual thing for Rover to run along side the car all the way to the top of the hill. The sad story was then revealed that on this day, another large dog ran out of a gateway and startled poor old Rover and he bounded to his right to get out of the way of the other big dog, and went right under the wheels of dad’s car. Dad’s anguish at being the driver of the car that killed our much loved pet dog was very evident but what can a father do? We never blamed him and actually felt sorry for him knowing that he would feel even worse than we did. He actually saw it all, heard the noise, saw the blood. It must have been terrible for him. We had to face the bad news, but it was a sanitized version of the bad news.

Mum’s response was to put on a brave face. Of course, she was from a British family, so what else do you do when tragedy strikes close to home. “Never mind, we can get another one, and we will go out right away and find our dog. Everything will be just fine, you’ll see.” For me, this was just nonsense, and no way was there another Rover out there waiting for us to go and get him. Nothing would replace our lost childhood pet, but we just stayed quiet and said “Uh, okay mum”.

I forget now where the substitute dog came from, but I think that perhaps there was a customer come into the shop, was told the story, and then happened to have some puppies waiting to be sent along to a new home, and mum readily agreed thinking this was perfect and solved the problem so effortlessly. It was kinda funny looking, vaguely like a Coker Spaniel mixed with who knows what. Our dog was a Kelpie, and it was a boys dog. This thing mum named Lindy-Loo and it was definitely a girls dog. Mum liked that name. I hated it. Rover was a real dog, Lindy-Loo was a sissy name and it was a sissy dog.

I tried my best to like it, and after about a couple of weeks or so, was succeeding so some extent. The memories of Rover were fading a little, and Lindy-Loo was trying its best to be playful and cute and adorable. Although it couldn’t possibly bound excitedly down the road when we came home from school, it was making inroads to our affections pretty well.

It was on a non school day, perhaps a weekend, and I was alone in the back yard of home. I noticed that the dog was not around and did not come to my calls. This was very strange as it normally was not very far away at any given time. I go searching gradually widening the search area. Then I see the dog lying on the road, and I see the blood streaming down the hill from the dog’s body.

Silently shattered I really had no idea how to deal with this. How do I tell the others? How do I feel? Sadness and more grief for what? This thing was supposed to remove the pain of losing Rover and now, just when you start to love the thing, it is violently and painfully snatched away again! Why did she bring in this sissy dog to replace Rover when MY dog was irreplaceable? Then the sissy dog ends up dead too! I tried to move this dog in to the huge void in my life left by Rover, and then even the small compensations that this inadequate replacement dog were now also taken.

I couldn’t think of how to tell anyone, and I was trying to figure out what it was that was going on in my world for me. Clearly there was no one who could explain it to me. I just swallowed down the hurt went into a quiet place by myself for the rest of the day. No problem, no one came looking for me anyway. When I walked in to the house at around tea time, my mother had to break the news to me that now Lindy-Loo was dead. I said “Oh, okay”. What else could I say. Then I remember her just looking at me and saying that maybe that dog was not the best replacement for Rover, and we would try again. I said “No thanks! I don’t want another dog, ever.” No one else knew how to deal with it so we all just carried on and pretended that it was all in the past and completely forgotten already. How nice.

These experiences definitely changed my life forever. The very clear lesson that I learned was that you should never love anything so much that you will be badly hurt when it is gone. And it is always going to be gone, sooner or later. I learned to protect myself by keeping a close guard on the issues of the heart.