My mother was a great collector of animals. We already had at least one dog, a cat, ducks, a horse, a goat and a budgie when I think she saw someone wanting to give this puppy away and brought him home. I just fell in love with him. We were never quite sure what breed or cross he was, but he looked like a labrador had bred with an old English sheepdog – he was shaggy and very cute. That is why he was immediately named Teddy.
He had hair the same colour as mine. When the village fete held a pets-who-look-most-like-their-owners competition, my mum thought that Teddy and I looked so alike that we should enter. Being a teenager, I refused.
Teddy was so good natured and jolly; just up for it. He was sort of lolloping – he ran along, but slightly clumsily. He wasn’t like an elegant greyhound. Nobody would be scared of him, either. He wasn’t aggressive; he always looked like he was smiling.
I would have been about 16 when we first got him. He came at a time when I was feeling quite alone. I had moved back in with my mother and my stepfather, after having spent nine months living with my father, which had gone disastrously, so everything was a little bit tense. It was a difficult time.
I would get up at half five in the morning to work for my stepfather, a newsagent, and then do a two hour commute to school, but I would still come home and walk the dog. We bonded on our long walks around the countryside. Once, we were walking across a stubble field in autumn and there was a moonbow. I always had this romantic idea of the lone figure under the Essex sky, the isolated teenager on the flat landscape, which very much bled into my artwork when I first started making pottery. And there was always a dog there.
Between the ages of 15 and 19 was a time of introspection for me. I put a lot of emotional baggage on Teddy and I think, him being called Teddy, I had an unconscious relationship with him as a slightly upgraded Alan Measles, my teddy bear. He was my nonjudgmental, uncomplicated mate who would have a bit of a laugh and a wrestle and go for a walk. It was quite a wrench when I went off to university and had to leave him behind. Whenever I came back, he would go berserk, because I was his best friend.
My mother and stepfather moved to Wales, to a dairy farm, and he went with them, where he lived into his old age, as far as I know. My relationship with my mother became quite strained. I still tear up looking at the old photographs of Teddy. I don’t know how much of that is about him and how much it’s about the time during which he was my friend.
We probably shared only three years together, but I think I was at my most vulnerable. I was deeply emotionally connected to Teddy and, at the height of my teenage dysfunction, it was a constant, stable relationship.
