Lost and found
How search for my missing dog nearly broke me
It had been over a week since her beloved Norfolk lurcher had gone missing, and writer Kate Spicer was in utter despair – “mad with grief ”. Days earlier, six-year-old Wolfy had escaped from her brother and sister-in-law’s house in Tufnell Park, north London, where Spicer had reluctantly left him for the first time to go to a wedding. As they opened their front door, Wolfy shot out – running up the road, through traffic and out of sight.
So began a frantic search to #Findwolfy. Spicer hurried back in floods of tears, posting a desperate message on Twitter, in the hope that a lead might emerge. What happened was that her cry for help took on a life of its own, sparking an outpouring of support. She was overwhelmed by tweets of sightings from the public. Jeremy Corbyn, Jeremy Clarkson, Kay Burley, Amanda Holden and Ricky Gervais joined the search – The Office star’s tweet was shared more than 10,000 times. Their sympathy restored her fading faith in people, seeing her through that dark period in November 2015 and becoming the catalyst for her new memoir, Lost Dog: A Love Story.
“I was stunned that people from all walks of life turned out for me,” says Spicer. “At the same time, I felt shame. There were desperate images of Syria in the news and, while I was utterly bereft and terrified of losing my dog forever, I knew in the grand scheme of things mine was a meaningless tragedy.”
After Wolfy vanished, Spicer experienced an extreme emotional reaction
– one she describes as “akin to losing a child” – which shocked her partner of nine years, Martin. While he tried to be pragmatic and philosophical, Spicer followed every tip-off, even consulting a psychic. Her days and nights were spent combing local parks, calling Wolfy’s name. She was consumed by loss and began to lay a scent trail around nearby streets, using her own urine and dirty underwear.
Outwardly, Spicer is confident and successful but this, she says, disguises “deep damage caused by my parents’ divorce”.
She goes on: “They split up when I was a child and for five years I didn’t see much of my Mum. So [losing Wolfy] was very ‘triggering’ in that sense – the feeling of complete longing for someone I loved, and total powerlessness over the situation, brought that miserable childhood reality alive again.
“When you’re a child and away from a significant parent, you shut down to protect yourself,” she adds. “I had low self-esteem, and relished disruptive relationships and doing stupid things. I was, I suppose, lost.”
It was 2015 when Spicer decided to get a dog. She was 46 and life was “OK, but there was a void. I’d tried hard to fill it with wholesome things, but I also used drink and drugs”.
A lurcher seemed the perfect breed to share her and Martin’s small Notting Hill flat, but the couple were turned down by box-ticking specialists for their “lack of experience”. It was starting to look hopeless, until fate intervened and the local rescue centre called. A lurcher was available. Would they take him?
Spicer, now 49, fell in love immediately: “Wolfy imposed order on my life in a way a child might have done. He opened my heart and let my feelings flow. I started singing and crying again.”
He also brought her and Martin closer together, giving them a shared focus. Fundamentally, she explains, they are different people: while Martin is hard-working, Spicer is, by her own admission, lazier. He rises at 5am everyday, when she was often just arriving home. But Wolfy brought their lives into sync and gave Spicer a reason to get up early – and without a hangover – to walk him.
It would be easy to cast Wolfy as the child that Spicer never had. She has written about being “childless through circumstance” – by the time the right man came along, it was too
late. “As much as I wanted to get pregnant, I was never going to be that person who slogged away on the IVF merry-go-round,” she says, pragmatically. “There was definitely a gap in my life where parenthood didn’t happen, but the actual prospect of ‘planning for a baby’ filled me with terror and boredom in equal doses.”
Before meeting Martin, she had considered adopting as a single mother but “didn’t have the guts, cash or stability”.
“I do regret that in some ways, but the addition of Wolfy to our lives meant I no longer craved the idea of being a mother.”
She does, though, detest the terms, “fur baby” and “dog mum”.
“It makes me feel sick when someone says to a dog ‘Mummy’s calling you!’ Possibly because there is an aspect of truth in it; a dog does sate your maternal urges.”
Wolfy arrived at a time when Spicer was “losing” vast numbers of friends to motherhood. “It’s a tribe that’s impossible to join if you don’t have kids,” she says. “I’ve seen friends surrender so much of their lives when children come along and I end up feeling bored, even resentful in their company.
“I’d get together with mothers for a night out but, unlike them, would have no reason to come home. You’ve got a filthy hangover, your relationship’s a joke, you feel a bit grubby.”
She found herself starting to turn her bond with Wolfy into a joke.
“My female friends are raising the next generation and here I am channelling all my love into a dog,” she explains. “I started sending up myself in front of the mothers because I felt they were laughing at me anyway. I’d say, ‘Yes, Wolfy’s very unhappy at his day care centre, but they do have great results at maths’.”
Gradually, though, Spicer stopped caring what people thought.
“I tried so many times to work through things with therapy, then I get this dog and magically my problems start to go away,” she says. “The hardness in my heart has been softened by him. He’s helped me find my soul.”
Wolfy was not a miracle worker, however. “I still underachieve and drink too much. I fight with my boyfriend. My bank account is in a childishly precarious state,” she admits. “But I am more comfortable in my skin. I can’t be bothered with Botox and fillers any more. I’m keen to be ‘just me’, not some idealised version of a woman. A dog’s purity and simplicity exposes what a daft game human life can be.”
Indeed, her book is not always kind to her female friends – and some have stopped speaking to her.
“It’s not a very convenient truth but women can be superbitchy to each other; attacking each other. I often don’t trust them,” she shrugs.
This surprising view might be explained by Spicer’s family background, where the fiercest voices were female. “I was frightened by the women in my family, by their moods and anger, their disappointment,” she says.
“I adore my mother and my sister-in-law. I say some not very nice things about my sister-in-law in the book, but that’s rooted in being jealous of her, and frightened of her. She’s a classic successful person; an Alpha female.” Though she won’t go into detail, both women ended up racked with guilt over Wolfy’s disappearance and relations between them became strained.
While we have been talking, Wolfy has been sleeping contentedly at Kate’s side in their favourite pub in Westbourne Grove. It was nine days after he went missing that the pair were finally reunited. While she was out one night searching, squirting a scent trail of her own urine from a plastic bottle, Martin rang. He had received a call from a garage on Highgate Road, close to her brother’s house. They had Wolfy. He was safe. A trip to the vet’s revealed a broken tail, cuts and bruises, and weight loss, but he was largely unscathed. Spicer cried into his fur with sheer relief – and for more reasons than one.
“Had Wolfy not come back, I don’t think we would have survived,” she says of her and Martin’s relationship. “By then we were a family of three. Finding Wolfy pulled us closer together, because we were the only two experiencing it on the inside. When two people share a terrible experience like that – followed by
‘Wolfy imposed order on my life in a way a child might have done’
‘The hardness in my heart has been softened. He’s helped me find my soul’
immense good luck and a happy ending – it can’t not bring you closer.”
There is, however, a point of conflict: “Martin now won’t leave Wolfy with anyone except his mother, which means that any time we go away, we have to drive to the Cotswolds first and drop him off. Personally, I think we could find a way to make it work whereby Wolfy won’t run away. This is something that continues to divide us.”
His floppy ears presumably burning, Wolfy nuzzles Spicer with his wet nose. The look of love between them is humbling.
“Owning a dog is magical,” she smiles. And with that they walk off through the crowds – a woman and her best friend.