Whippeting for me began when I was three-years-old.

It is a bizarre twist of fate that I was born in Overseal, the next door village to Church Gresley where the Old Hall Miners’ Welfare sports fields have for so long hosted the annual BWRA straight championships, the pinnacle of the whippet racing world, and where thirty-odd years later I’d scale those dizzy heights. One of my Dad’s mates was the local garage owner, known to us as uncle Ted (honorary rather the in blood), who in his spare time raced whippets. I can still see his two fawn bitches Tina and Mitzy in my mind’s eye and it was a pup from Tina that began our whippet journey as a family.

It was 1967, the year before the British Whippet Racing Association was formed. The summer of love had just unfolded in San Francisco and it would be two years before man landed on the moon. By the time we got our pup, Whisky, we had moved away from Derbyshire to Valley in Anglesey and we picked her up at a pub halfway between the two. She was fawn like her mother, but apparently unwanted because she was barrel-chested. She spent her first night sleeping on my pillow next to me but that was the end of luxurious living for her until her dotage.

We were a middle-class family, but my parents had come from mining stock in South Yorkshire. My Dad’s family were farmers on the west coast of Ireland although his father never kept animals once he came over to England. My Mum’s dad though was a prolific poacher, kept ferrets, brought my mum waif and stray wild animals he found on his exploits, including a pipistrelle bat, which she kept as a pet, and had a succession of terribly behaved dogs. He was a dark, swarthy man who I remember always wearing a white shirt, black trousers and a thick brown leather belt. He is hard to reason because he was soft with both children and animals, but was the go-to man to put dogs down (which he’d take to the local woods and shoot). Anyway, training Whisky fell to my mother and she’d seen what being soft with dogs like her father had been led to so our first whippet slept in the porch in a basket and was not allowed on the furniture. I wouldn’t say my mother was hard on us as kids, but she had a temper when roused and we all four children had moments caught in a corner as she let fly defending ourselves like Frasier versus Ali. Whisky too got the wrong end of it when she regressed from having been housetrained.

Truth be told though both the dog and us kids had a fantastic life in Valley. We lived about half-a-mile from a deserted beach and tidal island and during summer holidays we’d set off with the dog after breakfast on some adventure and return only for meals. The island was full of rabbits and Whisky would swim to get across to it if she had to. Frequently she’d go rabbiting without us and spend most of the day away from home. They were different times and I don’t remember anybody making much fuss about it.

There was only one house between the beach and ours and Whisky developed a habit of dropping in on her way to and from rabbiting to eat their cat’s food until one day it caught her and nearly took her eye out. She desisted after that.

We lived in Valley until I was about five and then moved to Flamborough Head in around 1969. Whisky was two-years-old by that time and my older brother took up with a local man who had two whippets, ferrets and a shotgun and they’d go out rabbiting at the weekend. Barrel chest or not Whisky couldn’t have been slow because she caught a leveret one day while they were out. Later when we had moved from Flamborough to a little village with a mediaeval castle on the north Wales coast Whisky passed from my brother to me and became my rabbiting dog and companion.

Apart from when I was going to school I took her everywhere with me. By this time she never wore a lead or collar, in fact we didn’t even have such things. It beggars belief in this day and age, but she never had any vaccinations, lived on pedigree chum and Winalot, and when she got cut up on barbed wire my mum would stitch her up with needle and thread.

Eventually, Whisky got too old for rabbiting. The realisation really came when she was about 10-years-old and I spotted a hare in the back field behind our house. I grabbed her from by the gas fire in the lounge and threw her over the wall to chase the hare with me in hot pursuit. The hare bounded off, but with about six inches of fresh snow on the ground Whisky looked at me as if to say “you are kidding” and never moved a inch from where she’d landed when I’d thrown into “pursuit”. I told my mum I needed a young dog and my brother, by now at university, backed me up and so started a new chapter.