Flying Doll finally rose to the challenge and gave us something to race in opens, but back in those days Whippet News was like a sweet shop for whippeteers. There were at least half-a-dozen litters advertised in every issue and the pups were far from expensive. I’d have bought one out of every issue if I’d had my way.

My fanaticism for the sport meant I ingested every result from every open and most of the club reports. At that time (late seventies/early eighties) there were five or six opens every weekend and about 50 or 60 clubs racing every weekend and some midweek as well during the summer. Whippet News was (and still is) published once a month and fitting everything in meant most things were printed in very small type. Despite that I developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the breeding of the better dogs. I didn’t just know that they were by such and such a sire, but also what their dam was and quite often how she was bred as well.

The dominant sire at the time, and in truth the biggest influence on the racing whippet breed that there has ever been, was Good As Gold. Space was so tight in the magazine that his name was often abbreviated to GasG in pedigrees and I laboured under the misunderstanding that there was actually a sire called GasG as well as one called Good As Gold for quite a time.

After Good As Gold, his son Rhinegold was next most influential and then a dog called Haymaker, though there were dozens of sires represented by dogs on the circuit and two pages of adverts for about 50 different stud dogs in the Stud Register at the back of Whippet News. It quite quickly became apparent to me that an unequal number of the best dogs were either by Good As Gold or by Rhinegold. I hankered after a pup by one of those two and eventually I felt a weakening of my parents’ resolve not to buy another racing whippet.

They had good reason to resist my ambitions. I was already 16 and was for certain heading to university in a couple of years, by which time any pup we bought would only have been racing for about a year. My brother was already away at university, my sisters had no interest in the dogs and my parents were weakly supportive but did no walking or training, so when I left the dogs would not be racing.

Anyway, common sense didn’t prevail and I managed to persuade them to buy me a pup that was advertised in Whippet News by Rhinegold out of a bitch called Duchess who was a half-sister to the fabled Supreme Racing Champion Double Handful, the best dog of that era.

We picked her up at Aire Valley WRC when she was about six weeks old and I’m bound to say what she and the litter sister we could have had instead looked like was a bit of a shock. Our previous two racing whippets were small, lightweight and as athletic as a ballet dancer from the get-go. These pups were like little puddings, all body and no legs. They looked more like Labradors than whippets in truth.

She was black like her dad Rhinegold and we named her Bess. In hindsight I think that was because Bess was a dark-haired heroine in my mum’s favourite poem The Highwayman – “Bess, the landlord’s daughter, plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair”. I guess in days past with long black hair and a love of romantic poetry my mum quite fancied herself as Bess.

Our Bess grew a bit quicker than we thought she would. By eight weeks old she weighed 9lb and didn’t look much more whippety than she had when we picked her up. Ideally you want a racing whippet to weigh between 18lb and 26lb when it is an adult and as a rule of thumb pups that weigh 12lb at 12 weeks end up about 26lb as adults. Bess was heading for a lot more than that.

Like all the racing whippet pups, we started her off behind the lure at about five months but she didn’t have it altogether either mentally or physically. She chased half-heartedly and one of her back legs had a bit of a mind of its own when she got going. By about nine moths old she weighed 34lb and while just about identifiable as a whippet she was a much more well-muscled dog than we’d been used to. At no point during her puppyhood had we been hopeful that she’d be any good and at her weight any hopes of having a top open dog were zero.

Somehow, I’m not sure how because I can’t remember ever trialling her with another dog, she was allowed into the club handicap. She immediately disgraced herself and us by playing with the other dogs as she came alongside them. To be fair, nobody made much of a fuss about it, but we knew she was a dreaded “tackler” that shouldn’t really be racing until she focused on chasing the lure and not the other dogs.

Bess was big and she was bad.

None of this was actually Bess’s fault, it was ours. She was big because we fed her too much and didn’t exercise her enough. Knowing what I know now, I think had she been properly fit she wouldn’t have been anymore than 32lb. And she wasn’t bad, she was just immature. Unlike our little lightweight racing whippets that were ready to race at eight months, Bess had a bit more greyhound in her and took much longer to grow up. When we started racing her she was still getting control of her legs and she would be about 18 months old before she got it altogether physically. About the same time she also got it together mentally and started to race properly rather than playing with the other dogs.

She started to win races at the club around that time, but by then I was a few months away from my A’levels and had all sorts of other distractions like rugby, cricket, girls and beer. I hardly had time to race her and everybody else had lost interest in her.

Bess probably had a very good racing dog inside her waiting for someone with time, knowledge and patience to get it out. I had none of those things at that time and her talent went to waste.

The happiest time of her life was when I went to university and she became my mum’s companion. Someone had to walk her and our other whippet Tina (aka Flying Doll who was by now nearly four) when I wasn’t there and it ended up being my mum. She used to take them down the fields, let Tina work for rabbits and Bess would do shuttle runs between Tina and my mum. Ridiculously, the only time in her life when she was properly fit was when I wasn’t there to race her.

I’d like to say there is a happy ending to this tale and that Bess went on to win lots of races and live a long life, but she didn’t. When she was about six-years-old my dad let her out into the open-plan garden for a wee and she took off after a stray dog that had been on her patch, both dogs were hit by a car and killed instantly.

My mum was bereft and beyond livid with my dad. I don’t think she could bring herself to forgive him for a long time.

In the end, quite big but not too big to be good and not so bad after all Bess was the one that got away.