University and an absence of seven years followed my first venture into whippet racing. My wife, then partner, and I had bought a cottage and having settled down it seemed an opportune time (for me at least) to have a dog.

Bess had died about four years earlier and those four years were the only period in my living memory that I have been without a running dog. I toyed with the idea of having a Deerhound because I’d always fancied one, but in the end saw sense given the rooms in our cottage were about 10 feet square and set about finding a couple of whippets (one to keep the other company).

Having found our previous whippets through Whippet News it was the obvious place to start. There was no internet, no email, no text messaging and no Facebook of course so contacting people meant ringing them up or writing to them. I decided to write to a handful of people who were advertising dogs at stud. Most of the dogs were ones I’d seen racing that had retired and I reasoned that their owners would know what litters were due given that their dogs would have been party to their conception. Only a few responded and the responses were mainly “can’t help”, but Steve Bateson who owned Mr Benn, the best dog whippet I’d seen and now the leading stud dog, gave us contact details of someone who had just had a litter.

I made the call, all four pups were bitches and available and I booked two of them. They cost me the princely sum of £20 each in 1990, which even today would only be £50 each, less than 10% the current going rate for a racing whippet. And so a few weeks later we set-off on the long haul from Guildford in Surrey to Lockerbie in Scotland to pick them up. The motorways were less intensely regulated in those days than they are today and in our nearly new hot hatch we made the 360 mile journey in good time.

The four pups, six-weeks-old, were kept inside and chased around the lounge like it was a miniature race track. The boss was the smallest black bitch who battled with another black bitch that was twice her size for supremacy. Her feistiness attracted me to her and we decided to have her and a slightly bigger fawn bitch with a black muzzle that was clearly the prettiest, but also the most timid of the litter.

The pups were by Albert and Greta Richardson’s little black racing champion Pitt’s Special out of a bitch that had been kept as a pet. I think the bitch’s mother was the bend racing champion Painted Lady because I remember Henry Dobie who had owned her having some involvement in the litter. In the only conversation I ever had with him he told me he was surprised I hadn’t picked the big black bitch, which he thought was the best in the litter. Only our two ever raced so we’ll never know how big a mistake I made, but I certainly made a mistake because the little black bitch’s feistiness turned out to be more weakness than strength.

We named them Moth (the little black one) and Cobweb (the fawn one) after two fairies in a Midsummer Night’s Dream. It seemed to suit them. They sat as quiet as mice in a wicker basket on the back seat on the near seven-hour journey home. We stopped once about halfway, decided to let them have a wee on a bit of grass in the service station and almost lost Cobweb who thought grass was for running on and shot off with me in hot pursuit.

Though they were mates it was always apparent that the little black one was a bossy boots. After a week of baby sitting them they were left to their own devices all day in the kitchen with Gill, my partner, and I out at work until Gill got home at 5pm. In hindsight it was a lot to ask of pups their age, but they were very happy and thrived. Their best ever day was when they broke into the lounge while we were out and used Gill’s knitting as a lure, weaving broken pieces of LPs into it. It looked like we’d been ransacked. It also turned out that they hadn’t been properly wormed and within a fortnight of having them I was cleaning up roundworms from all over the kitchen.

They were small, even for whippets, the little one ending up at just 15lb and the bigger one just 18lb. I couldn’t wait to get them out walking and as soon as their vaccinations had taken effect I had them out in the nearby fields off the lead. So tiny and faced with so much space they just followed me and though I discovered it by accident, off-the-lead as young as possible is the way I have started all pups off since. They seem just to naturally identify with you as pack leader, feel vulnerable and do as you ask without too much effort. They would always come straightaway if Gill or I called them even if they were working a rabbit. Where we free-ran them we’d often see them from hundreds of yards away heads down, running at about 30mph following the path we’d taken until they found us. Rather pompously they’d say they had “good recall” nowadays.

A neighbour of ours suggested a nearby common that they’d enjoy running on and it ended up being a godsend. From about five-months-old they’d spend an hour or so every morning on what was effectively about a thousand acres of open heath working rabbits and squirrels. In the evening Gill would take them to the playing fields and hit a tennis ball for them. Their’s was a wonderful childhood.

Having got a couple of whippets I said to Gill “might as well race them”, which hadn’t been part of the original plan as far as she was concerned. At eight-months-old we took them to Portsmouth Whippet Racing Club. Things had changed since my earlier dalliance with the sport, there were far fewer dogs and Portsmouth was now really a trialling club where a group of whippeteers ran their good open dogs on Wednesday evenings in trials to prepare them for the weekend. They were very welcoming and extremely helpful, setting our pups up in the right sort of races to educate them and get them ready to race themselves.

Both took to racing like ducks to water. Initially, the little black one looked like she might be quite special. She beat quite a good open dog in a trial getting the usual three-yard start for a pup and everyone got quite excited about her. Things went wrong pretty much straightaway after that. Cobweb came in season, meaning she wouldn’t be racing for about four months by which time the season would be over and Moth decided it was win at all costs. That meant if she was going to be passed it was going to be over her dead body and she’d lunge at any dog that got alongside her. That’s instant disqualification, so the whole club spent months trying to come up with solutions to stop her doing it. The most effective was to put a little pair of blinkers on her racing muzzle made out of sunglass lenses and some fine black leather. They worked for a handful of races because she couldn’t see the dogs coming that were about to pass her until it was too late to interfere with them. Quite quickly though she worked it out and would listen for them. Earplugs seemed to have no effect on that tactic.

We did run her in some puppy races and managed to avoid getting disqualified, largely because people were far more understanding then of the challenges with a pup like her than they are now. It is almost as if people wanted to do what they could to get another dog on the circuit at that time. Today, it feels as if many are doing what they can to stop new dogs becoming competition.

Moth never actually won a race outside trials at Portsmouth in that first season back in the sport and Cobweb never even raced other than in a few trials at the club where she showed just a little promise. Winter came, but to be truthful we’d actually enjoyed running the dogs even as also-rans and set about planning for the following year undaunted.