Short Story
NIP
T
Malcom Cockburn, The Sherborne Scribblers
he phone rang, ‘This is Sherborne Station, there is a dog for you here.’ I had been expecting the call, so I jumped into the Land Rover and hastened to the parcel office which in those days housed all manner of parcels, day-old chicks, Cornish clotted cream and sundry perishable goods. Today the carriage of the above items has been long abandoned by our railway and the parcel office is home to ‘Cycles 4 You’. Back then, sitting patiently and demurely among the parcels and boxes was a collie dog with a label round her neck which read Nip, and that was all. We bonded immediately and she sat beside me nervous but plainly relieved, for her journey must have been outside any experience in her six or seven years of life ’til then. There would have been at least two changes of train between Lanark in Scotland and Sherborne. My father started his farming life in the borders of Scotland and he would buy replacement ewes and rams from a livestock agent, Murray Jackson. When we moved from our farm in the hills and mountains of the Borders to the gentle Dorset farmland, a new dog was needed to herd the cows and sheep, and Murray Jackson’s service included supply of ‘part-worn collie dogs’! These dogs, after some five years racing up hill and down dale, were no longer ‘fit for purpose’, but they retained all the formidable skill of a trained border collie. The first dog to come south had been Wull, and I inherited that dog when I returned to the farm after working in Australia. I have to say that Wull and I never bonded. When he lost his temper with me he would go off round the farm on a sulky walk-about. You had to be careful feeding him because I think he knew the phrase ‘to bite the hand which feeds you’! I have wept and grieved over the loss of many pets, but sadly not Old Wull when he passed on. Nip was to be his replacement. Since there was an absence of any working instruction (as we have come to expect with kitchen gadgets and such) Nip and I had to ‘play it by ear’,
126 | Sherborne Times | January 2022
