An amazing Guide Dog and an amazing friend.
The phone call
On Sunday afternoon Simone and I were sitting in a meeting in Kildare, talking through plans for our wedding in July. My phone kept ringing. Again and again. It was Dad.
When I answered, he told me he was at the vet’s with Larry.
Simone and I got straight into the car and drove north to Holywood. But we were too late. Larry was gone.
I’ve been trying to work out how to write about him ever since. So I’m going to start where Larry and I started.
My mum’s living room
It was September 1998, not long after I lost my sight, and I was sitting in my mum’s living room when the Guide Dog trainer went out to his van and brought Larry in.
I’d never been a dog person. But this was so exciting.
He was enormous. Almost white, with a huge head. From the word go he looked like he was on the edge of dropping his professional training altogether. The moment the trainer took his harness off, he was straight over to me, bumping his nose under my arm for a pat and letting me swizzle his ears.
It was a huge step up from the hamster I had as a kid. But the feeling was the same.
Then Larry did the thing I’d come to know as his trademark. He put his head down onto the floor and pushed forward until he was nearly doing a front roll. Professionally not professional. That was Larry from the very first minute.
A dog on the edge
In January 1999 we went on a three-week residential course together to see if we’d be let loose in the world. We nearly weren’t.
Guide Dogs are meant to be steady and cautious. Larry walked too fast, then too slowly. He looked around at the traffic, at the people across the road, at everything. He was just so excited to be out in the world. He nearly failed the final part of his training.
But the very things that nearly failed him were exactly why he was right for me. I was 23, about to start my first job and live in the noise of Dublin city centre. I didn’t need a timid dog. I needed a dog on the edge.
There was one other problem. I’d asked for a dog with a short coat, because I’d be wearing dark suits and didn’t want to destroy offices, taxis and my own crappy little flat at the top of a Georgian building. Larry came with a fluffy undercoat, a wiry outer coat and hair everywhere. It didn’t matter. We’d picked each other.
Upper Fitzwilliam Street to Grafton Street in Dublin
Before Larry, I had the white stick. The whole idea of a white stick is that you find things by bumping into them, and then you go around them. It works. But it’s isolating, and I always felt self-conscious, as if everyone was looking at me and thinking, he’s blind.
My first walk on my own with Larry was from my apartment on Upper Fitzwilliam Street to Grafton Street. I knew the route. I’d done it with the stick. This time I picked up the harness, and we glided. Around people, puddles, bikes, posts, bins, all of it. Larry’s whole aim was to ease me through the city without me bumping into anything, and he was brilliant at it.
I felt confident. I felt free. It was a kind of joy I’ve rarely felt before or since.
Thomas Street
Every working day we walked through the city centre and squeezed onto a busy bus up to 151 Thomas Street, where I worked for IAWS. Larry slept under my desk all day, every so often popping his head out to see if anyone would give him a pat or slip him a biscuit. Someone usually did.
He was calm enough for the office and robust enough for the pub and, now and again, a nightclub. This was before the smoking ban, and it was years before I found out that friends had been pouring him his own little Guinness into the ashtrays.
We’d jump into the front seats of Dublin taxis and leave a trail of fur behind us. Years later I’d meet the same drivers, and they’d tell me they were still finding his hairs.
The top floor
Those early years were full. I was working, studying for a master’s and training. And, at times, nursing the hangover from hell.
Nobody feels good with a hangover. But lying in my one-bedroom flat at the top of that Georgian building, a hangover sometimes let the impact of blindness get in on me. I’d lie there, feeling all the negatives.
And then Larry would bump his nose under my arm to get a pat on the head. I loved him doing that. The pat was for him, but I think he knew it was for me too.
King of the Boathouse
Larry was there as I rebuilt my identity after blindness, went back rowing and got into adventure racing. He was there as I started my speaking business, on stage with me, in news interviews and in the documentaries. Girlfriends came and went. Jobs too. Larry was the constant.
For years he was king of the Trinity Boathouse. As Brendan Smyth and I pushed off and rowed up the river, he’d sit up on the balcony barking after us. When we came back he’d stop, clearly convinced his barking had brought us home. Then, as we paddled off again, he’d start all over.
When I lived in Trinity he’d slip out now and again and roam the campus. We often found him at the Pavilion Bar, sitting in the sunshine beside some friendly students.
Professionally not professional
Larry was a working Guide Dog, but he never took the rules too seriously. Then Simone came into our lives, and he fell for her too. When I answered the door to her, he’d be at the end of the hallway jumping straight up in the air. The moment she gave him the OK, he launched himself at her.
He knew he wasn’t allowed upstairs. But Simone tells me that if I ever went out in the morning with my white stick, Larry was straight up the stairs, peering around the door to see if she was ready to bend the rules. She was.
Simone and I would stand at either end of the grassy square in front of the Rubrics in Trinity. Larry would race to me and bury his head in the grass, then switch and race to Simone with a grassy green mohawk on his white furry head. Same routine in front of her, nearly a somersault, and back to me. He loved it. So did we.
Guide Dog of the Year
In 2007 Larry was named UK Guide Dog of the Year. When the press photographers gathered in Green Park in London to take his picture, he did it again: head into the ground and nearly a front roll. Professionally not professional, even on his big day.
He was also a Crufts finalist in the Special Friend category. Simone, my dad Johnny and I went over to Birmingham with him. (Larry really didn’t like flying.) Every time we walked from the hotel to the convention centre, Larry wasn’t just guiding me. He was guiding all three of us, dropping back, rounding us up and herding us along like his own little flock.
Friendly as ever, he set off one day to say hello to some RAF dogs. They shouted at him, as we like to say, and Larry, shocked and appalled , curled straight back around behind my legs.
Larry and Me
In 2008 the letter came to say it was time for Larry to retire. He went home to Holywood, where I grew up, to live with my dad, the two of them coming to the end of their working lives together. Ross Whitaker made a short film about it called Larry and Me, and you can watch it here:
Retirement didn’t slow him down much. He’d escape into Holywood to inspect the food waste, and he had a particular fondness for the chip shop at the bottom of the road. And one day Dad got a phone call to tell him that Larry had jumped into the big recycling skip.
The drive north
On the drive from Kildare to Holywood, I kept going back to Saturday night.
I’d been staying at Dad’s, in the bedroom I grew up in. In the middle of the night I got up to go to the bathroom and heard Larry downstairs, making a noise I’d heard loads of times before. Like he was dreaming. I didn’t go down to check on him, and I’ll always regret that. I’m afraid now that he may already have been in trouble.
On Sunday morning he was his usual self, out in the garden playing. Then I headed back to Dublin.
By the time we reached Holywood, Dad had told us everything. Larry had been in pain. A heart attack, we think. It would have been too cruel to leave him like that, and the vet did what he had to do.
A beautiful day
Monday was a beautiful day. I wanted to dig Larry’s grave myself, so Simone and I did the work together in Dad’s garden. We did it maybe a little too well. By the time we’d finished, it was about six foot long and three foot wide. A big hole for a big dog.
That afternoon we buried him. Dad, Mum, my sister, Simone and me, telling Larry stories and toasting him with a glass of champagne each. He’d probably have preferred a little Guinness in an ashtray, but I think he’d have forgiven us.
I cried in a way I never expected to. The memories came flooding back: Mum’s living room, Grafton Street, the balcony, the green mohawk. But more than any memory, it was the bond. On that top floor, in the dark times, when most people are on their own, I wasn’t. I was with Larry.
I loved him and I’ll always miss him. Thanks, mate.