Tramp came into our lives during the summer of 1989 and he cannot have been more than a year or two although there was no way of knowing for certain. The dog sanctuary that had taken him in had rescued him from a miserable life with a family of Roma who by all accounts had mistreated him. Sacha was on summer holidays from her school in Vilamora and was working at the sanctuary as a volunteer; helping the kind German and British ladies that ran the centre with the daily administration of the place. It was in fact the perfect summer job for Sacha aged thirteen – with her innate love of all animals great and small –  and it was here that she got to know Tramp and fell in love with him. Despite my father’s initial resistance to the idea, it was at her insistence that my parents agreed to take him in and he joined the other two dogs we had to form a sometimes unmanageable pack of three that he would lead off on long treks to get up to all sorts of things. This is something that he did throughout the life he spent with us and he succeeded in miseducating every single dog we had.

He was an elegant hound of no apparent breed; of medium size, long and languid, with a lovely if constantly dirty auburn coat and he carried himself about with a graceful gate. We suspect he had a fair amount of Irish Setter in his genes. He was clearly very intelligent and quite streetwise. He was also very vocal and he liked to greet the members of our family when he returned from his constant walk-abouts with a whole range of sounds he produced as he answered our questions as to where he had been all day. He came to us from the shelter with a funny protrusion from one of his eyes; a sort of growth like an inverted eye-lid that gave him a sorry look and that my parents payed a vet to remove.

My parents were living “in the country” at that time, in a village not too far from Loulé and Tramp and his now unruly, miscreant protégés had the run of the surrounding hills to disappear into for days on end when the urge took them; mostly without inconveniencing the other residents in the nearby houses. The following summer my parents moved back up to the Lisbon area and the more urban setting the dogs now found themselves in – initially in Sintra for a year or so before my parents moved to Estoril – must have been a significant change for them as they found themselves adjusting to walls and gates and the busy traffic at the top of our street on the Sintra to Colares road. Tramp, though, was unfazed and I seem to remember he soon worked out some cushy deal at the market in Estefania de Sintra where some butcher no doubt was giving him bones and meaty off-cuts that had no commercial value. He got around a lot and sometimes we would bump into him a mile or two from home at the other end of Sintra. He’d come up to say hello before taking off again en route to do whatever it was he was going to do. The thing about Tramp is that he just did not get “the rules”. There was no wall – no fence – high enough to keep him within the grounds of our house and he just did what he wanted, often taking the other two dogs with him on some misadventure. More often than not, the three of them would return to the house – hours later – absolutely filthy and reeking of rubbish or muddy pond water or some dead animal they had been rolling on. Whilst we lived in Sintra, Tramp and his anarchic antics just made us laugh as he and the others didn’t seem to be bothering anyone in particular. It was once we moved to Estoril that his complete disregard for any kind of norms began to be a problem with our neighbours. Tramp was a kind and friendly dog but the person he might be barking a greeting at in the street might not necessarily know this. One morning Graça, our neighbour from next door, called the house at eight am to ask us kindly if we might come and fetch our dog as he was barking at her front door and she couldn’t leave the house. We tried our best to contain him within the walls and fences of our garden but he would scramble over walls or wriggle between the bars of the fence at the front of the house and sprint down the road on to his next adventure. Fiasco, our white lab, was stocky and as greedy as labrador retrievers can be and nowhere near as lithe as him. Tramp having set the bad example, she would try to dash after him and on at least two occasions I remember her and her tummy getting wedged in the bars of the fence.

In those early years of the mid nineties my father was struggling to get his business going and my parents lived a relatively frugal life. One of my father’s little pleasures at the weekend, during those difficult years, was to go and sit outside in the garden with a glass of Catarina and his Economist. However, the three medium sized dogs ate a lot and shat accordingly, littering the garden with their decent sized turds. If nothing was done about it all at regular intervals the smell could be overpowering and would drive my father back indoors on an otherwise sunny day. My parents had real financial concerns at the time and my father must have felt the dogs were just an added problem and an expense he could well do without. He often said in moments of exasperation that as and when they eventually died he would not want to replace them. I did point the following out to him on several occasions: just about every other house on our street except for ours had been burgled at one moment or another. Did he not think that might have to do with the dogs? Years later when they no longer had any large, loud dogs their house was broken into three times in the space of two years. They then got Securitas to install an alarm and put up plaques saying as much. I’m sure it works well enough and I’ve no idea what it must cost but if it was up to me, being partial to canines, I would have just got another large dog. The Portuguese seem to have a healthy, innate respect for them and I’m quite sure they do a better job warding off intruders than Securitas does.

Tramp was a law unto himself and short of chaining him up, which sadly we found ourselves obliged to do for a period as he was being a nuisance around the neighbourhood with his barking and dumpster-diving, there was little we could do to keep him in the garden. He would disappear sometimes for days, at times returning shampooed and wearing a brand new collar after a spell at some other house that had taken him in. On one occasion I was walking up the hill from the station on my way back from university when he came running up to me with his vocal hellos and decided to walk back with me up to towards the house. We had just crossed the roundabout that is more or less half way up the hill when a car that was passing came to a screeching halt in front of us and a woman jumped out with a can of dog food, peeled off the lid and dumped its contents on the road in front of Tramp. As he tucked into his food the woman looked down at him with compassion and, shaking her head, she turned to me and said “poor dog. He’s abandoned, you know”.“No he’s not!” She looked surprised and embarrassed as I explained he was ours and she quickly got back into her car and drove off. 

Tramp got about a fair amount and sometimes I’d drive past him in Cascais or as far away as Sao Pedro. He used to catch the train into Cascais and then back again to Estoril. He knew where he was going and when to get off. A real character, he was a kind and affection dog if somewhat smelly on account of his chosen carefree lifestyle. He just had no time for our rules. In the summer of 1999 we went off on holiday to El Salvador for six weeks and we were told he went missing ten days after we left. We never saw him again. Perhaps he got run over. We’ll never know. 

A number of years ago he appeared in a dream I had; a very clear and lucid dream, I should add. He came running up to for a cuddle and greeted me with much excitement and all those guttural sounds he used to make. In my dream I remember understanding that all this time – all these years – poor old Tramp had been lost, somewhere. I’ve thought about it since on a number of occasions and I wonder if perhaps he had never understood that he had died. In my dream I cuddled him a bit longer before telling him he needed to follow the light. He looked at me for a moment then away turned and disappeared.

Fiasco – our white labrador – disappeared in 1995 (probably stolen for breading purposes although the bastards who took her must have soon found out she had been spayed. I dread to think what the rest of her days were like) and it was a family drama that upset us all tremendously, my mother in particular. Fiasco was a fantastic dog and she and I were very attached to one and other. We shared the same birthday and sought each other’s company. We used to go running together and I’d take her with me at the weekend if I happened to go away for a few days. In the summer she’d come to the beach with me. If I took her with me in to town she was calm and obedient and observant of my occasional commands. She was an incredibly intelligent animal – what with that big, broad, square head of hers – and she knew the members of our family by name. Like all labs, she was greedy and had a tendency to put on weight if we weren’t careful about what she ate. She had a real weakness for oranges, strangely enough. If you peeled one in front of her she would start to salivate profusely as she observed you. Tramp had done a great job of completely misdirecting her, teaching her all the wrong things, and very often – given half the chance –  she’d run off with him to get up to no good. Being the bad girl that she was, on two occasions she got knocked up by one or other of the local dogs and we had a real job trying to get rid of her litter of puppies. One time, when she was on heat, she got out of the garden and ran off across the valley to Monte Estoril to pay my father a visit at his office, with about twenty male dogs in hot pursuit, all of them gagging  to mount her. Fiasco led the frothing pack of horny dogs to the entrance of the office centre where my father worked and the heaving, humping mass caused such a commotion at the door that no one could get in or out. My mother got a call from my father, I suppose annoyed and embarrassed in equal parts; could she please come and get the dog. My mother arrived and put Fiasco in the car. They drove off back to Estoril with twenty dogs galloping behind them.