The Last Vet

First you notice the dogs. In all other ways Freetown is a West African city like any other, of red dust and raised cries, forty-degree heat and a year neatly segmented into two – hot and dry, hot and wet.

Today water tips from the sky. Beneath the canopy of a local store three street dogs and a man holding a briefcase stand and contemplate the rain. Another dog shelters beneath the umbrella of a cigarette seller. A fifth follows a woman across the street, literally dogging her footsteps, using her as a beacon to navigate the traffic and the floodwater.

In the dry season the kings of the city are the dogs. They weave through the crowds, lie in the roadside shade watching through slitted eyes, they circle and squabble, unite in the occasional frenzied dash. For the most part the people and the dogs exist on separate planes. The dogs ignore the people, who likewise step around and over them. On the road the drivers steer around reclining animals. This city has more street dogs than any I have known.

It is eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning. Torrents of water sluice off the hills and rush down the cross streets. The force of the rain has swept the traffic off the road, and now threatens the battered Peugeot ahead of me. Inside his clinic Dr Jalloh has placed his plans on hold, waits for me in his tiny surgery surrounded by dogs, waits for the rain to stop.The whole city waits for the rain to stop.

It was the dry season of 2004 and I was home working on a novel when I first met Gudush Jalloh. My friend Rosa called, concerned that her dog, at that moment whelping, was in trouble. The dog in question was a snappish bitch, a street rescue by the name of Corre whom I had so far failed to befriend. I was in that selfish space of writers and the interruption was unwelcome. Could she not call a vet? She told me the vet was upcountry. Call another vet? There was no other vet. Someone who knows about dogs, then? Yes, she replied, and waited for my answer.

I know a bit about dogs. I do not pretend to know a great deal. I enjoy the company of dogs and keep them, but know nothing of whelping bitches. I consider myself something less than an expert. An interested amateur.

Eyes closed, half in, half out of this world, the puppy looked dead. I had no idea what to do so I telephoned my husband in South East London, who in turn called our vet and relayed his instructions via mobile phone and satellite to reach us six thousand miles away, at a pound a minute. Try to free the pup’s shoulders. Olive oil might help. Corre, by now docile in her distress, allowed me to try to hook my forefingers under the puppy’s forelegs. I tried. Nothing worked: not the olive oil, the bitch’s efforts, or my own fumblings. At last we obtained the home number of the local vet. He’d travelled overnight from the Provinces, been asleep less than an hour and his telephone manner displayed the lagged thinking of the abruptly awoken. He told me he had sent his car away. I offered to collect him.

Dr Jalloh is the only vet in the country. No, that is not quite true. There are three government vets, employed by the Ministry of Agriculture. They wear rubber boots, but mostly deal with deal with figures, with capacities, stock and yields. There are also a small number of charlatans. Gudush Jalloh is the only qualified vet in private practice. The single person in the country to whom you might bring your sick dog, cat, monkey or goat.

The pup had never, not for an instant, known life. The body cavity was a huge fluid-filled sac, devoid of vital organs. By now we had moved Corre to the surgery and Dr Jalloh prodded at the dead puppy with a long pair of tweezers, declared this the second instance of such abnormality he had seen. Rosa turned away. I, whose paper-mask fantasies had never found expression, leaned in.A second pup suffered the same deformity. Another was stillborn. Four survived.

That first meeting made a deep impression upon me. In the years that followed I met Gudush Jalloh on one more occasion which was significant, and then socially perhaps five or six times more. At one point somebody mentioned his work with the street dogs, in which they thought I might be interested.

This is the country where I grew up. It was the 1970s. Here, as a child, I gathered, rescued, raised and lost more dogs than I can now recall. I have some of their names: Jack. Jim. Tigger. Apollo. Pandora. Bingo. KaiKai. Jupiter. Pluto. The turnover was so fast there are many more I have forgotten. My dogs died of disease, of being hit by cars, of falling off balconies, generally of life expectancy in the Third World. Sometimes they were lost or stolen. When I was nine Apollo disappeared. For months I scanned the streets during every car journey. One day, a long way from home, on the other side of the city, I saw Apollo. The driver stopped the car. We opened the back door, pulled Apollo inside and drove off at speed. I never found out who had taken him or why; he had not been mistreated. Nor do I know whether we were seen as we effected his rescue. I imagine whatever witnesses there were remained silent for fear of being disbelieved.

The third child and the youngest, I passed my earliest years as the beneficiary of what the experts call benign neglect. When I was three my father became active in politics. He was detained several times, once for three years. Amnesty named him a Prisoner of Conscience. My stepmother kept the family together. I collected dogs. My parents, if they noticed, did not pass comment, even when the household total achieved a high score of six. I read White Fang and Peter Pan and longed for a wolf and a dog which slept at the foot of my bed. Ours were strictly yard dogs.

Other animals passed through my life: a mongoose, a green parrot, a fawn. They interested me, fed my ambition to become a vet, but I did not love them. I loved only the dogs for reasons too complicated to elaborate upon, and yet also painfully obvious. In a time of lies, I found honesty and loyalty among the dogs. And if the memory of particular dogs has grown unreliable, then the memory of what they offered me in that time has become indelible: a retreat from the mutability of the human world, a place of safety.

There were a lot more vets back in those days. In the intervening thirty-odd years they have all gone: pursuing opportunities overseas, fleeing a civil war that lasted ten years and killed countless and uncounted numbers of us.