The way we were - The Neighbour's Dog

01.01.1970

By a Sister of St Columban.

Lingayan was to be journey's end for me. In Lingayen a school had been developing since the war under the auspicious name of St Columban's Academy. A slow broad river showed up as we drew nearer to our destination. Alligators lived in rivers, I thought, remembering stories from some of our Sisters who had spent the war years in the Philippine wilds. Were they in this one? Surely one of the Sisters would have mentioned it as an item of interest. Not one of these good Madres had raised a warning finger in advance. Not one of them had ever written that courteously helpful line: Beware of the dog.

It came as a horrible surprise to me to find that Filipino dogs are cross. And they never ignore a stranger. A yelping, leaping beast greeted us at the convent door but proved harmless. Not so the Neighbour's Dog. He walked boldly into our chapel the next morning and I, not knowing better, ordered him out. A ferocious grin and an angry snarl answered me back. The Sister near me whispered, "You mustn't even try to correct him." We were glad to see him march out by the farther door.

Often since that first unpropitious introduction did the Neighbour's Dog put me in my place as an inferior cowering human being. That vicious snarl at my heels in the hallway would freeze me to an icy rigour and I would never dare look around until the monster had taken his stately departure.

But one day when he was found thieving in our refectory upstairs, his dignity suffered a shock and his fat body with it and since then, his lordly manner has grown less assured and his growl less confident. He had come across some bread and eaten it, then growing bolder, he had clambered up on a chair and stolen a dinner which was awaiting a Sister just arrived on the midday bus. At that moment he was surprised on two fronts and made a dash for it. He missed his step on the stairs and rolled to the bottom with yelps of fright. Since then the Neighbour's Dog knows that his reign of terror is done with at the convent.

Taken from The Far East, June 1, 1954 page 10.