Memories of a wartime dog who won a medal

YOUR article on the Dickin Medal (Yorkshire Post, January 13) revived many memories of girlhood in wartime Liverpool. At the bottom of our school playing fields, on the other side of a sandstone wall, lived Mrs Cleaver, an imposing lady whose hair was worn in a thick plait round her head.

She bred Great Danes and Alsatians, and after school dinner my friend Elfrida (a vegetarian) and I ran down the field to see these dogs and give them the meat and gristle we had secreted in the pockets of our navy blue knickers (I always wondered what they were for and Elfrida showed me).

I was able to see these dogs at close quarters when sent to the butcher’s for “something off the ration” by my mother. The dogs’ jaws were opened wide by Mrs Cleaver, and a large lump of minced meat thrust inside. Perhaps this was their daily ration, since her dogs were being trained for rescue work.

Later I got friendly with Mrs Cleaver’s son Arnold, and even went to their house when she was out. I was surprised to see strange objects hanging round the walls of one room by bits of string, and Arnold told me they were hot cross buns dating from every year they had lived there, believed to protect the house from fire.

One of Mrs Cleaver’s dogs, a black Alsatian named Jet, was trained to sniff out people in bombed buildings in the city and suburbs of Liverpool.

If they were dead, Jet “pointed” with his tail; if alive, he barked. This brave intelligent animal received the Dickin Medal and walked in the Victory Parade in London.

Near my old school in Calderstones Park is a memorial sundial bearing a sculptured head of Jet, one of the 28 dogs who “also served” in that dreadful conflict.