“We can’t change the Lambert part of our name,” Ree says. “Furbert Herbert and Champ Cuthbert don’t work without the Lambert part.”
All Sally knows is that she’s unwilling to pretend her darlingboy is someone else. The way he looks up happily when she says “Champ!” Or “Champy” or “Chample-moose Pamplemousse”… He’d be devastated if he didn’t hear her call him Champ anymore. The story of his name is his favorite thing in the whole world to listen to. And she won’t deprive Furbs of his rightful surname either, especially not when he’s already been deprived of his life.
“No,” she tells Corinne firmly.
“Okay. I understand.” Corinne puts her hand on Sally’s shoulder. “Forget I suggested it.”
“So what, then?” Toby asks. “Do we have a plan B?” He looks hopefully at Corinne.
“Yes. We have a brilliant plan B. Even better than plan A,” she says. “I can’t wait to tell you all about it on the way to Norfolk—just as soon as I’ve worked out what it is.”
22
In our family, names matter. If Lesley Gavey had only said less and stopped talking sooner when she came for her viewing of Shukes… Well, let’s just say, a terrible thing might not have happened. There are causes, and then there are clinchers, and the memory of Lesley’s fake concern—“It’s not fair to give a dog a joke name like that, Sally. It’s disrespectful, actually”—fell decisively into the clincher category. The stark fact is that if those two sentences had never been uttered, a young man named Saul Hollingwood would have gone to work as usual on 29 June 2024 instead of doing what he did after calling in sick.
(He sounds as if he matters to our story, doesn’t he? Yet this is the first and last time his name will appear in these pages.)
Mum approaches the naming of anything she cares about with great reverence. She started to cry with delight when we went to pick Champ up from his first home in Llandysul and she found out that his Kennel Club name was Mehefin Afon, which isWelsh for “June river”—a fact Mum likes to tell Champ at regular intervals.
“Shall I tell you the story of your name?” she says to him all the time. Dad and Tobes tend to groan or leave the room, but I enjoy hearing the story. “Well,” Mum says next, settling into an armchair and pulling Champ up onto her lap, rubbing his belly or under his chin. “First of all, you were Mehefin Afon. That means ‘June River’—what a lovely name, isn’t it, baby boy?—and then you were Puppy Davies-Jones, because Hadi and Bleddyn didn’t want to give you your main name, did they? No, they didn’t! They didn’t! Because they knew you’d soon have a new family who would want to name you. Very sensible of them!”
Mum’s story, which we’ve all heard dozens of times, is not entirely true. I’d be willing to bet that Hadi Davies and Bleddyn Jones never once thought of Champ as “Puppy Davies-Jones.” Davies and Jones are their respective surnames, but they’re neither married nor double-barreled, so why would they have double-barreled their puppies’ names? Never mind, though; stories need a whole chain of plot developments, and I assume Mum didn’t want to leap too quickly from beginning to end, so Puppy Davies-Jones got inserted as a step along the way.
“And then for a while you wereChampDavies-Jones!”
(Also not really true.)
“And thenwecame along, your new family, your forever family, and then, finally, you became Champ Cuthbert Lambert. Aaaand”—this is the key moment of suspense in the story of Champ’s name—“you still are!” Mum never skimps on the big-reveal energy at the end.
“‘You still are?’” Tobes said scornfully the first time he heard it. “Is that it? That’s such an anticlimax.”
But that wasn’t, and isn’t, the end. There follows a sort of twist that no one sees coming when they hear the story for the first time: “And you’realsoa big Mehefalump!” Mum always adds, as a final flourish.
Here’s the non-cutesy version of how Champ got named: Mum decided before she met him that his name would be Gilbert Cuthbert Lambert, to follow the family’s traditional triple-Bert pattern that began with Furbert Herbert Lambert. But then Hadi mentioned that before we collected him, she’d had to take him to the vet because there was a problem with his tail. It turned out to be a form of cradle cap, called seborrheic dermatitis when a dog has it. “He was such a little champ, though,” Hadi told Mum proudly. “Made them all laugh at the vet’s, gave everyone acwtch.” (That means “cuddle” in Welsh.)
“Let’s just call him Champ,” Dad suggested. “I’d feel like a dick shouting ‘Gilbert’ in the park. Gilbert’s a name for a…poet or a musician or something. Not a dog. I felt daft enough shouting ‘Furbert’ for all those years. I should never have agreed to anything so undignified.”
“You mean ‘un-dog-nified,’” said Ree. (So, here I am, mentioning Ree for the first time. I’m sure you noticed, but just in case… )
“Undignified?” Mum said, aghast. “Mark! Justhowcan you say that to me? Now I’m going to have to remember, forever, that you said it.”
“Why?” Dad looked baffled. “Is someone going to test you on it one day? Can’t we call this new dog something normal?”
Tobes agreed. “We should call him Champ. That’s so obviously his name.”
As soon as he’d said it, Mum saw that it was true. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s Champ, not Gilbert, that has the great story behind it.”
(Great story? I mean…Champ briefly having a patch of hard skin on his tail isn’t exactlyWatership Down, but whatever.)
Anyway, that’s how Champ came to be called Champ Cuthbert Lambert. In his capacity as Mehefin Afon, his official Kennel Club name, he soon received his Five Generation Pedigree certificate that “I just know he would want” (Mum—and so she’d ordered it at considerable expense). She greeted its arrival with paroxysms of delight and quickly spotted a name that looked very familiar: Sennybridge Welsh and Wild. “Mark!” she screamed, and Dad came running from upstairs, thinking there was an emergency; this was no time to slow things down with a “No. Not Mark.”
“Look at this!” Mum said. “Sennybridge Welsh and Wild—look, he’s Champ’s furry grandfather, see?”
“Okay. So?” said a bewildered Dad.
“Now look at Furbs’s certificate.” Mum pointed to the kitchen wall, where it hung in the best and most visible display spot in the house, directly above the kitchen table. “Sennybridge Welsh and Wild is one of Furby’s litter brothers. He’s the one who went to Aylesbury, remember—with Julie and Darren? They ran a yoga school?”
“Sal, as if I’m going to remember that,” Dad said impatiently. “So, what does that make Champ in relation to Furbert? His…great-nephew?”
