Please meet Willow, a 1950s Chad Valley Corgi!

Please meet Willow, a Chad Valley Corgi and loyal Teddy bear friend.  She was manufactured in the 1950s.   She is made of mohair and is slightly grubby, but still nice.   There is one little wire poking through by her back paw.  She retains her Queen Mother Warrant label underneath her, which means she was made after 1953, plus she has a "Hygenic Toys Made in England Chad Valley and Co."  She's about eight inches tall to the top of her head and about a foot long.  She wears a little chain around her neck.   She's very unusual.   I've never seen one like her before.

Willow was the friendliest of puppies.  She wasn't the runt of the litter, but she was on the small side.   She had three brothers and three sisters, and they were a very rowdy bunch.   She loved playing with her brothers the best because her sisters, Willa, Wanda and Winnow were a little delicate and didn't want to put their feet in mud, whereas her brothers, Willie, Winston and Winger were always tunneling under the bushes and causing a general ruckus, and she was a bit of a tomboy.  She learned from an early age how to get attention, and she would bark very loudly at the top of her little lungs, and sometimes she would twist and twirl around in order to stand out in the crowd.

Willow adored the English countryside, and when the bluebells were in bloom carpeting the woodland floor near the family cottage, she would race through them with her litter mates, ears flapping behind her and little tail wagging, out of breath before she reached the garden gate.   She never was the first to arrive there, but she wasn't ever the last one either.   She was always in the middle.   By the time she was a year old, her brothers and sisters had been adopted out, and she lived in the cottage with a lovely older couple who would take her on long walks on the public footpaths, skirting around the great estates.   Willow was proud of her heritage, and although she knew she would never live with any members of the Royal Family, she enjoyed pointing out to the other soft toys and Teddy bears that she had a Royal Warrant on her tummy from the Queen Mother.  She knew she was special.

When I found Willow at a boot sale one summer weekend, she was a little grubby.   She was wearing a little chain around her neck, which she told me her Teddy bears friends had presented to her many years ago for the bravery she showed after she got into a tussle with a whippet on a farm she was passing by.   She had a little wear to one corner of her back paw, and a piece of metal was poking through.   She couldn't remember exactly how it happened, but she said she had lived a very full life, and she hoped I wasn't bothered by any of her flaws.   I wasn't. 

I tucked her into the tote bag I was carrying and placed her on the car seat beside me.   It was the last day of my holiday in the UK, and I was headed back to the airport that evening, with one more stop to make -- the Town of Windsor.  She was so excited.  She had only seen pictures of the Castle and wanted to see the place where the Queen Mother had lived.   She knew the current Queen raised Corgies and once had a Pembroke Corgi named Willow.   She was hoping to get a glimpse of the Queen and her dogs, but alas, it was not to be.   We walked that beautiful town for hours, had a lovely lunch and headed to Heathrow.   She hasn't been back to England since she's joined my hug, but once in a while, I find her surfing the internet, looking at webcams of her beloved England.