“All the dead doggies having a laugh”

“All the dead doggies having a laugh” is the unsigned inscription on a handmade card that Fern Woolbright finds after returning from a weekend in Godalming. Accompanying a drawing of dogs imagined in heaven, the words turn an anonymous condolence into an object of grief and hope: Fern treasures the card, but most wants to believe Charlie Treadaway made it for her.

The Card and Its Inscription

The card is drawn on a torn piece of brown cardboard and slipped under Fern’s door while she is away visiting her parents. Its front shows many dogs in dog heaven, with angel wings and halos; they come in different shapes and sizes, though none looks particularly like Smudge. On the back, the maker has left the words “all the dead doggies having a laugh” in very bad handwriting, without signing a name.

The inscription gives the image an informal, affectionate voice rather than identifying its author. The dogs’ imagined afterlife offers Fern a way to encounter the loss of Smudge through a picture, but the card’s anonymity leaves its personal meaning unresolved: its comfort is clear even as its sender remains uncertain.

Fern’s Response and Her Search for the Sender

The card makes Fern cry, but the response is tightly contained: a single tear slides down her nose, and she checks that the effect looks good in the mirror. Her controlled reaction does not make the drawing insignificant. She calls it beautiful and her best thing ever, a judgment that reflects not resemblance to Smudge—the picture does not particularly resemble him—but the care she hopes the gesture represents.

Fern first considers whether either of her flatmates made it, then dismisses the possibility after comparing the handwriting with notes they have left for each other. She wonders about Rob, who handed her the phone when James Frobisher called about Smudge and therefore knew how upset she was. But Fern recalls that Rob is studying engineering and reasons that his hands are too pudgy to have made the drawing. These are guesses rather than proof, and the card remains unsigned.

Charlie as the Hoped-for Author

More than any other possibility, Fern wants the picture to be Charlie’s work. She imagines the maker as the “smelly, curly-haired, black-eyed boy” who cares enough to draw her a lovely picture of many different dead dogs. The hope is specific: she is not simply looking for an explanation of the card, but longing for evidence that Charlie has noticed and responded to her grief.

Fern keeps the card in her underwear drawer, beneath her best bra and knickers and the plastic box containing a diaphragm recently fitted at a women’s health centre in Manchester. The placement makes the keepsake part of a private space, alongside her personal belongings and contraception. Its unsigned message therefore holds two kinds of intimacy at once: a tender acknowledgment of bereavement and Fern’s unconfirmed wish that Charlie is the person behind it.