Thorpe: Man bricks dog

What I (vaguely) remember:

I was somewhere between 10 and 14 years old. We were living in a terraced house in one of the couple of small streets that made up a no-man's land called Thorpe, somewhere in between Leeds and Wakefield. Thorpe is one of those nothingly places you drive through to get to somewhere real. This was emphasized on a daily basis by the noise of the nearby M62. There were no shops (that I recall). The only thing of interest was the Chlorine plant directly across the road. There was literally nothing to do there, except walk the dog.

Now, the bit I should remember about this but can't be sure is the name of the dog in this tale of woe. We definitely had a very stupid red setter called Bonnie when we lived here, but he/she was taken away again at some stage by the original owner because we basically couldn't handle the constant cleaning up of sick, nicking food off the table and general insanity. On the other hand, it might have been my auntie's dog. Let's just call it "the dog" for the sake of argument.

Anyway, I was walking the dog, not on a lead or anything. I got to the end of our street and the dog ran into the very small yard in front of the last house. It probably started having a dump, can't exactly remember - it may have just been nosing around. The owner came out, picked up a bit stone that was next to the door. As I was shouting "No!!!" he threw it at the dog and hit one of its legs. The dog started screaming in pain. Don't remember much what happened next but it involved me crying and swearing at him a lot.

My mum took him to court over it. I had to get up in the witness box and tell the story. When I got to the swearing bit I said something like "then I said some rude things", which made some people in the court laugh. We won the case.