One girl, one dog, one nightmare: When Marion Cutress took her daughter to see a friend who owned a Jack Russell, the visit was to change their lives. Nicholas Roe reports

Almost five years ago Marion Cutress took a decision that was to have far-reaching and terrible effects on the life of her toddler daughter, Louise. She decided to pop over the road and have a chat with a neighbour.

At that moment, Mrs Cutress now recognises, a chain of events began to unwind that was to lead to years of pain, disfigurement, tension and unhappiness - much of which continues to this day. Dog bites are like that, she says bitterly, but people seldom see the final outcome, despite an initial outcry. 'You get all this publicity - a child's been bitten. People talk about it the next day and that's it, you don't hear any more. I think it is in the public interest to know what children go through.'

So she lays it out in detail, sitting in her front room in Rainham, Kent, while Louise, now seven, plays on the sofa and hides a face that still bears marks of the attack: a lump on the top lip, a faint latticework of scars above and below the mouth.

What happened all those years ago was that Mrs Cutress went to see a neighbour to talk about buying something from a catalogue. Louise thought it would be fun to go along, too. The two families saw each other quite a lot; apart from living on the same estate, they were distantly related. So they knocked, the door was opened, and Mrs Cutress and Louise were invited in.

Mrs Cutress knew that the family had a Jack Russell terrier because it had bitten one of her sons (she has five children) two years earlier - not badly, but enough to cause tears. She had also been told of a similar attack by the same dog on another little girl living on the estate. The animal wasn't in sight, however, so they took a step inside.

'We were on the fringe of the porch-cum-front room when I heard a cry from Louise,' says Mrs Cutress. 'As I picked her up, we had the back of a chair in front of us and all of a sudden I just saw the dog and he came directly at her. By the time I had got her into my arms the dog was jumping down.

'I turned to look at Louise, and the top lip and cheek were just dangling down below her chin. It looked like a big hole in her face. Louise kept trying to get hold of the piece that was hanging. She kept saying it hurt and I kept holding on to both her arms because she was trying to pull it off.'

An ambulance rushed Louise and her parents to a local hospital, from where they were swiftly transferred to a specialist unit at East Grinstead. John and Marion Cutress paced up and down for five hours while surgeons inserted 109 stitches in their daughter's face.

This happened in the period leading up to the 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act, which imposed new restrictions on the ownership of fighting dogs, particularly the American pit-bull terrier. The Act has since been criticised for concentrating on one small section of dogs while leaving the vast bulk of breeds uncontrolled.

Marion and John Cutress stayed at the hospital for five days while their children were looked after by a neighbour. John Cutress was out of work at the time, so they had to borrow cash from friends to keep themselves in food and buy treats for Louise.

But more serious problems soon began to emerge. The couple were told that Louise would need more operations to reconstruct parts of her face. Her top lip drooped and the corner of her mouth overlapped, causing speech difficulties. There was a ridge in the flesh, and a tooth was missing (it still is).

On top of this, there were tensions between the Cutresses and the owners of the dog, made worse by the fact that they lived so close to each other. The animal had been put down the day after the attack and the matter did not come to court, but Mrs Cutress wanted compensation for her daughter's pain.

Meanwhile, Louise was sent to a nursery school, where she had special speech lessons every day. And nightmares began. 'She would see dogs at the window,' says Mrs Cutress. 'If she woke up she would say, 'There's a dog in the room.' Sometimes she was up four times in a night. This was nearly every night from after the attack until she was three and a half, then it eased off. It is only in the last eight months that she hasn't had any nightmares.'

Louise became sensitive to questions about her face, and on shopping trips would demand to be taken out of stores because people were staring at her.

Then, at four and a half, the first of the repair operations took place at Guy's Hospital, London. Mrs Cutress says: 'It was hell. In the anaesthetist's room he tried to get the needle in, but she was wriggling. I was trying to hold her. In the end there were five of us, the fifth person trying to get the needle into her arm. She was kicking. I just wanted to open the door and walk out with her. He got the needle in, but she pulled and it came out, so he went through the same routine with the other arm.

'As soon as she was unconscious I was ushered away. I was stranded, thinking, what shall I do now?'

What she did, in fact, was return with Louise for three similar operations in the years that followed, each one requiring at least four trips to London, and a total of more than three months off school for Louise, plus pain, the fresh embarrassment of bandages, and usually the return of nightmares for about a week. Mrs Cutress gave up her job in a local shop so that she could spend more time with her daughter.

The last operation was last June - four years after the attack - yet Louise still complained of pain from her bottom lip, saying that it felt 'tight'. So in February this year Mrs Cutress took her back to the surgeon, who said that she needed yet another operation, at which point Louise started crying and said: 'No more.' The surgeon tried explaining that he 'wanted to make her pretty', but Louise just went on shaking her head, and in the end they left it.

There, for the moment, the medical story rests; except that Louise has been told she can return to hospital for a further operation at any time, which means that the decision continues to hang over her.

But what about Mrs Cutress's compensation demands? There, too, tensions remain. Unable to put the matter from her mind, she successfully applied for legal aid on behalf of her daughter, planning to sue the dog's owners. Last year a writ was served, after which the families have stopped talking to each other altogether, twisting the wheel of discomfort one further notch.

Household insurance or pet insurance can provide third-party cover for dog bites in certain circumstances, but the dog in question appears not to have been covered, therefore legal aid has been withdrawn. Mrs Cutress is reapplying, but a successful outcome is by no means certain.

The family cannot look to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board for payment. According to Anne Johnstone, senior solicitor for the board, awards for dog bites are occasionally made, but in exceptional circumstances. 'For instance, where a dog is deliberately set upon you, or a person who knows a dog to be vicious recklessly - criminally rather than negliently - allows it to bite another person.'

What Mrs Cutress is left with is an issue that has dominated her family's life for five years, left her daughter with the prospect of at least one more trip to hospital and soured relationships with her neighbours. She says: 'If Louise had been run down by a car or something, she'd have got some sort of compensation, but she's left with nothing. It's as if nobody cares what happened just because it's a dog and people love dogs. Well I don't, not any more. It doesn't seem right that this can just happen and everyone forgets about it, while Louise suffers. There must be other children who've been bitten and I'd like to know if anyone ever paid them anything for what they went through. Children are being bitten every day.

'I don't think Louise will ever forget what happened to her. I know I won't. I'm not even sure the worst is over yet.'

(Photograph omitted)