Nothing stirred as I rattled across the cobbled market place then down the quiet street to Skeldale House with the ivy hanging in untidy profusion from its old bricks and “Siegfried Farnon M.R.C.V.S.” on the lopsided brass plate.
I think I would have galloped along the passage beyond the glass door but I had to fight my way through the family dogs, all five of them, who surged around me, leaping and barking in delight.
I almost collided with the formidable bulk of Mrs. Hall who was carrying the coffee-pot out of the dining-room. “You’re back then,” she said and I could see she was really pleased because she almost smiled. “Well, go in and get sat down. I’ve got a bit of home-cured in the pan for you.”
My hand was on the door when I heard the brothers’ voices inside. Tristan was mumbling something and Siegfried was in full cry. “Where the hell were you last night, anyway? I heard you banging about at three o’clock in the morning and your room stinks like a brewery. God, I wish you could see yourself—eyes like piss-holes in the snow!”
Smiling to myself, I pushed open the door, I went over to Tristan who stared up in surprise as I seized his hand and began to pump it; he looked as boyishly innocent as ever except for the eyes which, though a little sunken, still held their old gleam. Then I approached Siegfried at the head of the table. Obviously startled at my formal entry, he had choked in mid-chew; he reddened, tears coursed down his thin cheeks and the small sandy moustache quivered. Nevertheless, he rose from his chair, inclined his head and extended his hand with the grace of a marquis.
“Welcome, James,” he spluttered, spraying me lightly with toast crumbs. “Welcome home.”
THIRTY-SIX
I HAD BEEN AWAY for only two weeks but it was enough to bring it home to me afresh that working in the high country had something for me that was missing elsewhere. My first visit took me up on one of the narrow, unfenced roads which join Sildale and Cosdale and when I had ground my way to the top in bottom gear I did what I so often did—pulled the car on to the roadside turf and got out.
That quotation about not having time to stand and stare has never applied to me. I seem to have spent a good part of my life—probably too much—in just standing and staring and I was at it again this morning. From up here you could see away over the Plain of York to the sprawl of the Hambleton Hills forty miles to the east, while behind me, the ragged miles of moorland rolled away, dipping and rising over the flat fell-top. In my year at Darrowby I must have stood here scores of times and the view across the plain always looked different; sometimes in the winter the low country was a dark trough between the snow-covered Pennines and the distant white gleam of the Hambletons, and in April the rain squalls drifted in slow, heavy veils across the great green and brown dappled expanse. There was a day, too, when I stood in brilliant sunshine looking down over miles of thick fog like a rippling layer of cotton wool with dark tufts of trees and hilltops pushing through here and there.
But today the endless patchwork of fields slumbered in the sun, and the air, even on the hill, was heavy with the scents of summer. There must be people working among the farms down there, I knew, but I couldn’t see a living soul; and the peace which I always found in the silence and the emptiness of the moors filled me utterly.
At these times I often seemed to stand outside myself, calmly assessing my progress. It was easy to flick back over the years—right back to the time I had decided to become a veterinary surgeon. I could remember the very moment. I was thirteen and I was reading an article about careers for boys in the Meccano Magazine and as I read, I felt a surging conviction that this was for me. And yet what was it based upon? Only that I liked dogs and cats and didn’t care much for the idea of an office life; it seemed a frail basis on which to build a career. I knew nothing about agriculture or about farm animals and though, during the years in college, I learned about these things I could see only one future for myself; I was going to be a small animal surgeon. This lasted right up to the time I qualified—a kind of vision of treating people’s pets in my own animal hospital where everything would be not just modern but revolutionary. The fully equipped operating theatre, laboratory and X-ray room; they had all stayed crystal clear in my mind until I had graduated M.R.C.V.S.
How on earth, then, did I come to be sitting on a high Yorkshire moor in shirt sleeves and Wellingtons, smelling vaguely of cows?
The change in my outlook had come quite quickly—in fact almost immediately after my arrival in Darrowby. The job had been a godsend in those days of high unemployment, but only, I had thought, a stepping-stone to my real ambition. But everything had switched round, almost in a flash.
Maybe it was something to do with the incredible sweetness of the air which still took me by surprise when I stepped out into the old wild garden at Skeldale House every morning. Or perhaps the daily piquancy of life in the graceful old house with my gifted but mercurial boss, Siegfried, and his reluctant student brother, Tristan. Or it could be that it was just the realisation that treating cows and pigs and sheep and horses had a fascination I had never even suspected; and this brought with it a new concept of myself as a tiny wheel in the great machine of British agriculture. There was a kind of solid satisfaction in that.
Probably it was because I hadn’t dreamed there was a place like the Dales. I hadn’t thought it possible that I could spend all my days in a high, clean-blown land where the scent of grass or trees was never far away; and where even in the driving rain of winter I could snuff the air and find the freshness of growing things hidden somewhere in the cold clasp of the wind.
Anyway, it had all changed for me and my work consisted now of driving from farm to farm across the roof of England with a growing conviction that I was a privileged person.
I got back into the car and looked at my list of visits; it was good to be back and the day passed quickly. It was about seven o’clock in the evening, when I thought I had finished, that I had a call from Terry Watson, a young farm worker who kept two cows of his own. One of them, he said, had summer mastitis. Mid-July was a bit early for this but in the later summer months we saw literally hundreds of these cases; in fact a lot of the farmers called it “August Bag.” It was an unpleasant condition because it was just about incurable and usually resulted in the cow losing a quarter (the area of the udder which supplies each teat with milk) and sometimes even her life.
Terry Watson’s cow looked very sick. She had limped in from the field at milking time, swinging her right hind leg wide to keep it away from the painful udder, and now she stood trembling in her stall, her eyes staring anxiously in front of her. I drew gently at the affected teat and, instead of milk, a stream of dark, foul-smelling serum spurted into the tin can I was holding.
“No mistaking that stink, Terry,” I said. “It’s the real summer type all right.” I felt my way over the hot, swollen quarter and the cow lifted her leg quickly as I touched the tender tissue. “Pretty hard, too. It looks bad, I’m afraid.”
Terry’s face was grim as he ran his hand along the cow’s back. He was in his early twenties, had a wife and a small baby and was one of the breed who was prepared to labour all day for somebody else and then come home and start work on his own few stock. His two cows, his few pigs and hens made a big difference to somebody who had to live on thirty shillings a week.
“Ah can’t understand it,” he muttered. “It’s usually dry cows that get it and this ’uns still giving two gallons a day. I’d have been on with tar if only she’d been dry.” (The farmers used to dab the teats of the dry cows with Stockholm tar to keep off the flies which were blamed for carrying the infection.)
“No, I’m afraid all cows can get it, especially the ones that are beginning to dry off.” I pulled the thermometer from the rectum—it said a hundred and six.
“What’s going to happen, then? Can you do owt for her?”
“I’ll do what I can, Terry. I’ll give her an injection and you must strip the teat out as often as you can, but you know as wel
l as I do that it’s a poor outlook with these jobs.”
“Aye, ah know all about it.” He watched me gloomily as I injected the Coryne pyogenes toxoid into the cow’s neck. (Even now we are still doing this for summer mastitis because it is a sad fact none of the modern range of antibiotics has much effect on it.) “She’ll lose her quarter, won’t she, and maybe she’ll even peg out?”
I tried to be cheerful. “Well, I don’t think she’ll die, and even if the quarter goes she’ll make it up on the other three.” But there was the feeling of helplessness I always had when I could do little about something which mattered a great deal. Because I knew what a blow this was to the young man; a three-teated cow has lost a lot of her market value and this was about the best outcome I could see. I didn’t like to think about the possibility of the animal dying.
“Look, is there nowt at all I can do myself? Is the job a bad ’un do you think?” Terry Watson’s thin cheeks were pale and as I looked at the slender figure with the slightly stooping shoulders I thought, not for the first time, that he didn’t look robust enough for his hard trade.
“I can’t guarantee anything,” I said. “But the cases that do best are the ones that get the most stripping. So work away at it this evening—every half hour if you can manage it. That rubbish in her quarter can’t do any harm if you draw it out as soon as it is formed. And I think you ought to bathe the udder with warm water and massage it well.”
“What’ll I rub it with?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter what you use. The main thing is to move the tissue about so that you can get more of that stinking stuff out. Vaseline would do nicely.”
“Ah’ve got a bowl of goose grease.”
“O.K. use that.” I reflected that there must be a bowl of goose grease on most farms; it was the all-purpose lubricant and liniment for man and beast.
Terry seemed relieved at the opportunity to do something. He fished out an old bucket, tucked the milking stool between his legs and crouched down against the cow. He looked up at me with a strangely defiant expression. “Right,” he said. “I’m startin’ now.”
As it happened, I was called out early the next morning to a milk fever and on the way home I decided to look in at the Watsons’ cottage. It was about eight o’clock and when I entered the little two-stall shed, Terry was in the same position as I had left him on the previous night. He was pulling at the infected teat, eyes closed, cheek resting against the cow’s flank. He started as though roused from sleep when I spoke.
“Hello, you’re having another go, I see.”
The cow looked round, too, at my words and I saw immediately, with a thrill of pleasure that she was immeasurably improved. She had lost her blank stare and was looking at me with the casual interest of the healthy bovine and best of all, her jaws were moving with that slow, regular, lateral grind that every vet loves to see.
“My God, Terry, she looks a lot better. She isn’t like the same cow!”
The young man seemed to have difficulty in keeping his eyes open but he smiled. “Aye, and come and have a look at this end.” He rose slowly from the stool, straightened his back a little bit at a time and leaned his elbow on the cow’s rump.
I bent down by the udder, feeling carefully for the painful swelling of last night, but my hand came up against a smooth, yielding surface and, in disbelief, I kneaded the tissue between my fingers. The animal showed no sign of discomfort. With a feeling of bewilderment I drew on the teat with thumb and forefinger; the quarter was nearly empty but I did manage to squeeze a single jet of pure white milk on to my palm.
“What’s going on here, Terry? You must have switched cows on me. You’re having me on, aren’t you?”
“Nay, guvnor,” the young man said with his slow smile. “It’s same cow all right—she’s better, that’s all.”
“But it’s impossible! What the devil have you done to her?”
“Just what you told me to do. Rub and strip.”
I scratched my head. “But she’s back to normal. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Aye, I know you haven’t.” It was a woman’s voice and I turned and saw young Mrs. Watson standing at the door holding her baby. “You’ve never seen a man that would rub and strip a cow right round the clock, have you?”
“Round the clock?” I said.
She looked at her husband with a mixture of concern and exasperation. “Yes, he’s been there on that stool since you left last night. Never been to bed, never been in for a meal. I’ve been bringing him bits and pieces and cups of tea. Great fool—it’s enough to kill anybody.”
I looked at Terry and my eyes moved from the pallid face over the thin, slightly swaying body to the nearly empty bowl of goose grease at his feet. “Good Lord, man,” I said. “You’ve done the impossible but you must be about all in. Anyway, your cow is as good as new—you don’t need to do another thing to her, so you can go in and have a bit of rest.”
“Nay, I can’t do that.” He shook his head and straightened his shoulders. “I’ve got me work to go to and I’m late as it is.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
I COULDN’T HELP FEELING just a little bit smug as I squeezed the bright red rubber ball out through the incision in the dog’s stomach. We got enough small animal work in Darrowby to make a pleasant break from our normal life around the farms but not enough to make us blasé. No doubt the man with an intensive town practice looks on a gastrotomy as a fairly routine and unexciting event but as I watched the little red ball roll along the table and bounce on the surgery floor a glow of achievement filled me.
The big, lolloping Red Setter pup had been brought in that morning; his mistress said that he had been trembling, miserable and occasionally vomiting for two days—ever since their little girl’s ball had mysteriously disappeared. Diagnosis had not been difficult.
I inverted the lips of the stomach wound and began to close it with a continuous suture. I was feeling pleasantly relaxed unlike Tristan who had been unable to light a Woodbine because of the ether which bubbled in the glass bottle behind him and out through the anaesthetic mask which he held over the dog’s face; he stared moodily down at the patient and the fingers of his free hand drummed on the table.
But it was soon my turn to be tense because the door of the operating room burst open and Siegfried strode in. I don’t know why it was but whenever Siegfried watched me do anything I started to go to pieces; great waves seemed to billow from him—impatience, frustration, criticism, irritation. I could feel the waves buffeting me now although my employer’s face was expressionless; he was standing quietly at the end of the table but as the minutes passed I had the growing impression of a volcano on the bubble. The eruption came when I began to stitch the deep layer of the abdominal muscle. I was pulling a length of catgut from a glass jar when I heard a sharp intake of breath.
“God help us, James!” cried Siegfried. “Stop pulling at that bloody gut! Do you know how much that stuff costs per foot? Well it’s a good job you don’t or you’d faint dead away. And that expensive dusting powder you’ve been chucking about—there must be about half a pound of it inside that dog right now.” He paused and breathed heavily for a few moments. “Another thing, if you want to swab, a little bit of cotton wool is enough—you don’t need a square foot at a time like you’ve been using. Here, give me that needle. Let me show you.”
He hastily scrubbed his hands and took over. First he took a minute pinch of the iodoform powder and sprinkled it daintily into the wound rather like an old lady feeding her goldfish, then he cut off a tiny piece of gut and inserted a continuous suture in the muscle; he had hardly left himself enough to tie the knot at the end and it was touch and go, but he just made it after a few moments of intense concentration.
This process was repeated about ten times as he closed the skin wound with interrupted silk sutures, his nose almost touching the patient as he laboriously tied off each little short end with forceps. When he had finished he was slightly pop-eyed.<
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“Right, turn off the ether, Tristan,” he said as he pulled off half an inch of wool and primly wiped the wound down.
He turned to me and smiled gently. With dismay I saw that his patient look was spreading over his face. “James, please don’t misunderstand me. You’ve made a grand job of this dog but you’ve got to keep one eye on the economic side of things. I know it doesn’t matter a hoot to you just now but some day, no doubt, you’ll have your own practice and then you’ll realise some of the worries I have on my shoulders.” He patted my arm and I steeled myself as he put his head on one side and a hint of roguishness crept into his smile.
“After all, James, you’ll agree it is desirable to make some sort of profit in the end.”
It was a week later and I was kneeling on the neck of a sleeping colt in the middle of a field, the sun was hot on the back of my neck as I looked down at the peacefully closed eyes, the narrow face disappearing into the canvas chloroform muzzle. I tipped a few more drops of the anaesthetic on to the sponge and screwed the cap on to the bottle. He had had about enough now.
I couldn’t count the number of times Siegfried and I have enacted this scene; the horse on his grassy bed, my employer cutting away at one end while I watched the head. Siegfried was a unique combination of born horseman and dexterous surgeon with which I couldn’t compete, so I had inevitably developed into an anaesthetist. We liked to do the operations in the open; it was cleaner and if the horse was wild he stood less chance of injuring himself. We just hoped for a fine morning and today we were lucky. In the early haze I looked over the countless buttercups; the field was filled with them and it was like sitting in a shimmering yellow ocean. Their pollen had powdered my shoes and the neck of the horse beneath me.
Everything had gone off more or less as it usually did. I had gone into the box with the colt, buckled on the muzzle underneath his head collar then walked him quietly out to a soft, level spot in the field. I left a man at the head holding a long shank on the head collar and poured the first half ounce of chloroform on to the sponge, watching the colt snuffling and shaking his head at the strange scent. As the man walked him slowly round I kept adding a little more chloroform till the colt began to stagger and sway; this stage always took a few minutes and I waited confidently for Siegfried’s little speech which always came about now. I was not disappointed.
All Creatures Great and Small Page 24