I have a vivid recollection of a summer evening when I had to carry out a rumenotomy on a cow. As a rule I was inclined to play for time when I suspected a foreign body—there were so many other conditions with similar symptoms that I was never in a hurry to make a hole in the animal’s side. But this time diagnosis was easy; the sudden fall in milk yield, loss of cudding; grunting, and the rigid, sunken-eyed appearance of the cow. And to clinch it the farmer told me he had been repairing a hen house in the cow pasture—nailing up loose boards. I knew where one of the nails had gone.
The farm, right on the main street of the village, was a favourite meeting place for the local lads. As I laid out my instruments on a clean towel draped over a straw bale a row of grinning faces watched from above the half door of the box; not only watched but encouraged me with ribald shouts. When I was about ready to start it occurred to me that an extra pair of hands would be helpful and I turned to the door. “How would one of you lads like to be my assistant?” There was even more shouting for a minute or two, then the door was opened and a huge young man with a shock of red hair ambled into the box; he was a magnificent sight with his vast shoulders and the column of sunburned neck rising from the open shirt. It needed only the bright blue eyes and the ruddy, high-cheekboned face to remind me that the Norsemen had been around the Dales a thousand years ago. This was a Viking.
I had him roll up his sleeves and scrub his hands in a bucket of warm water and antiseptic while I infiltrated the cow’s flank with local anaesthetic. When I gave him artery forceps and scissors to hold he pranced around, making stabbing motions at the cow and roaring with laughter.
“Maybe you’d like to do the job yourself?” I asked. The Viking squared his great shoulders. “Aye, I’ll ’ave a go,” and the heads above the door cheered lustily.
As I finally poised my Bard Parker scalpel with its new razor-sharp blade over the cow, the air was thick with earthy witticisms. I had decided that this time I really would make the bold incision recommended in the surgery books; it was about time I advanced beyond the stage of pecking nervously at the skin. “A veritable blow,” was how one learned author had described it. Well, that was how it was going to be.
I touched the blade down on the clipped area of the flank and with a quick motion of the wrist laid open a ten-inch wound. I stood back for a few seconds admiring the clean-cut edges of the skin with only a few capillaries spurting on to the glistening, twitching abdominal muscles. At the same time I noticed that the laughter and shouting from the heads had been switched off and was replaced by an eerie silence broken only by a heavy, thudding sound from behind me.
“Forceps please,” I said, extending my hand back. But nothing happened. I looked round; the top of the half door was bare—not a head in sight. There was only the Viking spreadeagled in the middle of the floor, arms and legs flung wide, chin pointing to the roof. The attitude was so theatrical that I thought he was still acting the fool, but a closer examination erased all doubts: the Viking was out cold. He must have gone straight over backwards like a stricken oak.
The farmer, a bent little man who couldn’t have scaled much more than eight stones, had been steadying the cow’s head. He looked at me with the faintest flicker of amusement in his eyes. “Looks like you and me for it, then, guvnor.” He tied the halter to a ring on the wall, washed his hands methodically and took up his place at my side. Throughout the operation, he passed me my instruments, swabbed away the seeping blood and clipped the sutures, whistling tunelessly through his teeth in a bored manner; the only time he showed any real emotion was when I produced the offending nail from the depths of the reticulum. He raised his eyebrows slightly, said “ ’ello, ’ello,” then started whistling again.
We were too busy to do anything for the Viking. Halfway through, he sat up, shook himself a few times then got to his feet and strolled with elaborate nonchalance out of the box. The poor fellow seemed to be hoping that perhaps we had noticed nothing unusual.
I don’t suppose we could have done much to bring him round anyway. There was only one time I discovered a means of immediate resuscitation and that was by accident.
It was when Henry Dickson asked me to show him how to castrate a ruptured pig without leaving a swelling. Henry was going in for pigs in a big way and had a burning ambition to equip himself with veterinary skills.
When he showed me the young pig with the gross scrotal swelling I demurred. “I really think this is a vet’s job, Henry. Castrate your normal pigs by all means but I don’t think you could make a proper job of this sort of thing.”
“How’s that, then?”
“Well, there’s the local anaesthetic, danger of infection—and you really need a knowledge of anatomy to know what you’re doing.”
All the frustrated surgeon in Henry showed in his eyes. “Gaw, I’d like to know how to do it.”
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “How about if I do this one as a demonstration and you can make up your own mind. I’ll give him a general anaesthetic so you don’t have to hold him.”
“Right, that’s a good idea.” Henry thought for a moment. “What’ll you charge me to do ’im?”
“Seven and six.”
“Well I suppose you have to have your pound of flesh. Get on.”
I injected a few cc’s of Nembutal into the little pig’s peritoneum and after some staggering he rolled over in the straw and lay still. Henry had rigged up a table in the yard and we laid the sleeping animal on it. I was preparing to start when Henry pulled out a ten-shilling note.
“Better pay you now before I forget.”
“All right, but my hands are clean now—push it into my pocket and I’ll give you the change when we finish.”
I rather fancy myself as a teacher and soon warmed to my task. I carefully incised the skin over the inguinal canal and pulled out the testicle, intact in its tunics. “See there, Henry, the bowels have come down the canal and are lying in with the testicle.” I pointed to the loops of intestine, pale pink through the translucent membranes. “Now if I do this, I can push them right back into the abdomen, and if I press here, out they pop again. You see how it works? There, they’ve gone; now they’re out again. Once more I make them disappear and whoops, there they are back with us! Now in order to retain them permanently in the abdomen I take the spermatic cord and wind it in its coverings tightly down to the …”
But my audience was no longer with me. Henry had sunk down on an upturned oil drum and lay slumped across the table, his head cradled on his arms. My disappointment was acute, and finishing off the job and inserting the sutures was a sad anticlimax with my student slumbering at the end of the table.
I put the pig back in his pen and gathered up my gear: then I remembered I hadn’t given Henry his change. I don’t know why I did it but instead of half-a-crown, I slapped down a shilling and sixpence on the wood a few inches from his face. The noise made him open his eyes and he gazed dully at the coins for a few seconds, then with almost frightening suddenness he snapped upright, ashenfaced but alert and glaring.
“Hey!” he shouted. “I want another shillin’!”
FORTY-SEVEN
VETS ARE USELESS CREATURES, parasites on the agricultural community, expensive layabouts who really know nothing about animals or their diseases. You might as well get Jeff Mallock the knacker man as send for a vet.
At least that was the opinion, frequently expressed, of the Sidlow family. In fact, when you came right down to it, just about the only person for miles around who knew how to treat sick beasts was Mr. Sidlow himself. If any of their cows or horses fell ill it was Mr. Sidlow who stepped forward with his armoury of sovereign remedies. He enjoyed a God-like prestige with his wife and large family and it was an article of their faith that father was infallible in these matters; the only other being who had ever approached his skill was long-dead Grandpa Sidlow from whom father had learned so many of his cures.
Mind you, Mr. Sidlow was a just and humane man. After ma
ybe five or six days of dedicated nursing during which he would perhaps push half-a-pound of lard and raisins down the cow’s throat three times a day, rub its udder vigorously with turpentine or maybe cut a bit off the end of the tail to let the bad out, he always in the end called the vet. Not that it would do any good, but he liked to give the animal every chance. When the vet arrived he invariably found a sunken-eyed, dying creature and the despairing treatment he gave was like a figurative administration of the last rites. The animal always died so the Sidlows were repeatedly confirmed in their opinion—vets were useless.
The farm was situated outside the normal area of the practice and we were the third firm Mr. Sidlow had dealt with. He had been a client of Grier of Brawton but had found him wanting and moved to Wallace away over in Mansley. Wallace had disappointed him grievously so he had decided to try Darrowby. He had been with us for over a year but it was an uncomfortable relationship because Siegfried had offended him deeply on his very first visit. It was to a moribund horse, and Mr. Sidlow, describing the treatment to date, announced that he had been pushing raw onions up the horse’s rectum; he couldn’t understand why it was so uneasy on its legs. Siegfried had pointed out that if he were to insert a raw onion in Mr. Sidlow’s rectum, he, Mr. Sidlow, would undoubtedly be uneasy on his legs.
It was a bad start but there were really no other available vets left. He was stuck with us.
I had been uncannily lucky in that I had been at Darrowby for more than a year and had never had to visit this farm. Mr. Sidlow rarely called us up during normal working hours as, after wrestling with his conscience for a few days, he always seemed to lose the battle around eleven o’clock at night (he made exceptions in the case of the occasional Sunday afternoon) and it had always landed on Siegfried’s duty nights. It was Siegfried who had trailed out, swearing quietly, and returned, slightly pop-eyed in the small hours.
So when it did finally come round to my turn I didn’t rush out with any great enthusiasm, even though the case was just a choking bullock and should present no difficulties. (This was when a beast got a piece of turnip or a potato stuck in its gullet, preventing regurgitation of gases and causing bloating which can be fatal. We usually either relieved the bloat by puncturing the stomach or we carefully pushed the obstruction down into the stomach by means of a long flexible leather instrument called a probang.) Anyway, they had realised they couldn’t wait for days this time and by way of a change it was only four o’clock in the afternoon.
The farm was nearer Brawton than Darrowby and lay in the low country down on the Plain of York. I didn’t like the look of the place; there was something depressing about the dilapidated brick buildings in the dreary setting of ploughing land with only the occasional mound of a potato clamp to relieve the flatness.
My first sight of Mr. Sidlow reminded me that he and his family were members of a fanatically narrow religious sect. I had seen that gaunt, blue-jowled face with the tortured eyes staring at me from the pages of history books long ago. I had the feeling that Mr. Sidlow would have burnt me at the stake without a qualm.
The bullock was in a gloomy box off the fold yard. Several of the family had filed in with us; two young men in their twenties and three teenage girls, all good-looking in a dark gipsy way, but all with the same taut, unsmiling look as their father. As I moved around, examining the animal, I noticed another peculiarity—they all looked at me, the bullock, each other, with quick sideways glances without any head movement. Nobody said anything.
I would have liked to break the silence but couldn’t think of anything cheerful to say. This beast didn’t have the look of an ordinary choke. I could feel the potato quite distinctly from the outside, half-way down the oesophagus but all around was an oedematous mass extending up and down the left side of the neck. Not only that, but there was a bloody foam dripping from the mouth. There was something funny here.
A thought struck me. “Have you been trying to push the potato down with something?”
I could almost feel the battery of flitting glances, and the muscles of Mr. Sidlow’s clenched jaw stood out in a twitching ridge. He swallowed carefully. “Aye, we’ve tried a bit.”
“What did you use?”
Again the rippling jaw muscles under the dark skin. “Broom handle and a bit of hose pipe. Same as usual.”
That was enough; a sense of doom enveloped me. It would have been nice to be the first vet to make a good impression here but it wasn’t to be. I turned to the farmer. “I’m afraid you’ve ruptured the gullet. It’s a very delicate tube, you know, and you only have to push a bit too hard and you’re through. You can see the fluid collection round the rupture.”
A quivering silence answered me. I ploughed on. “I’ve seen this happen before. It’s a pretty black outlook.”
“All right,” Mr. Sidlow ground out. “What are you going to do about it?”
Well, we were at it now. What was I going to do about it? Maybe now, thirty years later, I might have tried to repair the gullet, packed the wound with antibiotic powder and given a course of penicillin injections. But there, in that cheerless place, looking at the patient animal gulping painfully, coughing up the gouts of blood, I knew I was whacked. A ruptured oesophagus was as near hopeless as anything could be. I searched my mind for a suitable speech.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Sidlow, but I can’t do anything about it.” The glances crackled around me and the farmer breathed in sharply through his nose. I didn’t need to be told what they were all thinking—another no-good, useless vet. I took a deep breath and continued. “Even if I shifted the potato the wound would get contaminated when the beast tried to eat. He’d have gangrene in no time and that means a painful death. He’s in pretty good condition—if I were you I’d have him slaughtered immediately.”
The only reply was a virtuoso display from the jaw muscles. I tried another tack. “I’ll give you a certificate. I’m sure the meat will pass for the butcher.”
No cries of joy greeted this remark. If anything, Mr. Sidlow’s expression became still more bleak.
“That beast isn’t ready for killin’ yet,” he whispered.
“No, but you’d be sending him in before long—another month, maybe. I’m sure you won’t lose much. I tell you what,” with a ghastly attempt at heartiness, “if I can come into the house I’ll write you this chit now and we’ll get the job over. There’s really nothing else for it.”
I turned and headed across the fold yard for the farm kitchen. Mr. Sidlow followed wordlessly with the family. I wrote the certificate quickly, waves of disapproval washing around me in the silent room. As I folded the paper I had the sudden conviction that Mr. Sidlow wasn’t going to pay the slightest attention to my advice. He was going to wait a day or two to see how things turned out. The picture of the big, uncomprehending animal trying vainly to swallow as his hunger and thirst increased was too strong for me. I walked over to the phone on the window sill.
“I’ll just give Harry Norman a ring at the abattoir. I know he’ll come straight up if I ask him.” I made the arrangements, hung up the receiver and started for the door, addressing Mr. Sidlow’s profile as I left. “It’s fixed. Harry will be along within half-an-hour. Much better to get it done immediately.”
Going across the yard, I had to fight the impulse to break into a gallop. As I got into the car I recalled Siegfried’s advice: “In sticky situations always get your car backed round before you examine the animal. Leave the engine running if necessary. The quick getaway is essential.” He was right, it took a long time reversing and manoeuvring under the battery of unseen eyes. I don’t blush easily but my face was burning as I finally left the farm.
That was my first visit to the Sidlows and I prayed that it might be my last. But my luck had run out. From then on, every time they sent for us it just happened to be me on duty. I would rather not say anything about the cases I treated there except to record that something went wrong every time. The very name Sidlow became like a jinx. Try as I might
I couldn’t do a thing right on that farm so that within a short time I was firmly established with the family as the greatest menace to the animal population they had ever encountered. They didn’t think much of vets as a whole and they’d met some real beauties in their time, but I was by far the worst. My position as the biggest nincompoop of them all was unassailable.
It got so bad that if I saw any Sidlows in the town I would dive down an alley to avoid them and one day in the market place I had the unnerving experience of seeing the entire family, somehow jammed into a large old car, passing within a few feet of me. Every face looked rigidly to the front but every eye, I knew, was trained balefully on me. Fortunately I was just outside the Drovers’ Arms, so I was able to reel inside and steady myself with a half-pint of Younger’s Special Heavy.
However, the Sidlows were far from my mind on the Saturday morning when Siegfried asked me if I would go through and officiate at Brawton races.
“They’ve asked me to do it as Grier is on holiday,” he said. “But I’d already promised to go through to Casborough to help Dick Henley with a rig operation. I can’t let him down. There’s nothing much to the race job: the regular course vet will be there and he’ll keep you right.”
He hadn’t been gone more than a few minutes when there was a call from the racecourse. One of the horses had fallen while being unloaded from its box and had injured its knee. Would I come right away.
Even now I am no expert on racehorses; they form a little branch of practice all by itself, with its own stresses, its own mystique. In my short spell in Darrowby I had had very little to do with them as Siegfried was fascinated by anything equine and usually gobbled up anything in that line which came along. So my practical experience was negligible.
All Creatures Great and Small Page 32