“ARE YE ALL RIGHT, Mr. Herriot?”
Lionel Brough looked down at me solicitously as I crawled on hands and knees through the gap in the wire netting.
“Yes,” I gasped. Lionel was very thin and he had slipped through the aperture like a snake, but I was having a little difficulty.
There were some unusual farms and smallholdings in our practice—converted railway wagons, henhouses and other artifices— but this one, I always thought, took the prize.
Lionel was one of a plentiful breed in those days, a roadman who kept livestock as a sideline and hobby. Some of them had four cows, others a few pigs, but Lionel had the lot.
He had housed his motley collection in a large hut by the side of his cottage. He appeared to have divided the hut into sections by using the first thing that came to hand. It was a labyrinth, a monumental piece of improvisation, with up-ended bed frames, sheets of plywood and corrugated iron, and stretches of wire netting separating the animals. There were no doors or passages anywhere.
I got to my feet, puffing slightly. “Where is this calf?”
“Not far to go now, Mr. Herriot.” We passed his solitary cow, then little pigs nibbled at my heels as Lionel laboriously undid a series of knots tied with coarse string so that we could enter the next compartment.
Here, a couple of nanny goats regarded us impassively.
“Grand milkers, them two,” the roadman grunted. “T’missus makes some smashin’ cheese from ’em, and it’s healthy milk, isn’t it?”
“That’s right, it is.” At that time, when T.B. infection was still a constant threat, the milk from the comparatively immune goat was highly regarded. The far wall of their pen consisted of a mahogany dining table lying on its side, its legs projecting into the interior. I skirted it warily before climbing over. I had suffered some nasty blows from those castored knobs.
We were among the calves now, three of them, and it was easy to pick out my patient, a small black animal with a purulent discharge crusting his nostrils.
As I bent to take his temperature I had to push aside a couple of squawking hens, and a fat Muscovy duck waddled out of my way. These feathered creatures seemed to have the run of the place, jumping and fluttering from pen to pen and in and out of the building. From my position by the calf I could see an assortment of cats perched on window sills or on the tops of partitions. A sudden snarling from the end of the hut marked the beginning of a friendly fight among Lionel’s three dogs. Beyond the doorway two sheep were visible, grazing contentedly in the field by the cottage.
I looked at the thermometer—103°, then I ausculated the chest with my stethoscope. “Just a touch of bronchitis, Lionel, but I’m glad you called me. He’s quite rough in his lungs, and pneumonia could be just round the corner. As it is, a couple of injections will probably clear him up.”
Lionel nodded in quiet satisfaction. He was a vague man, but kind, and all his animals were comfortable and well fed in their eccentric dwelling. Deep straw abounded, and the hayracks and troughs were well supplied.
I felt in my pockets. They were bulging with bottles and syringes. I had brought everything I might possibly need. On this establishment, it wasn’t easy to slip back to the car as an afterthought.
After the injection I turned to the roadman. “I’ll look in tomorrow morning. It’s Sunday, so you won’t be working, eh?”
“That’s right. Thank ye, Mr. Herriot.” He turned and began to lead me back through the obstacle course.
On the following day I found the calf greatly improved. “Temperature normal, Lionel,” I said. “And he’s on his feet now. That’s a good sign.”
The roadman nodded abstractedly, and I could see that his mind was elsewhere. “Aye, well, that’s grand … ah’m right pleased.” His eyes looked past me vacantly for a few moments, then he suddenly seemed to come back to the world.
“Mr. Herriot!” His voice took on an unaccustomed urgency. “There’s summat I want to ask ye.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Aye, I’ll tell you what it is.” He looked at me eagerly. “Ah fancy goin’ in for pigs in a big way.”
“You mean … keep a lot of pigs?”
“That’s right. Just pigs and nowt else, and keep ’em in a proper place.”
“But that would mean building a piggery.”
He thumped a fist into his palm. “You’ve just said it. That’s what I fancy. I’ve allus liked pigs, and I’d like to do the job proper. Ah could build the piggery out there in t’field.”
I looked at him in surprise. “But Lionel, these things cost a lot. There’s the question of. . .”
“Money? Oh, ah’ve got t’money. Remember, me awd uncle died a bit back? Lived with us for years. Well, ‘e left me a little legacy. Not a fortune, tha knows, but I could branch out a bit now.”
“Well, it’s up to you, of course,” I said. “But are you sure it’s what you really want? You’ve always seemed to be happy with your bit of stock here, and you’re not a youngster—you’ll be fifty-odd, won’t you?”
“Aye, I’m fifty-six, but they say you’re never too old to have a go at something new.”
I smiled. “Oh, I’m a strong believer in that. I’m all for it— providing you’re happy doing it.”
He looked very thoughtful and scratched his cheek a few times. I suppose, like most happy men, he didn’t realise the fact. “Get bye, duck!” he grunted with a flash of irritation and nudged the Muscovy with his toe as it tried to march between his legs. Still deep in thought, he bent and lifted a hen’s egg from the straw in the corner and put it in his pocket.
“Nay, ah’ve thought it over for a bit now, and me mind’s made up. I’ve got to have a go.”
“Okay, Lionel,” I said. “Have at it, and the best of luck.”
With a speed unusual in the Dales, the piggery took shape in the field. Rows of concrete pens with a covered yard appeared, and within a few weeks, sows and a boar were installed in the pens and a solid bunch of porkers grunted among the straw in the yard.
To me, this modern structure looked out of place, with the ancient dry-stone walls encircling its green setting and the smooth bulk of the fell rising to the stark moorland above, but I hoped it would bring Lionel the satisfaction he craved.
He still carried on with his road work. He had to get up earlier in the morning to feed and clean out his pigs, but he was a fit man and seemed to be enjoying it.
His vet bills went up, of course, but there was nothing serious, and everything I treated went on well—an occasional sow with mastitis, a farrowing, a few piglets with joint ill. He accepted these things without complaint because the old adage, “Where there’s stock there’s trouble,” was as familiar to him as to anybody else.
The only thing that bothered me a little was that, whereas, before, he spent a lot of time just leaning on his various partitions looking at his animals and smoking his pipe, he now had no time for that, He was always bustling about, pushing wheelbarrows, filling up troughs, mucking out, and it seemed to me that all this was foreign to his nature.
He certainly wasn’t as relaxed as he had been. He was happy enough, caring for his fine new charges, but there was a tautness in his expression, a slight anxiety that had not been there before.
There was anxiety in his voice, too, when he rang up one evening. “Just got back from work, Mr. Herriot, and there’s some young pigs here I don’t like t’look of.”
“What symptoms are they showing, Lionel?”
“Well, they haven’t been doin’ right for a bit. Not thrivin’ like the others. But they’ve been eatin’ and not really off it, like, so I haven’t bothered you.”
“But how about now?”
There was a pause. “They look different now. They’re kind o’ crambly on their back legs, and they’re scourin’ a bit … and there’s one dead. Ah’m a bit worried.”
I was worried, too. Instantly and profoundly. It sounded horribly like swine fever. In my early days those two words were
burned into my soul, and yet, to the modern young vet, they don’t mean a thing.
For around twenty years I was literally haunted by swine fever. Whenever I did a postmortem on a dead pig, I feared I might come across the dreaded button ulcers and haemorrhages. And what I feared still more was that I might fail to spot the disease and be responsible for its spread.
It wasn’t as bad as foot-and-mouth in that respect, but the same principles held good. If I didn’t recognise the symptoms, pigs might go from that farm to a market and be sold to places scattered over many miles. And every pig would carry its own load of infection and would spread the incurable disease among its healthy neighbours. Then the Ministry of Agriculture would be called in, and they would painstakingly trace the thing right back to Herriot, the man who had made the original unforgivable blunder.
It was a recurring nightmare, because, unlike foot-and-mouth, the disease was a common one, waiting round the corner all the time. I often used to think I would be blissfully happy if only there were no such thing as swine fever. In fact, when I look back at all the worry it caused me and my contemporaries, I feel that the present-day veterinarians should leap happily from their beds each morning and dance around the room crying out, “Hurrah, hurrah, there’s no swine fever now!”
At the farm, Lionel led me to a pen at the far end of the yard.
“They’re in there,” he said gloomily.
I leaned over the wall, and a wave of misery flowed through me. There were about a dozen young pigs in the pen—around sixteen weeks old—and they were nearly all showing the same symptoms.
They were thin and had a scruffy, unthrifty look, the backs of their ears were a dark purple-red, they staggered slightly as they walked and a thin diarrhea ran down the limp-hanging tails. I took a few temperatures. They were around 106.
It was classical—straight out of the book—but I didn’t tell Lionel right away. In fact, I wasn’t allowed to until I had gone through all the ritual.
“Where did you get this lot?” I asked.
“Haverton market. They were a right-good level bunch when they came, but by gaw they’ve gone down.” He pushed at a little corpse with his Wellington. “And now ah’ve got this dead ’un.”
“Yes … well, I’ll have to open him up and look inside him, Lionel.” My voice sounded weary. I was starting again on the agonising merry-go-round. “I’ll get my knife from the car.”
I came back with the postmortem knife, rolled the dead pig on its back and slit open the abdomen. How often had I done this with just the same feeling of taut apprehension?
The region of the ileo-caecal valve was the textbook site, and I aimed for it first. But as I cut into the intestine and scraped the mucosa with my knife, I found only haemorrhages and small necrotic spots, some dark red, others yellowish.
Sometimes you found the real thing further along in the colon, and for a long time I snipped my way along the coils of bowel with my scissors without finding anything definite.
Here I was again. I was sure this was swine fever, but I couldn’t say so to the farmer. The Ministry insisted that theirs was the right of diagnosis, and until they issued confirmation I could say nothing.
There were the usual petechial haemorrhages in kidney and bladder, but not one typical ulcer.
I sat back on my heels. “Lionel, I’m very sorry, but I’D have to report this as a suspected case of swine fever.”
“Oh, ‘e?, that’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Yes … yes, it is. But we can’t be positive until the Ministry confirms it. I’m going to take samples and send them off to the laboratory in Surrey.”
“And can’t you do owt to cure them?”
“No, I’m afraid not. It’s a virus, you see. There’s no cure.”
“And how about t’others? Does it spread?”
I cringed at having to answer, but there was no point in playing the thing down. “Yes, it spreads like anything. You’ll have to take every precaution. Keep a tray of disinfectant outside this pen, and dip your boots if you have to go in. In fact, I would go in as little as possible. Feed and water them over the top, and always attend to the healthy pigs first.”
“And how about if me other pigs get it? How many are goin’ to die?”
Another horrible question. The books say the mortality rate is eighty to a hundred percent. In my experience it had been a hundred percent.
I took a long breath. “Lionel, they could all die.”
The roadman looked slowly over the rows of new concrete pens with their sows and litters, and the pigs rooting happily among the straw in the yard. I felt I had to say something, however lame.
“Anyway, it might not be what I fear. I’ll send these samples off to the lab and let you know what they say. In the meantime, get these powders into them, either in their food or by dosing.”
I stowed the loops of bowel in my car boot, then went round the piggery making notes of the different grades of pigs. Because another little purgatory lay ahead of me—the filling up of the forms. I have a blind spot where forms are concerned, and the swine fever form was a horrendous pink thing about two feet long, with closely packed questions on each side about how many sows and boars and un weaned pigs and weaned pigs and fattening pigs, and heaven help you if you got any of the numbers wrong.
That evening at Skeldale House I wrestled with this pink thing for a long time, then turned to the real horror—the packing of the sample of bowel. The Ministry provided a special little outfit for this purpose. At first sight it looked just like a flat square of corrugated cardboard, some pieces of grease-proof paper, several lengths of hairy string and a sheet of brown paper. However, on closer examination you found that the cardboard folded into a small square box. The instructions were very explicit. You didn’t just bung a piece of bowel into the box; you had to lay a three-feet portion lengthwise on the grease-proof paper, then fold the ends of the paper inwards and tie the whole thing up in one of the pieces of string.
However, there was a catch here, because among the swine fever kit were two stridently printed red and black cards saying, “Pathological Specimen. Urgent.” With spaces for the address of the infected premises and all kinds of things. These cards had holes in each end, and the string containing the bowel had to be threaded through these holes before the box was closed. The other card went on the outside.
I painstakingly went through the ritual, and as I finally fumbled the string through the holes in the outside card and tied the box in the brown paper, I fell back exhausted because this sort of thing took more out of me than calving cows.
It was then, just as I was staring with glazed eyes at the envelopes containing the form for Head Office and the one for Divisional Office, the cardboard creation packed at last, that I saw the other card lying on the table. I had forgotten to include it with the contents.
“Damn and blast it to hell!” I yelled. “I always do that! I bloody well always do that!”
Helen must have thought I might have had some kind of seizure because she hurried through to the dispensary where I was working.
“Are you all right?” she asked anxiously.
I hung my head and nodded weakly. “Yes, sorry. It’s just this damned swine fever.”
“Well, all right, Jim.” She looked at me doubtfully. “But try to keep your voice down. You’ll wake the children.”
In grim silence I dismantled the box, threaded in the card and reconstructed the outfit once more. I had done this so often, and, oh, how I hated it. I thought bitterly that if ever I wanted something to kill a quiet evening, I had only to do an S.F. report.
I took the thing to the station and sent it off, and in an attempt to ease my mind I turned to one of my veterinary bibles, Udall’s Practice of Veterinary Medicine. Even among those hallowed pages I found little comfort. The great man’s pronouncements only reconfirmed my suspicions. He was an American and he called it hog cholera, but everything he described reminded me of what I had seen on Lionel’s pla
ce. He talked about injection of serum to protect the healthy pigs, but I had tried that, and it just didn’t work. It would be more expense for Lionel, with nothing to show for it.
Within a few days I got the result. The Ministry was unable to confirm the presence of swine fever on these premises. On that day I also heard from the roadman.
“Them pigs is worse. Your powders have done no good, and I ‘ave another dead ’un.”
Again the dash out to the piggery and the postmortem examination, and this time, as I slit the intestine along its length, I really thought I had found something definite. Surely those ulcers were slightly raised and concentric. The Ministry must confirm it this time, and then, at least, we would know where we were.
I had another evening of form filling and another struggle with the cardboard box and the papers, but as I sent off the samples, I was very hopeful that my doubts would be resolved.
When the word came back that the Ministry was once more unable to confirm the disease, I could have cried.
I appealed to Siegfried. “What the hell are they playing at? Can you tell me how they ever do diagnose S.F. from these samples at the lab?”
“Oh, yes.” My partner looked at me gravely. “They take the length of bowel from the paper and throw it against the ceiling. If it sticks there it’s a positive, if it falls off it’s negative.”
I gave a hollow laugh. “I’ve heard that one before, and sometimes I feel like believing it.”
“But don’t be too hard on the Ministry boys,” Siegfried said. “Remember, they have to be dead sure before they confirm, and they’d look damn silly if they were wrong. Lots of things can look like S.F. You find necrotic ulcers in worm infestations, for instance. It’s not easy.”
I groaned. “Oh, I know, I know. I’m not blaming them, really. It’s just that poor old Lionel Brough is sitting on the edge of a precipice, and I can’t do anything to help him.”
“Yes, James, it’s a hell of a situation. I’ve been there and I know.”
Two days later Lionel rang to say he had another dead pig. This time I found more typical ulcers, and though I still had no idea what the Ministry would say, I knew exactly what I had to do. My brain seemed to have worked it out during the night hours because my decision was crystal clear.
The Lord God Made Them All Page 35