by John Hicks
Too much adrenalin is wearying and a day spent assessing potential antagonists in pens full of angry deer is no picnic. Deer farmers now have better facilities, many with hydraulic crushes for large and fractious animals. ‘Killer’ deer are no longer valuable and are culled before they can become too much of a menace. More to the point, it has become a specialist business attracting those who know what they’re doing. The hobbyists—with a few deer and make-do pens manufactured from scraps of netting placed round a mud patch, with an off-cut carpet as a roof—have thankfully disappeared.
~
And so, if you are a large-animal vet the kicks are free, but what about the money? Is it worth it? Here the analogy with the popular song fails. An employed veterinarian should enjoy a comfortable income for all his or her hard work and, if he/she becomes a partner or invests in the business, perhaps better than comfortable (but perhaps worse). Unfortunately, there is always room for exploitation in a profession which many join for love. It would be a sad day were we to sink to the mores prevailing during the Great Depression, when ‘gentlemen’, keen to gain experience, would pay to work as a vet. A sad day for all of us.
My farming clients would no doubt disagree and, on second thoughts and from my position as partner in a veterinary business, I can feel myself warming to the idea. We need more gentlemen.
Chapter Thirty-four
Valour and Discretion
The crowd disgorges from the confines of the Kop and fans out across the streets: army ants on the move. Substitute the leaf litter of a forest floor for the stained tarmac of a Liverpool street, a beetle carcase dismembered and shouldered aside for that terrified couple hunched in their car as the army seethes round them—its soldiers reckless and untouchable in the frenzied knowledge of their united power. Above them bollards of mounted police represent law and order—a mere gesture—for where the press is thickest they are as powerless and immovable as tree trunks in that alien jungle.
Though the terrified couple do not know it they are in luck, for this is a good-natured swarm. Liverpool has had a home win and the army is in a playful mood. It contents itself with merely banging on the roof, and only for a brief moment is there a more sinister threat as a cadre positions itself fore and aft and gives the unsettled occupants a decent rocking. A few millimetres of glass separate them from these jeering louts. They adopt appeasing grimaces. It is a hopeless ploy, and they know they have no control over their destiny. Just as suddenly their tormentors lose interest and move on. Soon the car’s occupants are able to furtively creep around the straggling remnants, rueing the timing that induced them to forage round the back streets of the stadium on this particular afternoon. With relief their motor accelerates them to freedom. The dented carapace can be repaired. It could have been so much worse.
As part of the army I had been caught up in the action. I had felt the dangerous euphoria of our united power. I had felt for the brief terror of our casually discarded prey. Since this teenage experience I have registered extreme unease about any form of mass hysteria and its ability to suspend individual thought. Look at the frenzied participants in archived film from the Nuremburg rally; look at the unreasoned violence and chanting at massed political protests, or the divine rapture of evangelical congregations. These are all people who have sold their souls to a higher authority, invariably a human one, often claiming to be the mouthpiece of some supernatural god. Tell them to believe and they will. Command them to genocide and they will. Tell them to top themselves and they will. Remember Jonestown?
What would I have done if the crowd had turned ugly? What could I have done? It gave me immense respect for the courage of Bishop Desmond Tutu when he stepped in to rescue a victim from ‘necklacing’ by a lynch mob.
Of course Tom Brown would have done the same. Against all odds fictional heroes have stepped in and done their bit repeatedly and, usually unbelievably, survived. It makes the genuine real-life heroes, the Ernest Shackletons, Nancy Wakes and Charles Uphams, all the more admirable.
Not being a fictional character, and priding myself on a modicum of common-sense, I have never been the sort to march into a pub and pick a fight with the largest and ugliest at the bar, but I did wonder about Brian as we waited to meet a sales rep in an Ashburton pub. Ashburton is, to all outward appearances, a civilised little town. There are no docklands or bombed-out slums in Ashburton. To survive unharmed through a Liverpool childhood it was advisable to avoid certain areas at certain times, to avoid looking at certain people in certain, undefined, ways. In general, Liverpudlians are warm, friendly and humorous people, but the infamous ‘Liverpool kiss’ is no manifestation of affection.
Our rep wasn’t showing up. (He had waited for us in vain in the Seaforth Lounge. As he told us later: ‘I would never have gone to that bar.’) Without trepidation we gravitated to the back of the room to have a quiet game of pool. A Maori shearing gang was occupying the table. Tough men and women lined the walls. They worked hard all day and they played hard each night. After several games the table was idle. Brian and I waited politely to see if anyone else wanted to play. No? We seized our opportunity, stepped up and put our money in the slot. We set up the balls and started to play. After several years in New Zealand I had dropped my guard. Premonitions to which my Liverpool upbringing would normally have alerted me no longer blipped my radar screen.
A lean, muscular man of monolithic proportions strode casually to our table and rolled the cue ball away from the shot I had lined up. It was almost accidental. But then he started to mess with the other balls. I abandoned my naivety. This was deliberate! Brian was the first to speak. As an aside, he stage-whispered to me, ‘I never back down in situations like this’—just when I was considering that discretion would be the better part of valour. Well, if he wasn’t backing down, how could I?
I surveyed the opposition. We were outnumbered at least five to one by men obviously attuned to such situations. Intensely they focused on our little drama. Any conversation between them had ceased. Hands clenched on glasses and jugs. They were going to play this one out, and the Queensberry rules would have no part in it. They were quite obviously about to make mincemeat of us. Neither of us would be a match for men honed by a demanding physical job, men who sheared two- or three-hundred sheep a day—day in, day out. We might palpate a few rams, play the odd game of squash and do a spot of tramping. If it came to a stoush, we weren’t in their league.
Monolith started to swear. Explosive ‘f’ and ‘c’ words filled the air. The rest of the room became expectantly quiet, a sea of white faces blobbing out of focus in my field of vision. Intently I concentrated on the epicentre of this aggressive tirade. Brian responded to the barrage of invective with a bald statement. ‘You’ve got a rather limited vocabulary.’
It seemed rather a tactless thing to say. Internally I applauded the wry humour, but its subtlety was lost on Monolith who seemed to be in a world of his own. A rictus of wild indifference masked any shred of humanity. Eye contact was of the glazed variety. Nothing we said was going to register. He beckoned to his deputy, a smaller, shifty character. Belligerently he carried an empty jug towards us, poising it over the table. The implication was obvious. Adrenalin, the hormone of ‘flight or fight’, is a strange thing. We couldn’t back down now. Flight was out. I prepared myself for the worst.
Our plight had not gone unobserved. In the nick of time three policemen walked into the pub. They made straight for the pool table.
‘Everything OK here, guys?’ Monolith abandoned his zombie persona and a warm smile suffused his face. I have never seen such a rapid transformation. The police tried another tack and spoke directly to Monolith.
‘We have reason to believe you’re about to cause trouble again.’
‘No, we’re going to have a drink with these boys, officer.’ He held his hand out to shake Brian’s and then mine. The tension in the rest of the gang relaxed.
‘What you having, boys?’ Before we knew it jugs of beer were set
in front of us and the police melted away. They had done a great job, courtesy of an observant publican.
Brian and I were next faced with a gargantuan and very amicable drinking session. The first drink was welcome, but more kept coming. How could we refuse? We didn’t want to cause offence, yet Brian was determined to maintain the psychological upper-hand. The debate, such as it was, consensually visited such topics as the futility of violence, self-improvement through education, saving to benefit the future of your dependents. It was a bravura performance. For an hour or two we were all the best of mates. I wish I could remember more… We both returned home drunk that night. It could have been so much worse.
And yet, reflecting on this display of courage reminds me that, on another occasion, Brian was quite unable to face a rocky mountain ridge. Vertigo, fear of flying, arachnophobia: probe deep enough and every one of us has a weak point somewhere. I have had great personal difficulty confronting my own deep fears of happy-clappy congregations and country and western music. But I need to probe deeper than that.
~
My first day at boarding school was a shock. After a brief farewell to my parents at the front door, I was ushered by Mr Pratt into the front room of the Victorian residence—the Junior boarding school. Mr Pratt had been charming to my parents, but seemed decidedly distant once the front door was closed. Never mind, he was a busy man. It was ‘old Pratt’ who supervised our ritual daily cold baths. It was old Pratt who caned each and every one of us when a boy was hospitalised with concussion after the traditional end-of-year pillow fight. He was a diligent man, determined to instil some good old-fashioned values into us and harden us up.
A group of boys were enjoying a roughhouse over and around the tatty furniture. They scarcely paused at my entrance, and resumed their play. In one corner another boy sat rather disconsolately. Perhaps he too had just been dropped off by his parents. I was keen to face the challenge of my new life, but even though we were only twelve- or thirteen-year-olds, I had enough understanding to empathise with the misery of a fellow human being. It wasn’t till I started to approach him that any notice was taken of me.
‘Don’t talk to Evans.’ A solid boy, ‘Hippo’, was making a firm recommendation.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘He’s a coward.’ The story was related to me while Evans shifted miserably in his corner.
The previous year Evans, for some reason, had called Wickham a ‘bastard’. Wickham, as I was later to find out, fully justified that description. He was, for his age, a squat and powerfully built boy. He had had private boxing tuition in Jamaica, his home country. It would be easy to gauge that Evans, a skinny and uncoordinated child, would be no match for Wickham. Wickham seized his opportunity for immortality. Choosing to interpret the term ‘bastard’ as impugning his mother’s honour, he took the complaint to Mr Pratt. As a man of the old school, Mr Pratt was, or feigned to be, shocked. In a move that guaranteed him respect from the boys he acceded to Wickham’s request and permitted a boxing match. He produced the gloves to make sure that everything was fair. This was the manly way to settle disputes. Wickham smugly listened as Hippo recounted Evans’ nemesis to me.
For the first round of that fight Wickham had toyed with Evans. ‘You should have seen Evans at the end of the first round,’ remembered Hippo with glee, ‘his nose was pulped and there was blood all over his face.’
They cleaned him up. Evans was quite an obstinate boy. He had been given the opportunity to apologise and not realised the significance of not taking it. He had never been popular, or tried to seek popularity. His parents were missionaries in China, if they had known of their son’s plight perhaps they would have thought it was excellent training for their line of business. It would be nice to think that they would have been horrified. Not so Mr Pratt.
He let the fight continue. After a further pummelling Evans made a mistake that would live with him for the rest of his school days; and, if I can remember it now, for the rest of his life. He ran away from Wickham. As long as any of these boys knew him, he would be labelled a coward. He was never going to redeem himself on the playing-field. He was at the bottom of the C form. His parents were on the other side of the world. He was a hopeless case, but by merely surviving in that poisonous atmosphere for a few years he showed more courage than most of his tormentors.
In divulging this tale of woe, Hippo seemed to be including me into his group. He was now going to show me the ‘fifty-four card trick’. He grabbed a pack from the shelf. All eyes were on me.
‘Go on. What is it then?’ I asked eagerly. Hippo heaved the cards in the air.
‘Now pick them up.’
I ignored him. I was by nature a tidy boy. I had always cleared up my toys after play. I glanced round the shabby room. Discarded magazines littered the floor. I suspected that a few greasy cards wouldn’t make much difference. Anyway a bell sounded. Tea time! Without further ado Hippo and the other boys were squeezing through the door. He was a greedy bastard, although I never had the guts to say it to his face. He was bigger than me. I wasn’t stupid. His demise would come later when he became stuck in a tarn at a Scout camp in the Wicklow mountains. The hatred of the past-bullied who united to lob stones and witness his disintegration under fire was a surprise to him. All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. He was the better for realising it.
I suspect Wickham became a successful estate agent (after his holiday job as an assistant in a psychiatric institution where he avowedly was able to indulge his whims with mentally defective women) and Hippo a car salesman. As to Evans, I dread to think. After a few years of being unremittingly reviled he disappeared.
In a very short space of time I had learned that cowardice is an unpardonable indiscretion and it is perfectly acceptable, indeed endorsed by the authorities, to bully a coward in the most cowardly ways imaginable. We all need a scapegoat, someone lower on the pecking order whom we can legitimately despise.
I left the Junior boarding school a year later a wiser and more cynical boy. I was looking forward to Senior school and becoming one of the hardened elite in School House. I was about to step out of the frying pan and into the fire. Pernicious memories come flooding back.
~
Makliski, we failed you. Although you bunked for a year next to me, that is the only name by which I knew you. Oh yes! Your parents were recently separated and a few years later you were expelled. You were harmless, but you were different. When the older boys raided our dorm for a victim, it was you they chose. We individually cowered in relief that it was not one of us they carried to their dorm. And so it was you they tossed mercilessly in a blanket, indeed so hard that there were some awkward explanations to explain the exposed laths where your tensely terrified body had cracked the plaster off that high ceiling. Boys will be boys! Repeatedly, you will note, I call on you, Tom Brown, a hero that my late-developing body never allowed me to emulate. Even at thirteen you would have shown them your mettle. Your prowess at the game your school gave name to was no joy to me. I never rejoiced in thrusting my head and shoulders between the foetid buttocks of my peers and having my ears rubbed off in scrums. No selection by weight rather than age then. Irresponsible thugs with broken voices, cheesy breath and spotty faces enjoyed the temporary power that a few years’ start gave them over their feebler, downy colleagues. Alas, I chose the more shameful path of anonymity, suppressing my outrage at a system of sanctioned bullying till more mature years. Cowardice and courage: how misleadingly those terms are used to undermine any shred of confidence a frail schoolchild can develop in an evil environment.
By the time my parents had removed me from this malign influence and the men of the church who upheld it, I had acquired a very wary opinion of the establishment and I still retain it.
Yet it is possible to foster an entirely different attitude amongst schoolchildren. Emily and Morwenna both boarded. In an enlightened Dunedin school our children were accorded older girls as mentors to whom they co
uld turn for help. A mentoring system employs psychology entirely diametric to the fagging of British public schools. Mentor or fag? There is simply no choice in a civilised society. A caring and kindly atmosphere is vastly more enriching for all concerned than the sanctioned, even encouraged, exploitation of the young and weak by the powerful. I am sure that the young ladies and men educated under such an enlightened system have greater self-assurance and courage than the twisted misfits that survived the great British public school boarding traditions.
It wasn’t till much later that I read Thomas Hughes’ nineteenth-century classic, Tom Brown’s Schooldays —to which I have frequently referred. I was particularly interested in the preface of a later edition, where the author responds to the reception his work had received and, in particular, to the subject of bullying. A long letter he quotes is from ‘FD’ who, in my opinion, eloquently sums up a problem that was to plague English public schools for another century.
I blame myself for not having earlier suggested whether you could not, in another edition of ‘Tom Brown’ or another story, denounce more decidedly the evils of bullying at schools…
A boy may have moral courage, and a fine organised brain and nervous system. Such a boy is calculated, if judiciously educated to be a great, wise and useful man; but he may not possess animal courage; and one night’s tossing, or bullying, may produce such an injury to his brain and nerves that his usefulness is spoiled for life… A groom who tried to cure a shying horse by roughness and violence would be discharged as a brute and a fool. A man who would regulate his watch with a crowbar would be considered an ass. But the person who thinks a child of delicate and nervous organization can be made bold by bullying is no better.