Pizzles in Paradise

by John Hicks

  ‘Hey man, it says on the notice board that this meeting we’re going to is at the Grosvenor Hotel, do we know how to get there? ’It reads innocuously, but Grosvenor is a word seldom encountered in the English language outside of its association with hotels. Few of us will ever encounter a grosvenor in full regalia during our dull little lives. There were obviously no Grosvenor hotels in Pontypridd, or Richard would not have pronounced it as Gros Veenor. It’s not as though we would have pronounced Pontypridd correctly, but that is beside the point. He had said it to a group of like-minded friends and we instantly took up the challenge. We had him.

  ‘Never mind, Richard,’ said I, carefully borrowing his extreme rendition, ‘We’ll ask where the Gros Veenor is when we get into Chester.’

  Somehow Richard ended up in the passenger seat on that journey, an ideal position from which to seek directions from some unsuspecting member of the public.

  ‘Here’s someone we can ask where the Grus Veeenor is,’ said Tony eagerly. As we discussed the venue amongst ourselves the distortion had become monstrous. We pulled up beside an old man with a walking stick. Dutifully Richard wound down his window and politely made his request.

  ‘Please can you tell us where the Grus Veeenor Hotel is?’

  His Welsh accent wrought further disaster on the already mutated name.

  ‘I’ve lived here all my life and never heard of anything like that.’

  Richard stuck to his task diligently, attempting to prise the information from an increasingly puzzled old man. By this stage repressed giggles from the rest of the car’s occupants were evolving into irrepressible snorts. Richard turned round from his difficult conversation in amazement. We were right opposite the Grosvenor Hotel.

  ‘Look man, there! Across the road. The Grosvenor Hotel,’ said Tony, taking emphatic care to enunciate the vowels correctly and silence the central consonants.

  Richard, as ever, was quick on the uptake. After apologising to the involuntary scapegoat he rounded on the rest of us in vulgar terms: ‘You [adjective] bastards’, was all he could say to general uproar, including his own.

  ~

  The music of language is fascinating. A Welshman, if asked the difference between ‘here’s’, ‘ears’ and ‘years’ will supposedly claim that there is none. Likewise, for New Zealanders ‘here’ and ‘hair’, ‘ear’ and ‘air’, ‘ferry’ and ‘fairy’ are pairs of homonyms. E is invariably long, a long A an impossibility, and a short A is often rendered the same as a short E. It can cause problems, as this faithfully recorded conversation over a radio telephone will illustrate:

  ‘John, can you go to Alley Beard at—?’

  ‘Was that Alley? I can’t find an A Beard on the farm location map.’

  ‘Alley’s’ initials, for which I was hunting, were in fact L E. ‘Alley’ was known by his second name, Elliott—Elly for short. Transposing A’s and E’s can be very confusing. We still had to solve the Beard/Baird part, but within half an hour I was on my way. It would have been churlish to have said, ‘Oh, you mean Elliot Baird’, but sometimes I am churlish, so that is precisely what I did say. Afterwards we had a good laugh about it and the ex-pats attempted to give Daryl and other members of the staff a decent mauling. The trouble is, Kiwis just aren’t interested—a major cultural gulf. Kiwis couldn’t give a stuff about mangling the language as long as they’re winning the rugby. In that respect they’re as bad as the Scots and Welsh. Since I am now a fully paid up member of the club, good manners behove me to desist from my Kiwi homonym phobia and so I wander around repeating to myself: ‘sheared, shared; cheery, cherry; steer, stair; Elliot, Alliot; Beard, Baird.’ My life would be easier if only I could cease spelling words in my head. ‘Clarence, Clarance.’

  Chris Clarence was one of our deer farming clients. As used to be usual in New Zealand—until the combination of thieves, mobile phones and telephone directories put paid to the practice—his name was proudly displayed on his mail box at the entrance to the farm: C & T CLARENCE. I got to know Chris reasonably well after several seasons of develvetting and TB-testing his deer. He was pleasant company and a successful farmer. I had always been intrigued by the P CLARANCE mail box beside the driveway of the house across the road, directly opposite his, and commented about the coincidence.

  ‘Oh, that’s where my father lives,’ he enlightened me.

  ‘But Chris, why are the two names spelt differently then?’ I asked, unaware that I was grossly transgressing the normal rules of grammar with my carelessly phrased question, until I wrote it down just now.

  ‘They aren’t … are they?’ Although I informed him that indeed they were, the ENCE and ANCE mail boxes remained on the road for another five years, until the whole family moved to another district carting their monuments to dyslexia with them.

  Sheep farmers will tell you that there is more individual variation within breeds than between them. Working within a league of nations, as our vets have been described, I cannot but fail to agree. There are national characteristics, but the same virtues and vices are present in us all. However, tea room conversations would be less interesting were we to accede to this homily.

  It may also surprise you to know that Richard remains a very close friend.

  ~

  ‘Darling, do you think it’s safe to air your prejudices like this? You could offend a lot of people.’

  ‘No, it isn’t safe and I realise that it reflects sadly on me. I should be linguistically liberal and accept that our language is a living thing, constantly evolving. What I can’t understand is why we need to alter pronunciations and word meanings and spellings for the sake of effect or novelty and cause confusion where there needn’t be. Least of all I cannot abide changes supposedly implemented for reasons of logic.’

  ‘Alright, alright. I know where you’re heading now.’

  ‘Yes, our New World cousins. At least the colonials haven’t ridden roughshod over the language and changed all the spellings.’

  ‘But they retained some of the old spellings and it was the English who altered them subsequently.’

  ‘Yes, I can’t argue with that. But let me have one last rant. Folks out there should realise what has been happening to their language on the frontiers of science. We used to have wonderful words with classical derivations. I know I was no Latin scholar, but I do think the language should retain echoes of our linguistic history. Changing the spelling of oestrus to estrus, or dropping the ‘a’ from haemoglobin to become hemoglobin: it all seems neat and tidy until the next generation comes along and starts mispronouncing these words based upon the new spellings.’

  ‘It’s your age dear.’

  It is not possible to win every argument, but honour dictates that we stand up for what we feel is right. With some issues feelings countermand logic. Language is one of them, but heaven forbid I be categorised as a fuddy-duddy for my beliefs.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Dismantling the Barriers of Distaste

  ‘Go on, John, have a listen to this dog’s chest.’ Mr Betts was encouraging me to broaden my veterinary education. He took the stethoscope out of his hairy ears. Was I expected to insert the globby, off-white, plastic ear pieces with their streaks of wax directly into my own ears? The answer was yes. My veterinary education had taken a new twist and, from being a naturally fastidious person who disdained sharing a cup with even my own family members, I was now to embark on a process of desensitisation. True, Miss Joshua had pushed the boundaries too far, but in time the mind can be conditioned to over-ride feelings of revulsion, and looking back it seems that a large part of a vet’s training involves dismantling these natural barriers of distaste.

  There is a peril in this. The instincts to avoid sharing body fluids, and be squeamish about torn flesh and blood, body wastes and stinking corpses are an evolutionary protection mechanism. They minimise our exposure to noxious organisms. For vets the hazards from disease are greater than the risks of physical injury.

  Diseases co
mmunicable from animals to man are zoonoses. Brucella abortus, the bacterium that claimed the life of Mike, and many other vets of his era, is a classic example; but vets are regularly exposed to a cocktail of potentially dangerous and even life-threatening micro-organisms. We can pay attention to personal hygiene, wear protective clothing, splash the appropriate disinfectants around, but inevitably situations arise where there is unavoidable risk. Zoonoses lurk round every corner.

  Picture in your mind a cow urinating onto a concrete slab with the sun behind her. I make this request not for aesthetic reasons. In this light golden droplets can be seen to sparkle as they arch up and out, encompassing a considerable area. Now imagine that you are truncated to chest height and placed a couple of feet from where that stream of urine hits the slab. This is precisely the position of a dairy worker in a modern herringbone milking shed. His face is regularly exposed to urine droplets and vapour. If the cow is a Leptospirosis carrier, she will be shedding lethal little leptospires in her urine capable of being absorbed through mucous membranes such as lips and eyes. Should he contract the disease he will develop flu-like symptoms and progress to a state where if he isn’t dead, he will soon wish that he was. Early intervention with antibiotic treatment will spare him the worst effects but, because of the vague early symptoms, the connection may not be made. A disease that can be relatively innocuous in one species can be devastating in another.

  In the late 1990s a tourist to New Zealand harboured a previously unrecorded bacterium in his or her intestines. From the sewage ponds of Christchurch it is speculated that seagulls strewed the infection across the immaculate pastures of Canterbury and launched a new disease on the livestock industry. Salmonella Brandenburg (the ‘Thunderbird’ we looked at earlier) is an interesting variant of the usual strains of salmonellae that we encounter in New Zealand in that it is predisposed to seek out the pregnant uterus and cause abortion. Sheep are at greatest risk, and when the first wave of infection reached Southland our clinic was deluged with aborted lamb foetuses brought in to us by local farmers anxious to identify the reason for their losses. Dabbling in the cold, smelly and slimy little carcases to retrieve samples of stomach contents, heart blood, brain and placenta is one of the most disgusting jobs imaginable. Even so it is possible to suppress the distaste in the interests of science. On the shiny stainless steel table of our post-mortem room, wearing double gloves, gumboots, waterproof overalls and with plenty of water and disinfectant, we felt in control. The risk of infection, although those carcases were hooching with pathogenic organisms, was relatively slight.

  It was a different matter when, the following season, Salmonella Brandenburg started showing up in cattle. When a full-term calf dies inside a cow it might not be expelled immediately. Natural lubricating fluids, that would normally ease the passage of the calf, dry up. The cow herself starts to sicken and weaken, and the calf rots and expands with gas. The poor unsuspecting vet is on his way again.

  As I have described before, rotten calvings are not unusual for vets. One rotten calving is much like another. At midnight by torchlight, how are we to know that we are witnessing the manifestations of a hitherto unrecorded disease? Calving that cow as she squats down, straining an aerosol broth of salmonellae into your grimacing face, merely inches away, is virtually guaranteed to overwhelm the strongest immune system and give licence to those bacteria to colonise your body.

  That year three of our staff went down with severe dysenteric symptoms and Salmonella Brandenburg was confirmed as the cause. Recovery to full health can take months.

  Fortunately, the faeces of healthy ruminants are largely recycled grass containing a large proportion of chlorophyll, a natural deodorising chemical. The large-animal vet’s task is not as unpleasant as some may imagine. On a cold winter’s day there is no quicker way to warm the hands then to indulge in a spot of pregnancy testing. The use of scanning machines has obviated this advantage, but there are compensations.

  For a phenomenal capital outlay we obtained an ultrasonic scanning device that could be of use in many species. As a rectal probe, using heaps of lubricant, we could ascertain stages of pregnancy in cows, sheep, deer and horses. For dogs and cats it could be placed on the belly for the same purpose—rather as an ultrasound scan for human pregnancy.

  One of our vets had been out all day scanning hinds. The scanner’s probe, basically a modified human machine, had been well protected with black silage tape. I retrieved it from its shelf by the back door and hurriedly wiped it clean. I needed it to scan Mrs Dickens’ immaculate white Maltese Terrier. Was she pregnant? She sat, a picture of groomed perfection, on the consulting room table. Mrs Dickens, as elegant and well-groomed as her charge, chatted as I applied the lubricant to that precious tummy. It took some time, as is the case when there is nothing to find. I angled the probe in different directions.

  ‘I’m sorry, Susan, but I can’t make her pregnant. Oops, it looks as if we have another problem here.’

  I was looking at a large dark pool of faecal matter spreading over the table and already tinting those lustrous locks. It was also on my hand and the sleeve of my coat.

  ‘That’s strange,’ observed Mrs Dickens, ‘she has been the picture of health recently. Perhaps she’s nervous.’ She glared peevishly at the innocent-looking dog.

  After careful examination, I had drawn a blank.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. Look, her temperature’s OK and I can’t find anything else wrong. I doubt that there is a problem. It hasn’t even got an offensive smell to it. Let me know if you do have any concerns.’ And then the truth dawned.

  Surreptitiously I set the probe aside and guided her to the door. When I returned an even bigger pool had run out of the tape protecting the head of the probe. A pool comprising three parts lubricant and one part deer faeces makes a horrible mess.

  Words were said about cleaning up equipment after you have used it. Sometimes jokes about leaving you in the proverbial aren’t appreciated and the hoary old one as to whether I was sure it was a Maltese and not a Shih Tzu (say it quickly) was trotted out, but eventually I saw the funny side. There had been worse messes to clean up.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Southland’s Secrets

  The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time.

  Richard Jefferies

  Fly west across the wild mountains of Fiordland; north, up the mighty folds of the Southern Alps; glide east over the arid plateaux of Otago; east again where the cool, damp forests of the Catlins enfold a mysterious coast; head south to Stewart Island and the unspoilt nature within its sparkling shores. You are in the deep South of New Zealand, where large lakes wash the feet of rugged mountains. One of them, Te Anau, is a veritable inland sea, with its three western arms stabbing through remote peaks. Another—glittering Manapouri—has a scatter of islands and tentacle arms probing a jagged wilderness; and then there is narrow and moody Hauroko, deepest of them all, claiming a Maori princess with her caped skeleton mouldering at rest in the fastness of an island cave. This is the unparalleled heritage to which Southlanders enthusiastically lay claim. Here they can hunt, tramp, fish, ski and wonder as they inhale the cool freshness of primordial forests. Here was our new playground.

  Was it the pure air, healthy lifestyle and good food of Southland that gifted Viv and me our two fine daughters? No matter, after years of indignities and hospital tests we were blessed with a positive pregnancy test within a few months of our arrival.

  Before we were long in Southland we had completed some of the great walks, tramped among the rocky ramparts of the Darren Mountains, looked down on the crevasses and moraines of the Dart Glacier, and seen the secretive rock wrens in the alpine boulder fields of the Rees. Once again we were amazed by the sheer botanical diversity of New Zealand’s largely endemic flora: from forest floors carpeted with ferns, mosses and lichens, to vegeta
ble sheep, sentries on the high screes. Once more we were ‘hutting’ in places of wild isolation.

  I have brought you to another of my spiritual homes, far removed from the soft greens of the Anglo-Saxon dream-world where I commenced my journey. Here, among the sombre mountain beech forests, a harsh realm of delicate beauty unfolds. A sea of tussock grass extends between scattered islands of ancient trees, and gives way to the alpine herb fields we will soon ascend. But let us linger awhile and look up to the snow and rock above. The red-gold of the morning sun already catches the topmost peaks. A day of promise is unfolding, but a half-world of roiling mists lingers round our hut. Where the trees enclose the damper air above a rushing stream, the gnarled branches of the ancient ones are draped in hanging lichens: goblin forest. The poverty of the thin and sour soils, the drenching rains and heavy snows demand they strive for a hundred years or more to attain even the modest height of a man. Their struggle confers character and nobility, as it does to all those who emerge dignified, if battle-scarred, from great hardships.

  The air is washed in this damp climate to coolest purity. Far to the west the ridges rake into a wild and lonely part of the Tasman Sea … Perhaps we shall hear the wild and joyous cry of the kea bent on another day of mischievous playfulness, perhaps merely the gentle soughing of a damp wind but, as yet, there is a blanket of expectant silence. The clank of a billy reminds us of that first luxurious draught of hot tea, and calls our party to a companionable breakfast in the smoky hut. Hunched over a rude wooden table, knobbed with candle wax, our murmured conversations vaporise in the cool air.

  We are on the Dusky Track, a testing route through the heart of Fiordland. It twists over the Main Divide from the head of Lake Hauroko to Dusky Sound, the first place of landfall for Captain Cook on his visit of 1773—still pristine and remote. The route then doubles back over another high pass to the West Arm of Lake Manapouri, a trip of seven or eight days. Away to the east and over the ranges, where the bush wilderness is tamed to farmland, Cedric, a successor to Boris, romps in a rough bush paddock on Jean Sinclair’s farm.