The girl staggered from table to table, getting a bit more power into each scream till she found the door and fled through it with a last despairing cry.
Alf’s girlfriends were rather less ‘fast’ than Walsh’s chorus girl; his first date since the catastrophe at the cinema was Nan Elliot, whom he’d met at school. Another college-era girlfriend was Charlotte Clarke (‘The sweetest thing I have ever known’ – until she gave him the elbow), whom he met on a Boys’ Brigade weekend. Another girlfriend, Marion Grant, he encountered doing some wholesome camping and hill-walking. Otherwise the fictionalization of that evening was light. ‘Bernie Hill’ was actually Alf’s old Yoker friend, Alex Taylor, who did indeed stagger to a college dance with a Johnny Walker cut-out as a trophy, and was quite astonishingly inebriated. Dominic Boyce, prone to solitary singing when drunk in the pub and then sleeping for the main event, was the model for Don Noyce. ‘Theatricals’ such as chorus girls were sometime attendees at Buccleuch Street ‘dos’, but then the vet college dances attracted everybody in the environs of Garnethill, including dental students, cookery students, the prostitutes from the brothel opposite and the students from the Art School. The local papers liked to turn up to the Friday dances too, finding them colourful copy. A minor problem with Alf’s nights out was that his mother was convinced that he was saintly close to teetotalism, which required him walking the streets for hours afterwards to sober up. Or getting his friend Eddie Straiton, the dark-haired, teetotal fitness fanatic from Clydeside, to stick his fingers down his (Alf’s) throat to make him sick. Lest his mother should read it, in his diary he was careful in his recounting of the more lively events at vet college, such as a rugger trip to Edinburgh to play the Royal Dick:
What a journey home! Most of the lads were a trifle happy and some definitely tight. Chips, chocolate and beer went lavishly in the compartment … More fish and chips and singing in Glasgow and I staggered in at 1 o’clock. Great stuff. P.S ‘staggered’ doesn’t indicate any state of intoxication.
Alf was also in the Glasgow Veterinary College football team, along with many of his best friends, including Eddie Straiton, Jimmy Steele, Bob ‘Ginger’ Smith, Vincent O’Reilly, Johnny Ogg, Adam Farrell, Donald MacIntyre and Aubrey Melville. Once, after raising £16-15s-0d at a college dance, the team set off across the Irish Sea to play Dublin Veterinary College at Dalyneux Park. Excepting captain Eddie Straiton, the Glasgow team drank on the boat and drank in Dublin. They got no sleep, they played in wet kit (some wag had trailed the kit bags in the sea) yet still managed to be 3-1 up at full time. Alas, the referee, Dublin’s Professor of Parasitology, kept the game going. The Glasgow boys could run no more, and when the Dubliners equalized 3-3 the ref immediately blew the final final whistle.
On getting back to Glasgow, Alf wrote up the Dublin outing as a short story. He showed it to, among others, Eddie Straiton, who thought it ‘bloody marvellous’. Alf then put it in a drawer.
While he was at College, Alf also turned out for Yoker Fernlea in the Scottish Juvenile League, where neither the game nor the pitches – which were usually ash, gravel or mud – were beautiful. Many of the crowd at Juvenile soccer games were tribal ‘gentry of the corner’ who liked to trip up the opposition with a quick thrust of a leg from the touchline. It was a mistake to win away; when Yoker Fernlea crossed the Clyde on the boxy black Renfrew Ferry to trounce Govan, the local supporters attacked the Yoker team who had to barricade themselves in a shed until the police arrived. That was Alf’s last game for Yoker. He played a few games for Old Kilpatrick Amateurs in the West of Scotland Amateur League, and played for the college but never again for Yoker.
There was a sort of extra time, however, for football in Alf’s life. Based on his experience with Yoker Fernlea, Alf wrote an unpublished short story about a man in a Juvenile League crowd who is persuaded to turn out for an under-manned team, and who is almost destroyed by the inner conflict and physical exertions the 90 minutes bring. Although Alf had made the decision to prioritize animals over writing, he clearly had not abandoned the word. And football, Alf would find as a practising vet, was a lingua franca between him and the client, an ice-breaking topic, a means of bonding.
* * *
By Christmas 1936, Alf had broken the back of the veterinary course, having passed the professional exams in Chemistry, Physics, Physiology, Histology and Embryology, and Animal Husbandry (Animal Management). He was thrumming along too in Senior Anatomy, Pharmacology and Veterinary Hygiene. However, with the exception of Animal Husbandry – which covered everything from fitting a harness to a horse to shoeing, from manipulation to assessing conformation (body shape) – the work had been largely theoretical. That was about to change.
MR HERRIOT’S CASEBOOK
‘Try her with a kipper.’
Advice of J. J. McDowall MRCVS to client with a cat ‘off her food’
IT WAS A requirement of the MRCVS diploma that students received practical experience with professional veterinary practitioners, which was then written up as ‘casebooks’ to be presented for the final examination. At Glasgow, however, seeing service with working vets had an additional impetus, because the college did not have a clinic where students could prod and ponder sick animals.
So the Buccleuch Street students were assigned early and often from their third year onwards to various vets for some real hands-on sessions. The sheer amount of practical experience Glasgow students undertook was the other reason why Glasgow students were particularly sought after in the profession.
One of the first practitioners Alf spent time with was William Weipers, a Buccleuch Street old boy (and eventually its Dean), who ran a surgery in the city’s fashionable West End. Sticking a finger into the trade winds, Weipers had divined the change of direction towards small animal work and had decided to specialize in pets. His practice had X-ray machines – this, at a time when human hospitals struggled to get them – and metal tables with adjustable tops in the operating theatre. Weipers’ surgery was a white and steel vision of the future. Alf Wight, aspiring dog doctor, loved it. ‘It was just dogs and cats all day long … one thought hammered in my head. This is what I would do some day.’
In Glasgow, Alf also saw practice with Willie Robb, who was famed for his equine expertise. (When not toiling in his own veterinary practice, Robb doubled as a professor of Medicine and Surgery at Buccleuch Street.) But Alf went further afield than Glasgae in his search for veterinary know-how. He did a session with Donald Campbell of Rutherglen, although the most memorable aspect of the stint was not animal but human: it was Campbell’s idiosyncratic habit of telephoning the ‘ha-ouse’ at the end of evening surgery to let his wife know he was on the way home, bawling ‘I’ll be leaving na-ow, I’ll be na-ow’ into the black mouthpiece. When Alf brought Aubrey Melville along to witness this strange ritual, Melville had to rush off and was found rolling on the floor, almost unable to breathe because of laughter.
During his vacations in 1937, Alf travelled down to the swelling hills, stony rivers, stone walls and open fields of Dumfries in south-west Scotland to see practice with Tom Fleming. Fleming’s was a classic country practice, where the veterinary year was marked by spring calving and lambing, and another bout of calving in the autumn. There were few phones, fewer cars and the ‘veet’ was the conduit to the outside world, to be sat down on arrival and pumped for the latest news of neighbours and nation. Along with the vicar, the vet was a pastoral figure. In rural practices in the Thirties – even up to the Fifties – the relationship between vet and client was different to today, more intimate. ‘Being a vet then,’ recalled Herefordshire vet Nigel Carter,
was very much a social thing and after you’d done your work on the farm you would invariably go in and wash your hands and they would say, ‘Will you have a cup of tea or a piece of cake?’ So there would be a quarter or half an hour socialising and you became friends more or less … In those days people didn’t travel very much or get out and the local vet calling in was how they got al
l the news.
The vet also doubled as the doctor, and was quite likely to be called upon to treat skin diseases of children with gentian violet, set broken limbs or pull teeth. Many a country woman quietly ordered some udder cream for her chapped hands. A Gypsy client of Nigel Carter’s wanted some skin cream for an irritation on his arm. To get around any embarrassment or impropriety, Carter gave him some ointment ‘for your dog’.
Doctors had their uses though; the X-ray machine in the local hospital was handy to check for a fracture of Rover’s leg.
On his travels around Dumfries with Fleming in an unreliable car (vet’s cars were always unreliable), Alf opened the farm gate (the student’s job, always) to a caseload that was headed by cows, followed by horses, with the pig, goat and sheep as distant finishers. The relatively small number of sheep cases was a reflection of the fact that Dumfries was cattle country but also the smallness of the value of the sheep; calling out the vet and paying for medicine was likely to be more than the animal was worth.
This was a primitive landscape of small farms, carrying 15 or so cows, Ayrshires, Galloways or Shorthorns. The Ayrshire (or Dunlop) is a dual-purpose breed, producing both milk and beef, as is the Shorthorn, the subject of the first pedigree herd book in the world, Coates’s Herd Book of 1822. The Galloway, a beast for beef, is one of the oldest breeds of cattle in Britain. Alf wanted to see cows in Dumfries and he saw them. Herds of them on a single day:
Monday 22 March 1937
1. Cow calved last Wed. Retained cleansings. Taking food all right. Uterus contracted thus allowing only two fingers to work with. Cleansings removed & 2 boric acid & methyl violet pessaries inserted. Keep on bran mashes with little food. Little cake allowed. Rug up. Let out a while in first spell of good weather.
2. Cow cleansed by Mr F. Last week – not doing so well. Off her food. Syphoned off fluid then irrigated with pump. Usual pessaries. Also foal with rheumatism.
3. Cleansed cow – as usual. Castrated two calves – bloodless. To return if testicles not shrivelled after 6–8 weeks. Cord merely crushed. Gave farmer stomach powder for cow – Ammon Carb, Nux Vom, ginger.
4. Cow off feed, shivering, fever, quick, shallow stirterous [sic: stertorous] rasping.
Diagnosis – pneumonia, due to standing in stall opposite door in badly ventilated bire. Mustard on chest walls, covered by newspapers, then rugs. Injection of hexamine (unable to do so intravenously owing to struggling). Cow then drenched with 8 pints Aeth. Lit., Ammon Aect. in milk. Hexamine was heated first.
Struggling cows were a perennial problem in the lot of the country vet in the Thirties, before the ‘crush’, a metal cage, was invented to immobilize cattle for treatment. Theoretically a cow could be ‘cast’ (put on its back or side) with ropes, one method being that described in Black’s Veterinary Dictionary, 1928:
For casting cattle a common method is to make a running noose in one end of a long rope (30 feet at least), and pass this round the bases of the horns or round the neck in polled cattle (for the latter the noose should be fixed instead of running to avoid choking). A half-hitch is next made round the neck, a second round the chest immediately behind the elbows, and a third round the abdomen in front of the udder or scrotum.
When the rope was pulled on, the cow would sink to the ground, at which point one person would secure the cow by kneeling on its neck and another would tie the cow’s feet to a fence or wagon.
Casting a cow was deuced tricky to do, however, because Daisy first had to be persuaded to stand still. Some tame cows might be tied standing up with a halter, but as Alf discovered with Tom Fleming, ‘tame’ is a relative state in bovines. On one unforgettable day, his arms lathered with soap, Alf attempted to ‘cleanse a cow’ and cautiously tugged at the mass of wine-dark afterbirth hanging from the rear end of the handily tethered Galloway. At this assault upon her person the Galloway trumpeted her indignation and determined upon escape through a window in the shed. Alas the window was tiny, the cow was big, and as she burst through the opening she took the end off the shed. Amidst the collapsed timbers Alf Wight, Tom Fleming and the farmer watched the cow, part of the shed stuck round her neck, hoofing it for the horizon. ‘Let the bugger go!’ exclaimed the farmer.
The tendency of the temperamental Galloway to charge anything on two legs was one reason why farmers had bred the beastie to be hornless. Farmers are no fools: better a charging 400 kg Galloway without horns than a charging 400 kg Galloway with them. Vets are no fools either; some, when required to inject Galloways with calcium boro-gluconate against milk fever stabbed the needle into the hide, then ran to the car, in which the engine had been left running.
Still, temper or not, the Galloway was (and is) a good breed for Scottish farms with rough or hill pasture because of its preternatural ability to convert poor grazing into good beef, and all this without being fed expensive cattle cake in the long cold winter months.
The vet’s standard wear on farm work was a brown smock, but for calving and cleansing, stripping off to the waist was usual. In winter in a shed high on the hills, at least the work kept the chill off. ‘I was the only one who was warm,’ Nigel Carter remembered of a night when it was cold enough to freeze his veterinary instruments to the tray, ‘because the work was warm – and it was warm inside the cow too.’ Since few farms had electricity, the farmer or farm worker – or student vet – had to hold a tilly lamp. He would shiver, and so shake the light, making it difficult to see properly.
Alf came to love cows, and when he moved to Thirsk he would become the ‘cow doctor’ to Donald Sinclair’s ‘horsey man’. It is just as well Alf loved cows because there was plenty more to do with them in Dumfries. There were cows whose feet needed to be pared, bullocks to be dishorned (‘Used dishorning shears. Great haemorrhage. Dressed with boric acid afterwards. Sufficient chloroform was given to induce dullness’) and cows to be post-mortemed.
J. A. Wight Casebook 1937:
Post-mortem on Ayrshire cow.
There were innumerable small, hard caseous nodules in the lungs & in the bronchial & mediastinal glands. There were similar lesions, though fewer in number, in the liver & kidneys. The udder was also slightly affected.
Diagnosis: Miliary tuberculosis
Another post-mortemed cow, this one with ‘oedematous swellings’, was found to have eaten wire, which had worked its way from the stomach into the thoracic cavity. Wire was used to tie hay and straw bales, and broken bits of wire bindings were consumed by cows with a fatal regularity.
As Alf would observe in The Lord God Made Them All, ‘A lot of time was spent pouring things down cows’ throats’ in the Thirties. Universal Cattle Medicine (‘Never Fails to Give Relief’) was a favourite drench for bovines, at least among farmers, because the camphor-ammonia produced a jolt when sniffed, and ‘made farmers blink and shake their heads and say, “By gaw, that’s powerful stuff,” with deep respect.’
Drenching cows was always easier said than done. Over in Snowdonia, however, farmer Thomas Firbank saw two neighbours give a veritable masterclass in the art of pouring liquid down a cow’s throat:
The youth had his arm over the cow’s neck, grasping a horn, and his other hand was twisting up the cow’s head by a firm grip on the nose, a finger in each nostril. His father dextrously inserted the tip of a hollow horn in the animal’s mouth, and poured down a mixture which smelled of aniseed. The cow gurgled, and when released coughed a little, with the impersonal passivity which raises a cow so far above the frailties of human passion.
Actually, quite a lot of time on farms in the Thirties was spent squirting things (notably antiseptic Acriflavine) into every available orifice of cows and other beasts. So Alfie saw in Dumfries: pails of hot salt water pumped into stomach tubes to treat horse colic; a cow’s vagina douched with 10 grams of iodine crystals in a pint of water with ‘pot. iod.’; a mare’s urinary passage washed out by Higginson’s syringe a cow with an infected uterus pumped with five gallons of water containing ½ lb of commo
n salt; and a light draught gelding with ‘weed’ (lymphangitis) treated with 2 gallons of water with 2 lbs of sodium chloride.
The cure for milk fever, though, was neither drench nor douche. It was an injection with a hypodermic needle, as Alf dutifully recorded in his casebook.
Cow, 9 years old. Calved Saturday. Staring eyes, costive, staggering on rising. Diagnosis: Milk fever. Treatment: Injection of 3oz of calcium borogluconate. Instructions to give no food today & light feeding afterwards. To give 2 or 3 lbs of treacle to relieve constipation. Stomach powder also given (Glucose & sod. Bicarb).
Beating milk fever, a disease of lactating cows, was one of veterinary medicine’s great pre-War triumphs. A Danish vet, Jurgens Schmidt, had discovered by trial and error that pumping potassium iodide into an affected cow’s teats worked a sort of cure, before another Danish vet found that pumping in air was equally effective. At Edinburgh University, Dryerre and Greig divined that milk fever was caused by loss of calcium – pressure from pumping was effective because it halted the flow of milk and that replacing calcium loss by an injection of calcium borogluconate was the actual practical answer.
Of course, inflation of the udder would still do the trick of curing milk fever, but a hypodermic syringe had a considerably more professional image than a bicycle pump.
Since an injection of calcium boroglucanate seemed a wonder cure, it was used by Tom Fleming in hope and desperation on all sorts of improbable patients, such as calves with pneumonia.
Some of Tom Fleming’s methods of diagnosis were admirably straightforward, as Alf recorded on a visit to a sick horse:
History: Had grown lame in off hind leg. Since there was an abrasion on the pastern, the owner suspected tetanus. The horse therefore had been doing little work & yet receiving the normal oat ration.
Young James Herriot Page 15