by Hugh Lasgarn
I scooped up my cat and, with head down, made for the door. As I reached it the Reverend Deri was uttering his final ‘Aaa-men’; due to his communion with the Almighty, he had remained oblivious of the whole commotion.
The repercussions were milder than I had expected. My Auntie Min, who was a dressmaker and had two cats of her own, offered to repair the younger Miss Prowle’s hat for nothing, on condition that Boggy was confined to the shed on Sundays. Dad said it must never happen again, but I did detect a twinkle in his eye when he told me.
For two years Boggy and I were great pals, then one day he went missing.
A feeling of uneasiness came over me when he wasn’t on the wall after school. I ran home and searched and called. I asked all about and missed my tea. When it grew dark I became very worried.
‘Perhaps he’s gone off on a jaunt,’ said Dad. ‘Tom cats often do.’
But I couldn’t believe it of Boggy.
I didn’t sleep much that night, my mind constantly working over all his haunts and habits. Then a thought struck me — perhaps he was in the Trevethin Wood. I knew he went there sometimes when I was in school because Tom Ellis, the woodman, had told me.
At first light I went down to Mr Ellis’ cottage. He was shaving in the back yard and stood, great hairy shaving brush in hand, as I approached.
‘Have you seen Boggy, Mr Ellis?’ I asked, urgently.
The old man blew the lather from his lips.
‘Boggy?’ he questioned.
‘My cat. He’s ginger and white — you’ve seen him before.’
‘Oh. That cat.’ He tickled up the lather with his brush and ducked his head to glance into a piece of cracked mirror glass upon the wall. In fact, there were all types of oddments on Mr Ellis’ wall. Everything from tools to tyres, horseshoes to hurricane lamps and metal pieces, with ratchets and coils of fine wire.
The woodman shook his head and reached for his cut-throat razor, opening it expertly with one hand and holding it up so that its blade flashed coldly in the early morning sun.
‘Haven’t seen him for a long time,’ he said.
‘Do you think he might be in the wood?’
‘Might be,’ he replied, turning away, and with a deft sweep of his hand started to strip the lather from his face with the razor.
I still had time before school to make a quick search, so out across Hubbard’s Patch I sped and on to the Boggy Pipe.
I was half way across when I saw him. Not walking towards me as he did when we first met, but lying motionless at the foot of the far pillar.
When I got to him his eyes were open and he weakly parted his lips, but made no sound, neither did he move. Then I noticed the piece of wood just behind him; it had been cut from a tree and pointed with a knife. Running from it was a short cord joined to a thin piece of wire similar to the coils seen hanging on Mr Ellis’ wall. The wire disappeared into Boggy’s coat and when I picked him up, the stick and cord came as well.
He was so limp and lifeless, he just hung in my arms, and as the tears welled up I held him tightly to my chest. Boggy was breathing, but only very gently, and cradling him in front of me I carried him back along the pipe.
When I got to Mr Ellis’ cottage he was at his gate, as if he was expecting me.
‘I’ve found him, but he’s hurt,’ I sobbed. ‘Look at him.’
Mr Ellis took Boggy from me, carried him into his tiny kitchen and, pushing aside the cups and plates, laid him on the table. Then he went to a drawer and came back with a pair of pliers. Parting Boggy’s ginger fur, he snipped through the wire.
‘What is it, Mr Ellis?’ I asked, as he unwound the thing from the limp form and threw it in a corner.
‘For rabbits,’ he said, ‘not cats. But he got caught in it.’
I didn’t understand the implication as I do now as a country vet. For to live in the countryside is to accept country ways and to understand that the balance of nature is maintained, often in cruel mode. The childlike screams of the rabbit, the lethal dive of the hawk, the fluttering panic in the hen coop when the fox appears. But when your cat drags itself home with a wire snare cutting into its skin and its hind limbs paralysed, it becomes unacceptable.
A snare is a braided wire running noose. The noose is spread in a rabbit track, usually in a gap in hedge or undergrowth, and pegged securely and unobtrusively alongside the natural run. There is no distinction between its victims. Silently, it awaits rabbit, fox or cat on the scent.
Designed to garrotte — that is the easy way out — the wretched animal can also be trapped around the belly, as was Boggy. Or by the hind limbs or just one leg, and the agony is unimaginable. It has been known for a fox to bite off a portion of its own limb in an attempt to escape, leaving but a vestige of a trophy for the hunter.
I was fortunate that I didn’t fully comprehend the significance at that time.
‘Will he get better, Mr Ellis?’ I asked.
The old man’s newly shaven, craggy face softened and he looked down at the little cat; with his large rough hands he gently stroked the ginger coat and shook his head.
I couldn’t believe it — I wouldn’t believe it.
‘’Is back is broke,’ he said. ‘’E’ll never walk again.’
I tried to be brave. I tried hard for a good minute. Then I couldn’t hold it and sobbed uncontrollably.
Eventually, I calmed down and Mr Ellis put his hand on my shoulder.
‘You go home,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to Boggy.’
‘What are you going to do, Mr Ellis?’ I asked, through my tears.
‘Take his pain away,’ said the old man. ‘It’s the best thing.’
He saw me to his gate and, as I closed it, I turned towards him. There was one question I had to ask:
‘Was it your wire, Mr Ellis?’
‘Go home, son,’ said the old man gently, without answering my question. ‘I’ll come and see your father tonight.’
He did come and see Father, and three weeks later he turned up again with a little grey kitten which he gave to me and which I called Pip. Since those days I’ve had a lot of cats: there was Smoky, Max, Crispin and Tarquin, to name but a few. But they never did and never will mean the same to me as Boggy. I think it’s mainly because through him I learned to respect animals, know what company they can be and understand now-a-days how my clients feel when their cat has to be put down.
And it’s also because of Boggy that I’ve hated snares ever since.
* * *
If there was any other part of Abergranog village that contributed to my feelings for animals it was the Park.
The Park had been a small estate, left to the mining community by a local benefactor. A green oasis set amid the drab stonework of the village, it was surrounded for the most part by a high wall and was about four acres in all. A red ash path had been laid through the centre, circling a large clock on an iron stand that was a memorial to a local doctor and told a different time on each of its four sides. The entrances, of which there were two, were guarded by large iron gates, one at the Factory Lane end and the other leading onto Bowen’s Pitch. Just off the path at the Factory Lane was the Shelter, a small openfronted building with lavatories at either side.
The big house had long been demolished, but the lawns and rose gardens remained intact, as did the African Hut. This mysterious structure was actually the summer house belonging to the old residence and took its nickname from the fact that it was a black wooden construction with a conical straw roof, situated beneath a large willow at the end of the garden. Adding to the tribal atmosphere was the fact that the old men of the village spent most of the daytime inside, festooned in acrid smoke from the shag and twist of the day.
The fug was fresh air to their shrunken, pneumoconiotic lungs and stimulated wheezing laughter, crawing, spitting and much stamping of sticks.
The smoke was often so intense that it could be seen easing its way through the straw, as if the place was on fire, for the only ventilation —
and light for that matter — came through a small doorway at the front.
It was all in the care of Parky, Ernie Brewer, a mousy little man who manicured the shrubs and roses and wrestled with the great clattering mower that swathed the lawns in shaded lines. Ernie’s new-mown grass was as nectar. In those days the smell of Park grass and 4711 Eau-de-Cologne, which my mother used, were my favourite aromas.
Park sounds, too, I remember. Creaking swings, flushing lavatories, the old mower and kids shouting. But the one more abiding memory of mystery, intrigue, sound, smell and even colour, was that of the Co-op Slaughterhouse which was next to the children’s playground.
If you swung high enough, you got regular fleeting glimpses through the gaps in the shutters. Always the floor was wet; sometimes red wet, sometimes brown, sometimes green. Wellington boots you could see and the bottom of red rubber aprons. Once I saw a little calf lying on its side, very still.
But only once.
Sweeping, sweeping, the sound of someone constantly sweeping; whoever worked the bass broom in the Co-op Slaughterhouse worked hard. Whistling and singing I remember, bleating and lowing, the clang of metal chains and sharp cracks, like fireworks exploding.
In summer it smelt terrible: rich, sickly sweet and throat retching; but still we watched, swatting the big blue flies that sunned themselves on the brick wall. In the narrow gully by the side of the roundabout they kept the offal: great, glistening cow stomachs, mounds of partly digested fodder and animal guts in a thousand convolutions.
From the road between the buildings, when the wooden sliding door was open, you could see them killing sheep.
The word would spread about the Park and we kids would crowd, with morbid fascination, compelled to watch, hypnotised by the spectacle.
Two men with caps on worked side by side, one of them Parky’s brother. Periodically they disappeared into the gloom of the building, to return, carrying a struggling woolly bundle which they dumped in a trough and plunged at with a knife.
The legs would thrash wildly as the victim’s life gurgled away, and in no time at all, with an iron hook between its jaws, it was a lump of meat suspended on a rail, alongside its unfortunate fellows.
* * *
I often wonder how much the experiences of my youthful days in Abergranog guided me into my present way of life.
Was it Old Thundertits and that day at Little Pant, and the unforgettable feeling of newborn life in her offspring’s foot? Was it the joy and sadness of having a pet like Boggy? Or was it pity for those poor dead sheep hanging on the rail and that little calf lying on its side, ever so still?
Perhaps it was a mix of all of this, and even the smell of Ernie Brewer’s new mown grass, that made me leave Abergranog to settle eventually in Herefordshire as a country vet.
Two
As Miss Webb might have put it:
‘If a crow was to fly, say, over Trevethin Wood, around Abergavenny and up through Pendulas to Ledingford, much quicker it would be than going via Glasgow, wouldn’t it?’
And, of course it would have been, but Glasgow, and in particular the University, was my way of going to Ledingford. In retrospect, it was a very formative way and my valley mind, like the narrow mountain roads, was broadened into motorway proportions.
In due course I passed for grammar school, played Rugby, sang in the choir, acted in the school play and worked hard at physics and chemistry. But it was biology that I enjoyed most. No need for calculators or computers, for thought was relatively uncluttered. Those were the days of dogfish, frog and rabbit; of basic dissection and labelled diagrams, in a simple quest to find out how things worked. This simplicity was invaluable in moulding my future feelings for animals, helping to avoid the danger that modern methods and technology can spread of regarding living things as insensitive units of production or exploitation.
National Service was a legacy of the War, and unless one was able to secure one of the few places allocated to school leavers, it was the army first.
I was very fortunate in being granted a place at Glasgow.
There were seven university colleges teaching veterinary science at the time. London and Edinburgh were the oldest and most popular, then followed Glasgow and Liverpool, the two newest being Bristol and Cambridge. There was also a college in Dublin that I once visited on a Rugby tour. We spent most of the trip at the Guinness Brewery and at the time I thought how grand it would have been to study there.
But it was Glasgow that would have me and Glasgow I accepted. I didn’t know what I was going into — and they certainly didn’t know what they were getting. But it worked out all right for both of us in the end.
When I arrived at Central Station on that foggy October night, it was like entering a vast oil drum — dark, smelly and smoky.
Abergranog was sometimes dark and smelly, and often the wicked Welsh mist came down, embalming the valley in its cold, invisible breath. Yet, when it parted, hedgerows and trees would ghost silently into view. But the Glasgow fog was green, evil and penetrating and when it parted — there was just more fog.
Suddenly I missed the Trevethin Wood and Little Pant, the Park and even the Avon Llwyd. As the taxi rattled over the cobbled streets and bodged across the tram lines I spied Glaswegian bodies shuffling through the gloom, I felt rather lonely and wondered how that environment could ever mould me into a country vet.
But over the next five years I was to discover a Celtic warmth and companionship in that city and to come to understand how Sir Harry Lauder could sing with such feeling ‘I belong tae Glasgae’.
I found my digs and the following day saw the University at Gilmorehill. As I walked through Kelvingrove Park, the frostchilled mist gradually cleared and the towers and pinnacles of the great building took form. As I drew closer, the grand symmetry of its design became apparent, a monument to five hundred years of industry and learning.
The awe-inspiring sight lifted my depression and I knew that I had come to the right place.
Five years was and still is a long time to study for a career and be supported to achieve it. Financial assistance was not as generous as it is today and many parents, my own included, made considerable sacrifices to keep their offspring at university. Student life was poor but happy.
But the long course did have one peculiar advantage, in that the student not only learned to be a veterinary surgeon, but gradually grew into one.
In the very beginning, however, the incentive to join the profession and the urge to ease animal pain and suffering could, despite even the deepest enthusiasm, be severely shaken by the anatomy classes. The first time I entered the Dissection Hall I was silently shocked.
I knew that, in order to discover how animals were built, they were best studied by taking them apart, piece by piece. After all, I’d done it with dogfish, frog and rabbit. But I wasn’t prepared for the sight of large animal cadavers arranged in peculiar poses like plasticine models, grey, stodgy and in various stages of undress.
There were horses, skinned and lying on their backs, feet pointed rigidly to the ceiling; cows of indeterminable breed stripped of muscle so that the light shone through gaunt frames; from assorted tables sheep and pig heads gazed forlornly into space and, at the far end of the Hall, was positioned a large preserving tank — when I cautiously peered over the rim I discovered it to be full of failed greyhounds. Above, ran great gantries with pulley chains to assist the manipulation of the bodies, while fixed upon the walls were gaily coloured gazetteers of nerve pathways, bloodvessel patterns and bone structures. The whole room, though brightly lit, had a stifling atmosphere tainted with the pungent aroma of formalin that made the eyes smart, the stomach uneasy and the palms moist.
Becoming a vet was taking a bit of getting used to, but in due course I became acclimatised and involved in tracing the intricate pathways of arteries and veins, following nerve supplies and locating the attachments of ligaments and muscles; I came to regard specimens, like the horse, as a system of pulleys that ate
hay, rather than a dead body.
There was much to learn about other species as well as the horse. Cow, pig, sheep, dog, cat and even fowl were studied. This comparative anatomy made me envy the human medical students who, with some slight variations, always had their specimens with them. I felt this made it much easier to appreciate kidney pain, indigestion or skin rashes in their patients than to understand how a cow feels when its five stomachs are aching, which joint hurts in a lame horse or what an itch in fur, wool or feathers feels like. I often wondered if cows got headaches and whether it would be possible to prove it.
* * *
So far I had seen no sick or ailing animals. In fact, the pre-clinical years were entirely devoted to the study of normality, for without that, the abnormal could in no way be truly appreciated. But if I had learnt anything up until then, it was about the intricate balance and harmony that exists in every living being, even in such humble creatures as the barnyard fowl.
And it was in the barnyards of the Vale of Usk that I spent my summer vacations during those first years. It was most essential to obtain as much background and experience in agriculture as possible, and working on the farms was the best way to get it.
One of my most memorable experiences actually occurred in a barnyard, on the very first day I started work at Brynheulog Farm.
Brynheulog, which when translated means ‘the hill where the sun shines’, was aptly named. It consisted of a compact group of whitewashed stone buildings, situated upon a rising fold of ground at the foot of the roundshouldered Blorenge Mountain that overlooked Abergavenny.
It was a family farm, running a small mixed dairy herd, pigs, sheep, ducks and chickens, and growing enough corn and roots to feed the stock. There was an orchard with both sweet and sour fruit, a pond with coots and a pine wood full of soft cooing wood-pigeons. The farmhouse was lowbeamed and cosy, the dairy flagstoned and cool, and the fascinating lavatory was a small hut at the bottom of the garden. Fascinating to me because it had two seats — suggesting a joint venture I found difficult to imagine.