by Ivor Smith
The job was offered to Pat, a bright and vivacious young lady who was leaving Chosen Hill School with a large handful of very good O-level results. She was certainly well qualified to be our nurse/receptionist. The practice grew rapidly and it was satisfying to be able to offer jobs to others. Pat remained with the practice for many years before she married and moved to Cornwall. By then, as she frequently reminded me, her job description should really have been head nurse/receptionist/cleaner/secretary/practice manager/radiographer.
Actually, when Pat first started, we didn’t do any radiography; we could not afford the expensive X-ray machine. Buying the machine was a huge financial investment for a small business still trying to get off the ground. It is unimaginable now to think that it cost just a little short of half of what we paid for the whole premises. It was financed via the manager of Cheltenham’s Montpellier branch of the Midland Bank, Mr White. He did not look like Captain Mainwaring, but our business relationship I suspect was similar to that of our Dad’s Army hero.
‘Ivor, you can borrow as much as you like’, he said, with our house deeds safely tucked away in his strongroom, ‘but don’t find yourself in a position where you end up working every day for the Midland Bank.’ I had tremendous respect for this man. It was a bit like talking to a favourite uncle whom I think had a genuine interest and regard for my practice, and right from the start his advice was sound. How that traditional customer/manager relationship would change in such a short time. Two decades later our bank manager was a spotty youth and we questionned whose side he was even on.
I ordered a state-of-the-art X-ray machine, the GEC MX-2. The descriptive brochures claimed that it was a portable unit that could be dismantled quickly and transported in your car for use on the farm or in a stable. In reality the farthest our machine ever travelled was the surgery drive to X-ray the legs of lame horses. By the time the machine had been disassembled in the surgery, reassembled on the surgery drive, used for ten minutes then disassembled, moved back into the surgery and then reassembled in time to take a quick radiograph of the most recently injured cat, you certainly did not need to visit the gym that day. It is a superb piece of medical equipment, but I still question its portability. It was distributed by an entrepreneurial gentleman named Edward Elston, whom I believe was based in Sussex and was the UK’s sole distributor. Business was booming for him at the time and he travelled around the country delivering and setting up these machines from John O’Groats to Lands End. If the installation and staff instruction ran into a second day, Mr Elston overcame the issue of overnight accommodation by delivering the equipment in his large powerful car and towing a caravan, which on this occasion was easily accommodated on our practice drive. At the end of surgery that day, and following the initial staff tuition in radiography, we naturally invited him to join us for supper.
It was a jovial evening and the three-course cordon bleu supper Angela had prepared was accompanied by bottles of Chablis and Châteauneuf du Pape. While Angela served coffee and I poured the brandies, I happened to mention that it was unfortunate that Mr Elston’s wife, at home in Sussex, was unable to be with us tonight.
‘Oh, she’s all right out there.’
‘Out where?’
‘Out in our caravan.’
‘Which caravan?’
‘The one on your drive’, he replied quite casually. ‘She enjoys a bit of knitting and likes reading her magazines.’
‘Well, let’s take her a cup of coffee’, I offered, in utter disbelief.
‘Oh no, no need to bother with that, she’ll have her head down by now.’
An hour later her merry husband wobbled down the drive to rejoin her.
By the end of surgery the next morning the Elstons were back on the road and travelling on to the next practice, the next sale and, presumably, another sole supper. I never did have the opportunity to meet Mrs Elston. Her husband clearly ran a very successful business machine, and the machine he sold was even more successful. They were installed from one end of the country to the other. Thirty-five years later our original MX-2 was still in regular use, and still producing superb radiographs.
Who would have thought that so many intelligent pets could possibly eat those pins, needles, golf balls, undigested chop bones and all manner of unmentionable objects that we described to incredulous owners? Their X-rays were often spectacular and thanks are overdue to Mrs Elston for her part in delivering that machine. Her knitting, patience and tolerance have undoubtedly saved the lives of hundreds of animals.
I had never had any formal training on how to run a business and the technique I mainly used was to make it up as I went along. It was a fast learning curve but there were some early signs that I could indeed make a living running my own practice. I knew nothing at all about book-keeping but it wasn’t long before I realised that this was an essential aspect of keeping things on an even keel. How fortunate I was to be able to call upon one of my old Crypt classmates, John Eggleton.
At the time I put up the plate John was employed by the accountants Deloittes from their Spa Road offices in Gloucester. We had lost track of each other since we had left school. John had left a couple of years before me to join his well-known family firm of accountants, and then I had left Gloucester to go to Liverpool. It was great to get back together and there was much to talk about. He came for an early supper one evening each week, and eventually we left Angela to look after the dishes while we moved to the surgery and the books. On most of those occasions we were still discussing bank statements, sales ledgers and all the paraphernalia of the records you were expected to keep for the benefit of the Inland Revenue, at midnight. It was still a few years before the VAT man arrived on the scene and thereafter the record keeping seemed to treble.
With a little help from my friends I must have been doing the right thing most of the time. The practice was growing quickly and within two to three years we needed a vet assistant. This made an unbelievably pleasant difference to our lives. Not working all the hours of the day, we were soon on the riverbanks fishing once again and enjoying times we had not experienced since we were teenagers.
John had become engaged to Jacqui and over the years we enjoyed many pleasant meals together in restaurants in Cheltenham and Gloucester. The Bistro Bacchus in Spa Road was one of our favourites at that time. In some ways it was ahead of its time and its popularity meant that we invariably bumped into other long-lost friends there. John had enjoyed a successful rugby career playing scrum-half for Longlevens, but he was also an excellent cricketer.
On one occasion we arranged to spend a Saturday evening at a dinner/dance at the Carlton Hotel in Cheltenham. These live band dances were very popular at that time and the disco had not yet arrived. You would not be allowed in without a jacket and tie but nevertheless we quite enjoyed wearing our dark suits. For me it made a pleasant change from my shirt and working jeans. We relaxed at the end of the meal and before the band struck up we lit our cigarettes. I find it difficult to believe now that we enjoyed a smoke, but at the time it was harder to find someone who did not. In sophisticated fashion I lifted the flickering candlestick and held it inches from John’s face – he inhaled and the cigarette glowed. Then I tilted the candle towards me and in true James Bond fashion lit up. I have never seen melted candle wax drip on to the lap of 007. As it cooled on my smart trousers it turned white, and when I stood up Angela grimaced and as quietly as possible ordered me to ‘Sit down!’ If I had ventured on to the dance floor I would surely have been asked by the management staff to leave the premises immediately. Somehow I had to remove the adhering hard layer of glistening white wax. We came up with a cunning plan. I moved inconspicuously to the Gent’s with my hands cupped in front of me, masking the affected area. John followed closely behind with a table knife. In the privacy of the toilet we got down to business. John volunteered to do the scraping so I sat on a chair and he took up a kneeling position with his back to the door and began scraping. Within minutes he was making
good progress and I was beginning to feel more respectable and less fearful of someone misinterpreting the situation. But things were about to get a lot worse. The main door of the toilets flew open and none other than the manager entered. ‘This is where we get ejected’, I thought, with John’s head closer to my lap than the damned candlestick ever was. His words were more than a little surprising.
‘Oh, I am terribly sorry to have interrupted you gentlemen’, he almost whispered and promptly disappeared back out the door. In disbelief, I looked down at John and John looked up at me. He took seconds to complete the job and we shot back out to the restaurant. We rejoined the ladies and were relieved to find security was not waiting for us.
There were some wonderful summers through the 1970s and some freaky weather as well. We were really too tied to the practice to go away on holiday, but it was not a terrible hardship to spend time in our huge garden. The pleasure came as much from designing, planting and generally working in the garden as sitting in it, and it was always a labour of love.
I recall watching the television news in May 1975; with dramatic warnings of hazardous driving conditions on some of the motorways due to heavy snowfall at the beginning of the week. By the end of that week, with the temperature in the high 70s, that year’s heatwave had begun in most parts of the country.
The following year, 1976, was the year of the drought. The heat was astonishing that summer and it led to unexpected practical problems in the practice. The anaesthetic machine we used was very basic and, looking back, unbelievably primitive, even though when I had bought it a few years earlier it was considered to be state-of-the-art. The serious problem we faced was that the amount of vaporised halothane gas delivered to the patient increased rapidly with a rise in temperature, and none of us had experienced heat like this before. We now risked inadvertently administering an overdose of anaesthetic to our patients.
Fortunately, there was an easy solution. Well, easy I should say for the natural early risers, but a bit more difficult for the last-minute souls. We started operating before the sun rose, and for several weeks our operating sessions began before 6 o’clock, when the outside temperature was still around 80°F. It was too hot to sleep anyway. There were mornings when I was out and about on an urgent call at around 4 o’clock and many owners were already out walking their dog. Not surprisingly there weren’t many joggers around.
For Angela and me the ’70s had begun perilously, but had ended with us content and successful. From practically nothing the primitive practice had become a thriving veterinary centre in the rural area we loved, and we were providing veterinary care for a rapidly growing population. Our daughter, Sally, was one of them. She arrived in 1972 during the practice’s first year and it was our privilege to ask John Eggleton to be her godfather. There could not have been a better choice.
The most memorable social occasion of the decade had to be the Royal celebrations of 1977. Despite a grave economic crisis at the time, in keeping with the rest of the country our village was determined to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of the Queen’s accession in 1952 in style. Every British village would hold their own celebration and every inhabitant was involved.
Naturally there would be an old-fashioned farm tractor and trailer procession around the village of Churchdown with local costumed residents attempting to keep their balance on the back of the trailers. The decorative floats represented many different but related themes. Our float was ‘Humpty Dumpty and all the King’s Men’; it was great fun and all the participants were quite well behaved, compared to the last occasion I had ventured aboard.
That particular occasion had been about fifteen years ago and was part of Liverpool University’s rag week panto procession. The first year students of each faculty were expected to produce the winning item. Twenty-eight of my red-blooded veterinary mates and six Boudiccas had then defended our mobile ‘Lady Chatterley’s Gamekeeper’s Hut’ from hundreds of marauding Scousers. On our trek around the streets of Liverpool there had been several unfortunate events. We sent flowers and apologies to make amends for one of them. At the time we passed a ladies’ hairdressing salon, an attractive young Liverpudlian hairdresser ventured on to the pavement to watch the procession go by. We whisked her up on to our float and it was much later that we heard of the complaints of her customer, who had been left unattended under a hairdryer for a couple of hours.
There was no pillaging of our float in Churchdown, only the odd cheeky remark from bystanders to put up with. It turned out to be an overcast English summer’s day, but a happy one, cheered by the numerous Union Jack flags flying everywhere.
I am sure many will have no difficulty remembering their ride on the ‘elephant’ in the company of ‘zoo keeper’ Uncle Adam Pullen. Adam and his brother Ben were accustomed to caring for hundreds of cattle at nearby Home Farm, however looking after one mechanical elephant for a few hours was quite a challenge. Angela had already met this wonderful beast, who was the star of the show at a children’s party, just a couple of weeks before. When she asked if he was free on this special day the generous owners were more than delighted to deliver him to us from Cheltenham – not in a horse-box, but on a Bullinghams the Builders truck. With just a drop of oil and a couple of pints of petrol, his lawn mower power house worked well all day. Adam tired long before the elephant or the children did, having walked up and down a field a few hundred times. I was so pleased this animal required no medical attention. I might have ended up kicking a mower that wouldn’t work.
Evening celebrations took place in a myriad of venues. We gathered post-procession in the grounds of Teviotdale, at that time the home of David and Jane Foyle. An outbuilding had been transformed into a traditional village alehouse. They had made such an impressive success of this that for many years afterwards the village children could not understand where that other pub in the village was.
The 1970s had been an immensely challenging but enjoyable decade for us. But the river of life does not always run smoothly; now and again in the next decade the river would become quite turbulent.
CHAPTER SIX
LIFE BEGINS AT FORTY
I do not know for sure who conjured up the cliché ‘life begins at forty’, but I recall thinking a great deal about it each time my birthday came round while in my thirties. I remember the tune being whistled or hummed by my parents whilst as a youngster, and I know that it was a well-known song recorded in 1937 by Sophie Tucker. I have no idea why I should remember this amazingly insignificant fact as I am hopeless at Trivial Pursuit. One fact I do remember well is my date of birth, and my staff rarely forgot it either. They were so keen to celebrate in fact, that they even jumped the gun and celebrated my fortieth a year early.
It was a little embarrassing at the time, but their generosity and wit was appreciated. The appropriately rude birthday card, the candles, cake and bottle of Phyllosan tablets (the essential pills to fortify the over forties), appeared, and even a small bottle of champagne. There was an awkward moment’s silence when I tactfully suggested they check my year of birth. On doing so, they apologised for their error, sang ‘Happy Birthday’, and drank the champers anyway.
Three hundred and sixty-five days later they did it all again, this time presenting me with a bigger bottle of Phyllosan. Then they drank a bigger bottle of champers.
The 1970s passed quickly. Veterinary assistants came and went, gained experience with us and then moved on. The day-to-day running of veterinary practice life revolved around Anne, Rosemary and Debbie. Individually it would have been hard to select three more different people but we bonded well and formed the nucleus of a happy and successful team. In a small business and in the pre-specific job description days, there was frequently overlap, but no one complained.
Anne was the practice secretary. She and her husband hailed from the Forest of Dean, although they had been part of the vibrant Churchdown community for many years. They had both been educated at Lydney Grammar School, the scene of many rugby battles
in which I had taken part. That was at a time when their school seemed capable of producing far more than its fair share of schoolboy international players. Trevor Wintle, Cledwyn and John Davies, and Bev Dovey are names that come quickly to mind. I was fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to play against them, when we usually lost, and with them, as Gloucestershire schoolboys, when we usually won.
Where Anne was chatty and pleasantly flamboyant, Rosemary was particularly quiet and a little reserved, but a confident and professional nurse. Her slim stature was deceptive and she was a tough nut who never seemed to tire. She went home when the day’s work had been completed to her satisfaction and everything had been prepared for an early start the next morning. Rosemary had joined the practice in response to our advertisement in the Veterinary Record for a qualified RANA, one of our ‘girls in green’ whom we trusted and respected. She moved from London to take up the position.
Interviews often seem to be predictable, but on this occasion I was taken a little by surprise. Those were the days when the practice was expected to provide accommodation for both veterinary and nursing staff, and at the time it was unusual to be asked if there were any objections to the nurse’s partner sharing the accommodation. This now sounds naïvely prudish, but attitudes and expectations have changed significantly in thirty years. I could see no reason why I should object. Actually there was a very good reason: can you believe this – her boyfriend played in the front row for Wasps! It might have been worse of course, he could have been a Bath player. Now if ever there was chalk and cheese. He was a lovely guy off the field, and no doubt the diminutive Rosemary felt secure when she disappeared into the arms of her London prop forward.