by Tim Pears
‘A lack of education is no excuse for idiocy,’ Lottie said.
‘But if you ask them they will show you how hard the potato has become, proof that the rheumatic poison has gone from their body to the vegetable. Hard as a stone.’
Lottie did not know what to say to that.
‘If you wish one day to be a practitioner yourself,’ Patrick told her, ‘and not to lose all your clients, you will need to learn a little humility, Lottie.’
A vet was required to be equally expert in foaling, calving, lambing, farrowing and whelping. Patrick Jago taught his assistant that the simplest way to tell a good from a bad large-animal obstetrician was that a bad one starts by pulling, a good one by pushing. For the secret of rectifying a miscued presentation was to encourage the foetus back into the womb, in whose relative spaciousness one might manipulate disordered limbs. That spring of 1917 he bought them both rubber overalls. Lottie alternately sweated and shivered with cold. Her arms were chapped from continual rinsing. Under his guidance she found herself lying on a wet and filthy cowshed floor, up to her armpits while exploring the position of a calf. Sometimes the cow’s labour pangs came when Lottie’s arm was trapped between the calf’s head and the cow’s pelvic bone, and the girl cried out in pain. She returned to Bampton with fingers stiff and cramped, arm bruised blue from wrist to armpit.
Lottie was fed by Patrick Jago’s mother’s cook. The housemaid washed her clothes. The vet himself lived across town and did not speak of his wife, whether out of discretion or shame Lottie did not know. She understood that Mrs Jago was an invalid, with some illness of the mind and perhaps the body too. She was looked after by a nursemaid, overseen by her husband’s sister, who acted as their housekeeper. Knowing this much, Lottie did not feel able to ask more. She did not know whether or not the Jagos had children and so one day while they were out in the buggy she emboldened herself to enquire.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It is something one assumed would happen.’ He relaxed his grip on the reins. ‘And although it has been clear for many years that it will not, I must admit I am still not reconciled. To the absence, I suppose. The loss of what should have been. Of what should be.’
The cob had slowed down and the vet had not urged him on. The horse’s hooves and the iron rims of the wheels on the road made little sound. Gazing ahead along the lane, it was easy to speak to the person beside you.
‘You might have heard of the theory of alternative worlds,’ Patrick said. ‘That this life we live is but one of infinite possible lives. If we had taken that road, not this. Had met this person, not that one.’
Lottie shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I could not believe in that theory. Of course we can imagine other lives, but they are not real. Only this one is real. This horse, pulling this buggy, along this lane, on this cool morning.’
‘Yes, of course, Lottie, you’re right.’
They rolled on in silence for a while. ‘And yet,’ the vet said, ‘we know how random the process of reproduction is. How many spermatozoa fulfil no purpose. I wonder whether somehow those souls I should have fathered exist somewhere. If only in a realm you might call potential.’
Lottie turned and looked at him. Grey hair clipped close beneath his hat. The dark moustache. His weathered skin. He was not yet old. ‘You would have made a good father,’ she told him. ‘I’m sorry. I mean, you would make a good father.’
Patrick smiled at her. His eyes crinkled. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘May I ask what makes you say that? Apart from generously offering consolation to a maudlin old fool?’
‘You are kind,’ she said. ‘And your children would surely be curious. And, as proof that you are a good man, horses trust you.’
The vet nodded his thanks. ‘Never take a horse’s trust for granted,’ he said. ‘One kick, and …’ He raised his left hand from the reins, lifted it into the air as if it held something which he tossed away like some lost redundant soul, or spermatozoa, into the air.
6
From 20 March the vet and his assistant were to spend two days a week on a round of farms and stables. On the first day they took the buggy, for they needed to carry a great weight of rope as well as instruments. The season had arrived for the gelding of horses.
Patrick Jago told his assistant that, in his opinion, in the years before the war horse breeding had been at its zenith – both in terms of the number of foals produced and in their quality. Thoroughbreds, hunters, hackneys, hacks and cobs, shire horses, Clydesdale and Suffolk Punches. The war, of course, had only concentrated demand. In addition, there were droves of wild ponies across the moors, the Highlands of Scotland, the Welsh hills and mountains, and the New Forest.
All the wild and semi-wild unbroken colts had to be rounded up, surplus males castrated and sold. Many farmers kept one or two mares from which to breed. Even in peacetime there was a demand for geldings to act as remounts for the army. If a horse didn’t look like maturing into a valuable hunter or an officer’s charger, so long as he was sound he could be sold as a troop horse.
*
They came to a farm the vet knew well. He had been visiting regularly all his life, at first as a boy with his father. Lottie noticed a mound of carrots in the stable yard. Patrick said these were for pregnant mares. Foals here were sometimes born with yellowy-orange skin.
A rag of colts jostled together in a pen. Patrick had requested that they be rounded up and starved for at least twelve hours, to lessen the risk of a ruptured stomach.
While the vet spoke to the farmer, Lottie lit the coals to heat up the iron, and sharpened the vet’s knives. He had explained the procedure, and warned her that it had to be performed swiftly. She understood what she had to do and hoped to remember it. He would have no time to instruct her on what he was doing. She would have to make sense of what she saw as he carried it out. There were six colts, of various size and conformation. ‘They’s risin one year old,’ the farmer said. ‘Except for that one there.’ He nodded towards a chestnut with a white diamond emblazoned upon his forehead. ‘He’s risin two, I reckon.’
The vet asked for four men to help him. He put on his surgical coat, and a dirty old cloth cap Lottie had not seen before. He wore it back to front, the peak over the back of his neck. Lottie asked him why he donned so filthy an article when about to perform surgery.
‘A lot of the colts will be infested with lice,’ he said. ‘It’s to stop them getting into my hair.’
‘You did not warn me of that danger,’ she told him.
‘Since you never remove your own cap I did not think it worth mentioning,’ he said.
‘I don’t see what is humorous about that,’ Lottie said.
Patrick stopped smiling. He furrowed his brow. ‘Just remember,’ he said, ‘that these colts have not been handled or haltered. They are liable to strike out using both their fore and their hind feet. Not to mention their teeth.’
The vet made a loop at the end of a length of hemp. He spliced a wooden peg into the rope so that the knot would not slip so tight around the horse’s neck as to throttle it. He walked up to the nearest colt, the two-year-old chestnut, and swung the lasso up into the air. Lottie watched it fall over the animal’s head as easily as if the colt had been waiting patiently for precisely such an occurrence. It was only when it felt the rope tauten upon its skin that it struggled.
Lottie wondered why the vet had chosen this horse first. Or perhaps it was simply the first colt he came to, and when you had done this a hundred times you did not bother to make such choices. She would not have chosen the two year old herself.
Three of the four men, including the farmer, took up the hemp rope. The fourth, a lad, opened the gate and they drove the colt into the open field beyond, the men running behind. When the lad had closed the gate he ran to catch up with the others and grabbed a section of rope himself. In the middle of the field the men hung on to the rope with all their weight, and held it low to the ground. The colt planted his feet and tried to pull himsel
f away.
While the animal raged, Lottie laid out the vet’s instruments upon a board. Patrick Jago prepared another, thin rope. It was some forty feet long.
The farmer called out, ‘What the hell is that made of?’
‘Cotton,’ Jago told him. ‘It’s softer than hemp, less likely to injure their limbs. Supposedly.’
‘I hope for you and your lad’s sake it’s strong enough.’
‘I’m assured it is,’ Jago said. ‘And I hope so too.’
The vet made a loop in the middle of the cotton rope. This loop he passed over the end of the rope held by the men, each man releasing his grip to allow the vet to slip his loop along, towards the horse. Lottie picked up a long-forked stick from where she’d laid it on the ground and took up the far end of the cotton rope, walking out to one side. Patrick walked out to the other. At a nod from him they walked up either side of the colt, Patrick on his right, Lottie on his left, sliding the loop up the hemp rope to his neck. He became aware of this further intrusion and, eyes wild with panic and anger, threw his head around. Lottie used the long stick to manipulate the loop over the colt’s head.
‘Watch those feet,’ Patrick called out when he feared the girl was getting too close to the horse.
When she had got the cotton rope around the colt’s neck, Lottie walked away backwards.
‘Is your young lad up to this?’ the farmer called out. ‘You want one a my men to help you?’
‘No, thank you,’ Patrick Jago said. ‘He’ll do.’
The vet had explained to Lottie the procedure for casting the colts, using the simplest method he knew of, known as ‘the side-lines’. They would work in tandem. Still, she scrutinised exactly what he did on his side of the horse and followed suit closely.
The vet walked up to the horse and threw his end of the cotton rope between the hind feet and walked around the back of the colt and picked it up. Lottie did likewise. The colt kicked and plunged though he was still held by the four men on the hemp rope and so constrained.
Once the animal’s protests subsided, Patrick slowly approached the colt’s front and passed the end of his rope between the neck-rope and the colt’s shoulder. Then Lottie did the same. The four men watched in silence, their grip on the hemp rope firm. Then, at Jago’s request, leaving the farmer and the lad on the hemp rope, one of the farm workers came and joined the vet, the other joining Lottie.
‘We’ll cast him on your side,’ Patrick Jago called out. ‘You two over there, pull sideways and backwards.’ He turned to the man behind him and said, ‘We pull forwards. Ready?’
Now the farmer and the lad let go of the hemp rope. As the other two pairs slowly pulled on the cotton rope, both of the colt’s hind feet were drawn inexorably up to his elbows. His eyes were wild and he looked as if he wanted to struggle but was too surprised by what they had sprung on him to do so. He slowly toppled over and lay on the ground on his left side.
Patrick Jago used shorter ropes to secure the hind legs together at the pasterns with a double hitch, then the forelegs likewise. Lottie wondered whether he would ever trust her or anyone else to tie these particular knots. Finally he fixed the back rope to the upper hind shank and passed it under the loins to the other side, to keep the legs in the right position and give himself more room to operate.
‘Keep his head well back,’ Jago told the farmer. ‘He’ll struggle less and be less liable to injure his spine or his lumbar muscles.’
The vet washed the penis of the colt with cold water and carbolic soap, and dried it with a rough towel. He poured into the sheath a little carbolic oil and smeared some of it over the bag or scrotum. With his left hand, he pressed the closest testicle tight into the scrotum and with one quick sweep of his knife made a bold opening. The gland thus exposed, he pulled up. One or two inches up the cord he attached the clam.
Lottie passed Patrick the hot iron. He looked at it and murmured approvingly, ‘Dead red-heat,’ and took it and quickly cut through the vascular or hinder portion. Then he carefully seared through the spermatic cord or string. The vet handed the iron back to Lottie. By gently opening and closing the clam he checked to see that the bleeding had stopped. When satisfied it had done so he released the clam, and then applied the same procedure to the second testicle. The colt lay trussed up, on his side. Lottie saw him trembling, eyes wild with pain and anger and fear. He lay utterly still. She could feel him quivering, discerned his potential energy, waiting to be unleashed. It was apparent to her. Perhaps not to everyone.
The vet asked the men to free the ropes from around the colt’s neck. He unhitched the shackles around the horse’s feet in the same order in which he had tied them but in reverse. When the last hitch was undone they all stepped away. For a moment the animal lay there, unfettered but motionless, as if he did not believe he was free, and this was a trick. If he tried to move, the human beings would laugh and truss him up again. Or as if he desired a moment of repose in which to contemplate his new, emasculated state. Perhaps trying to find some good in it before entering this next, denuded stage of his life. Then he appeared to come to a decision. With an awkward kind of shrugging, stumbling movement, the gelding staggered to his feet and in a moment had cantered away to a far corner of the field.
Patrick Jago undid a button of his coat. He reached in and withdrew his pocket watch, and studied it.
‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. Lottie had not noticed him checking when they began. He put the watch back in his waistcoat pocket and rebuttoned his surgical coat. ‘Let’s try and speed it up,’ he said, to no one in particular. Perhaps to all.
The farmer shook his head. ‘Your old man I seen cut the horses standing up,’ he said. ‘Applied the twitch to their lip and that give him no more than two or three minutes.’ He shook his head. ‘Madness. But that’s the kind a thing they could do in the old days.’
Lottie wondered if the farmer knew that Patrick Jago’s father had died from an equine contagion. She put the iron back in the coals and followed the men to the yard to start in on the next colt.
The castrations proceeded. The fifth horse bled after the operation, but one of the farm workers secured him and walked him about, while another dashed a few pails of cold water under the tail and the bleeding ceased. If it resumed, the vet told the farmer, or if another of the horses were to haemorrhage, they should plug the opening with tow, well saturated with a tincture of iron and water.
When they had finished, the farmer was in a fine mood. He invited the vet to lunch but Patrick Jago said they had to get on. The farmer told his lad to run to the house and ask his dear wife to bring beer and cake. While Lottie coiled the ropes and gathered the instruments and stowed them in the buggy, the farmer told Patrick that his father had once come to castrate a large old boar pig. ‘His tusks were six inches long, near as dammit,’ he claimed. The pig was tied by a rope, applied around its upper jaw, to an iron rail in the cowshed. But it struggled and the rope broke. ‘I never saw my pig man move so fast,’ the farmer said. ‘Nor your father. Nor myself, for that matter. We spent much a the day sitting up among the beams under the roof. The boar sat below us, champing his jaws, waiting for the first of us to fall off.’
The vet did not say anything but Lottie could not help herself. She came up to the men and asked the farmer what happened then.
‘My dear wife come looking for us eventually,’ he said. ‘She saw what was going on, fetched my gun and shot the pig.’
The farmer’s wife came out with a tray of provisions, which they ate and drank standing up. The fruit cake was thick and moist and buttery. The woman asked after the vet’s wife. He said she was as well as could be expected, and thanked the woman for her concern.
The farmer told his wife that he had related the story of when she had shot that boar. The woman looked at Lottie and rolled her eyes. ‘If I could have been sure this old goat would be the first to fall, I’d have left the pig to it,’ she said. ‘But I couldn’t risk poor Mister Jago being gored.’ She nodded
at the memory. ‘That pig was a mean old bastard.’ Then she turned to Patrick Jago and said, ‘What a pretty lad you have. Better keep him away from our maids until he grows whiskers and turns ugly.’
The vet reminded the farmer to keep an eye on the colts. ‘Check the swelling. It will drop down into the sheath, and should disappear inside a week. If the sheath is very big and pendulous you may stab or prick it with the point of a clean, a very clean, penknife, to allow the escape of the collected serum.’ He said that even when the operation had been performed with skill and dexterity, complications could arise. ‘Protrusion of the omentum, or net. Septicaemia or blood poisoning … ’
It seemed to Lottie that the vet was precisely enumerating these dangers less for the farmer’s benefit than for her own.
‘… an abscess in the scrotum. If any of these occur, you should send for me at once.’
They visited two more farms. They ate lunch at the first. By the end of the afternoon a score of colts of all manner of horse had been castrated. As they rode back on the buggy, the cob ambling along the rough lanes, Lottie realised that though her eyes were open they saw nothing. She could not summon the effort to hold up the weight of her head, and let it lean against Patrick’s shoulder. Then her eyes closed.
Back at the surgery, Lottie took the instruments inside and cleaned them while Patrick reversed the cart into its shed and stabled the cob. When he came inside, Lottie pointed out a note Edgar Riddell had left, saying that he had come down with a bilious attack and gone home.
‘We are short of certain medicines,’ she said. ‘I shall make them up.’ She had removed her cap and unpinned her hair, which though much shorter than it had once been still fell upon her shoulders.
‘My dear Lottie,’ Patrick said, ‘you are admirably punctilious. By some miracle there is no one waiting in the surgery with their cat or mutt. I shall help you. Two apothecaries together.’
First they replenished the stock of tonics for horses. Patrick prepared a mixture of nitrate of potash, powdered resin, powdered digitalis, sulphate of iron and oil of juniper, while Lottie wrote labels that stated: GIVE ONE DAILY FOR FOUR TO SIX DAYS. Then she made the mixture into a ball with soft soap, while the vet prepared the next.