My heart dropped — what on earth had he been taking? I thought it pretty safe that he wouldn’t have been injecting himself with insulin, but he had probably been overdosing on Toby’s ‘choc-drops’ — delicious chocolate treats for dogs. I had been bringing a weekly supply for Toby under the strict instructions that he only got a couple a day last thing at night. However, by the quantities he was getting through, either Toby was getting extra helpings or Mr Scrope was also enjoying them. I suspected the latter. Other than choc drops I could not think what he might have been having.
‘Mr Scrope, what medicine of Toby’s have you been taking?’
‘Oh, let me see now. I don’t know what it is called. One minute, my boy, I’ll just go and check.’ I could hear him shuffling around and a short time later he came back on the phone. ‘It’s thick yellow medicine in the little bottle. It’s really good stuff. I have been taking a couple of spoonsful every morning and every evening lately and I am feeling so much better. It really is wonderful stuff. I need some more. I’ve almost finished this bottle.’
‘Ah, Mr Scrope — has the bottle got a label on it? What is it called?’
‘Yes, it has. It is called, let me see now, it’s called “show-off”.’
When I had finished laughing and explained what he had been taking, even he saw the funny side and this lovely chuckle came back over the phone. Twice a day he had been swallowing a spoonful of dog shampoo. Perhaps constipation had been his main issue, and it could have helped, but he sure would have had a shiny bowel.
I managed to avoid becoming his doctor and he did stop taking the shampoo. The choc drops, however, continued their good run.
DEBT COLLECTION — PJ
Vets don’t usually make natural businessmen and women. When I went through vet school, we were trained in all things veterinary, but no one told us we were going to be involved in business, which by necessity had to make a profit. So we just assumed that the money thing would be OK, and some of my fellow students even returned after holidays with stories of the vet, in whose practice they had just had free education, ‘ripping off the clients’ by charging extra for after hours, and charging for euthanising a pet.
There was a feeling that vets were implicitly wealthy and could afford to be generous. The reality, alas, is very different and despite the fact that some farmers, particularly of the dairy variety, still believe that vets ‘rip them off’ and are fabulously wealthy, I don’t know any vets on the Rich List, or even on the Half-Wealthy List. The truth is that we’ve all had to labour away for many years and very few of us retire with much of a nest egg as a result of purely veterinary labour.
So when Pete A and I started our own business, there was not just a gap in our knowledge of business systems. There was a black hole, a yawning chasm. And one of the biggest problems was debt collection.
In those days, everyone, regardless of whether we knew them, would charge it up, put their bill on tick, and if we were lucky, they’d pay us next month. I’m glad to say that things are a lot tidier now, but this was then and we didn’t want to off end anybody.
Unfortunately one or two of our farming clients and many of our small animal clients always abused the privilege of running accounts, and as we knew them all personally in those days, we took it as a personal affront when someone didn’t pay next month, or often for two, three or four months.
Every month our nurse/receptionist Jill would give us both a pile of unpaid bills. We used to pore through them and write appropriate small comments.
‘Please, Brian,’ or ‘We’d be grateful if you could settle this, Liz’ etc. We might even stretch to ‘Is your arm in plaster?’ but not often. Business was very tight and we wanted to remain friends with our clients. It was the strength of our business.
Now there was one farmer, a friend as well, who never paid on time. He wasn’t just late — if it was the Melbourne Cup, he wouldn’t have been there in time for the clean-up next day. And the bills weren’t insubstantial. They were important to us. This particular chap wouldn’t pay anyone else’s bill either and finally, when he was probably in some straits, he took to passing on all his bills to his accountants to pay for him. But still they were late, doubtless because our account sat on his desk with a heap of others for three months before they were given to the accountant.
After six months of one of these, in desperation, and with some attempt at humorous wrangling, I wrote in veterinarians’ scrawl across the overdue account, ‘Pay up, you dog tucker.’ Now the term ‘dog tucker’ is derogatory, meant to imply you’re not good enough to be meat for the table, but it is also used amongst friends as a form of humorous, put-down greeting. In a very rural New Zealand way.
I thought no more of it, the bill was eventually paid and the matter forgotten.
In those days before personal computers, our wives used to do all of the book-keeping work, and each month Ally would take the assembled debtors’ data to our accountants’ computer system, enter it all and produce monthly figures for GST. Chick did the same thing for creditors, producing the statements for clients, and then she and Jill would stuff them into the envelopes for mailing.
On one of these trips, Ally’s attention was drawn immediately to a familiar-looking statement, nicely framed, prominently placed on the wall of the accountants’ staff tearoom. A note pinned above it said something like ‘Model of good debt collection technique’.
There, blown up to four times its size, was a copy of the statement (all identifying features removed except the handwriting) we’d sent to our tardy friend. He’d sent it in for payment to the accountant who, highly amused, had decided to showcase it. The problem was that my writing, scruffy at the best of times, had been misread.
They thought it shocking, but amusing. Definitely not fit for the front office.
‘Pay up, you dog tucker,’ it said. But even I had to admit the ‘t’ looked awfully like an ‘f’ …
FLYING AND WORK — PA
In the scheme of things, something like 1200 hours of flying in 27 years, the bulk of it while on veterinary jobs, is not a great deal of flying compared with a commercial pilot. However, many of these hours have been somewhat event-filled. There have been plenty of adrenaline surges. Landing a plane on four or five different short, sloping, one-way airstrips or paddocks in a day with cross or tailwinds is a very different ball game to arriving at a proper airfield with several vectors and windsocks. I have always been full of admiration for the ‘Ag boys’, who can drop their top-dressing plane on the same metre of strip hour after hour, but they at least are familiar with the strip and can adjust to the flying conditions.
As a young lad growing up on a farm in the 1950s, times were not easy but there was a certain post-war optimism and vitality in the countryside. Compared to today there were a lot more people working in rural areas. In the Hundalees, south of Kaikoura, the main trunk railway line had not been in for long. Groups of two or three railway cottages where the railway workers and their young families lived were set up near railway stations located every few miles along the track. Stock were moved by steam train rather than by road as is done today. They had to be driven along country roads to these local stations where they were then loaded onto waiting stock wagons to be picked up by the next goods train heading down the line.
The hydro-electric lines went through in the mid-1950s and there were many more people, both permanent and itinerant, living in the country. Despite a number of properties being only marginally economic, many were now being farmed by returned servicemen with young families. Most employed a shepherd or two and a married couple. Farming was less efficient and much labour was required just to keep things functioning. Wood for the fires constantly needed to be cut, and while most farms had diesel generators for lighting, there was no power for a refrigerator or electric stove. Although a few TEA Fergy tractors and the odd Land Rover were appearing, horses were still important components of most farms, and needed to be cared for and fed. Oats were specific
ally planted and harvested for grain and chaff. Scrub was cut by slasher and axe and the land cleared. And of course the cows needed milking at the beginning and end of each day.
Most sheep and beef farms milked a handful of cows to supply milk for the family. Excess was separated and the cream put in the butter can and picked up twice weekly by the ‘cream truck’, at the same time replaced with a pound or two of butter. The skim milk fed a pig or two and a flock of ducks — the eggs preserved and used for cooking. On top of this there were frequently gangs of shearers, scrub cutters, fencers, rabbiters and road gangs moving through the district. There were more people around and small rural schools were overflowing with us baby boomers. Looking back it was quite a romantic period.
However, nothing fascinated me more than watching the ex-Air Force pilots flying around in Tiger Moths, literally throwing out handfuls of seed and super. The power of a little superphosphate on phosphate-deficient hill country soils was incredible. I had to be a top-dressing pilot.
But I had a wee problem. I also wanted to be a doctor, especially a flying one, because I had heard about flying doctors in Australia, but a guy called a veterinary surgeon came into the district and he saved a sick draught horse, which impressed me no end, so I also wanted to be a vet. I also loved the country and didn’t want to live in a city. In the end I guess all my dreams came true. I became an animal doctor who worked in the country and flew an ex-top-dressing plane.
A couple of years after graduating I started to learn to fly at the Marlborough Aero Club. After some stopping and starting caused by financial pressures and a young family, I finally earned my private pilot’s licence, but then I had trouble getting hold of a plane. The Marlborough Aero Club was justifiably reluctant to let an inexperienced pilot fly one of their planes into remote farm air strips. It really was a catch-22: you couldn’t hire a plane without experience but you couldn’t gain experience without doing such flying. The only solution I could see was to own a plane.
I soon became a quarter-share owner in a 90 hp Piper Cub BQX. Although it was a delightful little plane to fly, it was very much a fair weather plane and a bit like flying a leaf in the wind. Don Berry — an older, experienced, laid-back sort of pilot — and I then bought a Piper Colt EEW. Compared to the Cub, this was a rocket but it had a few drawbacks, including being a bit underpowered and not having flaps — which are very nice for landing and for giving more lift on take-off. But I loved it and learnt heaps flying it. Because of its general lack of performance, you had to use updrafts wherever possible when flying in the mountains, avoiding areas where you could expect a downdraft and predicting well beforehand whether or not you could make it over the next ridge. I learnt most by frequently frightening the hell out of myself, but also from talking to experienced pilots or getting them to fly with me. I was able to call on experienced local pilots like John Sinclair and Trevor Collins and very competent ‘Ag pilots’ David Bishop, Barry Cowley, Andrew Whelan and Ray Patchett. Most of these pilots had spent their life working all over Marlborough and knew the country intimately, and their advice was invaluable.
Mountain flying holds enough dangers even for the experienced and ‘current’ pilot. And being a pilot who flew intermittently — sometimes three or four days a week, but sometimes not for a month — I could never claim to be fully ‘current’ even if I was flying the same aeroplane each time. Not being current raises the risk factors significantly. One pilot, Barry Cowley, reckoned it would take him at least seven days of constant top-dressing work, involving hundreds of take-offs and landings, to come to grips with a different Fletcher, even if it was the same model as the previous one. And here I was, flying an underperforming Piper Colt into remote strips, only occasionally, and largely unaware of the dangers. It was Colin Bint, who had watched me flying for a week while he flew a Country Calendar camera crew in his helicopter to record the day in the life of a flying vet, who said, ‘Pete, that is not the plane for you. Get something with some grunt.’ He was so right.
While I always had nothing but total understanding from my farmer clients if the weather meant I couldn’t make it on a particular day, there was always some pressure to ‘give it a go’. We may have had three or four farms lined up in different valleys and the cows were already in the yards or held close by after weaning. The cattle muster could have taken three days with extra labour brought in and these shepherds were hanging around to help with the pregnancy testing. Another property might also have had the deer in the yards for reading their TB tests, which has to be done three days after the actual test. Going by car would have meant that I could only do one or two of the jobs. The rest would have to wait another day or more. You don’t like letting your clients and friends down. If we could fly, we could do them all — no problem.
Pressure to perform, and I hasten to add it seldom comes from the farmer, has meant that I know I have made some unwise decisions in the past and have flown when I should not have. I have not enjoyed those occasions. Flying adds extra stress to the constant physical and mental pressure of veterinary work. There is an awareness of the wind getting up as the day progresses, and the knowledge that the next strip or paddock you are flying to is a tricky one at the best of times. On top of this are the demands of flying in difficult terrain in inclement weather, and time restraints — there are only so many hours of daylight and you cannot fly in the mountains in the dark. There is no let-up and you cannot put yourself into ‘cruise mode’ for an hour or so like you can when driving. Such conditions can make for a very tiring day.
This may have contributed to a rather serious accident I had in Kekerengu, 70 kilometres south of Blenheim. It had been a big day, starting with an unexpected early morning calving. By the time that was finished I was already late for my planned first visit for the day at Muzzle Station in the Clarence Valley — a 35-minute flight or five to six hours’ driving. The jobs at the Muzzle were accomplished in good time but we were still running late. Back to the plane, over the range into the Awatere Valley to Muller Station to TB test 400 hinds. Things were going nicely but I still had another herd of deer at Kekerengu to test. The pressure came off, however, when Nicky Satterthwaite arrived at the deer shed with a very welcome cup of tea and scones and the message that she had heard from the clinic not to try and go to Kekerengu. The wind there was atrocious and Rod Heard said the deer could wait.
Great, the pressure went off. However, modern technology was creeping into our society and we had the latest in communication equipment — a cell phone the size and weight of a brick. If I flew high enough and cut the motor, I could talk to the clinic and let them know how things were going. Halfway down the valley and home, I contacted the clinic and received the message that it was still a bit windy but not as bad in Kekerengu. Two hours of daylight left, a small group of deer to test, Kekerengu is 10 minutes to the east — let’s give it a go.
Despite a good low check run along the airstrip, a narrow strip next to the Heards’ homestead, and a contingency plan to land further down the coast at Parakawa if I didn’t like the conditions, I must have assumed landing would be OK. Now, the Piper Colt is a ‘short coupled’ sort of plane. It is like a Piper Cub that has been squeezed from nose to tail and wing tip to wing tip. It is a squat, fat version of the Cub and has totally different handling characteristics. While the Cub will respond beautifully to all control movements at low speeds, the Colt was a bit of a slug. You had to set her up right well in advance and for me landings often involved side slipping with full rudder and aileron movements, a lot of throttle work, and a prayer or two.
It seems I was hit by a sudden severe gust of wind just before touchdown. The outcome in a more responsive plane with more power would most likely have been very different. The Colt was thrown over a row of trees and landed upside down on the tennis court. I have no memory of the accident other than a flashback that still appeared years later of looking upside down at rapidly approaching, neat green grass and me saying to myself something like ‘Thi
ngs are not looking too good here, Pete.’ As the air accident report said: ‘Game, set and match.’ I had written off apparently the second-to-last Piper Colt in the country.
I received a rather nasty knock to the head and several broken bones, including my jaw and several ribs, and was really very fortunate to survive that crash. However, while the broken bones prevented me from getting back to work for several weeks, they did heal reasonably quickly. It was a different story with my knock on the head. The effects from a head injury can take months, if not years, to fully recover from and in my case I believe it took a good two years before I was back to normal. I discuss this more in a later chapter.
Although I loved that little plane, she really was not up to what I was asking of her, but I also believe weariness may have affected my judgement and reaction times.
I needed a plane, so it was back to the good old Piper Cub BPG, this one owned by Molesworth Station but kept at and managed by the Marlborough Aero Club. Although probably the nicest plane I have ever flown, she was still a different plane and we are back to ‘the not being current’ dangers again. On top of that, hiring planes means you often have to book well in advance and sometimes it is not there even though you have booked it.
This happened one day and was the cause for another close call. Chick occasionally, bravely, flew with me and as this day was likely to be an interesting one, she was quite keen to come along and see some of the country few people have the pleasure of really getting close to. It was to be a full day and there were four calls to make but to our dismay when I got to the hangar there was no BPG. What to do? A full day lined up, four farmers waiting, driving impossible and BPG will be in Nelson for the day. However, Dick Bell’s Super Cub was sitting in the hangar. A quick phone call and he kindly gave me the OK to use her.
Cock and Bull Stories Page 7