James Herriot

by All Things Wise;Wonderful

  It was the “ket feller.” He had exactly the same type of wagon as Mallock and he went round a wide area of Yorkshire picking animals which even the knacker men didn’t want. It was a strange job and he was a strange-looking man. The oddly piercing eyes glittered uncannily from under a tattered army peaked cap.

  “Wot’s up, guvnor?” He removed a cigarette from his mouth and spat companionably into the roadway.

  My throat was tight “I—I’m sorry. I thought you were Jeff Mallock.”

  The eyes did not change expression, but the corner of his mouth twitched briefly. “If tha wants Jeff he’ll be back at his yard now, ah reckon.” He spat again and replaced his cigarette.

  I nodded dully. Jeff would be there now all right—long ago. I had been chasing the wrong wagon for about an hour and that cow would be dead and hanging up on hooks at this moment. The knacker man was a fast and skillful worker and wasted no time when he got back with his beasts.

  “Well, ah’m off ’ome now,” the ket feller said. “So long, boss.” He winked at me, started his engine and the big vehicle rumbled away.

  I trailed back to my car. There was no hurry now. And strangely, now that all was lost my mood relaxed. In fact, as I drove away, a great calm settled on me and I began to assess my future with cool objectivity. I would be drummed out of the Ministry’s service for sure, and idly I wondered if they had any special ceremony for the occasion—perhaps a ritual stripping of the Panel Certificates or something of the sort.

  I tried to put away the thought that more than the Ministry would be interested in my latest exploit. How about the Royal College? Did they strike you off for something like this? Well, it was possible, and in my serene state of mind I toyed with the possibilities of alternative avenues of employment. I had often thought it must be fun to run a second hand book shop and now that I began to consider it seriously I felt sure there was an opening for one in Darrowby. I experienced a comfortable glow at the vision of myself sitting under the rows of dusty volumes, pulling one down from the shelf when I felt like it or maybe just looking out into the street through the window from my safe little world where there were no forms or telephones or messages saying “Ring Min.”

  In Darrowby I drove round without haste to the knacker yard. I left my car outside the grim little building with the black smoke drifting from its chimney. I pulled back the sliding door and saw Jeff seated at his ease on a pile of cow hides, holding a slice of apple pie in blood-stained fingers. And, ah yes, there, Just behind him hung the two great sides of beef and on the floor, the lungs, bowels and other viscera—the sad remnants of Mr. Moverley’s pedigree Ayrshire.

  “Hello, Jeff,” I said.

  “Now then, Mr. Harriot.” He gave me the beatific smile which mirrored his personality so well. “Ah’m just havin’ a little snack. I allus like a bite about this time.” He sank his teeth into the pie and chewed appreciatively.

  “So I see.” I sorrowfully scanned the hanging carcase. Just dog meat and not even much of that Ayrshires were never very fat. I was wondering how to break the news to him when he spoke again.

  “Ah’m sorry you’ve caught me out this time, Mr. Herriot,” he said, reaching for a greasy mug of tea.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I allus reckon to have t’beast dressed and ready for you but you’ve come a bit early.”

  I stared at him. “ But … everything’s here, surely.” I waved a hand around me.

  “Nay, nay, that’s not ’er.”

  “You mean … that isn’t the cow from Moverley’s.”

  “That’s right.” He took a long draught from the mug and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I ’ad to do this ’un first. Moverley’s cow’s still in t’wagon out at the back.”

  “Alive?”

  He looked mildly surprised. “Aye, of course. She’s never had a finger on ’er. Nice cow for a screw, too.”

  I could have fainted with relief. “She’s no screw, Jeff. That’s the wrong cow you’ve got there!”

  “Wrong cow?” Nothing ever startled him but he obviously desired more information. I told him the whole story.

  When I had finished, his shoulders began to shake gently and the beautiful clear eyes twinkled in the pink face.

  “Well, that’s a licker,” he murmured, and continued to laugh gently. There was nothing immoderate in his mirth and indeed nothing I had said disturbed him in the least. The fact that he had wasted his journey or that the farmer might be annoyed was of no moment to him.

  Again, looking at Jeff Mallock, it struck me, as many times before, that there was nothing like a lifetime of dabbling among diseased carcases and lethal bacteria for breeding tranquillity of mind.

  “You’ll slip back and change the cow?” I said.

  “Aye, in a minute or two. There’s nowt spoilin’. Ah never likes to hurry me grub.” He belched contentedly. “And how about you, Mr. Herriot? You could do with summat to keep your strength up.” He produced another mug and broke off a generous wedge of pie which he offered to me.

  “No … no … er … no, thank you, Jeff. It’s kind of you, but no … no … not just now.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and smiled as he stretched an arm for his pipe which was balanced on a sheep’s skull. Flicking away some shreds of stray tissue from the stem he applied a match and settled down blissfully on the hides.

  “I’ll see ye later, then,” he said. “Come round tonight and everything’ll be ready for you.” He closed his eyes and again his shoulders quivered. “Ah’d better get the right ’un this time.”

  It must be more than twenty years since I took a cow under the TB Order, because the clinical cases so rarely exist now. “Ring Min” no longer has the power to chill my blood, and the dread forms which scarred my soul lie unused and yellowing in the bottom of a drawer.

  All these things have gone from my life. Charles Harcourt has gone too, but I think of him every day when I look at the little barometer which still hangs on my wall.

  CHAPTER 35

  THE FOOD WAS SO good at the Winckfield flying school that it was said that those airmen whose homes were within visiting distance wouldn’t take a day’s leave because they might miss some culinary speciality. Difficult to believe, maybe, but I often think that few people in wartime Britain fared as well as the handful of young men in the scatter of wooden huts on that flat green stretch outside Windsor.

  It wasn’t as though we had a French chef, either. The cooking was done by two grizzled old men—civilians who wore cloth caps and smoked pipes and went about their business with unsmiling taciturnity.

  It was rumoured that they were two ex-army cooks from the first world war, but whatever their origins they were artists. In their hands, simple stews and pies assumed a new significance and it was possible to rhapsodise even over the perfect flouriness of their potatoes.

  So it was surprising when at lunch time my neighbour on the left threw down his spoon, pushed away his plate and groaned. We ate on trestle tables, sitting in rows on long forms, and I was right up against the young man.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “This apple dumpling is terrific.”

  “Ah, it’s not the grub.” He buried his face in his hands for a few seconds then looked at me with tortured eyes. “I’ve been doing circuits and bumps this morning with Routledge and he’s torn the knackers off me—all the time, it never stopped.”

  Suddenly my own meal lost some of its flavour. I knew just what he meant. F. O. Woodham did the same to me.

  He gave me another despairing glance then stared straight ahead.

  “I know one thing, Jim. I’ll never make a bloody pilot.”

  His words sent a chill through me. He was voicing the conviction which had been gradually growing in me. I never seemed to make any progress—whatever I did was wrong, and I was losing heart. Like all the others I was hoping to be graded pilot, but after every session with F. O. Woodham the idea of ever flying an aeroplane all on my own s
eemed more and more ludicrous. And I had another date with him at 2 p.m.

  He was as quiet and charming as ever when I met him—till we got up into the sky and the shouting started again.

  “Relax! For heaven’s sake, relax!” or “Watch your height! Where the hell d’you think you’re going?” or “Didn’t I tell you to centralise the stick? Are you bloody deaf or something?” And finally, after the first circuit when we juddered to a halt on the grass, “That was an absolutely bloody ropy landing! Take off again!”

  On the second circuit he fell strangely silent. And though I should have felt relieved I found something ominous in the unaccustomed peace. It could mean only one thing—he had finally given me up as a bad job. When we landed he told me to switch off the engine and climbed out of the rear cockpit. I was about to unbuckle my straps and follow him when he signalled me to remain in my seat.

  “Stay where you are,” he said. “You can take her up now.”

  I stared down at him through my goggles. “What …?”

  “I said take her up.”

  “You mean, on my own … ? Go solo …?”

  “Yes, of course. Come and see me in the flight hut after you’ve landed and taxied in.” He turned and walked away over the green. He didn’t look back.

  After a few minutes a fitter came over to where I sat trembling in my seat. He spat on the turf then looked at me with deep distaste.

  “Look, mate,” he said. “That’s a good aircraft you’ve got there.”

  I nodded agreement

  “Well I don’t want it well smashed up, okay?”’

  “Okay.”

  He gave me a final disgusted glance then went round to the propellor.

  Panic-stricken though I was, I did not forget the cockpit drill which had been dinned in to me so often. I never thought I’d have to use it in earnest but now I automatically tested the controls—rudder, ailerons and elevator. Fuel on, switches off, throttle closed, then switches on, throttle slightly open.

  “Contact!” I cried.

  The fitter swung the propellor and the engine roared. I pushed the throttle full open and the Tiger Moth began to bump its way over the grass. As we gathered speed I eased the stick forward to lift the tail, then as I pulled it back again the bumping stopped and we climbed smoothly into the air with the long dining hut at the end of the airfield flashing away beneath.

  I was gripped by exhilaration and triumph. The impossible had happened. I was up here on my own, flying, really flying at last. I had been so certain of failure that the feeling of relief was overpowering. In fact it intoxicated me, so that for a long time I just sailed along, grinning foolishly to myself.

  When I finally came to my senses I looked down happily over the side. It must be time to turn now, but as I stared downwards cold reality began to roll over me in a gathering flood. I couldn’t recognise a thing in the great hazy tapestry beneath me. And everything seemed smaller than usual. Dry-mouthed, I looked at the altimeter. I was well over 2,000 feet.

  And suddenly it came to me that F. O. Woodham’s shouts had not been meaningless; he had been talking sense, giving me good advice, and as soon as I got up in the air by myself I had ignored it all. I hadn’t lined myself up on a cloud, I hadn’t watched my artificial horizon, I hadn’t kept an eye on the altimeter. And I was lost.

  It was a terrible feeling, this sense of utter isolation as I desperately scanned the great chequered landscape for a familiar object. What did you do in a case like this? Soar around southern England till I found some farmer’s field big enough to land in, then make my own abject way back to Winckfield? But that way I was going to look the complete fool, and also I’d stand an excellent chance of smashing up that fitter’s beloved aeroplane and maybe myself.

  It seemed to me that one way or another I was going to make a name for myself. Funny things had happened to some of the other lads—many had been air-sick and vomited in the cockpit, one had gone through a hedge, another on his first solo had circled the airfield again and again—seven times he had gone round—trying to find the courage to land while his instructor sweated blood and cursed on the ground. But nobody had really got lost like me. Nobody had flown off into the blue and returned on foot without his aeroplane.

  My visions of my immediate fate were reaching horrific proportions and my heart was hammering uncontrollably when far away on my left I spotted the dear familiar bulk of the big stand on Ascot racecourse. Almost weeping with joy, I turned towards it and within minutes I was banking above its roof as I had done so often.

  And there, far below and approaching with uncomfortable speed was the belt of trees which fringed the airfield and beyond, the windsock blowing over the wide green. But I was still far too high—I could never drop down there in time to hit that landing strip, I would have to go round again.

  The ignominy of it went deep. They would all be watching on the ground and some would have a good laugh at the sight of Herriot over-shooting the field by several hundred feet and cruising off again into the clouds. But what was I thinking about? There was a way of losing height rapidly and, bless you, F. O. Woodham, I knew how to do it.

  Opposite rudder and stick. He had told me a hundred times how to side slip and I did it now as hard as I could, sending the little machine slewing like an airborne crab down, down towards those trees.

  And by golly it worked! The green copse rushed up at me and before I knew I was almost skimming the branches. I straightened up and headed for the long stretch of grass. At fifty feet I rounded out then checked the stick gradually back till just above the ground when I slammed it into my abdomen. The undercarriage made contact with the earth with hardly a tremor and I worked the rudder bar to keep straight until I came to a halt. Then I taxied in, climbed from the cockpit and walked over to the flight hut.

  F. O. Woodham was sitting at a table, cup in hand, and he looked up as I entered. He had got out of his flying suit and was wearing a battle dress jacket with the wings we all dreamed about and the ribbon of the DFC.

  “Ah, Herriot, I’m just having some coffee. Will you join me?”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  I sat down and he pushed a cup towards me.

  “I saw your landing,” he said. “Delightful, quite delightful.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And that side-slip.” One corner of his mouth twitched upwards. “Very good indeed, really masterly.”

  He reached for the coffee pot and went on. “You’ve done awfully well, Herriot. Solo after nine hours’ instruction, eh? Splendid. But then I never had the slightest doubt about you at any time.”

  He poised the pot over my cup. “How do you like your coffee—black or white?”

  CHAPTER 36

  I WAS ONLY THE THIRD man in our flight of fifty to go solo and it was a matter of particular pride to me because so many of my comrades were eighteen and nineteen year olds. They didn’t say so but I often had the impression that they felt that an elderly gentleman like me in my twenties with a wife and baby had no right to be there, training for aircrew. In the nicest possible way they thought I was past it.

  Of course, in many ways they had a point. The pull I had from home was probably stronger than theirs. When our sergeant handed out the letters on the daily parade I used to secrete mine away till I had a few minutes of solitude to read about how fast little Jimmy was growing, how much he weighed, the unmistakable signs of outstanding intelligence, even genius, which Helen could already discern in him.

  I was missing his babyhood and it saddened me. It was something I deeply regret because it comes only once and is gone so quickly. But I still have the bundles of letters which his proud mother wrote to keep me in touch with every fascinating stage, and when I read them now it is almost as though I had been there to see it all.

  At the time, those letters pulled me back almost painfully to the comforts of home. On the other hand there were occasions when life in Darrowby hadn’t been all that comfortable … .

&
nbsp; I think it was the early morning calls in the winter which were the worst. It was a fairly common experience to be walking sleepy-eyed into a cow byre at 6 a.m. for a calving but at Mr. Blackburn’s farm there was a difference. In fact several differences.

  Firstly, there was usually an anxious-faced farmer to greet me with news of how the calf was coming, when labour had started, but today I was like an unwelcome stranger. Secondly, I had grown accustomed to the sight of a few cows tied up in a cobbled byre with wooden partitions and an oil lamp, and now I was gazing down a long avenue of concrete under blazing electric light with a seemingly endless succession of bovine backsides protruding from tubular metal standings. Thirdly, instead of the early morning peace there was a clattering of buckets, the rhythmic pulsing of a milking machine and the blaring of a radio loudspeaker. There was also a frantic scurrying of white-coated, white-capped men, but none of them paid the slightest attention to me.

  This was one of the new big dairy farms. In place of a solitary figure on a milk stool, head buried in the cow’s side, pulling forth the milk with a gentle “hiss-hiss,” there was this impersonal hustle and bustle.

  I stood just inside the doorway while out in the yard a particularly cold snow drifted from the blackness above. I had left a comfortable bed and a warm wife to come here and it seemed somebody ought at least to say “hello.” Then I noticed the owner hurrying past with a bucket. He was moving as fast as any of his men.

  “Hey, Mr. Blackburn!” I cried. “You rang me—you’ve got a cow calving?”

  He stopped and looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment. “Oh aye … aye … she’s down there on fright.” He pointed to a light roan animal half way along the byre. She was easy to pick out—the only one lying down.

  “How long has she been on?” I asked, but when I turned round Mr. Blackburn had gone. I trotted after him, cornered him in the milk house and repeated my question.