by Gillian Hick
As the last client finally left, I felt like time was standing still. I checked Straus again before making my way through the routine chores and then locking up for the night. Amanda had left as I knew there was nothing more that we could do. I felt almost nauseous as I heard the familiar jeep engine pulling up outside.
Resisting the urge to go out and greet them, I sat with Straus for a few minutes before they finally came in. Despite the dark glasses that Sylvia wore, she was clearly crying, and Johan’s face looked pale and drawn. There was little need for words. As the pair came over to the kennel, I pulled out some freshly laundered vet beds and placed them beside the kennel, providing a comfortable seat for them to sit with Straus. They didn’t ask, and I didn’t have to tell them, how he was doing. The once-magnificent dog was clearly in grave trouble. They knelt before him, reaching in and hugging him and whispering softly to him for quite some time. As always in these cases, I struggled with whether to go and leave them or to stay, but when I offered to give them some time alone, after quickly translating to Sylvia, they both emphatically declined.
‘No, please no leave,’ replied Sylvia, before turning back to Straus in tears.
I’ve no idea how long they stayed, but eventually Johan turned to me and in a barely audible voice said, ‘I think but we have no option but to let him go?’
Tears brimmed in my eyes and I could only nod in agreement. My response did not needed to be translated. After a few moments, I pulled myself together enough to add, ‘He hasn’t responded at all to the treatment. Leaving him any longer will only allow him to suffer. If there was anything I could do to save him, I would do it,’ I added, almost desperately. As always, as a veterinary surgeon, it is difficult not to feel that we have failed when an animal does not respond to years of college education and clinical experience.
Johan smiled back at me and then turned to Sylvia. I gave them a few more minutes and then gently explained how I would simply change the fluid in his drip to a concentrated anaesthetic and he would drift into a deep sleep before finally passing away. As he was so weak, there was no need to sedate him. I went to load some syringes from the carefully locked safe and as I came back into the room, they made space between them, graciously spreading out the vet beds, allowing me to kneel between them at Straus’ side to administer the lethal injection. Just as I was about to open the valve on the giving set, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Johan turn towards me and then heard his deep voice say, ‘I love you, my darling.’ I stopped dead, thinking for a split second that Johan was talking to me instead of Sylvia.
My thoughts must have registered on my face, as I turned a deep shade of red, and in an instant we all realised the misunderstanding and spontaneously broke into shrieks of laughter. The tension which until that instant had been almost unbearable, was instantly shattered. We continued to laugh and then cry looking to each other and then back at Straus who despite his condition seemed almost to recognise the relief. It took us a few minutes and a few reams of tissues in what was the most bizarre last few minutes of Straus’ life before we could all regain our composure. Straus gently slipped away as the blue liquid trickled slowly through his intravenous cannula.
I left them with him to say their final goodbyes. I sat wearily at the desk and dismally hit the RIP button on Straus’ file, watching as his name disappeared from the client register and silently shed a few more tears of my own, somehow feeling a poor accomplice in this beautiful animal’s premature demise.
I had sufficiently composed myself by the time they came out. Straus was to stay with us and be cremated, so at least we did not have to go through the process of carrying his enormous body out to the jeep. Both Sylvia and Johan thanked me and hugged me before they left. As Sylvia hugged me she whispered into my ear, ‘And I do love you too, for all things you do for my Straus.’ Tears streamed down both our faces as they walked out looking totally deflated as I gently closed the door behind them.
The impact of Straus’ short life was so great that they simply couldn’t bear to get another dog for some time afterwards. Although I bumped into them once in a petrol station, I missed them as clients.
Almost four years later, my heart skipped a beat as I saw their names on the morning consult list once more. ‘Pippa’, the new name read where once ‘Straus’ had been. Quickly I clicked into the clinical records and was stunned to see that Pippa was, far from a regal German shepherd, a terrier cross! I was fascinated to meet this new arrival and simply couldn’t equate a terrier cross with Sylvia and Johan.
The clinic was busy that morning and it was some time before I got to satisfy my curiosity.
‘They’re waiting for you outside,’ Amanda told me, so once more I made my way out to the grassy lawn and from a distance observed my new patient. The sight was very different from the previous time, where the magnificent Straus had seemed to match the stunning couple. This time a small, unruly-looking terrier hared around the front grass, followed by an exuberant toddler who shrieked with glee every time she made contact with the shaggy body. A transformed-looking Sylvia, in well-worn jeans and a loose ponytail, followed behind calling in, now-almost-perfect English, to the child and then laughing in mock despair as she failed miserably to catch the attention of either dog or child. Johan was not present, as Sylvia no longer required interpretation. For a few minutes, I watched the scene in total fascination as, although totally different, once again the dog seemed to perfectly match the owners.
Chapter 12
A New Career
They say that a change is as good as a rest, but in some cases, I’m not so sure. There is no doubt that having spent a year building the new practice, and the first couple of years working in what was a rapidly expanding small animal clinic, we could have done with a week in the sun, but in December 2008, a change was all that was on offer.
It was exactly ten days before Christmas when I was called out to a colicing horse late one evening. I was feeling slightly put out as it was a busy time of year for Donal and I had just got the kids to bed. We were planning to sit down with a glass of wine – more than likely the last one until after Christmas, as he would be working from early to late until whatever time everyone collected their hams on Christmas Eve.
Thankfully, by the time I got to the yard, Jill, the owner of the stiff old piebald gelding, looked to be in more distress than he did. As I drew up a dose of an anti-spasmodic injection, I felt confident that my services would not be further required.
‘Just keep him walking if he’s showing any signs of discomfort, and don’t give him any feed until tomorrow,’ I advised Jill as I headed back to the car.
It was bitterly cold, and the car had only started to warm up by the time I got home. Taking a bottle of wine, a box of crackers and some cheese, I went into the sitting room where Donal sat watching the news in front of the fire.
Unusually, he didn’t ask how I got on with the horse, but remained engrossed in the news. In a world of my own, I busied myself cutting up the cheese and arranging slices on the crackers until the news ended.
‘What do you think of that?’ asked Donal as the ads came on.
‘Sorry? Think of what?’ I asked. ‘I wasn’t even watching it.’
On the nine o’clock news it had been announced that traces of dioxin, a carcinogenic substance, had been found in some samples of Irish pork. As a health and safety measure, all Irish pork was being withdrawn for sale – ten days before Christmas.
To the vast majority of people, this probably didn’t seem a big deal. The news announcer had assured customers that any pork or bacon products could be returned to the shop of purchase for a full refund. However, to a fifth-generation pork butcher who spends from August to December carefully selecting and hand-curing the vast quantities of rashers and hams consumed by the population over the Christmas period, it was a very big problem.
Until recently, and for the previous five generations, Donal had used his own slaughterhouse, so tracing the meat to farm
was simple. In our early years together, Friday nights had always starting by driving around a few small local pig farmers, where Donal would select the pigs for the next week. However, with ever-increasing legislation from the Department of Agriculture, the slaughter house had eventually become unviable for such a small number of pigs and so he had to source his meat from one of a handful of giant slaughterhouses where the pigs came from vast pig units instead of small local farms. Now it appeared that, having been forced to abandon the small local suppliers, the pork was contaminated and unfit for human consumption.
We sat in semi-stunned silence that evening, the bottle of wine left untouched, wondering about the implications of the announcement. The name Hick was synonymous with top-quality, hand-cured hams and rashers and it seemed that nobody could get through Christmas without a Hick’s fry. Unfortunately, most people seemed to manage without it the rest of the year so that apart from the few loyal regulars the vast majority of Donal’s business was done on Christmas week, which then carried the business though until the next year. To lose this crucial few weeks of Christmas trade could wipe out the entire family business.
Having spent some tedious months in food-safety lectures in my fourth and final year of college, I tried to reassure Donal that once the source of the contaminated pork had been confirmed, unless he was unlucky enough to have purchased from that particular supplier, he would be free to carry on.
By the following morning, several emergency websites had been updated by the Department, and now it was abundantly clear. All Irish pork and bacon was to be removed from sale and destroyed. No exceptions.
The next two days were a blur, with constant phone calls to and from health inspectors and department officials. Within hours, supermarket shelves carried only non-pork meats and for most people, life carried on as normal. But at a time when Donal should have been in the shop from six in the morning, boning and rolling the hams that he had been hand-curing for months, instead he was sitting at home in a daze. The staff (still known as ‘the girls’ although now in their fifties!) that had worked in the shop since their teens, before Donal had purchased it from his aunt had, with enormous regret and upset on Donal’s part, to be made redundant as it seemed unlikely that the shop could carry on from the financial loss of a whole Christmas’ trade.
Instead of cutting rashers and linking sausages, Donal spent the day on the phone to his accountants and solicitors, trying to figure out what to do next. His only visit to the shop over the following two days was to load the entire meat content of the shop into a skip and sign the appropriate department documents allowing everything to be destroyed. It seemed likely during that period that ‘Hicks of Dalkey’, the oldest business in the quaint coastal town, would be no more.
In the meantime, Molly, Fiona and Jack, blissful unaware of what was happening to their potential college fees, carried on in full preparation for Santa’s arrival. The clinics were thankfully quiet as most people were busy organising themselves for the last few days of the Christmas rush.
I idly wondered what it would be like to have a Christmas with a husband not involved in the meat business. It seemed unimaginable.
But that was not to be, either. The solicitors’ and accountants’ phone calls had concluded that closing the business was going to be even more expensive than losing the entire Christmas stock. It seemed ironic that while the business was non-viable, the cost of closing it would involve re-mortgaging the house and more. There was no option but to carry on, but now with no stock to sell and no staff to sell it. We sat up late into the evening while a plan evolved.
Donal’s parents, now well in their late seventies, were happy to be drafted into action. His father, the original Jack Hick, had never actually retired anyway, arriving into the shop at some stage every day for a few hours – whether to help or to check up on things, who knew? His mother, Betty, too, had worked a lifetime in their own shop, and was now more than happy to mind the kids and bake. One of ‘the girls’ also agreed to come back to work, but that still left less staff and more work at an already overwhelming time of year.
In my college years, I had usually gone straight from the last exam into the shop to help with the Christmas rush. I could cut rashers, although my sausage-linking skills were still in the experimental stages. I was also becoming a dab hand at cooking and preparing potato cakes, and had a few Christmas weeks’ experience in hand-finishing cooked hams. Although I had never served behind the counter, I was the best offer at the time. It was a quiet time of year in a veterinary practice, but all the same, animals were still going to need emergency care. It was at that stage that Ralf, our neighbouring vet in Roundwood, stepped in.
‘It’s quiet,’ he assured me. ‘I can go down to your place and do a quick clinic during the day for anyone that needs to be seen. If anything is urgent when I am in my own practice, they can come up to me until you get home in the evening.’
It almost seemed too simple a solution.
The next morning, Sunday, I diverted the veterinary phones to Ralf, and dropped the kids, in their pyjamas, to Donal’s parents where his father insisted on staying to supervise the feeding of a mountain of pancakes before he too joined us in the shop.
Fresh stock had been ordered from the pig units that had-proved to be clear from the contaminated feed, and Donal and Jack Snr began the unenviable task of restocking the entire shop for the Christmas trade. Over the previous years, the demand for cooked hams had dramatically increased, so what had started as a kindly gesture for the local elderly parish priest, had evolved so that over half of the hams being sold were now sold cooked. It usually took the vast majority of the time over the last two days before Christmas to cook such a number of hams. It was painfully time-consuming, carefully dressing each ham with the fiddly little clove studs and glazing them with brown sugar before the last few minutes in a hot oven. With such an amount of raw preparation to be done, Donal decided that it simply would not be possible to do this in the short time available; for 2008 people would just have to cook their own hams. I began the thankless task of ringing the pages of orders to inform people that due to the pork crisis we would be unable to cook the hams, but to reassure them that we would still be able to supply the ham, although it would not be traditionally hand-cured as this was a process that took weeks to months.
The first few numbers rang out or went to voicemail and I was down to the third or fourth before I got an answer. Mrs Beacon was a lovely lady, Donal assured me.
‘You’re joking me,’ came the terse reply after I had politely explained the situation.
‘No, unfortunately not, Mrs Beacon. All our stock has been removed, and there is simply no way we can restock and cook the hams for such a large quantity of people.’
‘Well, I’m not interested in other people. That’s not my problem, but I am having eight people for Christmas and I have promised them Hick’s ham,’ she snapped back. ‘I simply must have a cooked ham for Christmas!’
The next phone call was just as unsuccessful.
‘I ordered that ham two months ago. I’m shocked with a shop with a reputation like yours. This an absolute disgrace.’
The third one sounded like she was having some sort of panic attack as she explained in short gasping breaths how she had booked to get her hair cut and meet her friend for lunch on Christmas Eve and how she simply couldn’t figure out how she would even have time to collect the ham never mind cook it herself. At that she burst into tears and hung up.
I always liked my father’s theory that we are all equally busy and stressed in our own mind, but just at different levels. As I looked down through the pages of orders I had to cancel, judging by the amount of time and effort that the first three cancellations had taken, I made a rapid decision.
‘This isn’t going to work,’ I told Donal and his Dad. ‘It would be quicker to come in and do the cooked orders myself than spend the next three days counselling everyone.’
The last week before Christmas w
as a blur. We were up before six each morning, delivering the kids to Granny and to the smell of hot pancakes. At some stage after tea, I would collect the kids and head home to do as brief an evening clinic as I could get away with. Poor Amanda was left with the unenviable job of deciding what needed my attention and what could wait. Friends, home for a few days before Christmas, later commented that they had rung me on my mobile to try to meet up for a chat, but that the phone was diverted to the office and they were greeted instead by ‘the Rottweiler’ as they called her! Meanwhile Donal and his father continued to work late into the evening, preparing the vast quantities of fresh sausage, rashers, pudding and stuffing that the customers would get through over Christmas week. We would meet at some stage late in the evening to grab a few hours’ sleep before starting the whole process again.
The ‘season of goodwill’ has never meant much to me after that week serving behind the counter. Some customers were pleasant and would kindly enquire as to whether the pork crisis had put us out much. Others were incredulous. Why had we run out of stuffing? What has that got to do with contaminated pork? One helpfully suggested we should just sell chicken, lamb and beef although she walked out the door carrying her order in the ‘J. HICK AND SONS PORK BUTCHERS’ bag.
My limited skills were pushed to the extreme, and one lady did complain to Donal that the new woman on the till wasn’t nearly as good as the girls.