I’d been a great Biggles fan as a boy, which had taken me on to reading about real flyers in the Great War, and one, the American Eddie Rickenbacker, said: ‘Courage is doing things you’re afraid to do. There is no courage without fear.’ The question here was not that Malcolm was afraid to do it – that much was obvious – but rather whether he could overcome his fear.
I know now I should have stopped it there and then. I should never have allowed things to get this far. Disaster lurked over that cliff edge.
Although it’s contrary to instinct, abseilers are trained to stand up straight and walk backwards over the edge and, when confidence is gained, they don’t have a problem with that. Novices will always want to get nearer the ground, to bend knees and slither over, which may feel safer but in fact is quite the opposite as it can lead to tangles and loss of control.
Malcolm, the experienced army abseiler, showed himself to be a rank beginner – either that or Bempton had made him forget everything he’d learned. He wriggled backwards on his hands and knees and stopped. A coastguard came to ask me if this was really a good idea. Still thinking Malcom should be given the chance to do the job and get a good report, I let it go to the next stage, with Malcolm over the edge but not yet disappeared as he ‘abseiled’ all of a yard.
At last, common sense prevailed and I gave the nod to the coastguards who pulled him back up. Still saying that he could have done it, and would have done it, and actually would still do it, the relief in Malcolm was apparent to all, as his face went from the grey it had recently become, back through white to normal.
I told him to go and get a hot cup of something, and thanked providence that he had not done the thing he was afraid to do.
*
Geoff, my senior boss in Sheffield, was even dafter than me, especially when it came to rescues. Having been a professional climber and mountain rescue guide before the RSPCA, he was top expert in that area and a great leader of men. The only problems were (1) he always wanted to do the rescue himself, and (2) he was a brusque, abrupt Yorkie, intimidating perhaps, which meant that one or two people didn’t get on with him.
I got on with him all right. He trained me in rope rescue and, as we got to know each other, he would tend to phone me first when there was something good on, by which we both meant something with an edge to it. Of course the animal to be rescued was always the point, but if the rescue was hard, tricky, dangerous or deeply uncomfortable, so much the better.
One Saturday morning in November, an off-duty weekend, Geoff was on the phone saying he wanted me to come on a rope rescue in the Peak District. I started to say that I was scheduled to paint the bathroom but that had no priority for Geoff (or me) over the attempted rescue of a kitten down a mine shaft in Derbyshire, and it was my turn to do the rescue.
We met at a village near Matlock, then had a trek of about forty-five minutes across the hills in the pouring rain, carrying all the ropes and rescue gear that Geoff always had ready in his van. The couple who had raised the alarm, who had ‘heard a kitten mewing’, were experienced rambler types (they’d have had to be, out in that filthy November weather), and had provided highly specific instructions, with map references, on how to reach the spot, with repeated assurances that they had indeed heard a kitten down a mine shaft in deepest Derbyshire. We reached the place in standard RSPCA winter clothing, which was the greatcoat. There was no super-waterproof, lightweight, breathable climbing kit; we had a big heavy woollen overcoat that got heavier and heavier as it got wetter.
Lead mining in that region finished many years ago and most of the old shafts have collapsed or been blocked or fenced off, but there are still some holes in the ground for the unwary to fall into. Quite how a kitten had fallen into one, in the middle of the White Peak miles from civilisation, we could not tell, but we knew what the challenge would be when we found it.
Here was a typical bell pit, a vertical narrow shaft about a yard wide with the spoil from digging it thrown around the entrance, so it looked like a miniature, flattened-out volcano. We could expect a wider chamber somewhere beneath, where they’d dug out the lead ore, although how far beneath we had no idea. As we looked down the black hole and listened, hearing nothing but the wind and the rain, Geoff said he would go. I said no he wouldn’t, it was my turn, he’d done it last time, and so that was decided upon, although Geoff couldn’t resist telling me about the poison gases that often lurked in these old mines. I didn’t know if he was winding me up or what, but he told me to be very careful because these gases could not be detected before they overcame you. I asked him what would be the point of being careful, if care was going to make no difference. He just gave me an enigmatic look and said I had to keep in regular touch.
We had no radios or mobile phones, so communication was by shouting and rope-tugging – one tug for I’m okay, two tugs and I’m coming back up, three tugs for send down a cat basket. We also tied a knot ten feet up from the bottom of the 300 feet rope, so that I’d know I was just ten feet from falling off the end.
I’d descended nowhere near that far when the shaft narrowed and I was stuck. Geoff lowered a folding spade down to me, the sort soldiers carried in World War One for digging trenches, and I bashed away at the limestone with that. The rain was still reaching me as I swung on my rope, held by the figure-of-eight, trying to see what I was doing with an ordinary torch (no headtorches then).
During the hour it took me to widen the shaft enough to find a way through, Geoff must have asked me a dozen times if I wanted him to take over, and I wasn’t very far off saying something quite rude when a rock came away and I was abseiling again, into the unknown. The torch showed only a little bit of the shaft sides but nothing of what lay below. Anyway, when I was on the move I needed two hands so the only way I could hold the torch was in my armpit, which didn’t help much.
I was sniffing the air for Geoff’s poison gases, meanwhile realising that if I failed to sniff in time and lost consciousness and therefore my grip, the figure-of-eight wouldn’t hold and I’d be gone. Such thoughts lend that edge to the excitement that I mentioned earlier.
It took me another half an hour to reach the bottom, a small chamber with two passages running off. I reckoned I’d come about 70 feet and wondered if a kitten could survive such a fall and, if it had, whether it had gone on down the smaller of the two entries, about eighteen inches high, which would have meant the end of any rescue attempt.
On my knees I listened. Nothing. I turned the torch off and listened again in the blackness, that deep, deep blackness you only get underground, where no light penetrates.
With no clue on kitty, my only option was to explore the larger of the two passages, which was about a yard in diameter – about the same as the last time I was in a limestone tunnel, when it fell on my head. If that happened here, there was no Dan to pull me out.
Actually, there was another option, which was to leave a cat trap baited with food and hope the kitten would come to it. The implications of this – a daily visit to the mineshaft, a daily abseil down to the trap and a return tramp across the hills – made it definitely second best as a choice.
I wriggled through the tunnel for a few yards without too much trouble, calling, ‘Puss, puss,’ and getting no reply, but the job was getting harder and the torch was becoming less useful in penetrating the clouds of dust I was making in the blackness. And then, the moment. I heard it. I heard a weak, pathetic, tiny mew and I knew my living had not been in vain.
A few more feet and I could see cat’s eyes in the torchlight. Now, the worry was if it would take fright and run. There was no possibility of my following it for any distance. Stay there, puss, stay there, please stay there.
The more I called, the more response I had, and then I saw it properly, a miserable, terrified little waif, black and white, maybe twelve weeks old. I reached towards it, where it crouched in a crevice in the rock, and stroked its head. The mew changed to a purr and I knew I was home. I grabbed it by the scruff and p
ulled it towards me. Claws were instinctively out but it didn’t try to bite as a feral cat would have done, so I stuffed it down the front of my greatcoat and began my reverse wriggling. If my nose and throat hadn’t been full of dust I’d have broken into song.
In the chamber, large enough to sit upright if not to stand, I could retrieve the purring little beastie and examine it. The poor thing was an absolute bag of bones and very dehydrated. You test this by pinching the skin on the back of the neck. Normally it would return to normal when you let go, but the skin of a dehydrated animal stays where it is.
I shouted up to Geoff to find some water from somewhere, collect the rain if need be, while I prussicked back up. Tired as I was, the adrenalin was flowing and I was up there in no time. We had no food with us but the kitten lapped up the water, and the journey back to the vans with it in my coat seemed to fly by. There we had some tins of fish recipe, but we only fed a little. You can’t give a starving animal loads of food; that’s asking for trouble. So, cruel to be kind, we watched the little kit eat its spoonful of food in half a second, put it in a basket and said our goodbyes, still with no idea about how such a small domestic animal could end up in a mineshaft so far from any possibility of home.
Geoff, the great instigator of rescues that many others would never contemplate, pointed out that it was his turn next, and I could only hope that it would prove every bit as interesting as my turn had been.
I took the kitten home, fed it some more and, over the next weeks, watched him fill out and regain full health. After fourteen years as Marbles the Mystery Cat, our family cat, he did what cats so often do. Without making a fuss, he disappeared away somewhere to die in peace.
16
ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL
Vets are enormously important to an RSPCA inspector who, if he’s new on the job, will tend to take them as they come, respect their words and opinions, and not argue. This was especially so when I started and picked up the name of a veterinary practice in Scorswick that had its surgery on one of the main streets, right opposite a cinema.
I say ‘surgery’ – really it was more of a time warp. The two vets, Mr McAllister and Mr McSweenie, known universally behind their backs as Haggis and Co., had trained just after the war, or maybe during it, had set up their business in the likeness of the ones they’d trained in, and hadn’t changed it since. There was no modern equipment – nothing newer than 1955; their one concession to progress was an X-ray machine but even that was probably driven by clockwork.
They didn’t stock any modern drugs. They knew about antibiotics and suchlike of course, but if something like that was required for an animal patient, they would write out a prescription and the client – in some cases me – would get it from the high street pharmacy and, naturally, pay for it. This I am sure was a unique arrangement. I’ve never heard of anything like it since.
Otherwise they relied on the old remedies, and would make them up in the back room from a most impressive array of bottles and jars containing lurid liquids with labels displaying abbreviated Latin names, also the contents of a mysterious wooden dresser with a hundred little drawers, wherein were kept powders and, for all I knew, eye of newt and toe of frog. There were jars of whale fat that they used to make ointments, and PULV. of this, EXTR. of that and AQ. of the other. Compared to this, James Herriot’s surgery was the last word in advanced technology.
That their remedies worked I could not doubt. I had a semi-sprained ankle once, greatly swollen, and Mr McAllister told me to wait a minute. He emerged from the back room with a bottle of grey water. ‘Lead and opium,’ he said. ‘Pour it on, soak your sock in it.’ So I did, and the swelling went down almost before my eyes.
The common view that Scotsmen are tight with money is, I am sure, largely a myth and a vile calumny, but there must be a germ of truth in it somewhere if Haggis and Co. were anything to go by. Their thriftiness with the tools of their trade was matched by their satisfaction on receipt of the fees coming their way when they appeared in court as my expert witnesses. This regular and highly nutritious addition to their practice income had no effect whatever on the fees they charged me and the RSPCA.
They didn’t have a proper operating theatre, although they had a room where they did operations, and they were very reluctant to use it for the post mortems that were a fairly frequent reason for my visits. Establishing cause of death was critical to success in many cases of cruelty. Haggis and Co. were perfectly willing and competent, but they insisted on doing the post mortem in the back of my van, out in the street.
Usually we could get away with this, without causing too much of a stir, no thanks to Mr McAllister who took delight in embarrassing me, this new RSPCA boy, as much as he possibly could. On one occasion there had been a series of reported incidents of cats being shot with a .22 air rifle, but we had no witnesses until someone heard a shot, saw a young lad with a gun, and saw a ginger tomcat fall off a fence. It was now worth having a post mortem done on the cat. Maybe we could find the bullet, the lead slug, and link it to the gun in true forensic fashion.
Mr McAllister decided that the matter could be resolved only by skinning the cat, and his way of doing it was to make the necessary incisions, then hold the cat up by its back legs and pull the entire skin right off, past the head and away. He did this a little like the executioner holding up the head of Charles the First, waving it about for all to see, only his audience was the normal kind of innocent passers-by you generally had on a high street on a Saturday lunchtime.
*
Then I ran up against a certain Mr Pipe, known as Plumber for obvious reasons, who was to become a regular client of mine and a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work. He was an animal dealer. He may have started off in a reputable way, dealing in cattle and sheep, but his stock in trade now was quite different. He had several specialities, one of which was supplying dogs to a certain university laboratory for research. The university may well have believed the dogs were honestly got, but I knew they were strays or household pets on the wander, kidnapped by Plumber Pipe and sold on.
Another ‘revenue stream’ was all the clapped-out, broken-mouthed, dry-uddered sheep at the auction mart that nobody wanted. He’d buy them for almost nothing, slaughter them using his version of the halal system, and sell the meat (halal assured) to the less fussy end of the curry house business. He’d been to prison on two occasions that I knew about, and a visit to his so-called farm would be a regular thing.
On this day I found three goats and two sheep in dreadful condition. Two of the goats had broken legs, one of which was gangrenous, so I had to shoot them there and then. The other three animals were already dead, two sheep seemingly from starvation, the third goat from strangulation due to getting knotted up in its tether. I phoned Haggis and Co., got Mr McAllister, and was told to turn up a three o’clock.
He emerged from his premises, threading his way through the shoppers on the pavement, wearing his usual slaughterman’s apron, a mighty construction of black rubbery material reaching from neck to floor and held in the middle with a length of bailer twine. He also had with him, in full view, his favourite knife for this work, another relic of the slaughterhouse, a long, wicked-looking thing that he kept sharp with the steel he also was never without.
As I said, we could get away with this procedure, even on a busy shopping afternoon – if it was one small dog or cat – but there were five large animals here in the back of my little Ford Escort van, and a couple of them had been dead for some time. Mr McAllister would be primarily concerned with the contents of the stomach, or lack thereof, and his incisions immediately caused an outflow of nauseous gases and a gradual drip of partially digested, miscellaneous vegetation in the form of a foul kind of slurry.
This, mixed with blood, was soon too much for the confines of the van and began to run down the street. People came to look. Children made horrified noises. I tried to keep them away. McAllister could not have cared less. He was oblivious. He made his notes
on his little bloodstained pad while I pushed and swept sheep- and goat-guts back into the van.
He was a meticulous worker, slow and steady, and by the time he’d cut his way to the fifth animal there was a long queue forming outside the cinema. I’ve no idea what was on – Dracula, House of Frankenstein, Don’t Look Now – but if it was blood and guts they were there to see, they could have saved their money with a brief spec inside my van.
This was my last post mortem with Haggis and Co. They had been very good to me, and I admired and liked them very much, but the image of the RSPCA was not being well served by roadside butchery on that scale. I had to go elsewhere and, soon afterwards, Messrs McAllister and McSweenie retired, doubtless well insulated against financial privation by the huge stack of court fees they’d earned and by their rigorous implementation of that old Caledonian proverb, ‘Mony a mickle maks a muckle’.
17
MY ZOO AND OTHER ANIMALS
There was never any room in our garage for the RSPCA van – not because it was like most garages everywhere, full of junk, tumble drier, DIY gear, holiday canoe, bicycles and whatnot, but because every square inch of wall and floor space was taken up with the cages, baskets and boxes of my private wildlife rescue centre.
The annexe was an aviary in the garden, where birds could convalesce from, say, a damaged wing, and regain their strength, before I could release them back into the wild. There were also various unofficial and temporary annexes, that is corners of rooms in the house, where animals rested that had to be kept nice and warm.
Spring was high season for this high-endeavour, high-reward (spiritual/ emotional), loss-making enterprise, when young birds fell out of their nests and all wild animals became more active in the world, and so had more accidents and/or were more likely to be picked up unnecessarily by a well-meaning member of the public.
An Alligator in the Bathroom...And Other Stories Page 13