All Creatures Great and Small (30 page)

I felt a little bewildered as I filled a four ounce bottle in the dispensary, but I took a few pairs of forceps with me too; I had lost a bit of faith in Grier’s long-range diagnosis.

I was surprised when Mrs. Mallard opened the door of the smart semi-detached house. For some reason I had been expecting an old lady, and here was a striking-looking blonde woman of about forty with her hair piled high in glamorous layers as was the fashion at that time. And I hadn’t expected the long ballroom dress in shimmering green, the enormous swaying earrings, the heavily made up face.

Mrs. Mallard seemed surprised too. She stared blankly at me till I explained the position. “I’ve come to see your dog—I’m Mr. Grier’s locum. He’s ill at the moment, I’m afraid.”

It took a fair time for the information to get through because she still stood on the doorstep as if she didn’t know what I was talking about; then she came to life and opened the door wide. “Oh yes, of course, I’m sorry, do come in.” I walked past her through an almost palpable wall of perfume and into a room on the left of the hall. The perfume was even stronger in here but it was in keeping with the single, pink-tinted lamp which shed a dim but rosy light on the wide divan drawn close to the flickering fire. Somewhere in the shadows a radiogram was softly pouring out “Body and Soul.”

There was no sign of my patient and Mrs. Mallard looked at me irresolutely, fingering one of her earrings.

“Do you want me to see him in here?” I asked.

“Oh yes, certainly.” She became brisk and opened a door at the end of the room. Immediately a little West Highland Terrier bounded across the carpet and hurled himself at me with a woof of delight. He tried his best to lick my face by a series of mighty springs and this might have gone on for quite a long time had I not caught him in mid air.

Mrs. Mallard smiled nervously. “He seems a lot better now,” she said.

I flopped down on the divan still with the little dog in my arms and prised open his jaws. Even in that dim light it was obvious that there was nothing in his throat. I gently slid my forefinger over the back of his tongue and the terrier made no protest as I explored his gullet. Then I dropped him down on the carpet and took his temperature—normal.

“Well, Mrs. Mallard,” I said, “there is certainly no bone in his throat and he has no fever.” I was about to add that the dog seemed perfectly fit to me when I remembered Grier’s parting admonition—I had to justify my visit.

I cleared my throat. “It’s just possible, though, that he has a little pharyngitis which has been making him cough or retch.” I opened the terrier’s mouth again. “As you see, the back of his throat is rather inflamed. He may have got a mild infection in there or perhaps swallowed some irritant. I have some medicine in the car which will soon put him right.” Realising I was beginning to gabble, I brought my speech to a close.

Mrs. Mallard hung on every word, peering anxiously into the little dog’s mouth and nodding her head rapidly. “Oh yes, I do see,” she said. “Thank you so much. What a good thing I sent for you!”

On the following evening I was half way through a busy surgery when a fat man in a particularly vivid tweed jacket bustled in and deposited a sad-eyed Basset Hound on the table.

“Shaking his head about a bit,” he boomed. “Think he must have a touch of canker.”

I got an auroscope from the instrument cupboard and had begun to examine the ear when the fat man started again.

“I see you were out our way last night. I live next door to Mrs. Mallard.”

“Oh yes,” I said peering down the lighted metal tube. “That’s right, I was.”

The man drummed his fingers on the table for a moment. “Aye, that dog must have a lot of ailments. The vet’s car seems always to be outside the house.”

“Really, I shouldn’t have thought so. Seemed a healthy little thing to me.” I finished examining one ear and started on the other.

“Well, it’s just as I say,” said the man. “The poor creature’s always in trouble, and it’s funny how often it happens at night.”

I looked up quickly. There was something odd in the way he said that. He looked at me for a moment with a kind of wide-eyed innocence, then his whole face creased into a knowing leer.

I stared at him “You can’t mean …”

“Not with that ugly old devil, you mean, eh? Takes a bit of reckoning up, doesn’t it?” The eyes in the big red face twinkled with amusement.

I dropped the auroscope on the table with a clatter and my arms fell by my sides.

“Don’t look like that, lad!” shouted the fat man, giving me a playful punch in the chest. “It’s a rum old world, you know!”

But it wasn’t just the thought of Grier that was filling me with horror; it was the picture of myself in that harem atmosphere pontificating about pharyngitis against a background of “Body and Soul” to a woman who knew I was talking rubbish.

In another two days Angus Grier was out of bed and apparently recovered; also, a replacement assistant had been engaged and was due to take up his post immediately. I was free to go.

Having said I would leave first thing in the morning I was out of the house by 6:30 a.m. in order to make Darrowby by breakfast. I wasn’t going to face any more of that porridge.

As I drove west across the Plain of York I began to catch glimpses over the hedge tops and between the trees of the long spine of the Pennines lifting into the morning sky; they were pale violet at this distance and still hazy in the early sunshine but they beckoned to me. And later, when the little car pulled harder against the rising ground and the trees became fewer and the hedges gave way to the clean limestone walls I had the feeling I always had of the world opening out, of shackles falling away. And there, at last, was Darrowby sleeping under the familiar bulk of Herne Fell and beyond, the great green folds of the Dales.

Nothing stirred as I rattled across the cobbled market place then down the quiet street to Skeldale House with the ivy hanging in untidy profusion from its old bricks and “Siegfried Farnon M.R.C.V.S.” on the lopsided brass plate.

I think I would have galloped along the passage beyond the glass door but I had to fight my way through the family dogs, all five of them, who surged around me, leaping and barking in delight.

I almost collided with the formidable bulk of Mrs. Hall who was carrying the coffee-pot out of the dining-room. “You’re back then,” she said and I could see she was really pleased because she almost smiled. “Well, go in and get sat down. I’ve got a bit of home-cured in the pan for you.”

My hand was on the door when I heard the brothers’ voices inside. Tristan was mumbling something and Siegfried was in full cry. “Where the hell were you last night, anyway? I heard you banging about at three o’clock in the morning and your room stinks like a brewery. God, I wish you could see yourself—eyes like piss-holes in the snow!”

Smiling to myself, I pushed open the door, I went over to Tristan who stared up in surprise as I seized his hand and began to pump it; he looked as boyishly innocent as ever except for the eyes which, though a little sunken, still held their old gleam. Then I approached Siegfried at the head of the table. Obviously startled at my formal entry, he had choked in mid-chew; he reddened, tears coursed down his thin cheeks and the small sandy moustache quivered. Nevertheless, he rose from his chair, inclined his head and extended his hand with the grace of a marquis.

“Welcome, James,” he spluttered, spraying me lightly with toast crumbs. “Welcome home.”

THIRTY-SIX

I
HAD BEEN AWAY
for only two weeks but it was enough to bring it home to me afresh that working in the high country had something for me that was missing elsewhere. My first visit took me up on one of the narrow, unfenced roads which join Sildale and Cosdale and when I had ground my way to the top in bottom gear I did what I so often did—pulled the car on to the roadside turf and got out.

That quotation about not having time to stand and stare has never applied to me. I seem to have spent a good part of my life—probably too much—in just standing and staring and I was at it again this morning. From up here you could see away over the Plain of York to the sprawl of the Hambleton Hills forty miles to the east, while behind me, the ragged miles of moorland rolled away, dipping and rising over the flat fell-top. In my year at Darrowby I must have stood here scores of times and the view across the plain always looked different; sometimes in the winter the low country was a dark trough between the snow-covered Pennines and the distant white gleam of the Hambletons, and in April the rain squalls drifted in slow, heavy veils across the great green and brown dappled expanse. There was a day, too, when I stood in brilliant sunshine looking down over miles of thick fog like a rippling layer of cotton wool with dark tufts of trees and hilltops pushing through here and there.

But today the endless patchwork of fields slumbered in the sun, and the air, even on the hill, was heavy with the scents of summer. There must be people working among the farms down there, I knew, but I couldn’t see a living soul; and the peace which I always found in the silence and the emptiness of the moors filled me utterly.

At these times I often seemed to stand outside myself, calmly assessing my progress. It was easy to flick back over the years—right back to the time I had decided to become a veterinary surgeon. I could remember the very moment. I was thirteen and I was reading an article about careers for boys in the Meccano Magazine and as I read, I felt a surging conviction that this was for me. And yet what was it based upon? Only that I liked dogs and cats and didn’t care much for the idea of an office life; it seemed a frail basis on which to build a career. I knew nothing about agriculture or about farm animals and though, during the years in college, I learned about these things I could see only one future for myself; I was going to be a small animal surgeon. This lasted right up to the time I qualified—a kind of vision of treating people’s pets in my own animal hospital where everything would be not just modern but revolutionary. The fully equipped operating theatre, laboratory and X-ray room; they had all stayed crystal clear in my mind until I had graduated M.R.C.V.S.

How on earth, then, did I come to be sitting on a high Yorkshire moor in shirt sleeves and Wellingtons, smelling vaguely of cows?

The change in my outlook had come quite quickly—in fact almost immediately after my arrival in Darrowby. The job had been a godsend in those days of high unemployment, but only, I had thought, a stepping-stone to my real ambition. But everything had switched round, almost in a flash.

Maybe it was something to do with the incredible sweetness of the air which still took me by surprise when I stepped out into the old wild garden at Skeldale House every morning. Or perhaps the daily piquancy of life in the graceful old house with my gifted but mercurial boss, Siegfried, and his reluctant student brother, Tristan. Or it could be that it was just the realisation that treating cows and pigs and sheep and horses had a fascination I had never even suspected; and this brought with it a new concept of myself as a tiny wheel in the great machine of British agriculture. There was a kind of solid satisfaction in that.

Probably it was because I hadn’t dreamed there was a place like the Dales. I hadn’t thought it possible that I could spend all my days in a high, clean-blown land where the scent of grass or trees was never far away; and where even in the driving rain of winter I could snuff the air and find the freshness of growing things hidden somewhere in the cold clasp of the wind.

Anyway, it had all changed for me and my work consisted now of driving from farm to farm across the roof of England with a growing conviction that I was a privileged person.

I got back into the car and looked at my list of visits; it was good to be back and the day passed quickly. It was about seven o’clock in the evening, when I thought I had finished, that I had a call from Terry Watson, a young farm worker who kept two cows of his own. One of them, he said, had summer mastitis. Mid-July was a bit early for this but in the later summer months we saw literally hundreds of these cases; in fact a lot of the farmers called it “August Bag.” It was an unpleasant condition because it was just about incurable and usually resulted in the cow losing a quarter (the area of the udder which supplies each teat with milk) and sometimes even her life.

Terry Watson’s cow looked very sick. She had limped in from the field at milking time, swinging her right hind leg wide to keep it away from the painful udder, and now she stood trembling in her stall, her eyes staring anxiously in front of her. I drew gently at the affected teat and, instead of milk, a stream of dark, foul-smelling serum spurted into the tin can I was holding.

“No mistaking that stink, Terry,” I said. “It’s the real summer type all right.” I felt my way over the hot, swollen quarter and the cow lifted her leg quickly as I touched the tender tissue. “Pretty hard, too. It looks bad, I’m afraid.”

Terry’s face was grim as he ran his hand along the cow’s back. He was in his early twenties, had a wife and a small baby and was one of the breed who was prepared to labour all day for somebody else and then come home and start work on his own few stock. His two cows, his few pigs and hens made a big difference to somebody who had to live on thirty shillings a week.

“Ah can’t understand it,” he muttered. “It’s usually dry cows that get it and this ’uns still giving two gallons a day. I’d have been on with tar if only she’d been dry.” (The farmers used to dab the teats of the dry cows with Stockholm tar to keep off the flies which were blamed for carrying the infection.)

“No, I’m afraid all cows can get it, especially the ones that are beginning to dry off.” I pulled the thermometer from the rectum—it said a hundred and six.

“What’s going to happen, then? Can you do owt for her?”

“I’ll do what I can, Terry. I’ll give her an injection and you must strip the teat out as often as you can, but you know as well as I do that it’s a poor outlook with these jobs.”

“Aye, ah know all about it.” He watched me gloomily as I injected the Coryne pyogenes toxoid into the cow’s neck. (Even now we are still doing this for summer mastitis because it is a sad fact none of the modern range of antibiotics has much effect on it.) “She’ll lose her quarter, won’t she, and maybe she’ll even peg out?”