All Creatures Great and Small (46 page)

“But James, why should there be any inflammation there? Don’t you think the liniment would do more good on the chest wall?” Siegfried was wearing his patient look again.

“No, I don’t. Not in a case of calf diphtheria.”

Siegfried put his head on one side and a smile of saintly sweetness crept over his face. He laid his hand on my shoulder. “My dear old James, perhaps it would be a good idea if you started right at the beginning. Take all the time you want—there’s no hurry. Speak slowly and calmly and then you won’t become confused. You told me you were treating a calf with pneumonia—now take it from there.”

I thrust my hands deep into my coat pockets and began to churn among the thermometers and scissors and little bottles which always dwelt there. “Look, I told you right at the start that I didn’t think there was any pneumonia but that I suspected early diphtheria. There was also a bit of fever—103.”

Siegfried was looking past me at the window. “God, just look at that snow. We’re going to have some fun getting round today.” He dragged his eyes back to my face. “Don’t you think that with a temperature of 103 you should be injecting some Prontosil?” He raised his arms sideways and let them fall. “Just a suggestion, James—I wouldn’t interfere for the world but I honestly think that the situation calls for a little Prontosil.”

“But hell, I am using it!” I shouted. “I told you that way back but you weren’t listening. I’ve been doing my damnedest to get this across to you but what chance have I got …”

“Come come, dear boy, come come. No need to upset yourself.” Siegfried’s face was transfigured by an internal radiance. Sweetness and charity, forgiveness, tolerance and affection flowed from him in an enveloping wave. I battled with an impulse to kick him swiftly on the shin.

“James, James.” The voice was caressing. “I’ve not the slightest doubt you tried in your own way to tell me about this case, but we haven’t all got the gift of communication. You’re the most excellent fellow but must apply yourself to this. It is simply a matter of marshalling your facts and presenting them in an orderly manner. Then you wouldn’t get confused and mixed up as you’ve done this morning; it’s only a question of practice, I’m sure.” He gave an encouraging wave of the hand and was gone.

I strode quickly through to the stock room and, seeing a big, empty cardboard box on the floor, dealt it a vicious kick. I put so much venom into it that my foot went clear through the cardboard and I was trying to free myself when Tristan came in. He had been stoking the fire and had witnessed the conversation.

He watched silently as I plunged about the room swearing and trying to shake the box loose. “What’s up, Jim? Has my big brother been getting under your skin?”

I got rid of the box at last and sank down on one of the lower shelves. “I don’t know. Why should he begetting under my skin now? I’ve known him quite a long time and he’s always been the same. He’s never been any different but it hasn’t bothered me before—not like this, anyway. Any other time I’d laugh that sort of thing off. What the hell’s wrong with me?”

Tristan put down his coal bucket and looked at me thoughtfully. “There’s nothing much wrong with you, Jim, but I can tell you one thing—you’ve been just a bit edgy since you went out with the Alderson woman.”

“Oh God,” I groaned and closed my eyes. “Don’t remind me. Anyway, I’ve not seen her or heard from her since, so that’s the end of that and I can’t blame her.”

Tristan pulled out his Woodbines and squatted down by the coal bucket. “Yes, that’s all very well, but look at you. You’re suffering and there’s no need for it. All right, you had a disastrous night and she’s given you the old heave ho. Well, so what? Do you know how many times I’ve been spurned?”

“Spurned? I never even got started.”

“Very well then, but you’re still going around like a bullock with bellyache. Forget it, lad, and get out into the big world. The rich tapestry of life is waiting for you out there. I’ve been watching you—working all hours and when you’re not working you’re reading up your cases in the text books—and I tell you this dedicated vet thing is all right up to a point. But you’ve got to live a little. Think of all the lovely little lasses in Darrowby—you can hardly move for them. And every one just waiting for a big handsome chap like you to gallop up on his white horse. Don’t disappoint them.” He leaned over and slapped my knee. “Tell you what. Why don’t you let me fix something up? A nice little foursome—just what you need.”

“Ach I don’t know. I’m not keen, really.”

“Nonsense!” Tristan said. “I don’t know why I haven’t thought of it before. This monkish existence is bad for you. Leave all the details to me.”

I decided to have an early night and was awakened around eleven o’clock by a heavy weight crashing down on the bed. The room was dark but I seemed to be enveloped in beer-scented smoke. I coughed and sat up. “Is that you, Triss?”

“It is indeed,” said the shadowy figure on the end of the bed. “And I bring you glad tidings. You remember Brenda?”

“That little nurse I’ve seen you around with?”

“The very same. Well, she’s got a pal, Connie, who’s even more beautiful. The four of us are going dancing at the Poulton Institute on Tuesday night” The voice was thick with beery triumph.

“You mean me, too?”

“By God I do, and you’re going to have the best time you’ve ever had. I’ll see to that.” He blew a last choking blast of smoke into my face and left, chuckling.

FIFTY-THREE

“W
E’RE HAVING A ’OT
dinner and entertainers.”

My reaction to the words surprised me. They stirred up a mixture of emotions, all of them pleasant; fulfilment, happy acceptance, almost triumph.

I know by now that there is not the slightest chance of anybody asking me to be President of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, but if they had, I wonder if I’d have been more pleased than when I heard about the ’ot dinner.

The reason, I suppose, was that the words reflected the attitude of a typical Dales farmer towards myself. And this was important because, though after just over a year I was becoming accepted as a vet, I was always conscious of the gulf which was bound to exist between these hill folk and a city product like me. Much as I admired them I was aware always that we were different; it was inevitable, I knew, but it still rankled so that a sincere expression of friendship from one of them struck a deep answering chord in me.

Especially when it came from somebody like Dick Rudd. I had first met Dick last winter on the doorstep of Skeldale House at six o’clock on the kind of black morning when country vets wonder about their choice of profession. Shivering as the ever-present passage draught struck at my pyjamaed legs, I switched on the light and opened the door. I saw a small figure muffled in an old army greatcoat and balaclava leaning on a bicycle. Beyond him the light spilled onto a few feet of streaming pavement where the rain beat down in savage swathes.

“Sorry to ring your bell at this hour, guvnor,” he said. “My name’s Rudd, Birch Tree Farm, Coulston. I’ve got a heifer calvin’ and she’s not getting on with t’job. Will you come?”

I looked closer at the thin face, at the water trickling down the cheeks and dripping from the end of the nose. “Right, I’ll get dressed and come straight along. But why don’t you leave your bike here and come with me in the car? Coulston’s about four miles isn’t it and you must be soaked through.”

“Nay, nay, it’ll be right.” The face broke into the most cheerful of grins and under the sopping balaclava a pair of lively blue eyes glinted at me. “I’d only have to come back and get it another time. I’ll get off now and you won’t be there long afore me.”

He mounted his bike quickly and pedalled away. People who think farming is a pleasant, easy life should have been there to see the hunched figure disappear into the blackness and the driving rain. No car, no telephone, a night up with the heifer, eight miles biking in the rain and a back-breaking day ahead of him. Whenever I thought of the existence of the small farmer it made my own occasional bursts of activity seem small stuff indeed.

I produced a nice live heifer calf for Dick that first morning and later, gratefully drinking a cup of hot tea in the farmhouse kitchen, I was surprised at the throng of young Rudds milling around me; there were seven of them and they were unexpectedly grown up. Their ages ranged from twenty odd down to about ten and I hadn’t thought of Dick as middle-aged; in the dim light of the doorway at Skeldale House and later in the byre lit only by a smoke-blackened oil lamp his lively movements and perky manner had seemed those of a man in his thirties. But as I looked at him now I could see that the short, wiry hair was streaked with grey and a maze of fine wrinkles spread from around his eyes onto his cheeks.

In their early married life the Rudds, anxious like all farmers for male children, had observed with increasing chagrin the arrival of five successive daughters. “We nearly packed up then,” Dick confided to me once; but they didn’t and their perseverance was rewarded at last by the appearance of two fine boys. A farmer farms for his sons and Dick had something to work for now.

As I came to know them better I used to observe the family with wonder. The five girls were all tall, big-limbed, handsome, and already the two chunky young boys gave promise of massive growth. I kept looking from them to their frail little parents—“not a pickin’ on either of us,” as Mrs. Rudd used to say—and wonder how the miracle had happened.

It puzzled me, too, how Mrs. Rudd, armed only with the milk cheque from Dick’s few shaggy cows, had managed to feed them all, never mind bring them to this state of physical perfection. I gained my first clue one day when I had been seeing some calves and I was asked to have a “bit o’ dinner” with them. Butcher’s meat was a scarce commodity on the hill farms and I was familiar with the usual expedients for filling up the eager stomachs before the main course—the doughy slab of Yorkshire pudding or the heap of suet dumplings. But Mrs. Rudd had her own method—a big bowl of rice pudding with lots of milk was her
hors d’oeuvres.
It was a new one on me and I could see the family slowing down as they ploughed their way through. I was ravenous when I sat down but after the rice I viewed the rest of the meal with total detachment.

Dick believed in veterinary advice for everything so I was a frequent visitor at Birch Tree Farm. After every visit there was an unvarying ritual; I was asked into the house for a cup of tea and the whole family downed tools and sat down to watch me drink it. On weekdays the eldest girl was out at work and the boys were at school but on Sundays the ceremony reached its full splendour with myself sipping the tea and all nine Rudds sitting around in what I can only call an admiring circle. My every remark was greeted with nods and smiles all round. There is no doubt it was good for my ego to have an entire family literally hanging on my words, but at the same time it made me feel curiously humble.

I suppose it was because of Dick’s character. Not that he was unique in any way—there were thousands of small farmers just like him—but he seemed to embody the best qualities of the Dalesman; the indestructibility, the tough philosophy, the unthinking generosity and hospitality. And there were the things that were Dick’s own; the integrity which could be read always in his steady eyes and the humour which was never very far away. Dick was no wit but he was always trying to say ordinary things in a funny way. If I asked him to get hold of a cow’s nose for me he would say solemnly “Ah’ll endeavour to do so,” or I remember when I was trying to lift a square of plywood which was penning a calf in a corner he said “Just a minute till ah raise portcullis.” When he broke into a smile a kind of radiance flooded his pinched features.

When I held my audiences in the kitchen with all the family reflecting Dick’s outlook in their eager laughter I marvelled at their utter contentment with their lot. None of them had known ease or softness but it didn’t matter; and they looked on me as a friend and I was proud.

Whenever I left the farm I found something on the seat of my car—a couple of home-made scones, three eggs. I don’t know how Mrs. Rudd spared them but she never failed.

Dick had a burning ambition—to upgrade his stock until he had a dairy herd which would live up to his ideals. Without money behind him he knew it would be a painfully slow business but he was determined. It probably wouldn’t be in his own lifetime but some time, perhaps when his sons were grown up, people would come and look with admiration at the cows of Birch Tree.

I was there to see the very beginning of it. When Dick stopped me on the road one morning and asked me to come up to his place with him I knew by his air of suppressed excitement that something big had happened. He led me into the byre and stood silent. He didn’t need to say anything because I was staring unbelievingly at a bovine aristocrat.

Dick’s cows had been scratched together over the years and they were a motley lot. Many of them were old animals discarded by more prosperous farmers because of their pendulous udders or because they were “three titted ’uns.” Others had been reared by Dick from calves and tended to be rough-haired and scruffy. But half way down the byre, contrasting almost violently with her neighbours was what seemed to me a perfect Dairy Shorthorn cow.

In these days when the Friesian has surged over England in a black and white flood and inundated even the Dales which were the very home of the Shorthorn, such cows as I looked at that day at Dick Rudd’s are no longer to be seen, but she represented all the glory and pride of her breed. The wide pelvis tapering to fine shoulders and a delicate head, the level udder thrusting back between the hind legs, and the glorious colour—dark roan. That was what they used to call a “good colour” and whenever I delivered a dark roan calf the farmer would say “It’s a good-coloured ’un,” and it would be more valuable accordingly. The geneticists are perfectly right, of course: the dark roaned cows gave no more milk than the reds or the whites, but we loved them and they were beautiful.

“Where did she come from, Dick?” I said, still staring.