All Creatures Great and Small (49 page)

Siegfried seated him strategically by Miss Harbottle’s elbow, giving him an unimpeded view of the desk. Then he excused himself, saying he had a dog to attend to in the operating room. I stayed behind to answer the clients’ queries and to watch developments. I hadn’t long to wait; the farmers began to come in, a steady stream of them, clutching their cheque books. Some of them stood patiently by the desk, others sat in the chairs along the walls waiting their turn.

It was a typical bill-paying day with the usual quota of moans. The most common expression was that Mr. Farnon had been “ower heavy wi’ t’pen” and many of them wanted a “bit knockin’ off.” Miss Harbottle used her discretion in these matters and if the animal had died or the bill did seem unduly large she would make some reduction.

There was one man who didn’t get away with it. He had truculently demanded a “bit of luck” on an account and Miss Harbottle fixed him with a cold eye.

“Mr. Brewiss,” she said. “This account has been owing for over a year. You should really be paying us interest. I can only allow discount when a bill is paid promptly. It’s too bad of you to let it run on for this length of time.”

Dennis, sitting bolt upright, his hands resting on his knees, obviously agreed with every word. He pursed his lips in disapproval as he looked at the farmer and turned towards me with a positively scandalised expression.

Among the complaints was an occasional bouquet. A stooping old man who had received one of the polite letters was full of apologies. “I’m sorry I’ve missed paying for a few months. The vets allus come out straight away when I send for them so I reckon it’s not fair for me to keep them waiting for their money.”

I could see that Dennis concurred entirely with this sentiment. He nodded vigorously and smiled benevolently at the old man.

Another farmer, a hard-looking character, was walking out without his receipt when Miss Harbottle called him back. “You’d better take this with you or we might ask you to pay again,” she said with a heavy attempt at roguishness.

The man paused with his hand on the door knob. “I’ll tell you summat, missis, you’re bloody lucky to get it once—you’d never get it twice.”

Dennis was right in the thick of it all. Watching closely as the farmers slapped their cheque books on the desk for Miss Harbottle to write (they never wrote their own cheques) then signed them slowly and painstakingly. He looked with open fascination at the neat bundles of notes being tucked away in the desk drawer and I kept making little provocative remarks like “It’s nice to see the money coming in. We can’t carry on without that, can we?”

The queue began to thin out and sometimes we were left alone in the room. On these occasions we conversed about many things—the weather, Dennis’s stock, the political situation. Finally, Siegfried came in and I left to do a round.

When I got back, Siegfried was at his evening meal. I was eager to hear how his scheme had worked out but he was strangely reticent. At length I could wait no longer.

“Well, how did it go?” I asked.

Siegfried speared a piece of steak with his fork and applied some mustard. “How did what go?”

“Well—Dennis. How did you make out with him?”

“Oh, fine. We went into his mastitis problem very thoroughly. I’m going out there on Tuesday morning to infuse every infected quarter in the herd with acriflavine solution. It’s a new treatment—they say it’s very good.”

“But you know what I mean. Did he show any sign of paying his bill?”

Siegfried chewed impassively for a few moments and swallowed. “No, never a sign.” He put down his knife and fork and a haggard look spread over his face. “It didn’t work, did it?”

“Oh well, never mind. As you said, we could only try.” I hesitated. “There’s something else, Siegfried. I’m afraid you’re going to be annoyed with me. I know you’ve told me never to dish out stuff to people who don’t pay, but he talked me into letting him have a couple of bottles of fever drink. I don’t know what came over me.”

“He did, did he?” Siegfried stared into space for a second then gave a wintry smile. “Well, you can forget about that. He got six tins of stomach powder out of me.”

FIFTY-SIX

T
HERE WAS ONE CLIENT
who would not have been invited to the debtors’ cocktail party. He was Mr. Horace Dumbleby, the butcher of Aldgrove. As an inveterate non-payer he fulfilled the main qualification for the function but he was singularly lacking in charm.

His butcher shop in the main street of picturesque Aldgrove village was busy and prosperous but most of his trade was done in the neighbouring smaller villages and among the scattered farmhouses of the district. Usually the butcher’s wife and married daughter looked after the shop while Mr. Dumbleby himself did the rounds. I often saw his blue van standing with the back doors open and a farmer’s wife waiting while he cut the meat, his big, shapeless body hunched over the slab. Sometimes he would look up and I would catch a momentary glimpse of a huge, bloodhound face and melancholy eyes.

Mr. Dumbleby was a farmer himself in a small way. He sold milk from six cows which he kept in a tidy little byre behind his shop and he fattened a few bullocks and pork pigs which later appeared as sausages, pies, roasting cuts and chops in his front window. In fact Mr. Dumbleby seemed to be very nicely fixed and it was said he owned property all over the place. But Siegfried had only infrequent glimpses of his money.

All the slow payers had one thing in common—they would not tolerate slowness from the vets. When they were in trouble they demanded immediate action. “Will you come at once?,” “How long will you be?,” “You won’t keep me waiting, will you?,” “I want you to come out here straight away.” It used to alarm me to see the veins swelling on Siegfried’s forehead, the knuckles whitening as he gripped the phone.

After one such session with Mr. Dumbleby at ten o’clock on a Sunday night he had flown into a rage and unleashed the full fury of the P.N.S. system on him. It had no loosening effect on the butcher’s purse strings but it did wound his feelings deeply. He obviously considered himself a wronged man. From that time on, whenever I saw him with his van out in the country he would turn slowly and direct a blank stare at me till I was out of sight. And strangely, I seemed to see him more and more often—the thing became unnerving.

And there was something worse. Tristan and I used to frequent the little Aldgrove pub where the bar was cosy and the beer measured up to Tristan’s stringent standards. I had never taken much notice of Mr. Dumbleby before although he always occupied the same corner, but now, every time I looked up, the great sad eyes were trained on me in disapproval. I tried to forget about him and listen to Tristan relating his stories from the backs of envelopes but all the time I could feel that gaze upon me. My laughter would trail away and I would have to look round. Then the excellent bitter would be as vinegar in my mouth.

In an attempt to escape, I took to visiting the snug instead of the bar and Tristan, showing true nobility of soul, came with me into an environment which was alien to him; where there was a carpet on the floor, people sitting around at little shiny tables drinking gin and hardly a pint in sight. But even this sacrifice was in vain because Mr. Dumbleby changed his position in the bar so that he could look into the snug through the communicating hatch. The odd hours I was able to spend there took on a macabre quality. I was like a man trying desperately to forget. But quaff the beer as I might, laugh, talk, even sing, half of me was waiting in a state of acute apprehension for the moment when I knew I would have to look round. And when I did, the great sombre face looked even more forbidding framed by the wooden surround of the hatch. The hanging jowls, the terraced chins, the huge, brooding eyes—all were dreadfully magnified by their isolation in that little hole in the wall.

It was no good, I had to stop going to the place. This was very sad because Tristan used to wax lyrical about a certain unique, delicate nuttiness which he could discern in the draught bitter. But it had lost its joy for me; I just couldn’t take any more of Mr. Dumbleby.

In fact I did my best to forget all about the gentleman, but he was brought back forcibly into my mind when I heard his voice on the phone at 3 a.m. one morning. It was nearly always the same thing when the bedside phone exploded in your ear in the small hours—a calving.

Mr. Dumbleby’s call was no exception but he was more peremptory than might have been expected. There was no question about apologising about ringing at such an hour as most farmers would do. I said I would come immediately but that wasn’t good enough—he wanted to know exactly in minutes how long I would be. In a sleepy attempt at sarcasm I started to recite a programme of so many minutes to get up and dressed, so many to go downstairs and get the car out etc. but I fear it was lost on him.

When I drove into the sleeping village a light was showing in the window of the butcher’s shop. Mr. Dumbleby almost trotted out into the street and paced up and down, muttering, as I fished out my ropes and instruments from the boot. Very impatient, I thought, for a man who hadn’t paid his vet bill for over a year.

We had to go through the shop to get to the byre in the rear. My patient was a big, fat white cow which didn’t seem particularly perturbed by her situation. Now and then she strained, pushing a pair of feet a few inches from her vulva. I took a keen look at those feet—it is the vet’s first indication of how tough the job is going to be. Two huge hooves sticking out of a tiny heifer have always been able to wipe the smile off my face. These feet were big enough but not out of the way, and in truth the mother looked sufficiently roomy. I wondered what was stopping the natural sequence.

“I’ve had me hand in,” said Mr. Dumbleby. “There’s a head there but I can’t shift owt. I’ve been pulling them legs for half an hour.”

As I stripped to the waist (it was still considered vaguely cissy to wear a calving overall) I reflected that things could be a lot worse. So many of the buildings where I had to take my shirt off were primitive and draughty but this was a modern cow house and the six cows provided a very adequate central heating. And there was electricity in place of the usual smoke-blackened oil lamp.

When I had soaped and disinfected my arms I made my first exploration and it wasn’t difficult to find the cause of the trouble.

There was a head and two legs all right, but they belonged to different calves.

“We’ve got twins here,” I said. “These are hind legs you’ve been pulling—a posterior presentation.”

“Arse fust, you mean?”

“If you like. And the calf that’s coming the right way has both his legs back along his sides. I’ll have to push him back out of the way and get the other one first.”

This was going to be a pretty tight squeeze. Normally I like a twin calving because the calves are usually so small, but these seemed to be quite big. I put my hand against the little muzzle in the passage, poked a finger into the mouth and was rewarded by a jerk and flip of the tongue; he was alive, anyway.

I began to push him steadily back into the uterus, wondering at the same time what the little creature was making of it all. He had almost entered the world—his nostrils had been a couple of inches from the outside air—and now he was being returned to the starting post.

The cow didn’t think much of the idea either because she started a series of straining heaves with the object of frustrating me. She did a pretty fair job, too, since a cow is a lot stronger than a man, but I kept my arm rigid against the calf and though each heave forced me back I maintained a steady pressure till I had pushed him to the brim of the pelvis.

I turned to Mr. Dumbleby and gasped: “I’ve got this head out of the way. Get hold of those feet and pull the other calf out.”

The butcher stepped forward ponderously and each of his big, meaty hands engulfed a foot. Then he closed his eyes and with many facial contortions and noises of painful effort he began to go through the motions of tugging. The calf didn’t move an inch and my spirits drooped. Mr. Dumbleby was a grunter. (This expression had its origin in an occasion when Siegfried and a farmer had a foot apiece at a calving and the farmer was making pitiful sounds without exerting himself in the slightest. Siegfried had turned to him and said: “Look, let’s come to an arrangement—you do the pulling and I’ll do the grunting.”)

It was clear I was going to get no help from the big butcher and decided to have one go by myself. I might be lucky. I let go the muzzle and made a quick grab for those hind feet, but the cow was too quick for me. I had just got a slippery grasp when she made a single expulsive effort and pushed calf number two into the passage again. I was back where I started.

Once more I put my hand against the wet little muzzle and began the painful process of repulsion. And as I fought against the big cow’s straining I was reminded that it was 4 a.m. when none of us feels very strong. By the time I had worked the head back to the pelvic inlet I was feeling the beginning of that deadly creeping weakness and it seemed as though somebody had removed most of the bones from my arm.

This time I took a few seconds to get my breath back before I made my dive for the feet, but it was no good. The cow beat me easily with a beautifully timed contraction. Again that intruding head was jammed tight in the passage.

I had had enough. And it occurred to me that the little creature inside must also be getting a little tired of this back and forth business. I shivered my way through the cold, empty shop out into the silent street and collected the local anaesthetic from the car. Eight cc’s into the epidural space and the cow, its uterus completely numbed, lost all interest in the proceedings. In fact she pulled a little hay from her rack and began to chew absently.

From then on it was like working inside a mail bag; whatever I pushed stayed put instead of surging back at me. The only snag was that once I had got everything straight there were no uterine contractions to help me. It was a case of pulling. Leaning back on a hind leg and with Mr. Dumbleby panting in agony on the other, the posterior presentation was soon delivered. He had inhaled a fair amount of placental fluid but I held him upside down till he had coughed it up. When I laid him on the byre floor he shook his head vigorously and tried to sit up.