I found the only way to stop myself going nearly mad with boredom was to keep reminding myself what I was there for. So when I came to a gaunt red cow with a pendulous udder I straightened up and turned to the farmer.
“I’m going to take a milk sample from this one. She’s a bit hard in that left hind quarter.”
The farmer sniffed. “Please yourself. There’s nowt wrong with her but I suppose it’ll make a job for somebody.”
Squirting milk from the quarter into a two ounce bottle, I thought about Siegfried’s veterinary friend who always took a pint sample from the healthiest udder he could find to go with his lunchtime sandwiches.
I labelled the bottle and put it into the car. We had a little electric centrifuge at Skeldale House and tonight I would spin this milk and examine the sediment on a slide after staining by Ziehl-Neelsen. Probably I would find nothing but at times there was the strange excitement of peering down the microscope at a clump of bright red, iridescent T.B. bacilli. When that happened the cow was immediately slaughtered and there was always the thought that I might have lifted the death sentence from some child—the meningitis, the spinal and lung infections which were so common in those days.
Returning to the byre I finished the inspection by examining the wall in front of each cow.
The farmer watched me dourly. “What you on with now?”
“Well, if a cow has a cough you can often find some spit on the wall.” I had, in truth, found more tuberculous cows this way than any other—by scraping a little sputum on to a glass slide and then staining it as for the milk.
The modern young vet just about never sees a T.B. cow, thank heavens, but “screws” were all too common thirty years ago. There were very few in the high Pennines but in the low country on the plain you found them; the cows that “weren’t doing right,” the ones with the soft, careful cough and slightly accelerated breathing. Often they were good milkers and ate well, but they were killers and I was learning to spot them. And there were the others, the big, fat, sleek animals which could still be riddled with the disease. They were killers of a more insidious kind and nobody could pick them out. It took the tuberculin test to do that.
At the next four places I visited, the farmers had got tired of waiting for me and had turned their cows out. They had all to be brought in from the field and they came slowly and reluctantly; there was nothing like the rodeo I had had with Mr. Kay’s heifers but a lot more time was lost. The animals kept trying to turn back to the field while I sped around their flanks like a demented sheep dog; and as I panted to and fro each farmer told me the same thing—that cows only liked to come in at milking time.
Milking time did eventually come and I caught three of my herds while they were being milked, but it was after six when I came tired and hungry to my second last inspection. A hush hung over the place and after shouting my way round the buildings without finding anybody I walked over to the house.
“Is your husband in, Mrs. Bell?” I asked.
“No, he’s had to go into t’village to get the horse shod but he won’t be long before he’s back. He’s left cows in for you,” the farmer’s wife replied.
That was fine. I’d soon get through this lot. I almost ran into the byre and started the old routine, feeling sick to death of the sight and smell of cows and fed up with pawing at their udders. I was working along almost automatically when I came to a thin, rangy cow with a narrow red and white face; she could be a crossed Shorthorn-Ayrshire. I had barely touched her udder when she lashed out with the speed of light and caught me just above the kneecap.
I hopped round the byre on one leg, groaning and swearing in my agony. It was some time before I was able to limp back to have another try and this time I scratched her back and cush-cushed her in a wheedling tone before sliding my hand gingerly between her legs. The same thing happened again only this time the sharp-edged cloven foot smacked slightly higher up my leg.
Crashing back against the wall, I huddled there, almost weeping with pain and rage. After a few minutes I reached a decision. To hell with her. If she didn’t want to be examined she could take her luck. I had had enough for one day—I was in no mood for heroics.
Ignoring her, I proceeded down the byre till I had inspected the others. But I had to pass her on my way back and paused to have another look; and whether it was sheer stubbornness or whether I imagined she was laughing at me, I don’t know, but I decided to have just one more go. Maybe she didn’t like me coming from behind. Perhaps if I worked from the side she wouldn’t mind so much.
Carefully I squeezed my way between her and her neighbour, gasping as the craggy pelvic bones dug into my ribs. Once in the space beyond, I thought, I would be free to to do my job; and that was my big mistake. Because as soon as I had got there the cow went to work on me in earnest. Switching her back end round quickly to cut off my way of escape, she began to kick me systematically from head to foot. She kicked forward, reaching at times high on my chest as I strained back against the wall.
Since then I have been kicked by an endless variety of cows in all sorts of situations but never by such an expert as this one. There must be very few really venomous bovines and when one of them uses her feet it is usually an instinctive reaction to being hurt or frightened; and they kick blindly. But this cow measured me up before each blow and her judgement of distance was beautiful. And as she drove me further towards her head she was able to hook me in the back with her horns by way of variety. I am convinced she hated the human race.
My plight was desperate. I was completely trapped and it didn’t help when the apparently docile cow next door began to get into the act by prodding me off with her horns as I pressed against her.
I don’t know what made me look up, but there, in the thick wall of the byre was a hole about two feet square where some of the crumbling stone had fallen out. I pulled myself up with an agility that amazed me and as I crawled through head first a sweet fragrance came up to me. I was looking into a hay barn and, seeing a deep bed of finest clover just below I launched myself into space and did a very creditable roll in the air before landing safely on my back.
Lying there, bruised and breathless, with the front of my coat thickly patterned with claw marks I finally abandoned any lingering illusions I had had that Ministry work was a soft touch.
I was rising painfully to my feet when Mr. Bell strolled in. “Sorry ah had to go out,” he said, looking me over with interest, “But I’d just about given you up. You’re ’ellish late.”
I dusted myself down and picked a few strands of hay from my hair. “Yes, sorry about that. But never mind, I managed to get the job done.”
“But … were you havin’ a bit of a kip, then?”
“No, not exactly, I had some trouble with one of your cows.” There wasn’t much point in standing on my dignity. I told him the story.
Even the friendliest farmer seems to derive pleasure from a vet’s discomfiture and Mr. Bell listened with an ever-widening grin of delight. By the time I had finished he was doubled up, beating his breeches knees with his hands.
“I can just imagine it. That Ayrshire cross! She’s a right bitch. Picked her up cheap at market last spring and thought ah’d got a bargain, but ah soon found out. Took us a fortnight to get bugger tied up!”
“Well, I just wish I’d known,” I said, rather tight lipped.
The farmer looked up at the hole in the wall. “And you crawled through …” he went into another convulsion which lasted some time, then he took off his cap and wiped his eyes with the lining.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” he murmured weakly. “By gaw, I wish I’d been here.”
My last call was just outside Darrowby and I could hear the church clock striking a quarter past seven as I got stiffly out of the car. After my easy day in the service of the government I felt broken in mind and body; I had to suppress a scream when I saw yet another long line of cows’ backsides awaiting me. The sun was low, and dark thunder clouds piling up in the we
st had thrown the countryside into an eerie darkness; and in the old-fashioned, slit-windowed byre the animals looked shapeless and ill-defined in the gloom.
Right, no messing about. I was going to make a quick job of this and get off home; home to some food and an armchair. I had no further ambitions. So left hand on the root of the tail, right hand between the hind legs, a quick feel around and on to the next one. Eyes half closed, my mind numb, I moved from cow to cow going through the motions like a robot with the far end of the byre seeming like the promised land.
And finally here it was, the very last one up against the wall. Left hand on tail, right hand between legs … At first my tired brain didn’t take in the fact that there was something different here, but there was … something vastly different. A lot of space and instead of the udder a deeply cleft, pendulous something with no teats anywhere.
I came awake suddenly and looked along the animal’s side. A huge woolly head was turned towards me and two wide-set eyes regarded me enquiringly. In the dull light I could just see the gleam of the copper ring in the nose.
The farmer who had watched me in silence, spoke up.
“You’re wasting your time there, young man. There’s nowt wrong wi’ HIS bag.”
FORTY-THREE
THE CARD DANGLED ABOVE the old lady’s bed. It read “God is Near” but it wasn’t like the usual religious text. It didn’t have a frame or ornate printing. It was just a strip of cardboard about eight inches long with plain lettering which might have said “No smoking” or “Exit” and it was looped carelessly over an old gas bracket so that Miss Stubbs from where she lay could look up at it and read “God is Near” in square black capitals.
There wasn’t much more Miss Stubbs could see; perhaps a few feet of privet hedge through the frayed curtains but mainly it was just the cluttered little room which had been her world for so many years.
The room was on the ground floor and in the front of the cottage, and as I came up through the wilderness which had once been a garden I could see the dogs watching me from where they had jumped on to the old lady’s bed. And when I knocked on the door the place almost erupted with their barking. It was always like this. I had been visiting regularly for over a year and the pattern never changed; the furious barking, then Mrs. Broadwith who looked after Miss Stubbs would push all the animals but my patient into the back kitchen and open the door and I would go in and see Miss Stubbs in the corner in her bed with the card hanging over it.
She had been there for a long time and would never get up again. But she never mentioned her illness and pain to me; all her concern was for her three dogs and two cats.
Today it was old Prince and I was worried about him. It was his heart—just about the most spectacular valvular incompetence I had ever heard. He was waiting for me as I came in, pleased as ever to see me, his long, fringed tail waving gently.
The sight of that tail used to make me think there must be a lot of Irish Setter in Prince but I was inclined to change my mind as I worked my way forward over the bulging black and white body to the shaggy head and upstanding Alsatian ears. Miss Stubbs often used to call him “Mr. Heinz” and though he may not have had 57 varieties in him his hybrid vigour had stood him in good stead. With his heart he should have been dead long ago.
“I thought I’d best give you a ring, Mr. Herriot,” Mrs. Broadwith said. She was a comfortable, elderly widow with a square, ruddy face contrasting sharply with the pinched features on the pillow. “He’s been coughing right bad this week and this morning he was a bit staggery. Still eats well, though.”
“I bet he does.” I ran my hands over the rolls of fat on the ribs. “It would take something really drastic to put old Prince off his grub.”
Miss Stubbs laughed from the bed and the old dog, his mouth wide, eyes dancing, seemed to be joining in the joke. I put my stethoscope over his heart and listened, knowing well what I was going to hear. They say the heart is supposed to go “Lub-dup, lub-dup,” but Prince’s went “swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh. “There seemed to be nearly as much blood leaking back as was being pumped into the circulatory system. And another thing, the “swish-swoosh” was a good bit faster than last time; he was on oral digitalis but it wasn’t quite doing its job.
Gloomily I moved the stethoscope over the rest of the chest. Like all old dogs with a chronic heart weakness he had an ever-present bronchitis and I listened without enthusiasm to the symphony of whistles, rales, squeaks and bubbles which signalled the workings of Prince’s lungs. The old dog stood very erect and proud, his tail still waving slowly. He always took it as a tremendous compliment when I examined him and there was no doubt he was enjoying himself now. Fortunately his was not a very painful ailment.
Straightening up, I patted his head and he responded immediately by trying to put his paws on my chest. He didn’t quite make it and even that slight exertion started his ribs heaving and his tongue lolling. I gave him an intramuscular injection of digitalin and another of morphine hydrochloride which he accepted with apparent pleasure as part of the game.
“I hope that will steady his heart and breathing, Miss Stubbs. You’ll find he’ll be a bit dopey for the rest of the day and that will help, too. Carry on with the tablets, and I’m going to leave you some more medicine for his bronchitis.” I handed over a bottle of my old standby mixture of ipecacuanha and ammonium acetate.
The next stage of the visit began now as Mrs. Broadwith brought in a cup of tea and the rest of the animals were let out of the kitchen. There were Ben, a Sealyham, and Sally, a Cocker Spaniel, and they started a deafening barking contest with Prince. They were closely followed by the cats, Arthur and Susie, who stalked in gracefully and began to rub themselves against my trouser legs.
It was the usual scenario for the many cups of tea I had drunk with Miss Stubbs under the little card which dangled above her bed.
“How are you today?” I asked.
“Oh, much better,” she replied and immediately, as always, changed the subject.
Mostly she liked to talk about her pets and the ones she had known right back to her girlhood. She spoke a lot, too, about the days when her family were alive. She loved to describe the escapades of her three brothers and today she showed me a photograph which Mrs. Broadwith had found at the bottom of a drawer.
I took it from her and three young men in the knee breeches and little round caps of the nineties smiled up at me from the yellowed old print; they all held long church warden pipes and the impish humour in their expressions came down undimmed over the years.
“My word, they look really bright lads, Miss Stubbs,” I said.
“Oh, they were young rips!” she exclaimed. She threw back her head and laughed and for a moment her face was radiant, transfigured by her memories.
The things I had heard in the village came back to me; about the prosperous father and his family who lived in the big house many years ago. Then the foreign investments which crashed and the sudden change in circumstances. “When t’owd feller died he was about skint,” one old man had said. “There’s not much brass there now.”
Probably just enough brass to keep Miss Stubbs and her animals alive and to pay Mrs. Broadwith. Not enough to keep the garden dug or the house painted or for any of the normal little luxuries.
And, sitting there, drinking my tea, with the dogs in a row by the bedside and the cats making themselves comfortable on the bed itself, I felt as I had often felt before—a bit afraid of the responsibility I had. The one thing which brought some light into the life of the brave old woman was the transparent devotion of this shaggy bunch whose eyes were never far from her face. And the snag was that they were all elderly.
There had, in fact, been four dogs originally, but one of them, a truly ancient golden Labrador, had died a few months previously. And now I had the rest of them to look after and none of them less than ten years old.
They were perky enough but all showing some of the signs of old age; Prince with his heart, Sally begi
nning to drink a lot of water which made me wonder if she was starting with a pyometra, Ben growing steadily thinner with his nephritis. I couldn’t give him new kidneys and I hadn’t much faith in the hexamine tablets I had prescribed. Another peculiar thing about Ben was that I was always having to clip his claws; they grew at an extraordinary rate.
The cats were better, though Susie was a bit scraggy and I kept up a morbid kneading of her furry abdomen for signs of lymphosarcoma. Arthur was the best of the bunch; he never seemed to ail anything beyond a tendency for his teeth to tartar up.
This must have been in Miss Stubbs’ mind because, when I had finished my tea, she asked me to look at him. I hauled him across the bedspread and opened his mouth.
“Yes, there’s a bit of the old trouble there. Might as well fix it while I’m here.”
Arthur was a huge, grey, neutered Tom, a living denial of all those theories that cats are cold-natured, selfish and the rest. His fine eyes, framed in the widest cat face I have ever seen, looked out on the world with an all-embracing benevolence and tolerance. His every movement was marked by immense dignity.
As I started to scrape his teeth his chest echoed with a booming purr like a distant outboard motor. There was no need for anybody to hold him; he sat there placidly and moved only once—when I was using forceps to crack off a tough piece of tartar from a back tooth and accidentally nicked his gum. He casually raised a massive paw as if to say “Have a care, chum,” but his claws were sheathed.
My next visit was less man a month later and was in response to an urgent summons from Mrs. Broadwith at six o’clock in the evening. Ben had collapsed. I jumped straight into my car and in less than ten minutes was threading my way through the overgrown grass in the front garden with the animals watching from their window. The barking broke out as I knocked, but Ben’s was absent. As I went into the little room I saw the old dog lying on his side, very still, by the bed.