“Now then, laddie,” he cried at length, putting a heaped plate at my elbow. “Get yourself round that lot.” He took his own supply and collapsed with a sigh into another chair.
He took a gargantuan bite and spoke as he chewed. “You know, Jim, this is something I enjoy—a nice little snack. Zoe always leaves me plenty to go at when she pops out.” He engulfed a further few inches of sandwich. “And I’ll tell you something, though I say it myself, these are bloody good, don’t you think so?”
“Yes indeed.” Squaring my shoulders I bit, swallowed and held my breath as another unwanted foreign body slid down to the ferment below.
Just then I heard the front door open.
“Ah, that’ll be Zoe,” Granville said and was about to rise when a disgracefully fat Staffordshire Bull Terrier burst into the room, waddled across the carpet and leaped into his lap.
“Phoebles, my dear, come to daddykins!” he shouted. “Have you had nice walkies with mummy?”
The Staffordshire was closely followed by a Yorkshire Terrier which was also enthusiastically greeted by Granville.
“Yoo-hoo, Victoria, Yoo-hoo!”
The Yorkie, an obvious smiler, did not jump up but contented herself with sitting at her master’s feet, baring her teeth ingratiatingly every few seconds.
I smiled through my pain. Another myth exploded; the one about these specialist small animal vets not being fond of dogs themselves. The big man crooned over the two little animals. The fact that he called Phoebe “Phoebles” was symptomatic.
I heard light footsteps in the hall and looked up expectantly. I had Granville’s wife typed neatly in my mind; domesticated, devoted, homely; many of these dynamic types had wives like that, willing slaves content to lurk in the background. I waited confidently for the entrance of a plain little hausfrau.
When the door opened I almost let my vast sandwich fall. Zoe Bennett was a glowing warm beauty who would make any man alive stop for another look. A lot of soft brown hair, large grey-green friendly eyes, a tweed suit sitting sweetly on a slim but not too slim figure; and something else, a wholesomeness, an inner fight which made me wish suddenly that I was a better man or at least that I looked better than I did.
In an instant I was acutely conscious of the fact that my shoes were dirty, that my old jacket and corduroy trousers were out of place here. I hadn’t troubled to change but had rushed straight out in my working clothes, and they were different from Granville’s because I couldn’t go round the farms in a suit like his.
“My love, my love!” he carolled joyously as his wife bent over and kissed him fondly. “Let me introduce Jim Herriot from Darrowby.”
The beautiful eyes turned on me.
“How d’you do, Mr. Herriot!” she looked as pleased to see me as her husband had done and again I had the desperate wish that I was more presentable; that my hair was combed, that I didn’t have this mounting conviction that I was going to explode into a thousand pieces at any moment.
“I’m going to have a cup of tea, Mr. Herriot. Would you like one?”
“No-no, no, no, thank you very much but no, no, not at the moment.” I backed away slightly.
“Ah well, I see you’ve got one of Granville’s little sandwiches.” She giggled and went to get her tea.
When she came back she handed a parcel to her husband. “I’ve been shopping today, darling. Picked up some of those shirts you like so much.”
“My sweet! How kind of you!” He began to tear at the brown paper like a schoolboy and produced three elegant shirts in cellophane covers. “They’re marvellous, my pet, you spoil me.” He looked up at me. “Jim! These are the most wonderful shirts, you must have one.” He flicked a shining package across the room on to my lap.
I looked down at it in amazement. “No, really, I can’t…”
“Of course you can. You keep it.”
“But Granville, not a shirt…it’s too…”
“It’s a very good shirt.” He was beginning to look hurt again.
I subsided.
They were both so kind. Zoe sat right by me with her tea cup, chatting pleasantly while Granville beamed at me from his chair as he finished the last of the sandwiches and started again on the onions.
The proximity of the attractive woman was agreeable but embarrassing. My corduroys in the warmth of the room had begun to give off the unmistakable bouquet of the farmyard where they spent most of their time. And though it was one of my favourite scents there was no doubt it didn’t go with these elegant surroundings.
And worse still, I had started a series of internal rumblings and musical tinklings which resounded only too audibly during every lull in the conversation. The only other time I have heard such sounds was in a cow with an advanced case of displacement of the abomasum. My companions delicately feigned deafness even when I produced a shameful, explosive belch which made the little fat dog start up in alarm, but when another of these mighty borborygmi escaped me and almost made the windows rattle I thought it time to go.
In any case I wasn’t contributing much else. The alcohol had taken hold and I was increasingly conscious that I was just sitting there with a stupid leer on my face. In striking contrast to Granville who looked just the same as when I first met him back at the surgery. He was cool and possessed, his massive urbanity unimpaired. It was a little hard.
So, with the tin of tobacco bumping against my hip and the shirt tucked under my arm I took my leave.
Back at the hospital I looked down at Dinah. The old dog had come through wonderfully well and she lifted her head and gazed at me sleepily. Her colour was good and her pulse strong. The operative shock had been dramatically minimised by my colleague’s skilful speedy technique and by the intravenous drip.
I knelt down and stroked her ears. “You know, I’m sure she’s going to make it, Granville.”
Above me the great pipe nodded with majestic confidence.
“Of course, laddie, of course.”
And he was right Dinah was rejuvenated by her hysterectomy and lived to delight her mistress for many more years.
On the way home that night she lay by my side on the passenger seat, her nose poking from a blanket. Now and then she rested her chin on my hand as it gripped the gear lever and occasionally she licked me lazily.
I could see she felt better than I did.
18
BEN ASHBY THE CATTLE dealer looked over the gate with his habitual deadpan expression. It always seemed to me that after a lifetime of buying cows from farmers he had developed a terror of showing any emotion which might be construed as enthusiasm. When he looked at a beast his face registered nothing beyond, occasionally, a gentle sorrow.
This was how it was this morning as he leaned on the top spar and directed a gloomy stare at Harry Sumner’s heifer. After a few moments he turned to the farmer.
“I wish you’d had her in for me, Harry. She’s too far away. I’m going to have to get over the top.” He began to climb stiffly upwards and it was then that he spotted Monty. The bull hadn’t been so easy to see before as he cropped the grass among the group of heifers but suddenly the great head rose high above the others, the nose ring gleamed, and an ominous, strangled bellow sounded across the grass. And as he gazed at us he pulled absently at the turf with a fore foot.
Ben Ashby stopped climbing, hesitated for a second then returned to ground level.
“Aye well,” he muttered, still without changing expression. “It’s not that far away. I reckon I can see all right from here.”
Monty had changed a lot since the first day I saw him about two years ago. He had been a fortnight old then, a skinny, knock-kneed little creature, his head deep in a calf bucket.
“Well, what do you think of me new bull?” Harry Sumner had asked, laughing. “Not much for a hundred quid is he?”
I whistled. “As much as that?”
“Aye, it’s a lot for a new-dropped calf, isn’t it? But I can’t think of any other way of getting into the Newto
n strain. I haven’t the brass to buy a big ’un.”
Not all the farmers of those days were as far-seeing as Harry and some of them would use any type of male bovine to get their cows in calf.
One such man produced a gaunt animal for Siegfried’s inspection and asked him what he thought of his bull. Siegfried’s reply of “All horns and balls” didn’t please the owner but I still treasure it as the most graphic description of the typical scrub bull of that period.
Harry was a bright boy. He had inherited a little place of about a hundred acres on his father’s death and with his young wife had set about making it go. He was in his early twenties and when I first saw him I had been deceived by his almost delicate appearance into thinking that he wouldn’t be up to the job; the pallid face, the large, sensitive eyes and slender frame didn’t seem fitted for the seven days a week milking, feeding, mucking-out slog that was dairy farming. But I had been wrong.
The fearless way he plunged in and grabbed at the hind feet of kicking cows for me to examine and his clenched-teeth determination as he hung on to the noses of the big loose beasts at testing time made me change my mind in a hurry. He worked endlessly and tirelessly and it was natural that his drive should have taken him to the south of Scotland to find a bull.
Harry’s was an Ayrshire herd—unusual among the almost universal shorthorns in the Dales—and there was no doubt an injection of the famous Newton blood would be a sure way of improving his stock.
“He’s got prize winners on both his sire and dam’s side,” the young farmer said. “And a grand pedigree name, too. Newton Montmorency the Sixth—Monty for short.”
As though recognising his name, the calf raised his head from the bucket and looked at us. It was a comic little face—wet-muzzled, milk slobbered half way up his cheeks and dribbling freely from his mouth. I bent over into the pen and scratched the top of the hard little head, feeling the tiny horn buds no bigger than peas under my fingers. Limpid-eyed and unafraid, Monty submitted calmly to the caress for a few moments then sank his head again in the bucket.
I saw quite a bit of Harry Sumner over the next few weeks and usually had a look at his expensive purchase. And as the calf grew you could see why he had cost £100. He was in a pen with three of Harry’s own calves and his superiority was evident at a glance; the broad forehead and wide-set eyes; the deep chest and short straight legs; the beautifully even line of the back from shoulder to tail head. Monty had class; and small as he was he was all bull.
He was about three months old when Harry rang to say he thought the calf had pneumonia. I was surprised because the weather was fine and warm and I knew Monty was in a draught-free building. But when I saw him I thought immediately that his owner’s diagnosis was right. The heaving of the rib cage, the temperature of 105 degrees—it looked fairly straightforward. But when I got my stethoscope on his chest and listened for the pneumonic sounds I heard nothing. His lungs were perfectly clear. I went over him several times but there was not a squeak, not a râle, not the slightest sign of consolidation.
This was a facer. I turned to the farmer. “It’s a funny one, Harry. He’s sick, all right, but his symptoms don’t add up to anything recognisable.”
I was going against my early training because the first vet I ever saw practice with in my student days told me once: “If you don’t know what’s wrong with an animal for God’s sake don’t admit it. Give it a name—call it McLuskie’s Disease or Galloping Dandruff—anything you like, but give it a name.” But no inspiration came to me. I looked at the panting, anxious-eyed little creature.
Treat the symptoms. That was the thing to do. He had a temperature so I’d try to get that down for a start. I brought out my pathetic armoury of febrifuges; the injection of non-specific antiserum, the “fever drink” of sweet spirit of nitre; but over the next two days it was obvious that the time-honoured remedies were having no effect.
On the fourth morning, Harry Sumner met me as I got out of my car. “He’s walking funny, this morning, Mr. Herriot—and he seems to be blind.”
“Blind!” An unusual form of lead-poisoning—could that be it? I hurried into the calf pen and began to look round the walls, but there wasn’t a scrap of paint anywhere and Monty had spent his entire life in there.
And anyway, as I looked at him I realised that he wasn’t really blind; his eyes were staring and slightly upturned and he blundered unseeingly around the pen, but he blinked as I passed my hand in front of his face. To complete my bewilderment he walked with a wooden, stiff-legged gait almost like a mechanical toy and my mind began to snatch at diagnostic straws—tetanus, no—meningitis—no, no; I always tried to maintain the calm, professional exterior but I had to fight an impulse to scratch my head and stand gaping.
I got off the place as quickly as possible and settled down to serious thought as I drove away. My lack of experience didn’t help, but I did have a knowledge of pathology and physiology and when stumped for a diagnosis I could usually work something out on rational grounds. But this thing didn’t make sense.
That night I got out my books, notes from college, back numbers of the Veterinary Record and anything else I could find on the subject of calf diseases. Somewhere here there would surely be a clue. But the volumes on medicine and surgery were barren of inspiration and I had about given up hope when I came upon the passage in a little pamphlet on calf diseases. “Peculiar, stilted gait, staring eyes with a tendency to gaze upwards, occasionally respiratory symptoms with high temperature.” The words seemed to leap out at me from the printed page and it was as though the unknown author was patting me on the shoulder and murmuring reassuringly: “This is it, you see. It’s all perfectly clear.”
I grabbed the phone and rang Harry Sumner. “Harry, have you ever noticed Monty and those other calves in the pen licking each other?”
“Aye, they’re allus at it, the little beggars. It’s like a hobby with them. Why?”
“Well I know what’s wrong with your bull. He’s got a hair ball.”
“A hair ball? Where?”
“In the abomasum—the fourth stomach. That’s what’s setting up all those strange symptoms.”
“Well I’ll go to hell. What do we do about it, then?”
“It’ll probably mean an operation, but I’d like to try dosing him with liquid paraffin first I’ll put a pint bottle on the step for you if you’ll come and collect it. Give him half a pint now and the same first thing in the morning. It might just grease the thing through. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I hadn’t a lot of faith in the liquid paraffin. I suppose I suggested it for the sake of doing something while I played nervously with the idea of operating. And next morning the picture was as I expected; Monty was still rigid-limbed, still staring sightlessly ahead of him, and an oiliness round his rectum and down his tail showed that the paraffin had by-passed the obstruction.
“He hasn’t had a bite now for three days,” Harry said. “I doubt he won’t stick it much longer.”
I looked from his worried face to the little animal trembling in the pen. “You’re right. Well have to open him up straight away to have any hope of saving him. Are you willing to let me have a go?”
“Oh aye, let’s be at t’job—sooner the better.” He smiled at me. It was a confident smile and my stomach gave a lurch. His confidence could be badly misplaced because in those days abdominal surgery in the bovine was in a primitive state. There were a few jobs we had begun to tackle fairly regularly but removal of a hair ball wasn’t one of them and my knowledge of the procedure was confined to some rather small-print reading in the text books.
But this young farmer had faith in me. He thought I could do the job so it was no good letting him see my doubts. It was at times like this that I envied our colleagues in human medicine. When a surgical case came up they packed their patient off to a hospital but the vet just had to get his jacket off on the spot and make an operating theatre out of the farm buildings.
Harry and I busie
d ourselves in boiling up the instruments, setting out buckets of hot water and laying a clean bed of straw in an empty pen. Despite his weakness the calf took nearly sixty cc’s of Nembutal into his vein before he was fully anaesthetised but finally he was asleep, propped on his back between two straw bales, his little hooves dangling above him. I was ready to start.
It’s never the same as it is in the books. The pictures and diagrams look so simple and straightforward but it is a different thing when you are cutting into a living, breathing creature with the abdomen rising and falling gently and the blood oozing beneath your knife. The abomasum, I knew, was just down there, slightly to the right of the sternum but as I cut through the peritoneum there was this slippery mass of fat-streaked omentum obscuring everything; and as I pushed it aside one of the bales moved and Monty tilted to his left causing a sudden gush of intestines into the wound. I put the flat of my hand against the shining pink loops—it would be just great if my patient’s insides started spilling out on to the straw before I had started.
“Pull him upright, Harry, and shove that bale back into place,” I gasped. The farmer quickly complied but the intestines weren’t at all anxious to return to their place and kept intruding coyly as I groped for the abomasum. Frankly I was beginning to feel just a bit lost and my heart was thudding when I came upon something hard. It was sliding about beyond the wall of one of the stomachs—at the moment I wasn’t sure which. I gripped it and lifted it into the wound. I had hold of the abomasum and that hard thing inside must be the hair ball.
Repelling the intestines which had made another determined attempt to push their way into the act, I incised the stomach and had my first look at the cause of the trouble. It wasn’t a ball at all, rather a flat plaque of densely matted hair mixed freely with strands of hay, sour curd and a shining covering of my liquid paraffin. The whole thing was jammed against the pyloric opening.