Both the farmers sat up suddenly as I went on. “Those kids down there and all the people seem to be friends. And remember that waiter who thought it was funny to be offered money?”
Just at that moment a handsome young couple appeared at the far end of the room, the man in a dark suit, the girl in a glittering, spangled bridal gown.
“My God!” I said. “It’s a wedding reception!”
And it was, indeed. The newlyweds moved around among their guests, and when they reached us, I half expected to be thrown out, but, on the contrary, they seemed to regard our presence as a gracious courtesy visit. They bowed and shook hands with us and made us welcome with smiles and gestures. Before they moved on, the bride gave each of us a long silver thread. She did this with some ceremony, and I deduced that it was an honoured local custom, the thread having possibly been taken from her gown. In any case, I took it in this spirit, and I carried that thread in my wallet for many years thereafter until it gradually disintegrated.
We were still recovering from our surprise when two men in traditional Turkish dress appeared on a stage at the other end of the room. They were obviously entertainers and comedians to boot, because very soon the room was echoing with laughter. It was strange for the three of us sitting there to hear the totally unintelligible cross talk, followed by the roars of mirth, the little children jumping up and down and clapping their hands in delight.
They were versatile chaps, those two. When they had finished being funny, one of them produced a one-string fiddle and began to play, while the other sang in that peculiar wail which is associated only with Eastern countries.
I had no way of telling whether it was a love song, a happy song or a sad song, but as I listened to that strange ululation going on and on, I felt very far from home.
It was about then that my eyelids began to droop. I remembered that I had had only two hours’ sleep the night before and that rather a lot had happened in a short time. I was very tired, and when I turned to look at my farmer friends, I saw that Joe was nodding and Noel was slumbering peacefully, his chin on his chest.
I stood up and suggested that we ought to leave. They didn’t need much persuading.
Back in the hotel, I descended to my basement room and made up the bed from the pile of blankets on the chair. I would have fallen asleep immediately but from somewhere quite close at hand came the same wailing which I had heard at the wedding reception. At first I thought I was dreaming but then I realised there was a party going on in one of the hotel rooms. It was a noisy party, too, with screams of laughter, outbursts of music, thumping of dancing feet. It went on and on, and it must have been the middle of the night before the din subsided and I fell into an exhausted sleep.
Chapter
33
I STOOD, HEAD BOWED, leaning on my great guillotine which stood chest high. It occurred to me that my pose was exactly that of the executioner resting against his axe as I had seen in old pictures of the beheading of Sir Walter Raleigh and other unfortunates.
However, I wasn’t wearing a hood; I was standing in a deep-strawed fold yard, not on a scaffold; and I was waiting for a bullock to be dehorned, not for a hapless victim to lay his head upon the block.
In the fifties, bovine homs quite suddenly went out of fashion. To veterinary surgeons and most farmers their passing was unla-mented. Homs were at best a nuisance, at worst extremely dangerous. They worked their way under vets’ coats and pulled off the buttons and tore out pockets. They could whip round and bash the hand, arm or even the head of a man injecting the neck and, of course, in the case of a really wild cow or bull, they could be instruments of death.
Homs were a menace, too, to other bovines. Some cows and bullocks were natural bullies, and one animal could impose a reign of terror on its more timid neighbours, driving them away viciously from food troughs in open yards and inflicting savage wounds on any that resisted. The farmers in Yorkshire used to call these injuries “hipes,” and they ranged from massive hae-matomata over the ribs to deep lacerations of the udder. It was strange how a boss cow would always go for the udder and the résulte were often ruinous. Since the passing of horns you never heard the word “hipe” now.
There were farmers, notably pedigree breeders, who attached great importance to well-set horns and pointed out that a neat, “cocky” little horn looked well in the show ring and that their highly bred animals would be disfigured, but their voices were lost in the tumult for abolition.
One down-to-earth dairyman said to me at the time, “You don’t get much milk out of a bloody horn,” and that seemed to be the general attitude.
From my own point of view, the only thing I missed was that convenient handle to get hold of a cow. For many years I had smacked one hand down on the horn, then pushed the fingers of the other hand into the nose, but after the dehorning revolution there was nothing to grasp. Most cows were expert at tucking their noses down on the ground or round the other side where you couldn’t get at them, but that was a small thing.
So, by and large, the disappearance of these dangerous and largely useless appendages was a great blessing but, oh dear, there was one tremendous snag. The horns didn’t just go away by themselves. They had to be removed by the vets, and that removal wrote a gory and ham-fisted chapter in veterinary history that still hangs like a dark cloud in my memory.
I suppose Siegfried and I reacted just like the other members of our profession. As the situation arose and we looked out on a countryside apparently dominated by a waving forest of horns, we wondered how we would start. Was it to be general or local anaesthesia? Did we saw them off or chop them off?
In the beginning the chop school appeared to hold sway, because there were many advertisements in the Veterinary Record for villainous-looking guillotines. We ordered one of these, but we both experienced a sense of shock when we unpacked it. As I said, it was nearly as tall as a small man and its weight was frightening.
Siegfried, groaning slightly, hefted the thing by its long wooden handles till the huge, sliding blades were at eye level, then he lowered it quickly and leaned against the wall.
He took a long, shuddering breath. “Hell, you need to be a trained athlete just to lift that bloody thing!” He paused in thought. “There’s no doubt we’ll need something like that for the big beasts, but surely we can find something else for the little stirks.” He raised a finger. “James, I believe I know the very thing.”
“You do?”
“Yes. I saw some nice light hedge-clippers in Albert Kenning’s window yesterday. I bet they’d do the job. Tell you what—let’s go round and try them.”
When Siegfried had one of his ideas, he didn’t mess about. Within seconds we were hurrying, almost at a trot, through the market place to the ironmonger’s.
I followed close on Siegfried’s heels as he burst into the shop.
“Albert!” he shouted. “Those hedge-clippers! Let’s have a look at them!”
They certainly looked all right—round, gleaming, wooden shafts terminating in small, curved blades which crossed each other scissors-wise.
“Mm, yes,” I said. “Do you think they’ll be strong enough to cut through a little horn?”
“Only one way to find out.” Siegfried brandished his new weapon. “Fetch me one of those canes, Albert!”
The little man turned towards a bundle of thick bamboos that were on sale for tying up flowers and shrubs. “These?”
“That’s right. Look sharp.”
Albert selected a cane and brought it over.
“Now, hold it out towards me,” Siegfried said. “No, no, no, upright. That’s fine, fine.”
Starting at the top, he began to clip off inch lengths of the bamboo at lightning speed. The fragments flew in all directions, and Albert had to duck several times as they flew past his ears. But he was more anxious about his hand as the blades worked rapidly downwards. Apprehensively, he kept lowering his grasp until Siegfried made his final slash an inch above his thumb. Hold
ing the tiny stump at arm’s length, he looked wide-eyed at my colleague.
But Siegfried wasn’t finished yet. He continued to chop away at the air, obviously enjoying his work. “Let’s have another one, Albert!”
Wordlessly, the little man produced a second cane, half closed his eyes and held it as far away from his body as possible.
My colleague recommenced his onslaught with such vigour that the woody cylinders whizzed round the shop like machine-gun bullets. A customer entering by the door backed away and took cover behind a stack of milking buckets.
Albert had gone pale by the time Siegfried demolished the second cane, finishing once more just above the little man’s thumb.
“Grand little machine, this, James.” Siegfried hesitated, tried a few more practice snips, then turned to the ironmonger. “Just one more, Albert.”
“Really, Mr. Farnon, don’t ye think …”
“C’mon, c’mon, we’ve got work to do. Don’t hang about!”
This time the little man’s jaw dropped, and the cane wobbled uncontrollably in his grasp. Siegfried, obviously determined to make the most of this last test, put everything into his effort, and his movements were almost too rapid to follow. There was a brief fusillade of clippings, then Albert was left breathless, clutching his small remnant.
“Splendid!” Siegfried cried happily. “We’ll take it. How much?”
‘Twelve an’ six,” gasped the ironmonger.
“And the canes?”
“Oh, er … another shillin’.”
My colleague delved in his pocket and pulled out a handful of notes, coins and small veterinary instruments. “There’s a quid among that lot, Albert. Help yourself.”
Tremblingly, the little man extracted the pound from Siegfried’s palm, then crunched over the carpet of bamboo clippings to get change.
Siegfried crammed the money into his pocket without looking and tucked his new purchase under his arm. “Goodbye, Albert, and thank you,” he said, and we left.
As I passed the shop window at a brisk pace, I could see the ironmonger following us wonderingly with his eyes.
The hedge-clippers did indeed perform nobly for us with the smaller bovines, but there were so many other complications. For a long time we used general anaesthesia by means of the chloroform muzzle, and when the animal collapsed unconscious, we whipped the horns off quickly. But we found to our dismay that the haemorrhage was massive and terrifying. Red jets fountained several feet in the air, spraying everything and everybody for yards around. In those days you could always tell when a vet had been out dehorning because his collar and face were spattered with blood.
An ingenious tourniquet was devised by laying a length of binder twine longways to the inside of each horn, then encircling both horns with another piece of twine. By knotting the first two tightly over the encircling one, the arteries were effectively compressed and haemorrhage was nil.
But then, often the chopping blades severed the twine and we were in trouble again.
As time passed, two advances emerged. The first was that by removing the horn by sawing and taking about half an inch of skin with it, there was virtually no bleeding. The second was that local anaesthesia was infinitely easier and more effective. It was quite simple to inject a few c.c.’s of local under the temporal ridge and into the branch of the fifth cranial nerve, which supplies the horn. There was nothing to it, and it gave a perfect nerve block. The animal couldn’t feel a thing.
I have seen cows chewing their cud while I sawed away, and this merciful improvement in our method signalled the end of all the old things. The horrible choppers and guillotines and tourniquets disappeared almost overnight.
Nowadays, of course, a horn is rarely seen anywhere because calves are painlessly disbudded early in life, using this same nerve block.
But, as I say, the whole period of adult dehorning left a scar on my memory, and it was during the guillotine period that Andrew Bruce came to visit me.
For several years after the war, people were still renewing contact with each other. The war brought the normal lives of so many to a full stop that the ensuing period was a time of taking stock, of looking around and wondering what had happened to one’s friends.
Andrew and I had not met since our schooldays, and I hardly recognised the dark-suited, bowler-hatted figure on the doorstep. It turned out that he was doing very nicely in a bank in Glasgow and was on a business trip down south when he saw the sign to Darrowby and decided to pay me a call. A lot of my schoolmates seemed to have gone into banking, and since I have always had to use my fingers for counting, I regarded these men with a certain amount of awe.
“I don’t know how you do it, Andy,” I said after lunch. “I wouldn’t last a couple of days in your job.”
He shrugged and smiled. “Oh, it’s meat and drink to me. I loved maths at school, if you remember.”
“Oh yes.” I shivered. “That’s right. You used to get prizes for dreadful things like trigonometry.”
We chatted for a few minutes over our coffee, then I stood up. “I’m afraid I’ve got to go,” I said. “I have to be on a farm by two-fifteen.”
“Okay, Jim….” He hesitated for a moment. “Do you think I could come with you? I’ve never seen a country vet at work, and I could easily drive to Birmingham this evening.”
I smiled. So many people wanted to accompany me on my rounds. There seemed to be some fascination in the veterinary life. “Of course you can, Andy. But I don’t think you’ll find it very entertaining. All I have is an afternoon’s dehorning.”
“Really? Sounds interesting. I’d love to come, if you don’t mind.”
I found a spare pair of Wellingtons for him, and we got into the car. As we drove away I noticed him looking around him: at the boxes of bottles and instruments on the back seat, at my clothes which contrasted so sharply with his own natty outfit. At that time I had discarded the breeches and leggings that were almost a vet’s uniform when I qualified and now wore brown corduroy trousers with a sort of canvas jacket made for me by a German prisoner and which I had cherished for years.
The corduroys were frayed and stiffened with mud and muck, and the jacket, too, despite the protective clothing I always wore, bore ample evidence of my trade.
I could see Andy’s nostrils wrinkling as he took in the rich bouquet of manure, dog hairs and assorted chemicals that was the normal atmosphere in my car, but after a few minutes he appeared to forget everything as he gazed out of the window.
It was a golden afternoon in October, and beyond the stone walls, the fell-sides, ablaze with their mantle of dead bracken, rose serenely into a deep, unbroken blue. We passed under a long canopy of tinted leaves thrown over us by the roadside trees, then followed a stretch of white-pebbled river before turning along a narrow track that led up the hillside.
Andrew was silent as we climbed into the stark, airy solitude that is the soul of the Dales, but as the track levelled out on the summit, he put a hand on my arm.
“Just stop a minute, Jim, will you?” he said.
I pulled up and wound down the window. For a few moments he looked out over the miles of heathery moorland and the rounded summits of the great hills slumbering in the sunshine, then he spoke quietly as though to himself.
“So this is where you work?”
“Yes, this is it, Andy.”
He took a long breath, then another, as if greedy for more.
“You know,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about air like wine, but this is the first time I’ve realised what it means.”
I nodded. I always felt I could never get enough of that air, sharp and cool and tinged only with the grass scent that lingers in the high country.
“Well, you’re a lucky beggar, Jim,” Andrew said with a touch of weariness. “You spend your life driving around in country like this, and I’m stuck in a damned office.”
“I thought you liked your job.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Oh yes, I suppo
se playing around with figures is what I’m best at but, oh hell, I have to do it all inside. In fact,” he said, becoming a little worked up, “when I start to think about it, I live and have my being in a bloody centrally heated box with no windows and electric light blasting down all day, and I share what passes for air with a whole crowd of other people.” He slumped back in his seat. “Makes me wish I hadn’t come out with you.”
“I’m sorry, Andy.”
He laughed ruefully. “Oh, I didn’t really mean that, but, honestly, this is idyllic.”
At the end of the moor the land dipped into a lush valley where the herd of Mr. Dunning grazed and grew fat on the abundant grass around the farm buildings. The Dunnings were not dairymen, as was usual in the Dales, but raised beef cattle. And they did so on a large scale, with more than two hundred animals under their care.
I had been there for the last few afternoons, dehorning, and I was glad that this was my last visit because the bullocks on which I had been operating were massive three-year-old shorthorns, and I had had a rough time. Nowadays, with the housewife’s preference for smaller, leaner joints, most beef cattle are slaughtered at around eighteen months, and the kind of huge creatures I had to face at Mr. Dunning’s are rarely seen any more.
As we drove into the farmyard, there were about twenty of them milling around in a collecting pen.
“We’ll run ’em into the fold yard one at a time as usual,” Mr. Dunning cried as he trotted towards me. He was a small, excitable man, bursting with energy, and his voice seldom fell below a piercing shout.
His sons, large young men with the classical Dales names of Thomas, fames and William followed more slowly.
I introduced Andy, and he gazed with interest at the enormous boots, the work-worn clothes and the tangle of hair pushing from under the caps. The farmers, in turn, seemed similarly intrigued with my friend’s pinstripes, gleaming white collar and tasteful tie.
Once the action commenced, Mr. Dunning launched into full cry, poking at the beasts’ rumps with his stick and emitting shrill yelps of, “Haow, haow, cush-cush, get on there!”