All Things Wise and Wonderful, Page 2

  My eyes were shut most of the time now as I blundered round the park and when I opened them a red mist swirled. But it is incredible what the human frame will stand and I blinked in disbelief as the iron gates appeared once more under their arch of sooty branches.

  I had survived the second lap but an ordinary rest would be inadequate now. This time I would have to lie down. I felt sick.

  “Good lads!” the corporal called out, cheerful as ever. “You’re doin’ fine. Now we’re just going to ’ave a little hoppin’ on the spot.”

  Incredulous wails rose from our demoralised band but the corporal was unabashed.

  “Feet together now. Up! Up! Up! That’s no good, come on, get some height into it! Up! Up!”

  This was the final absurdity. My chest was a flaming cavern of agony. These people were supposed to be making us fit and instead they were doing irreparable damage to my heart and lungs.

  “You’ll thank me for this later, lads. Take my word for it. GET YOURSELVES OFF THE GROUND. UP! UP!”

  Through my pain I could see the corporal’s laughing face. The man was clearly a sadist. It was no good appealing to him.

  And as, with the last of my strength, I launched myself into the air it came to me suddenly why I had dreamed about Blossom last night.

  I wanted to go home, too.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE FOG SWIRLED OVER the heads of the marching men; a London fog, thick, yellow, metallic on the tongue. I couldn’t see the head of the column, only the swinging lantern carried by the leader.

  This 6:30 a.m. walk to breakfast was just about the worst part of the day, when my morale was low and thoughts of home rose painfully.

  We used to have fogs in Darrowby, but they were country fogs, different from this. One morning I drove out on my rounds with the headlights blazing against the grey curtain ahead, seeing nothing from my tight-shut box. But I was heading up the Dale, climbing steadily with the engine pulling against the rising ground, then quite suddenly the fog thinned to a shimmering silvery mist and was gone.

  And there, above the pall, the sun was dazzling and the long green line of the fells rose before me, thrusting exultantly into a sky of summer blue.

  Spellbound, I drove upwards into the bright splendour, staring through the windscreen as though I had never seen it all before; the bronze of the dead bracken spilling down the grassy flanks of the hills, the dark smudges of trees, the grey farmhouses and the endless pattern of walls creeping to the heather above.

  I was in a rush as usual but I had to stop. I pulled up in a gateway, Sam jumped out and we went through into a field; and as the beagle scampered over the glittering turf I stood in the warm sunshine amid the melting frost and looked back at the dark damp blanket which blotted out the low country but left this jewelled world above it.

  And, gulping the sweet air, I gazed about me gratefully at the clean green land where I worked and made my living.

  I could have stayed there, wandering round, watching Sam exploring with waving tail, nosing into the shady corners where the sun had not reached and the ground was iron hard and the rime thick and crisp on the grass. But I had an appointment to keep, and no ordinary one—it was with a peer of the realm. Reluctantly I got back into the car.

  I was due to start Lord Hulton’s tuberculin test at 9:30 a.m. and as I drove round the back of the Elizabethan mansion to the farm buildings nearby I felt a pang of misgiving; there were no animals in sight. There was only a man in tattered blue dungarees hammering busily at a makeshift crush at the exit to the fold yard.

  He turned round when he saw me and waved his hammer. As I approached I looked wonderingly at the slight figure with the soft fairish hair falling over his brow, at the holed cardigan and muck-encrusted Wellingtons. You would have expected him to say, “Nah, then, Mr. Herriot how ista this morning’?”

  But he didn’t, he said, “Herriot, my dear chap, I’m most frightfully sorry, but I’m very much afraid we’re not quite ready for you.” And he began to fumble with his tobacco pouch.

  William George Henry Augustus, Eleventh Marquis of Hulton, always had a pipe in his mouth and he was invariably either filling it, cleaning it out with a metal reaming tool or trying to light it. I had never seen him actually smoking it. And at times of stress he attempted to do everything at once. He was obviously embarrassed at his lack of preparedness and when he saw me glance involuntarily at my watch he grew more agitated, pulling his pipe from his mouth and putting it back in again, tucking the hammer under his arm, rummaging in a large box of matches.

  I gazed across to the rising ground beyond the farm buildings. Far off on the horizon I could make out tiny figures: galloping beasts, scurrying men; and faint sounds came down to me of barking dogs, irritated bellowings and shrill cries of “Haow, haow!” “Gerraway by!” “Siddown, dog!”

  I sighed. It was the old story. Even the Yorkshire aristocracy seemed to share this carefree attitude to time.

  His lordship clearly sensed my feelings because his discomfort increased.

  “It’s too bad for me, old chap,” he said, spraying a few matchsticks around and dropping flakes of tobacco on the stone flags. “I did promise to be ready for nine thirty but those blasted animals just won’t cooperate.”

  I managed a smile. “Oh never mind, Lord Hulton, they seem to be getting them down the hill now and I’m not in such a panic this morning, anyway.”

  “Oh splendid, splendid!” He attempted to ignite a towering mound of dark flake which spluttered feebly then toppled over the edge of his pipe. “And come and see this! I’ve been rigging up a crush. We’ll drive them in here and we’ll really have ’em. Remember we had a spot of bother last time, what?”

  I nodded. I did remember. Lord Hulton had only about thirty suckling cows but it had taken a three-hour rodeo to test them. I looked doubtfully at the rickety structure of planks and corrugated iron. It would be interesting to see how it coped with the moorland cattle.

  I didn’t mean to rub it in, but again I glanced unthinkingly at my watch and the little man winced as though he had received a blow.

  “Dammit!” he burst out “What are they doing over there? Tell you what, I’ll go and give them a hand!” Distractedly, he began to change hammer, pouch, pipe and matches from hand to hand, dropping them and picking them up, before finally deciding to put the hammer down and stuff the rest into his pockets. He went off at a steady trot and I thought as I had done so often that there couldn’t be many noblemen in England like him.

  If I had been a marquis, I felt, I would still have been in bed or perhaps just parting the curtains and peering out to see what kind of day it was. But Lord Hulton worked all the time, just about as hard as any of his men. One morning I arrived to find him at the supremely mundane task of “plugging muck,” standing on a manure heap, hurling steaming forkfuls on to a cart. And he always dressed in rags. I suppose he must have had more orthodox items in his wardrobe but I never saw them. Even his tobacco was the great smoke of the ordinary farmer—Redbreast Flake.

  My musings were interrupted by the thunder of hooves and wild cries; the Hulton herd was approaching. Within minutes the fold yard was filled with milling creatures, steam rising in rolling clouds from their bodies.

  The marquis appeared round the corner of the building at a gallop.

  “Right, Charlie!” he yelled. “Let the first one into the crush!”

  Panting with anticipation he stood by the nailed boards as the men inside opened the yard gate. He didn’t have to wait long. A shaggy red monster catapulted from the interior, appeared briefly in the narrow passage then emerged at about fifty miles an hour from the other end with portions of his lordship’s creation dangling from its horns and neck. The rest of the herd pounded close behind.

  “Stop them! Stop them!” screamed the little peer, but it was of no avail. A hairy torrent flooded through the opening and in no time at all the herd was legging it back to the high land in a wild stampede. The men followed them a
nd within a few moments Lord Hulton and I were standing there just as before watching the tiny figures on the skyline, listening to the distant “Haow, haow!” “Gerraway by!”

  “I say,” he murmured despondently. “It didn’t work terribly well, did it?”

  But he was made of stern stuff. Seizing his hammer he began to bang away with undiminished enthusiasm and by the time the beasts returned the crush was rebuilt and a stout iron bar pushed across the front to prevent further break-outs.

  It seemed to solve the problem because the first cow, confronted by the bar, stood quietly and I was able to clip the hair on her neck through an opening between the planks. Lord Hulton, in high good humour, settled down on an upturned oil drum with my testing book on his knee.

  “I’ll do the writing for you,” he cried. “Fire away, old chap!”

  I poised my calipers. “Eight, eight.” He wrote it down and the next cow came in.

  “Eight, eight,” I said, and he bowed his head again.

  The third cow arrived: “Eight, eight.” And the fourth, “Eight, eight.”

  His lordship looked up from the book and passed a weary hand across his forehead.

  “Herriot, dear boy, can’t you vary it a bit? I’m beginning to lose interest.”

  All went well until we saw the cow which had originally smashed the crush. She had sustained a slight scratch on her neck.

  “I say, look at that!” cried the peer. “Will it be all right?”

  “Oh yes, it’s nothing. Superficial.”

  “Ah, good, but don’t you think we should have something to put on it? Some of that …”

  I waited for it. Lord Hulton was a devotee of May and Baker’s Propamidine Cream and used it for all minor cuts and grazes in his cattle. He loved the stuff. But unfortunately he couldn’t say “Propamidine.” In fact nobody on the entire establishment could say it except Charlie the farm foreman and he only thought he could say it. He called it “Propopamide” but his lordship had the utmost faith in him.

  “Charlie!” he bawled. “Are you there, Charlie?”

  The foreman appeared from the pack in the yard and touched his cap, “Yes, m’lord.”

  “Charlie, that wonderful stuff we get from Mr. Herriot—you know, for cut teats and things, Pro … Pero … what the hell do you call it again?”

  Charlie paused. It was one of his big moments. “Propopamide, m’lord.”

  The marquis, intensely gratified, slapped the knee of his dungarees. “That’s it, Propopamide! Damned if I can get my tongue round it. Well done, Charlie!”

  Charlie inclined his head modestly.

  The whole test was a vast improvement on last time and we were finished within an hour and a half. There was just one tragedy. About halfway through, one of the cows dropped down dead with an attack of hypomagnesaemia, a condition which often plagues sucklers. It was a sudden, painless collapse and I had no chance to do anything.

  Lord Hulton looked down at the animal which had just stopped breathing. “Do you think we could salvage her for meat if we bled her?”

  “Well, it’s typical hypomag. Nothing to harm anybody … you could try. It would depend on what the meat inspector says.”

  The cow was bled, pulled into a van and the peer drove off to the abattoir. He came back just as we were finishing the test.

  “How did you get on?” I asked him. “Did they accept her?”

  He hesitated. “No … no, old chap,” he said sadly. “I’m afraid they didn’t.”

  “Why? Did the meat inspector condemn the carcass?”

  “Well … I never got as far as the meat inspector, actually just saw one of the slaughtermen.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Just two words, Herriot.”

  “Two words …?”

  “Yes … ‘Bugger off!’ ”

  I nodded. “I see.” It was easy to imagine the scene. The tough slaughterman viewing the small, unimpressive figure and deciding that he wasn’t going to be put out of his routine by some ragged farm man.

  “Well, never mind, sir,” I said. “You can only try.”

  “True … true, old chap.” He dropped a few matches as he fumbled disconsolately with his smoking equipment.

  As I was getting into the car I remembered about the Propamidine. “Don’t forget to call down for that cream, will you?”

  “By Jove, yes! I’ll come down for it after lunch. I have great faith in that Prom … Pram … Charlie! Damn and blast what is it?”

  Charlie drew himself up proudly. “Propopamide, m’lord.”

  “Ah yes, Propopamide!” The little man laughed, his good humour quite restored. “Good lad, Charlie, you’re a marvel!”

  “Thank you, m’lord.” The foreman wore the smug expression of the expert as he drove the cattle back into the field.

  It’s a funny thing, but when you see a client about something you very often see him soon again about something else. It was only a week later, with the district still in the iron grip of winter, that my bedside ’phone jangled me from slumber.

  After that first palpitation of the heart which I feel does vets no good at all I reached a sleepy hand from under the sheets.

  “Yes?” I grunted.

  “Herriot … I say, Herriot … is that you, Herriot?” The voice was laden with tension.

  “Yes, it is, Lord Hulton.”

  “Oh good … good … dash it, I do apologise. Frightfully bad show, waking you up like this … but I’ve got something damn peculiar here.” A soft pattering followed which I took to be matches falling around the receiver.

  “Really?” I yawned and my eyes closed involuntarily. “In what way, exactly?”

  “Well, I’ve been sitting up with one of my best sows. Been farrowing and produced twelve nice piglets, but there’s something very odd.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Difficult to describe, old chap … but you know the … er … bottom aperture … there’s a bloody great long red thing hanging from it.”

  My eyes snapped open and my mouth gaped in a soundless scream. Prolapsed uterus! Hard labour in cows, a pleasant exercise in ewes, impossible in sows.

  “Long red …! When …? How …?” I was stammering pointlessly. I didn’t have to ask.

  “Just popped it out, dear boy. I was waiting for another piglet and whoops, there it was. Gave me a nasty turn.”

  My toes curled tightly beneath the blankets. It was no good telling him that I had seen five prolapsed uteri in pigs in my limited experience and had failed in every case. I had come to the conclusion that there was no way of putting them back.

  But I had to try. “I’ll be right out,” I muttered.

  I looked at the alarm clock. It was five thirty. A horrible time, truncating the night’s slumber yet eliminating any chance of a soothing return to bed for an hour before the day’s work. And I hated turning out even more since my marriage. Helen was lovely to come back to, but by the same token it was a bigger wrench to leave her soft warm presence and venture into the inhospitable world outside.

  And the journey to the Hulton farm was not enlivened by my memories of those five other sows. I had tried everything; full anaesthesia, lifting them upside down with pulleys, directing a jet from a hose on the everted organ, and all the time pushing, straining, sweating over the great mass of flesh which refused to go back through that absurdly small hole. The result in each case had been the conversion of my patient into pork pies and a drastic plummeting of my self-esteem.

  There was no moon and the soft glow from the piggery door made the only light among the black outlines of the buildings. Lord Hulton was waiting at the entrance and I thought I had better warn him.

  “I have to tell you, sir, that this is a very serious condition. It’s only fair that you should know that the sow very often has to be slaughtered.”

  The little man’s eyes widened and the corners of his mouth drooped.

  “Oh, I say! That’s rather a bore … one of my best ani
mals. I … I’m rather attached to that pig.” He was wearing a polo-necked sweater of such advanced dilapidation that the hem hung in long woollen fronds almost to his knees, and as he tremblingly attempted to light his pipe he looked very vulnerable.

  “But I’ll do my very best,” I added hastily. “There’s always a chance.”

  “Oh, good man!” In his relief, he dropped his pouch and as he stooped the open box of matches spilled around his feet. It was some time before we retrieved them and went into the piggery.

  The reality was as bad as my imaginings. Under the single weak electric bulb of the pen an unbelievable length of very solid-looking red tissue stretched from the rear end of a massive white sow lying, immobile on her side. The twelve pink piglets fought and worried along the row of teats; they didn’t seem to be getting much.

  As I stripped off and dipped my arms into the steaming bucket I wished with all my heart that the porcine uterus was a little short thing and not this horrible awkward shape. And it was a disquieting thought that tonight I had no artificial aids. People used all sorts of tricks and various types of equipment but here in this silent building there was just the pig, Lord Hulton and me. His lordship, I knew, was willing and eager, but he had helped me at jobs before and his usefulness was impaired by the fact that his hands were always filled with his smoking items and he kept dropping things.

  I got down on my knees behind the animal with the feeling that I was on my own. And as soon as I cradled the mass in my arms the conviction flooded through me that this was going to be the same as all the others. The very idea of this lot going back whence it came was ridiculous and the impression was reinforced as I began to push. Nothing happened.

  I had sedated the sow heavily and she wasn’t straining much against me; it was just that the thing was so huge. By a supreme effort I managed to feed a few inches back into the vaginal opening but as soon as I relaxed it popped quietly out again. My strongest instinct was to call the whole thing off without delay; the end result would be the same and anyway I wasn’t feeling very strong. In fact my whole being was permeated by the leaden-armed pervading weakness one feels when forced to work in the small hours.