Every Living Thing (18 page)

Blanco was the soul of good nature and the only time he showed a gleam of anger was if he thought Mr. Bendelow was being threatened. This protectiveness was invaluable to the tailor because the set-up in that house was conducive to exasperation and I had heard a few blustering men and screeching women driven to distraction by the interminable delays. But the great white head and cold eyes appearing round the corner of the table had a wonderfully calming effect. Sometimes a little growl or a pointed sniffing round the customer’s ankles was required but I had never seen a failure.

In my musings I had often thought that Blanco was a vindication of my long-held theory that big dogs came from little houses and little dogs from big ones. In fact it seemed to me to be the ultimate corroboration because in the greatest of battlemented, multi-acred mansions you got down to Border terriers and Jack Russells while in tiny, one-up, one-down dwellings you found something like Blanco. A week later, ever optimistic, I returned to Mr. Bendelow’s establishment. He was in his usual place, cross-legged like a little gnome on his table.

Another customer, a disgruntled-looking farmer, was just about to leave, but he was giving the tailor a few parting words.

“Ah’m about fed up comin’ here every week after you’ve promised.” His voice took on an angry tone. “You don’t seem bothered, but it’s not good enough, you know.”

Mr. Bendelow gave the familiar gesture with his needle. “Next week…next week.”

“Aye, that’s what you always say,” barked the farmer, and I looked over the table at Blanco, stretched by the fire. This was the sort of thing that always brought him to his feet, but he showed no interest and didn’t move as the farmer, with a final snort, turned and left, banging the door behind him.

“Good morning, Mr. Bendelow,” I said briskly. “I’ve just dropped in for—”

“Now then, Mr. Herriot!” The little man stabbed his needle at me. “I was just goin’ to tell you summat about moneyed people when you left. Old Crowther, down Applegate. Left eighty thousand and when I patched his trousers for ’im he had to stay in bed. I’m not jokin’ nor jestin’, he had to stay in bed.”

“Talking about trousers, Mr. Bendelow…”

“He ’ad a housekeeper—Maud something was her name—she did everything for ’im. Got ’im in and out of bed, cooked for ’im, slaved for ’im for thirty years. But, do you know, he never left her a penny. She contested the will, you know, but she only got five hundred pounds. Money all went to some distant relatives.”

“Are my trousers ready? I do need them for—”

“And I could tell you a worse case than that, Mr. Herriot. When I was a lad, I worked for a farmer. That man was worth thousands, but he never went into a pub, never went to the pictures, never went anywhere. Saved every penny. Don’t know what ’e did with it all. Maybe kept it about the house. Oh, that reminds me of a story.”

I was about to utter another plea when a stout lady behind me burst out. “Now look ’ere, I don’t want to butt in, but I’m in a hurry. I want my dress now—you promised it for today.”

The tailor waved his needle. “Not ready. Been too busy. Come next week.”

“Too busy! Too busy chatterin’ is more like it.” She had a high, piercing delivery and she gave the tailor the full blast. I looked at Blanco, still motionless by the fire. His lack of interest was unusual.

Mr. Bendelow, too, seemed to miss his dog’s support because he was untypically abashed by the lady’s attack.

“Aye, well,” he mumbled. “You shall ’ave it next week definite.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “You, too, Mr. Herriot.”

When I called the following week, I stopped in the doorway, transfixed by the amazing sight. Mr. Bendelow was actually stitching. Up on his table, his head bent low over a jacket, his hand flashing over a lapel with wonderful deftness. And he wasn’t talking.

The talking was being done by a man and his wife who were submitting him to an aggressive barrage of complaints. The tailor, silent and unhappy, made no reply. And Blanco was still asleep by the fire.

In the quest for my trousers I called in a few times during my rounds but there was always a queue and I didn’t have time to wait. I did notice, however, that on each occasion Mr. Bendelow was working, silent and subdued, on his table, and his dog was motionless by the fire. The picture saddened me. Talking was the little man’s life, his hobby and solace in his bachelor existence. Something was far wrong.

I called round one evening and found Mr. Bendelow alone, still stitching.

I didn’t mention my trousers. “What’s wrong with Blanco?” I said.

He looked at me in surprise. “Nowt, as far as I know.”

“Is he eating all right?”

“Aye, he is.”

“Getting plenty of exercise?”

“Yes, a good walk night and mornin’. You know I look after me dog, Mr. Herriot.”

“Yes, of course you do. But…he’s not up round your table like he used to be. Not…er…interested in the customers.”

He nodded miserably. “Aye, that’s t’only thing. But he isn’t ill.”

“Let’s have a look at him,” I said. I went over to the fire and bent over the dog. “Come on, Blanco, old lad, let’s see you on your feet.”

I tapped him on the rump and he got up slowly. I looked at the tailor. “He seems a bit stiff.”

“Aye, maybe, but ’e soon works it off when I take him out.”

“Not really lame, though? No pins?”

“Nay, nay, ah can allus tell when he’s picked one up.”

“Hmm. Still, I’d better check on his paws.”

Whenever I lifted one of Blanco’s feet I had the same feeling as when I examined a horse’s hoof and, indeed, had to stop myself from saying, “Whoa, there, boy,” and tucking the paw between my knees.

I carefully inspected each foot, squeezing the pads, which were the usual sites for the dangerous pins, but all seemed normal. I took his temperature, auscultated his chest and palpated his abdomen without finding any clues. But as I looked down at the big animal I could not rid myself of the nagging certainty that there was something amiss.

Blanco, tiring of my attention, sat down, and he did so gingerly, lowering himself carefully onto the fireside rug.

That wasn’t right at all. “Get up, lad,” I said quickly.

There had to be some trouble at his rear end. Impacted anal glands, perhaps? No, they were all right. I passed my hands down the massive thighs and on the left side, as I felt my way down the musculature, the dog winced suddenly. There was a painful swelling there and as I clipped away the hair, all became clear. Deeply embedded in the flesh was one of his old enemies, a pin.

It was a moment’s work to extract it with my forceps and I turned to Mr. Bendelow. “Well, there it is. He must have sat on this when it got onto the rug. It’s a wonder he hasn’t been lame, but there’s a little abscess which has been upsetting him. An abscess is a depressing thing.”

“Aye…aye…but what can you do?” He looked at me with worried eyes.

“I’ll have to get him round to the surgery and drain the pus away. Then he’ll be fine.”

Blanco’s visit to Skeldale House passed off smoothly. I evacuated the abscess and filled up the cavity by squeezing a few of the ever-useful penicillin intramammary tubes into it.

I didn’t visit Mr. Bendelow for another week. I clung to the hope that he might have repaired my working trousers. My wardrobe was very limited and I sorely needed them.

The scene was as always, the tailor on his table and Blanco stretched by the fire. And strangely, Mrs. Haw, the farmer’s wife I had seen at my first visit, was there.

She was having a kind of tug-of-war with her husband’s waistcoat, which Mr. Bendelow had apparently mended at last but was reluctant to release. His lips were moving rapidly with his quick-fire delivery. “And that’s what the feller said to me. You wouldn’t believe it, would you, and that’s not all…”

With a quick tug the lady managed to win possession of the waistcoat. “Thank ye very much, Mr. Bendelow. I’ll ’ave to go now…” She nodded, waved and scurried past me, looking exhausted but triumphant.

The tailor turned to me. “Ah, it’s you, Mr. Herriot.”

“Yes, Mr. Bendelow, I was wondering…”

“You’ll remember I was just goin’ to tell you that story about the rich man.”

“About my trousers…”

“He was an old farmer, he kept his brass in the house in buckets. His missus brought up a bucket and she said, ‘There’s fifteen hundred pounds in this bucket’ and the old chap said, ‘There’s summat wrong somewhere. There should be two thousand in that ’un.’ And do you know, that man and his wife used to pay separately for their own food. It’s true what I’m tellin’ you—she went out and bought hers and ’e did the same. And I’ll tell you summat else, Mr. Herriot…”

“Have you, by any chance, managed to… ?

“Just listen to this—”

“Hey, Bendy!” A big man had just come in and he was roaring over my shoulder. “I can ’ear you and ah’m not listenin’! I want my bloody jacket!”

It was Gobber Newhouse, hugely fat, notorious drunk and bully. Stale beer fumes billowed around him as he bellowed again. “Don’t give me any of your bloody excuses, Bendy, ah know you!”

Like a surfacing white whale, Blanco rose from the fireside and surged to the table. He seemed to know the kind of man he was dealing with and didn’t waste any frills on him. Reaching his mighty head high he opened his mouth wide and bayed with tremendous force into the red sweating face. “Whaaa! Whaaa!”

Gobber backed away. “Bloody dog …siddown…gerrim away, Bendy.”

“Whaaa! Whaaa! Whaaa!” went Blanco.

The big man was half out of the door when Mr. Bendelow signalled with his needle. “Come next week.”

“As I was sayin’, Mr. Herriot…” he continued.

“I really do need…”

“Next week, definite, but let me tell you…”

“Must go, I’m afraid.” I escaped into the street.

Out there my feelings were mixed, but on the whole, happy. I still hadn’t got my trousers, but Blanco was right back on the job.

F
IVE O’CLOCK IN THE
morning and the telephone jangling in my ear. Ewe lambing at Walton’s, a lonely farm on the high moorland, and as I crawled from the haven of bed into the icy air of the bedroom and began to pull on my clothes I tried not to think of the comfortless hour or two ahead.

Pushing my arms through my shirtsleeves, I gritted my teeth as the cloth chafed the flesh. In the pale dawn light I could see the little red fissures that covered my hands and ran up to my elbows. In lambing time I hardly ever seemed to have my jacket on and the constant washing in the open pens or in windy fields had turned my skin to raw meat. I could detect the faint scent of Helen’s glycerine and rose water which she applied to my arms every night and made them bearable.

Helen stirred under the blankets and I went over and kissed her cheek. “Off to Walton’s,” I whispered.

Eyes closed, she nodded against the pillow, and I could just hear her sleepy murmur. “Yes… I heard.”

Going out of the door I looked back at my wife’s huddled form. When this happened she, too, was jerked into the world of work and duty. That phone could blast off again at any time and she would have to get in touch with me. And on top of this, she would have to get the fires lit, the tea made and the children started with their breakfast—the little tasks I tried to help her with and which weren’t easy in our big, beautiful icebox of a house.

I drove through the tight-shut, sleeping little town, then onto the narrow road winding between its walls till the trees dwindled and disappeared, leaving the wide, windswept fells, bare and unwelcoming.

I wondered if there were any chance of the ewe being inside. In the early fifties, it didn’t seem to occur to many of the farmers to bring their lambing ewes into the buildings and I attended to the great majority out in the open fields. There were happy occasions when I almost chuckled in relief at the sight of a row of hurdles in a warm fold yard, or sometimes the farmers would build pens from stacked-up straw bales, but my spirits plummeted when I drew up at the farm and met Mr. Walton, who came out carrying a bucket of water and headed for the gate.

“Outside, is she?” I asked, trying to sound airy.

“Aye, just ower there.” He pointed over the long, bracken-splashed pasture to a prone woolly form in the distance, which looked a hell of a long way ower there. As I trailed across the frosty grass, my medical bag and obstetric overall dangling, a merciless wind tore at me, picking up an extra Siberian cold from the long drifts of snow that still lay behind the walls in this late Yorkshire spring.

As I stripped off and knelt behind the ewe I looked around. We were right on top of the world and the panorama of hills and valleys with grey farmhouses and pebbled rivers in their depths was beautiful, but would have been more inviting if it had been a warm summer afternoon and I was preparing for a picnic with my family.

I held out my hand and the farmer deposited a tiny sliver of soap on my palm. I always felt that farmers kept special pieces of soap for the vet—minute portions of scrubbing soap that were too small and hard to be of any use. I rubbed this piece frantically with my hands, dipping frequently into the water, but I could work up only the most meagre film of lather. Not enough to protect my tender arm as I inserted it into the ewe, and the farmer looked at me enquiringly as I softly ooh’d and aah’d my way towards the cervix.

I found just what I didn’t want to find. A big single lamb jammed tight. Two lambs are the norm and three quite common, but a big single lamb often spells trouble. It was one of my joys in practice to sort out the tangles of twins and triplets, but with the singles it was a case of not enough room and the big lamb had to be eased and pulled out as gently as possible—a long and tedious business. Also, often the single lamb was dead through pressure and had to be removed by embryotomy or a Caesarean operation.

Resigning myself to the fact that I was going to spend a long time crouched on that windy hilltop, I reached as far as possible and poked a finger into the lamb’s mouth, feeling a surge of relief as the little tongue stirred against my hand. He was alive, anyway, and with a lifting of my spirits I began the familiar ritual of introducing lubricating jelly, locating the tiny legs and fastening them with snares and finally, as I sat back on my heels for a breather, I knew that all I had to do now was to bring the head through the pelvis. That was the tricky bit. If it came through I was home and dry, if it didn’t I was in trouble. Mr. Walton, holding back the wool from the vulva, watched me in silence. Despite his lifetime experience with sheep he was helpless in a case like this because, like most farmers, he had huge, work-roughened hands with fingers like bananas and could not possibly have got inside a ewe. My small “lady’s hand,” as they called it, was a blessing.