Every Living Thing (21 page)

“I’ll bet they do. I know all about Granville Bennett, but Jim, you’re perfectly capable of doing these yourself.”

“Oh, I know, but we’ve always done it this way. We’re a large-animal practice. This is only a sideline.”

He laughed. “Since I came here I’ve seen you do laparotomies, enterotomies, pyometras. What’s the difference?”

“Well, I really don’t know, Calum. These other things are emergencies. Maybe it’s because when you’re doing a spay you’re starting on a healthy animal. Silly, I suppose.”

“I know what you mean. You can’t bear the thought of a client bringing in his fit little animal and then the operation goes wrong.”

“Something like that. Maybe it all stems from a lack of confidence. I can’t help thinking of myself as a farm-animal doctor who shouldn’t be doing such things.”

Calum raised a finger. “Well, with respect, Jim, you’ve got to change your ideas. Small-animal work is the thing of the future and the day has gone when country vets can turn their backs on routine things like spays just because they think they haven’t the time.”

“Maybe you’re right. I suppose we ought to start some time.”

“Why not now?”

“Eh?”

“Let’s have a crack at these three. Spays are easy—I’ve done quite a few at the college clinic.”

I was beginning to raise objections, but Calum hoisted a cage onto the table and lifted out a pretty twelve-week-old kitten. “Here we go,” he cried. “Spay number one—the beginning of a new era in Skeldale House.”

I was carried along by his enthusiasm and we soon had the little creature anaesthetised and the site prepared. Calum poised his knife and made a tiny incision in the flank. “Keyhole surgery is the order here. It’s so easy that you don’t need a lot of room to work. You just fish out the uterus like this.” He probed through the incision with forceps. “It’s no trouble at all.”

He fished out a slender strand of tissue on the end of the forceps. “There it is, you see, child’s play.” Then he paused. “No, that’s not it.” He pushed the thing back and searched further within. But when he withdrew the forceps it still wasn’t the uterus he had hold of but the same mysterious pink-white thread.

“Damn! I’ve never had this trouble,” he grunted, and began another exploration in the small abdomen. He had just pulled the wrong thing out again when the phone rang.

“Milk fever, flat out. Urgent. Afraid I’ve got to go, Calum, can you manage?”

“Of course, I’m okay. But where the hell is this uterus?”

I left him staring down at the little cat in exasperation.

When we met later in the day, he gave me a rueful grin. “I’m sorry I made a hash of my demonstration, Jim. You’d hardly got through the door before I found the uterus and finished the job in a few minutes. I did the other two cats after that on my own—no problem.”

I believed him. If ever there was a naturally gifted surgeon it was Calum. But that wasn’t the end of the story. A few days later, we admitted four more spays and since Calum was the only man around he anaesthetised them with Nembutal instead of using our oxygen and ether apparatus and did them himself. When I walked along to the operating room he was starting on the last one.

“I’m glad to see you, Jim,” he said. “I’ve just done those three,” pointing at the sleeping cats, “did ’em in double-quick time. Piece of cake. Anyway, I can show you what I mean now you’re here.”

He inserted his forceps in the incision and pulled out not the uterus but the same string-like filament as before. He stared at it for a moment and then he tried again and then a third time but with the same result.

“I don’t believe it!” he exploded. “It’s like black magic!”

I laughed and patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry I can’t wait, Calum. I just dashed along between jobs to see how you were getting on.”

“I was getting on fine till you came in,” he shouted as I went out.

When I look back, I realise it was one of the strange and unaccountable little episodes in my life, because on the third occasion, around a week later, when I walked into the operating room I found my colleague bent over a sleeping cat.

He looked up and gave me an eager smile. “Ah, here you are again, Jim. I’ve done a couple of spays like hot cakes and I’m just starting on this one. Now watch, and I’ll show you how to do it.”

Quickly and confidently he reached inside with his forceps and instead of the expected uterus there appeared the same fine cord of baffling origin. He pushed it back and tried again, and again and again without success.

“Bugger it!” he yelled. “What’s going on? When it happened before I thought it was because I was too cocky, but now I know. It’s you!” He stared at me, wild-eyed. “You’re a hoodoo! You put the evil eye on me every time!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Calum,” I said, fighting the giggles. “It’s just unfortunate—but anyway, what is that thing you keep pulling out? Has it got a name?”

“It has now,” my colleague growled. “It’s called Herriot’s duct.”

It passed into the language of the practice and, long after spaying had lost its novelty in the practice and become a regular, trouble-free routine, whenever that errant piece of tissue showed itself the cry went up.

“Hello, there goes Herriot’s duct again!”

W
HEN
I
AWOKE ON
the first morning after our move to Rowan Garth, I found myself in the usual mental state of acute readiness, like a sprinter on his blocks, ready to hurl on my clothes and take off on my daily gallop round the icy acres of Skeldale House. I was so much in the groove that when my alarm went my legs started twitching, ready for the off. It took me a minute or two to realise that such things as the sessions of fire-lighting, wrestling with the anthracite stove and running to keep warm were all in the past.

Everything was to hand. Almost effortlessly, I donned a dressing gown and meandered down the few stairs to the little hall and then into the kitchen, where a blissful warmth from the Aga cooker enveloped me. Dinah the beagle came wagging from her basket and as I patted her and exchanged the usual morning pleasantries I could discern an “isn’t this wonderful” expression in her eyes.

It was heaven. As in a trance, I slid the kettle onto the hotplate and dropped the tea into the teapot, and I hardly noticed the ascent as I sailed up with Helen’s morning cup.

Back in the kitchen I poured tea for myself and stood for a few moments, imbibing the fragrant fluid, nestling up to the Aga as I looked out at the green fields and the hills and feeling like a sultan. Life, I thought, didn’t have much more to offer.

It was all so clear now. My failures to buy those other houses had seemed at the time a black demolition of all my hopes, but in fact they had been blessed strokes of luck. I had a far better house now than either of them—modern, reasonably small, convenient…and warm. I gazed for a moment at the long-desired hatch: oh yes, it was the realisation of a dream.

Lulled by these thoughts, I sank gratefully into my chair, but rocketed up again instantly as a rasping sound exploded beneath me. My peace shattered, I lifted the cushion and found a whoopie device underneath. Shrill laughter came down from the top of the stairs as I threw open the door and saw Jimmy and Rosie hanging gleefully over the bannisters.

“You young blighters!” I yelled as I stormed upwards. “The very first morning! I’m coming to get you!” But they had locked themselves in their bedrooms by the time I arrived and I hadn’t time to go further into the matter.

Sitting down for the second time, I ruminated on the fact that I’d have to take extra care from now on. Playing jokes on Dad was a hobby of my children—imitation ink blots, buns that squeaked when bitten, envelopes that emitted a terrifying buzz when opened—particularly in the mornings when my defences were down. Every time we visited my parents in Glasgow they made a bee-line for Tam Shepherd’s joke shop in Queen Street to lay in further supplies, and in this small house I was infinitely more accessible.

However it took only a few soothing draughts of tea before I slid back into my previous euphoria. I couldn’t believe the warmth and comfort and the reeling that you could reach out and touch everything. Life was going to be so much easier for Helen.

The peace didn’t last long. Within minutes of the children coming downstairs the kitchen was reverberating with deafening noise. Jimmy had rigged up an extension speaker on a shelf to play records from our beloved Murphy radiogram, which was now stationed in the dining room next door, and within minutes Elvis Presley was blasting his message into my ears.

I escaped for a few moments by taking up Helen’s second cup. For a long time at Skeldale House it had been her only concession to my pleas to take things easier in the mornings and I was determined that this routine would continue in our new home. When I came downstairs I lifted the morning paper from the door, picked up my teacup and settled down again at the table.

Rosie, sitting next to me, was rocking back and forth in time with the music and she got so carried away that, on one of the ways down, she swivelled and the bottom of the chair leg crunched onto my slippered toe. She was a fat little girl at that time and very heavy, and I yelped in pain and my tea flew into the air and descended in a warm shower on my newspaper. As I leaped to my feet and hopped around in agony my son and daughter shrieked with laughter and Dinah set up a joyous barking to join in the fun.

Through my anguish I reflected that this was the second time within a few minutes that those two had had a good laugh at Dad’s expense. A memorable day for them.

The music was to be a regular preschool routine every morning and at first it was torture because as a lifelong devotee of classical music I found the pop scene bewildering. To me it was just a loud, unpleasant noise. But as the months passed at Rowan Garth and each day I was subjected to “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Jailhouse Rock” and others I developed something approaching affection for old Elvis, and now, more than thirty years later, any of his songs coming over the radio can transport me back to those mornings in the kitchen at Rowan Garth with the children at their cornflakes, my dog at my side and the whole world young and carefree.

And yet…there was at that time another pull on my emotions. Leaving Skeldale the day before had been a far greater wrench than I had ever imagined. After the van had taken the last of our things away I roamed through the empty rooms that had echoed to my children’s laughter. The big sitting room where I had read the bedtime stories and where, before all that, Siegfried, Tristan and I had sprawled in bachelor contentment, seemed to reproach me with its ageless charm and grace. The handsome fireplace with its glass cupboard above, and the old pewter tankard that used to hold our cash still resting there, the French window opening onto the long, high-walled garden with its lawns, fruit trees, asparagus and strawberry beds—these things were part of a great surging ocean of memories.

I walked upstairs to the large alcoved room where Helen and I had slept, and to which we had brought our children as babies to sleep in the cot that had once stood in that corner. I clumped over the bare boards to the dressing room. Jimmy and Rosie had shared this chamber, and I could almost hear their giggles and teasings that were the beginning of each new day.

I climbed another flight to the little rooms under the eaves where Helen and I had started our married life. Here, a bench against the wall and a gas ring once served as our only cooking arrangements. I walked to the window and looked over the tumbled roofs of the little town to the green fells and swallowed a huge lump in my throat. Dear old Skeldale. I was so glad it was going to be kept on as the practice house and I would walk through its doors every day, but my family was leaving and I wondered if we could ever be as happy again as we had been here.

“C
AN
I
SPEAK TO
the vet wi’ t’badger?”

As I handed the phone to our new assistant it struck me that this request was becoming common and it did me good to hear it. It meant that Calum was being accepted by the farmers. I didn’t mind at all if some of them wanted him instead of me. What I dreaded was hearing “Don’t send that bugger!” which I had learned from the experiences of some of my neighbouring vets when they employed new assistants.

I had been so lucky with John Crooks, who had been an outstanding asset to our practice, and it seemed to be asking too much of fate for a second top-class man to come along. All the new graduates were better educated than I had been, but there were reasons why a few didn’t make the grade. Some of them just couldn’t face the long rough and tumble of general practice with its antisocial hours, others lacked the ability to get on with the clients, and one or two were academically bright but unpractical.

Calum, to my vast relief, seemed to be slotting into the job effortlessly, but, just as John and Tristan had been different from each other, so was he from them. Very different. His ever-present badger fascinated people, his tall, walrus-moustached appearance, eager friendliness and unusual outlook on life made him interesting to both farm and small-animal clients, but, most important of all, he knew his stuff. He was a fine vet.

Phin Calvert, one of the characters in our practice who always addressed me as “Happy Harry” on my visits to his farm, had given me his opinion of Calum in his usual forthright way. “That feller,” he said, “is a
vitnery
!”

My colleague Calum put down the phone and turned to me. “That was Eddie Coates. Said he had a beast ‘a bit dowly.’ I’m getting to be an expert with dowly beasts.”

I laughed. “Good, Calum. You’d better get along, then.”

He looked thoughtful for a moment, then, “Something I wanted to ask you, Jim. Could I change my hours a bit?”

“In what way? Different half-day?”

“No, I’d like to start at six o’clock every morning and finish at two in the afternoon.”

I stared at him in amazement. “What’s the idea of that?”

“It would give me more opportunities to get around the countryside—find out more about the wildlife and flora about here.”