All Things Bright and Beautiful (5 page)

The following Friday morning Siegfried was sitting behind his desk, working out the morning rounds. He scribbled a list of visits on a pad, tore out the sheet and handed it to me.

“Here you are, James, I think that’ll just about keep you out of mischief till lunch time.” Then something in the previous day’s entries caught his eye and he turned to his younger brother who was at his morning task of stoking the fire.

“Tristan, I see Joe Mulligan was in yesterday afternoon with his dog and you saw it. What did you make of it?”

Tristan put down his bucket “Oh, I gave him some of the bismuth mixture.”

“Yes, but what did your examination of the patient disclose?”

“Well now, let’s see.” Tristan rubbed his chin. “He looked pretty lively, really.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes…yes…I think so.”

Siegfried turned back to me. “And how about you, James? You saw the dog the day before. What were your findings?”

“Well it was a bit difficult,” I said. “That dog’s as big as an elephant and there’s something creepy about him. He seemed to me to be just waiting his chance and there was only old Joe to hold him. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to make a close examination but I must say I thought the same as Tristan—he did look pretty lively.”

Siegfried put down his pen wearily. On the previous night, fate had dealt him one of the shattering blows which it occasionally reserves for vets—a call at each end of his sleeping time. He had been dragged from his bed at 1 a.m. and again at 6 a.m. and the fires of his personality were temporarily damped.

He passed a hand across his eyes. “Well God help us. You, James, a veterinary surgeon of two years experience and you, Tristan, a final year student can’t come up with anything better between you than the phrase ‘pretty lively’. It’s a bloody poor thing! Hardly a worthy description of clinical findings is it? When an animal comes in here I expect you to record pulse, temperature and respiratory rate. To auscultate the chest and thoroughly palpate the abdomen. To open his mouth and examine teeth, gums and pharynx. To check the condition of the skin. To catheterise him and examine the urine if necessary.”

“Right,” I said.

“O.K.,” said Tristan.

My partner rose from his seat “Have you fixed another appointment?”

“I have, yes.” Tristan drew his packet of Woodbines from his pocket. “For Monday. And since Mr. Mulligan’s always late for the surgery I said we’d visit the dog at his home in the evening.”

“I see.” Siegfried made a note on the pad, then he looked up suddenly. “That’s when you and James are going to the young farmers’ meeting, isn’t it?”

The young man drew on his cigarette. “That’s right. Good for the practice for us to mix with the young clients.”

“Very well,” Siegfried said as he walked to the door. “I’ll see the dog myself.”

On the following Tuesday I was fairly confident that Siegfried would have something to say about Mulligan’s dog, if only to point out the benefits of a thorough clinical examination. But he was silent on the subject

It happened that I came upon old Joe in the market place sauntering over the cobbles with Clancy inevitably trotting at his heels.

I went up to him and shouted in his ear. “How’s your dog?”

Mr. Mulligan removed his pipe and smiled with slow benevolence. “Oh foine, sorr, foine. Still womitin’ a bit but not bad.”

“Mr. Farnon fixed him up, then?”

“Aye, gave him some more of the white medicine. It’s wonderful stuff, sorr, wonderful stuff.”

“Good, good,” I said. “He didn’t find anything else when he examined him?”

Joe took another suck at his pipe. “No he didn’t now, he didn’t. He’s a clever man, Mr. Farnon—I’ve niver seen a man work as fast, no I haven’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well now he saw all he wanted in tree seconds, so he did.”

I was mystified. “Three seconds?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Mulligan firmly. “Not a moment more.”

“Amazing. What happened?”

Joe tapped out his pipe on his heel and without haste took out a knife and began to carve a refill from an evil looking coil of black twist. “Well now I’ll tell ye. Mr. Farnon is a man who moves awful sudden, and that night he banged on our front door and jumped into the room.” (I knew those cottages. There was no hall or lobby—you walked straight from the street into the living room.) “And as he came in he was pullin’ his thermometer out of its case. Well now Clancy was lyin’ by the fire and he rose up in a flash and he gave a bit of a wuff, so he did.”

“A bit of a wuff, eh?” I could imagine the hairy monster leaping up and baying into Siegfried’s face. I could see the gaping jaws, the gleaming teeth.

“Aye, just a bit of a wuff. Well, Mr. Farnon just put the thermometer straight back in its case turned round and went out the door.”

“Didn’t he say anything?” I asked.

“No, divil a word. Just turned about like a soldier and marched out the door, so he did.”

It sounded authentic. Siegfried was a man of instant decision. I put my hand out to pat Clancy but something in his eyes made me change my mind.

“Well, I’m glad he’s better,” I shouted.

The old man ignited his pipe with an ancient brass lighter, puffed a cloud of choking blue smoke into my face and tapped a little metal lid on to the bowl. “Aye, Mr. Farnon sent round a big bottle of the white stuff and it’s done ’im good. Mind yous,” he gave a beatific smile, “Clancy’s allus been one for the womittin’, so he has.”

Nothing more was said about the big dog for over a week, but Siegfried’s professional conscience must have been niggling at him because he came into the dispensary one afternoon when Tristan and I were busy at the tasks which have passed into history—making up fever drinks, stomach powders, boric acid pessaries. He was elaborately casual.

“Oh by the way, I dropped a note to Joe Mulligan. I’m not entirely convinced that we have adequately explored the causes of his dog’s symptoms. This womiting…er, vomiting is almost certainly due to depraved appetite but I just want to make sure. So I have asked him to bring him round tomorrow afternoon between two and two thirty when we’ll all be here.”

No cries of joy greeted his statement, so he continued. “I suppose you could say that this dog is to some degree a difficult animal and I think we should plan accordingly.” He turned to me. “James, when he arrives you get hold of his back end, will you?”

“Right,” I replied without enthusiasm.

He faced his brother. “And you, Tristan, can deal with the head. O.K.?”

“Fine, fine,” Tristan muttered, his face expressionless.

His brother continued. “I suggest you get a good grip with your arms round his neck and I’ll be ready to give him a shot of sedative.”

“Splendid, splendid,” said Tristan.

“Ah well, that’s capital.” My partner rubbed his hands together. “Once I get the dope into him the rest will be easy. I do like to satisfy my mind about these things.”

It was a typical Dales practice at Darrowby; mainly large animal and we didn’t have packed waiting rooms at surgery times. But on the following afternoon we had nobody in at all, and it added to the tension of waiting. The three of us mooched about the office, making aimless conversation, glancing with studied carelessness into the front street, whistling little tunes to ourselves. By two twenty-five we had all fallen silent. Over the next five minutes we consulted our watches about every thirty seconds, then at exactly two thirty Siegfried spoke up.

“This is no damn good. I told Joe he had to be here before half past but he’s taken not a bit of notice. He’s always late and there doesn’t seem to be any way to get him here on time.” He took a last look out of the window at the empty street. “Right we’re not waiting any longer. You and I, James, have got that colt to cut and you, Tristan, have to see that beast of Wilson’s. So let’s be off.”

Up till then, Laurel and Hardy were the only people I had ever seen getting jammed together in doorways but there was a moment when the three of us gave a passable imitation of the famous comics as we all fought our way into the passage at the same time. Within seconds we were in the street and Tristan was roaring off in a cloud of exhaust smoke. My colleague and I proceeded almost as rapidly in the opposite direction.

At the end of Trengate we turned into the market place and I looked around in vain for signs of Mr. Mulligan. It wasn’t until we had reached the outskirts of the town that we saw him. He had just left his house and was pacing along under a moving pall of blue smoke with Clancy as always bringing up the rear.

“There he is!” Siegfried exclaimed. “Would you believe it? At the rate he’s going he’ll get to the surgery around three o’clock. Well we won’t be there and it’s his own fault.” He looked at the great curly-coated animal tripping along, a picture of health and energy. “Well, I suppose we’d have been wasting our time examining that dog in any case. There’s nothing really wrong with him.”

For a moment he paused, lost in thought, then he turned to me.

“He does look pretty lively, doesn’t he?”

“T
HEM MASTICKS,” SAID
M
R.
Pickersgill judicially, “is a proper bugger.”

I nodded my head in agreement that his mastitis problem was indeed giving cause for concern; and reflected at the same time that while most farmers would have been content with the local word “felon” it was typical that Mr. Pickersgill should make a determined if somewhat inaccurate attempt at the scientific term.

He didn’t usually go too far off the mark—most of his efforts were near misses or bore obvious evidence of their derivation—but I could never really fathom where he got the masticks. I did know that once he fastened on to an expression it never changed; mastitis had always been “them masticks” with him and it always would be. And I knew, too, that nothing would ever stop him doggedly trying to be right. This, because Mr. Pickersgill had what he considered to be a scholastic background. He was a man of about sixty and when in his teens he had attended a two week course of instruction for agricultural workers at Leeds University. This brief glimpse of the academic life had left an indelible impression on his mind, and it was as if the intimation of something deep and true behind the facts of his everyday work had kindled a flame in him which had illumined his subsequent life.

No capped and gowned don ever looked back to his years among the spires of Oxford with more nostalgia than did Mr. Pickersgill to his fortnight at Leeds and his conversation was usually laced with references to a godlike Professor Malleson who had apparently been in charge of the course.

“Ah don’t know what to make of it,” he continued. “In ma college days I was allus told that you got a big swollen bag and dirty milk with them masticks but this must be another kind. Just little bits of flakes in the milk off and on—neither nowt nor something, but I’m right fed up with it, I’ll tell you.”

I took a sip from the cup of tea which Mrs. Pickersgill had placed in front of me on the kitchen table. “Yes, it’s very worrying the way it keeps going on and on. I’m sure there’s a definite factor behind it all—I wish I could put my finger on it.”

But in fact I had a good idea what was behind it. I had happened in at the little byre late one afternoon when Mr. Pickersgill and his daughter Olive were milking their ten cows. I had watched the two at work as they crouched under the row of roan and red backs and one thing was immediately obvious; while Olive drew the milk by almost imperceptible movements of her fingers and with a motionless wrist, her father hauled away at the teats as though he was trying to ring in the new year.

This insight coupled with the fact that it was always the cows Mr. Pickersgill milked that gave trouble was enough to convince me that the chronic mastitis was of traumatic origin.

But how to tell the farmer that he wasn’t doing his job right and that the only solution was to learn a more gentle technique or let Olive take over all the milking?

It wouldn’t be easy because Mr. Pickersgill was an impressive man. I don’t suppose he had a spare penny in the world but even as he sat there in the kitchen in his tattered, collarless flannel shirt and braces he looked, as always, like an industrial tycoon. You could imagine that massive head with its fleshy cheeks, noble brow and serene eyes looking out from the financial pages of the Times. Put him in a bowler and striped trousers and you’d have the perfect chairman of the board.

I was very chary of affronting such natural dignity and anyway, Mr. Pickersgill was fundamentally a fine stocksman. His few cows, like all the animals of that fast-dying breed of small farmer, were fat and sleek and clean. You had to look after your beasts when they were your only source of income and somehow Mr. Pickersgill had brought up a family by milk production eked out by selling a few pigs and the eggs from his wife’s fifty hens.

I could never quite work out how they did it but they lived, and they lived graciously. All the family but Olive had married and left home but there was still a rich decorum and harmony in that house. The present scene was typical. The farmer expounding gravely, Mrs. Pickersgill bustling about in the background, listening to him with quiet pride. Olive, too, was happy. Though in her late thirties, she had no fears of spinsterhood because she had been assiduously courted for fifteen years by Charlie Hudson from the Darrowby fish shop and though Charlie was not a tempestuous suitor there was nothing flighty about him and he was confidently expected to pop the question over the next ten years or so.

Mr. Pickersgill offered me another buttered scone and when I declined he cleared his throat a few times as though trying to find words. “Mr. Herriot,” he said at last, “I don’t like to tell nobody his job, but we’ve tried all your remedies for them masticks and we’ve still got trouble. Now when I studied under Professor Malleson I noted down a lot of good cures and I’d like to try this ’un. Have a look at it.”

He put his hand in his hip pocket and produced a yellowed slip of paper almost falling apart at the folds. “It’s an udder salve. Maybe if we gave the bags a good rub with it it’d do t’trick.”