All Things Bright and Beautiful (27 page)

“Aw right,” he said and began to walk slowly towards the door. He stopped opposite Ewan but didn’t look at him. “But ah’ll tell you summat, Maister Thwaite. If ah can’t put that calf bed back this awd bugger never will.”

Ewan drew on his cigarette and peered up at him impassively. He didn’t follow him with his eyes as he left the byre but leaned back against the walk puffed out a thin plume of smoke and watched it rise and disappear among the shadows in the roof.

Mr. Thwaite was soon back. “Now, Mr. Ross,” he said a little breathlessly, “I’m sorry about you havin’ to wait but we can get on now. I expect you’ll be needin’ some fresh hot water and is there anything else you want?”

Ewan dropped his cigarette on the cobbles and ground it with his foot. “Yes, you can bring me a pound of sugar.”

“What’s that?”

“A pound of sugar.”

“A pound of…right, right…I’ll get it.”

In no time at all the farmer returned with an unopened paper bag. Ewan split the top with his finger, walked over to the cow and began to dust the sugar all over the uterus. Then he turned to Mr. Thwaite again.

“And I’ll want a pig stool, too. I expect you have one.”

“Oh aye, we have one, but what the hangment…?”

Ewan cocked a gentle eye at him. “Bring it in, then. It’s time we got this job done.”

As the farmer disappeared at a stiff gallop I went over to my colleague. “What’s going on, Ewan? What the devil are you chucking that sugar about for?”

“Oh it draws the serum out of the uterus. You can’t beat it when the thing’s engorged like that.”

“It does?” I glanced unbelievingly at the bloated organ. “And aren’t you going to give her an epidural…and some pituitrin…and a calcium injection?”

“Och no,” Ewan replied with his slow smile. “I never bother about those things.”

I didn’t get the chance to ask him what he wanted with the pig stool because just then Mr. Thwaite trotted in with one under his arm.

Most farms used to have them. They were often called “creels” and the sides of bacon were laid on them at pig-killing time. This was a typical specimen—like a long low table with four short legs and a slatted concave top. Ewan took hold of it and pushed it carefully under the cow just in front of the udder while I stared at it through narrowed eyes. I was getting out of my depth.

Ewan then walked unhurriedly out to his car and returned with a length of rope and two objects wrapped in the inevitable brown paper. As he draped the rope over the partition, pulled on a rubber parturition gown and began to open the parcels I realised I was once again watching Ewan setting out his stall.

From the first parcel he produced what looked like a beer tray but which I decided couldn’t possibly be; but when he said, “Here, hold this a minute, Jim,” and I read the emblazoned gold scroll, “John Smith’s Magnet Pale Ale” I had to change my mind. It was a beer tray.

He began to unfold the brown paper from the other object and my brain reeled a little as he fished out an empty whisky bottle and placed it on the tray. Standing there with my strange burden I felt like the stooge in a conjuring act and I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if my colleague had produced a live rabbit next.

But all he did was to fill the whisky bottle with some of the clean hot water from the bucket.

Next he looped the rope round the cow’s horns, passed it round the body a couple of times then leaned back and pulled. Without protest the big animal collapsed gently on top of the milk stool and lay there with her rear end stuck high in the air.

“Right now, we can start,” Ewan murmured, and as I threw down my jacket and began to tear off my tie he turned to me in surprise.

“Here, here, what do you think you’re doing?”

“Well I’m going to give you a hand, of course.”

One corner of his mouth twitched upwards. “It’s kind of you, Jim, but there’s no need to get stripped off. This will only take a minute. I just want you and Mr. Thwaite to keep the thing level for me.”

He gently hoisted the organ, which to my fevered imagination had shrunk visibly since the sugar, on to the beer tray and gave the farmer and me an end each to hold.

Then he pushed the uterus back.

He did literally only take a minute or not much more. Without effort, without breaking sweat or exerting visible pressure he returned that vast mass to where it belonged while the cow, unable to strain or do a thing about it, just lay there with an aggrieved expression on her face. Then he took his whisky bottle, passed it carefully into the vagina and disappeared up to arm’s length where he began to move his shoulder vigorously.

“What the hell are you doing now?” I whispered agitatedly into his ear from my position at the end of the beer tray.

“I’m rotating each horn to get it back into place and pouring a little hot water from the bottle into the ends of the horns to make sure they’re completely involuted.”

“Oh, I see.” I watched as he removed the bottle, soaped his arms in the bucket and began to take off his overall.

“But aren’t you going to stitch it in?” I blurted out.

Ewan shook his head. “No, Jim. If you put it back properly it never comes out again.”

He was drying his hands when the byre door opened and Duke Skelton slouched in. He was washed and dressed, with his red handkerchief knotted again round his neck and he glared fierce-eyed at the cow which, tidied up and unperturbed, looked now just like all the other cows in the row. His lips moved once or twice before he finally found his voice.

“Aye, it’s all right for some people,” he snarled. “Some people with their bloody fancy injections and instruments! It’s bloody easy that way, isn’t it!” Then he swung round and was gone.

As I heard his heavy boots clattering across the yard it struck me that his words were singularly inapt. What was there even remotely fancy about a pig stool, a pound of sugar, a whisky bottle and a beer tray?

“I
WORK FOR CATS.”

That was how Mrs. Bond introduced herself on my first visit, gripping my hand firmly and thrusting out her jaw defiantly as though challenging me to make something of it. She was a big woman with a strong, high-cheekboned face and a commanding presence and I wouldn’t have argued with her anyway, so I nodded gravely as though I fully understood and agreed, and allowed her to lead me into the house.

I saw at once what she meant. The big kitchen-living room had been completely given over to cats. There were cats on the sofas and chairs and spilling in cascades on to the floor, cats sitting in rows along the window sills and right in the middle of it all, little Mr. Bond, pallid, wispy-moustached, in his shirt sleeves reading a newspaper.

It was a scene which was going to become very familiar. A lot of the cats were obviously uncastrated Toms because the atmosphere was vibrant with their distinctive smell—a fierce pungency which overwhelmed even the sickly wisps from the big saucepans of nameless cat food bubbling on the stove. And Mr. Bond was always there, always in his shirt sleeves and reading his paper, a lonely little island in a sea of cats.

I had heard of the Bonds, of course. They were Londoners who for some obscure reason had picked on North Yorkshire for their retirement. People said they had a “bit o’ brass” and they had bought an old house on the outskirts of Darrowby where they kept themselves to themselves—and the cats. I had heard that Mrs. Bond was in the habit of taking in strays and feeding them and giving them a home if they wanted it and this had predisposed me in her favour, because in my experience the unfortunate feline species seemed to be fair game for every kind of cruelty and neglect. They shot cats, threw things at them, starved them and set their dogs on them for fun. It was good to see somebody taking their side.

My patient on this first visit was no more than a big kitten, a terrified little blob of black and white crouching in a corner.

“He’s one of the outside cats,” Mrs. Bond boomed.

“Outside cats?”

“Yes. All these you see here are the inside cats. The others are the really wild ones who simply refuse to enter the house. I feed them of course but the only time they come indoors is when they are ill.”

“I see.”

“I’ve had frightful trouble catching this one. I’m worried about his eyes—there seemed to be a skin growing over them, and I do hope you can do something for him. His name, by the way, is Alfred.”

“Alfred? Ah yes, quite.” I advanced cautiously on the little half-grown animal and was greeted by a waving set of claws and a series of open-mouthed spittings. He was trapped in his corner or he would have been off with the speed of light.

Examining him was going to be a problem. I turned to Mrs. Bond. “Could you let me have a sheet of some kind? An old ironing sheet would do. I’m going to have to wrap him up.”

“Wrap him up?” Mrs. Bond looked very doubtful but she disappeared into another room and returned with a tattered sheet of cotton which looked just right

I cleared the table of an amazing variety of cat feeding dishes, cat books, cat medicines and spread out the sheet, then I approached my patient again. You can’t be in a hurry in a situation like this and it took me perhaps five minutes of wheedling and “Puss-pussing” while I brought my hand nearer and nearer. When I got as far as being able to stroke his cheek I made a quick grab at the scruff of his neck and finally bore Alfred, protesting bitterly and lashing out in all directions, over to the table. There, still holding tightly to his scruff, I laid him on the sheet and started the wrapping operation.

This is something which has to be done quite often with obstreperous felines and, although I say it, I am rather good at it. The idea is to make a neat, tight roll, leaving the relevant piece of cat exposed; it may be an injured paw, perhaps the tail, and in this case of course the head. I think it was the beginning of Mrs. Bond’s unquestioning faith in me when she saw me quickly enveloping that cat till all you could see of him was a small black and white head protruding from an immovable cocoon of cloth. He and I were now facing each other, more or less eyeball to eyeball, and Alfred couldn’t do a tiling about it.

As I say, I rather pride myself on this little expertise and even today my veterinary colleagues have been known to remark: “Old Herriot may be limited in many respects but by God he can wrap a cat.”

As it turned out, there wasn’t a skin growing over Alfred’s eyes. There never is.

“He’s got a paralysis of the third eyelid, Mrs. Bond. Animals have this membrane which flicks across the eye to protect it. In this case it hasn’t gone back, probably because the cat is in low condition—maybe had a touch of cat flu or something else which has weakened him. I’ll give him an injection of vitamins and leave you some powder to put in his food if you could keep him in for a few days. I think he’ll be all right in a week or two.”

The injection presented no problems with Alfred furious but helpless inside his sheet and I had come to the end of my first visit to Mrs. Bond’s.

It was the first of many. The lady and I established an immediate rapport which was strengthened by the fact that I was always prepared to spend time over her assorted charges; crawling on my stomach under piles of logs in the outhouses to reach the outside cats, coaxing them down from trees, stalking them endlessly through the shrubbery. But from my point of view it was rewarding in many ways.

For instance there was the diversity of names she had for her cats. True to her London upbringing she had named many of the Toms after the great Arsenal team of those days. There was Eddie Hapgood, Cliff Bastin, Ted Drake, Wilf Copping, but she did slip up in one case because Alex James had kittens three times a year with unfailing regularity.

Then there was her way of calling them home. The first time I saw her at this was on a still summer evening. The two cats she wanted me to see were out in the garden somewhere and I walked with her to the back door where she halted, clasped her hands across her bosom, closed her eyes and gave tongue in a mellifluous contralto.

“Bates, Bates, Bates, Ba-hates.” She actually sang out the words in a reverent monotone except for a delightful little lilt on the “Ba-hates.” Then once more she inflated her ample rib cage like an operatic prima donna and out it came again, delivered with the utmost feeling.

“Bates, Bates, Bates, Ba-hates.”

Anyway it worked, because Bates the cat came trotting from behind a clump of laurel. There remained the other patient and I watched Mrs. Bond with interest.

She took up the same stance, breathed in, closed her eyes, composed her features into a sweet half-smile and started again.

“Seven-times-three, Seven-times-three, Seven-times-three-hee.” It was set to the same melody as Bates with the same dulcet rise and fall at the end. She didn’t get the quick response this time, though, and had to go through the performance again and again, and as the notes lingered on the still evening air the effect was startlingly like a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.

At length she was successful and a fat tortoise-shell slunk apologetically along the wall-side into the house.

“By the way, Mrs. Bond,” I asked, making my voice casual. “I didn’t quite catch the name of that last cat.”

“Oh, Seven-times-three?” She smiled reminiscently. “Yes, she is a dear. She’s had three kittens seven times running, you see, so I thought it rather a good name for her, don’t you?”

“Yes, yes, I do indeed. Splendid name, splendid.”

Another thing which warmed me towards Mrs. Bond was her concern for my safety. I appreciated this because it is a rare trait among animal owners. I can think of the trainer after one of his racehorses had kicked me clean out of a loose box examining the animal anxiously to see if it had damaged its foot; the little old lady dwarfed by the bristling, teeth-bared Alsatian saying: “You’ll be gentle with him won’t you and I hope you won’t hurt him—he’s very nervous”; the farmer, after an exhausting calving which I feel certain has knocked about two years off my life expectancy, grunting morosely: “I doubt you’ve tired that cow out, young man.”

Mrs. Bond was different. She used to meet me at the door with an enormous pair of gauntlets to protect my hands against scratches and it was an inexpressible relief to find that somebody cared. It became part of the pattern of my life; walking up the garden path among the innumerable slinking, wild-eyed little creatures which were the outside cats, the ceremonial acceptance of the gloves at the door, then the entry into the charged atmosphere of the kitchen with little Mr. Bond and his newspaper just visible among the milling furry bodies of the inside cats. I was never able to ascertain Mr. Bond’s attitude to cats—come to think of it he hardly ever said anything—but I had the impression he could take them or leave them.