All Things Bright and Beautiful (42 page)

I smiled to myself when I thought of Nellie’s face when I told her her pet was going to be able to eat and grow strong and playful like any other pup. I was still smiling when the car pulled up on the outskirts of Granville’s home village. I glanced idly through the window at a low stone building with leaded panes and a wooden sign dangling over the entrance. It read “Old Oak Tree Inn.” I turned quickly to my companion.

“I thought we were going to your branch surgery?”

Granville gave me a smile of childish innocence. “Oh that’s what I call this place. It’s so near home and I transact quite a lot of business here.” He patted my knee. “We’ll just pop in for an appetizer, eh?”

“Now wait a minute,” I stammered gripping the sides of my seat tightly. “I just can’t be late today. I’d much rather…”

Granville raised a hand. “Jim, laddie, we won’t be in for long.” He looked at his watch. “It’s exactly twelve thirty and I promised Zoe we’d be home by one o’clock. She’s cooking roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and it would take a braver man than me to let her pudding go flat. I guarantee we’ll be in that house at one o’clock on the dot—O.K.?”

I hesitated. I couldn’t come to much harm in half an hour. I climbed out of the car.

As we went into the pub, a large man who had been leaning on the counter turned and exchanged enthusiastic greetings with my colleague.

“Albert!” cried Granville. “Meet Jim Herriot from Darrowby. Jim, this is Albert Wainwright, the landlord of the Wagon and Horses over in Matherley. In fact he’s the president of the Licensed Victuallers’ Association this year, aren’t you, Albert?”

The big man grinned and nodded and for a moment I felt overwhelmed by the two figures on either side of me. It was difficult to describe the hard, bulky tissue of Granville’s construction but Mr. Wainwright was unequivocally fat. A checked jacket hung open to display an enormous expanse of striped shirted abdomen overflowing the waistband of his trousers. Above a gay bowtie cheerful eyes twinkled at me from a red face and when he spoke his tone was rich and fruity. He embodied the rich ambience of the term “Licensed Victualler.”

I began to sip at the half pint of beer I had ordered but when another appeared in two minutes I saw I was going to fall hopelessly behind and switched to the whiskies and sodas which the others were drinking. And my undoing was that both my companions appeared to have a standing account here; they downed their drinks, tapped softly on the counter and said “Yes please, Jack,” whereupon three more glasses appeared with magical speed. I never had a chance to buy a round. In fact no money ever changed hands.

It was a quiet, friendly little session with Albert and Granville carrying on a conversation of the utmost good humour punctuated by the almost soundless taps on the bar. And as I fought to keep up with the two virtuosos the taps came more and more frequently till I seemed to hear them every few seconds.

Granville was as good as his word. When it was nearly one o’clock he looked at his watch.

“Got to be off now, Albert. Zoe’s expecting us right now.”

And as the car rolled to a stop outside the house dead on time I realised with a dull despair that it had happened to me again. Within me a witch’s brew was beginning to bubble, sending choking fumes into my brain. I felt terrible and I knew for sure I would get rapidly worse.

Granville, fresh and debonnair as ever, leaped out and led me into the house.

“Zoe, my love!” he warbled, embracing his wife as she came through from the kitchen.

When she disengaged herself she came over to me. She was wearing a flowered apron which made her look if possible even more attractive.

“HelLO!” she cried and gave me that look which she shared with her husband as though meeting James Herriot was an unbelievable boon. “Lovely to see you again. I’ll get lunch now.” I replied with a foolish grin and she skipped away.

Flopping into an armchair I listened to Granville pouring steadily over at the sideboard. He put a glass in my hand and sat in another chair. Immediately the obese Staffordshire Terrier bounded on to his lap.

“Phoebles, my little pet!” he sang joyfully. “Daddykins is home again.” And he pointed playfully at the tiny Yorkie who was sitting at his feet, baring her teeth repeatedly in a series of ecstatic smiles. “And I see you, my little Victoria, I see you!”

By the time I was ushered to the table I was like a man in a dream, moving sluggishly, speaking with slurred deliberation. Granville poised himself over a vast sirloin, stropped his knife briskly then began to hack away ruthlessly. He was a prodigal server and piled about two pounds of meat on my plate then he started on the Yorkshire puddings. Instead of a single big one, Zoe had made a large number of little round ones as the farmers’ wives often did; delicious golden cups, crisply brown round the sides. Granville heaped about six of these by the side of the meat as I watched stupidly. Then Zoe passed me the gravy boat.

With an effort I took a careful grip on the handle, closed one eye and began to pour. For some reason I felt I had to fill up each of the little puddings with gravy and I owlishly directed the stream into one then another till they were all overflowing. Once I missed and spilled a few drops of the fragrant liquid on the table cloth. I looked up guiltily at Zoe and giggled.

Zoe giggled back, and I had the impression that she felt that though I was a peculiar individual there was no harm in me. I just had this terrible weakness that I was never sober day or night, but I wasn’t such a bad fellow at heart.

It usually took me a few days to recover from a visit to Granville and by the following Saturday I was convalescing nicely. It happened that I was in the market place and saw a large concourse of people crossing the cobbles. At first I thought from the mixture of children and adults that it must be a school outing but on closer inspection I realised it was only the Dimmocks and Pounders going shopping.

When they saw me they diverted their course and I was engulfed by a human wave.

“Look at ’im now, Mister!” “He’s eatin’ like a ’oss now!” “He’s goin’ to get fat soon, Mister!” The delighted cries rang around me.

Nellie had Toby on a lead and as I bent over the little animal I could hardly believe how a few days had altered him. He was still skinny but the hopeless look had gone; he was perky, ready to play. It was just a matter of time now.

His little mistress ran her hand again and again over the smooth brown coat.

“You are proud of your little dog, aren’t you Nellie,” I said, and the gentle squinting eyes turned on me.

“Yes, I am.” She smiled that smile again. “Because ’e’s mine.”

I
T WAS ALMOST AS
though I were looking at my own cows because as I stood in the little new byre and looked along the row of red and roan backs I felt a kind of pride.

“Frank,” I said, “they look marvellous. You wouldn’t think they were the same animals.”

Frank Metcalfe grinned. “Just what I was thinking meself. It’s wonderful what a change of setting’ll do for livestock.”

It was the cows’ first day in the new byre. Previously I had seen them only in the old place—a typical Dales cowhouse, centuries old with a broken cobbled floor and gaping holes where the muck and urine lay in pools, rotting wooden partitions between the stalls and slit windows as though the place had been built as a fortress. I could remember Frank sitting in it milking, almost invisible in the gloom, the cobwebs hanging in thick fronds from the low roof above him.

In there, the ten cows had looked what they were—a motley assortment of ordinary milkers—but today they had acquired a new dignity and style.

“You must feel it’s been worth all your hard work,” I said, and the young farmer nodded and smiled. There was a grim touch about the smile as though he was reliving for a moment the hours and weeks and months of back-breaking labour he had put in there. Because Frank Metcalfe had done it all himself. The rows of neat, concreted standings, the clean, level sweep of floor, the whitewashed, cement-rendered walls all bathed in light from the spacious windows had been put there by his own two hands.

“I’ll show you the dairy,” Frank said.

We went into a small room which he had built at one end and I looked admiringly at the gleaming milk cooler, the spotless sinks and buckets, the strainer with its neat pile of filter pads.

“You know,” I said. “This is how milk should be produced. All those mucky old places I see every day on my rounds—they nearly make my hair stand on end.”

Frank leaned over and drew a jet of water from one of the taps. “Aye, you’re right. It’ll all be like this and better one day and it’ll pay the farmers better too. I’ve got me T.T. licence now and the extra fourpence a gallon will make a hell of a difference. I feel I’m ready to start.”

And when he did start, I thought, he’d go places. He seemed to have all the things it took to succeed at the hard trade of farming—intelligence, physical toughness, a love of the land and animals and the ability to go slogging on endlessly when other people were enjoying their leisure. I felt these qualities would overcome his biggest handicap which was simply that he didn’t have any money.

Frank wasn’t a farmer at all to start with. He was a steel worker from Middlesbrough. When he had first arrived less than a year ago with his young wife to take over the isolated small holding at Bransett I had been surprised to learn that he hailed from the city because he had the dark, sinewy look of the typical Dalesman—and he was called Metcalfe.

He had laughed when I mentioned this. “Oh, my great grandfather came from these parts and I’ve always had a hankering to come back.”

As I came to know him better I was able to fill in the gaps in that simple statement. He had spent all his holidays up here as a small boy and though his father was a foreman in the steelworks and he himself had served his time at the trade the pull of the Dales had been like a siren song welling stronger till he had been unable to resist it any longer. He had worked on farms in his spare time, read all he could about agriculture and finally had thrown up his old life and rented the little place high in the fells at the end of a long, stony track.

With its primitive house and tumbledown buildings it seemed an unpromising place to make a living and in any case I hadn’t much faith in the ability of townspeople to suddenly turn to farming and make a go of it; in my short experience I had seen quite a few try and fail. But Frank Metcalfe had gone about the job as though he had been at it all his life, repairing the broken walls, improving the grassland, judiciously buying stock on his shoe-string budget; there was no sign of the bewilderment and despair I had seen in so many others.

I had mentioned this to a retired farmer in Darrowby and the old man chuckled. “Aye, you’ve got to have farmin’ inside you. There’s very few people as can succeed at it unless it’s in their blood. It matters nowt that young Metcalfe’s been brought up in a town, he’s still got it in ’im—he’s got it through the titty, don’t you see, through the titty.”

Maybe he was right, but whether Frank had it through the titty or through study and brains he had transformed the holding in a short time. When he wasn’t milking, feeding, mucking out, he was slaving at that little byre, chipping stones, mixing cement, sand and dust clinging to the sweat on his face. And now, as he said, he was ready to start.

As we came out of the dairy he pointed to another old building across the yard. “When I’m straightened out I aim to convert that into another byre. I’ve had to borrow a good bit but now I’m T.T. I should be able to clear it off in a couple of years. Sometime in the future if all goes well I might be able to get a bigger place altogether.”

He was about my own age and a natural friendship had sprung up between us. We used to sit under the low beams of his cramped living room with its single small window and sparse furniture and as his young wife poured cups of tea he liked to talk of his plans.

And, listening to him, I always felt that a man like him would do well not only for himself but for farming in general.

I looked at him now as he turned his head and gazed for a few moments round his domain. He didn’t have to say: “I love this place, I feel I belong here.” It was all there in his face, in the softening of his eyes as they moved over the huddle of grass fields cupped in a hollow of the fells. These fields, clawed by past generations from the rough hillside and fighting their age-old battle with heather and bracken, ran up to a ragged hem of cliff and scree and above you could just see the lip of the moor—a wild land of bog and peat hag. Below, the farm track disappeared round the bend of a wooded hill. The pastures were poor and knuckles of rock pushed out in places through the thin soil, but the clean, turf-scented air and the silence must have been like a deliverance after the roar and smoke of the steelworks.

“Well we’d better see that cow, Frank,” I said. “The new byre nearly made me forget what I came for.”

“Aye, it’s this red and white ’un. My latest purchase and she’s never been right since I got her. Hasn’t come on to her milk properly and she seems dosy, somehow.”

The temperature was a hundred and three and as I put the thermometer away I sniffed. “She smells a bit, doesn’t she?”

“Aye,” Frank said. “I’ve noticed that myself.”

“Better bring me some hot water, then. I’ll have a feel inside.”

The uterus was filled with a stinking exudate and as I withdrew my arm there was a gush of yellowish, necrotic material. “Surely she must have had a bit of a discharge,” I said.

Frank nodded. “Yes, she has had, but I didn’t pay much attention—a lot of them do it when they’re clearing up after calving.”

I drained the uterus by means of a rubber tube and irrigated it with antiseptic, then I pushed in a few acriflavine pessaries. “That’ll help to clean her up, and I think she’ll soon be a lot better in herself, but I’m going to take a blood sample from her.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well it may be nothing, but I don’t like the look of that yellow stuff. It consists of decayed cotyledone—you know, the berries on the calf bed—and when they’re that colour it’s a bit suspicious of Brucellosis.”