James Herriot (18 page)

“Poor awd beggar. Ah never knew it was owt like that.” He drew on his cigarette. “And could an operation cure it?”

“Yes, Ted, it’s one of the most satisfying jobs a vet can do. I always feel I’ve done a dog a good turn when I’ve finished.”

“Aye, ah bet you do. It must be a nice feelin’. But it’ll be a costly job, ah reckon?”

I smiled wryly. “It depends how you look at it. It’s a fiddly business and takes time. We usually charge about a pound for it.” A human surgeon would laugh at a sum like that but it would still be too much for old Albert.

For a few moments we were both silent looking across the room at the old man, at the threadbare coat, the long tatter of trouser bottoms falling over the broken boots. A pound was two weeks of the old age pension. It was a fortune.

Ted got up suddenly. “Any road, somebody ought to tell ’im. Ah’ll explain it to ’im.”

He crossed the room. “Are ye ready for another, Albert?”

The old shepherd glanced at him absently then indicated his glass, empty again. “Aye, ye can put a drop i’ there, Ted.”

The cowman waved to Mr. Waters then bent down. “Did ye understand what Mr. Herriot was tellin’ ye, Albert?” he shouted.

“Aye … aye … Mick’s got a bit o’ caud in ’is eyes.”

“Nay, ’e hasn’t! It’s nowt of t’soart! It’s a en … a en … summat different.”

“Keeps gettin’ caud in ’em.” Albert mumbled, nose in glass.

Ted yelled in exasperation. “Ye daft awd divil! Listen to what ah’m sayin’—ye’ve got to take care of ’im and …”

But the old man was far away. “Ever sin ’e were a pup … allus been subjeck to it …”

Though Mick took my mind off my own troubles at the time, the memory of those eyes haunted me for days. I yearned to get my hands on them. I knew an hour’s work would transport the old dog into a world he perhaps had not known for years, and every instinct told me to rush back to Copton, throw him in the car and bear him back to Darrowby for surgery. I wasn’t worried about the money but you just can’t run a practice that way.

I regularly saw lame dogs on farms, skinny cats on the streets and it would have been lovely to descend on each and every one and minister to them out of my knowledge. In fact I had tried a bit of it and it didn’t work.

It was Ted Dobson who put me out of my pain. He had come in to the town to see his sister for the evening and he stood leaning on his bicycle in the surgery doorway, his cheerful, scrubbed face gleaming as if it would light up the street.

He came straight to the point “Will ye do that operation on awd Mick, Mr. Herriot?”

“Yes, of course, but … how about …?”

“Oh that’ll be right. T’lads at Fox and Hounds are seein’ to it. We’re takin’ it out of the club money.”

“Club money?”

“Aye, we put in a bit every week for an outin’ in t’summer. Trip to t’seaside or summat like.”

“Well, it’s extremely kind of you, Ted, but are you quite sure? Won’t any of them mind?”

Ted laughed. “Nay, it’s nowt, we won’t miss a quid. We drink ower much on them do’s anyway.” He paused. “All t’lads want this job done—it’s been gettin’ on our bloody nerves watchin’ t’awd dog ever since you told us about ’im.”

“Well, that’s great,” I said. “How will you get him down?”

“Me boss is lendin’ me ’is van. Wednesday night be all right?”

“Fine.” I watched him ride away then turned back along the passage. It may seem to modern eyes that a lot of fuss had been made over a pound but in those days it was a very substantial sum, and some idea may be gained from the fact that four pounds a week was my commencing salary as a veterinary surgeon.

When Wednesday night arrived it was clear that Mick’s operation had become something of a gala occasion. The little van was crammed with regulars from the Fox and Hounds and others rolled up on their bicycles.

The old dog slunk fearfully down the passage to the operating room, nostrils twitching at the unfamiliar odours of ether and antiseptic. Behind him trooped the noisy throng of farm men, their heavy boots clattering on the tiles.

Tristan, who was doing the anaesthesia, hoisted the dog on the table and I looked around at the unusual spectacle of rows of faces regarding me with keen anticipation. Normally I am not in favour of lay people witnessing operations but since these men were sponsoring the whole thing they would have to stay.

Under the lamp I got my first good look at Mick. He was a handsome, well-marked animal except for those dreadful eyes. As he sat there he opened them a fraction and peered at me for a painful moment before closing them against the bright light; that, I felt, was how he spent his life, squinting carefully and briefly at his surroundings. Giving him the intravenous barbiturate was like doing him a favour, ridding him of his torment for a while.

And when he was stretched unconscious on his side I was able to carry out my first examination. I parted the lids, wincing at the matted lashes, awash with tears and discharge; there was a long standing keratitis and conjunctivitis but with a gush of relief I found that the cornea was not ulcerated.

“You know,” I said. “This is a mess, but I don’t think there’s any permanent damage.”

The farm men didn’t exactly break into a cheer but they were enormously pleased. The carnival air was heightened as they chattered and laughed and when I poised my scalpel it struck me that I had never operated in such a noisy environment.

But I felt almost gleeful as I made the first incision; I had been looking forward so much to this moment. Starting with the left eye I cut along the full length parallel to the margin of the lid then made a semicircular sweep of the knife to include half an inch of the tissue above the eye. Seizing the skin with forceps I stripped it away, and as I drew the lips of the bleeding wound together with stitches I noticed with intense gratification how the lashes were pulled high and away from the corneal surface they had irritated, perhaps for years.

I cut away less skin from the lower lid—you never need to take so much there—then started on the right eye. I was slicing away happily when I realised that the noise had subsided; there were a few mutterings, but the chaff and laughter had died. I glanced up and saw big Ken Appleton, the horseman from Laurel Grove; it was natural that he should catch my eye, because he was six feet four and built like the Shires he cared for.

“By gaw, it’s ’ot in ’ere,” he whispered, and I could see he meant it because sweat was streaming down his face.

I was engrossed in my work or I would have noticed that he wasn’t only sweating but deadly pale. I was stripping the skin from the eyelid when I heard Tristan’s yell.

“Catch him!”

The big man’s surrounding friends supported him as he slid gently to the floor and he stayed there, sleeping peacefully, till I had inserted the last stitch. Then as Tristan and I cleaned up and put the instruments away he began to look around him and his companions helped him to his feet. Now that the cutting was over the life had returned to the party and Ken came in for some leg-pulling; but his was not the only white face.

“I think you could do with a drop of whisky, Ken,” Tristan said. He left the room and returned with a bottle which, with typical hospitality, he dispensed to all. Beakers, measuring glasses and test tubes were pressed into service and soon there was a boisterous throng around the sleeping dog. When the van finally roared off into the night the last thing I heard was the sound of singing from the packed interior.

They brought Mick back in ten days for removal of the stitches. The wounds had healed well but the keratitis had still not cleared and the old dog was still blinking painfully. I didn’t see the final result of my work for another month.

It was when I was again driving home through Copton from an evening call that the lighted doorway of the Fox and Hounds recalled me to the little operation which had been almost forgotten in the rush of new work. I went in and sat down among the familiar faces.

Things were uncannily like before. Old Albert Close in his usual place, Mick stretched under the table, his twitching feet testifying to another vivid dream. I watched him closely until I could stand it no longer. As if drawn by a magnet I crossed the room and crouched by him.

“Mick!” I said. “Hey, wake up, boy!”

The quivering limbs stilled and there was a long moment when I held my breath as the shaggy head turned towards me. Then with a kind of blissful disbelief I found myself gazing into the wide, clear, bright eyes of a young dog.

Warm wine flowed richly through my veins as he faced me, mouth open in a panting grin, tail swishing along the stone flags. There was no inflammation, no discharge, and the lashes, clean and dry, grew in a soft arc well clear of the corneal surface which they had chafed and rasped for so long. I stroked his head and as he began to look around him eagerly I felt a thrill of utter delight at the sight of the old animal exulting in his freedom, savouring the new world which had opened to him. I could see Ted Dobson and the other men smiling conspiratorially as I stood up.

“Mr. Close,” I shouted. “Will you have a drink?”

“Aye, you can put a drop i’ there, young man.”

“Mick’s eyes are a lot better.”

The old man raised his glass. “Good ’ealth. Aye, it were nobbut a bit o’ caud.”

“But Mr.Close …!”

“Nasty thing, is caud in t’eyes. T’awd feller keeps lyin’ in that door’ole and ah reckon he’ll get it again. Ever since ’e were a pup ’e’s been subjeck …”

A
S
I
BENT OVER
the wash basin in the “ablutions” and went into another violent paroxysm of coughing I had a growing and uncomfortable conviction that I was a mere pawn.

The big difference between my present existence and my old life as a vet was that I used to make up my own mind as to how I would do things, whereas in the RAF all the decisions which affected me were made by other people. I didn’t much like being a pawn because the lives of us lowly airmen were ruled by a lot of notions and ideas dreamed up by individuals so exalted that we never knew them.

And so many of these ideas seemed crazy to me.

For instance, who decided that all our bedroom windows should be nailed open throughout a Yorkshire winter so that the healthy mist could swirl straight from the black ocean and settle icily on our beds as we slept? The result was an almost one hundred per cent incidence of bronchitis in our flight, and in the mornings the Grand Hotel sounded like a chest sanatorium with a harrowing chorus of barks and wheezes.

The cough seized me again, racking my body, threatening to dislodge my eyeballs. It was a temptation to report sick but I hadn’t done it yet. Most of the lads stuck it out till they had roaring fevers before going sick and by now, at the end of February, nearly all of them had spent a few days in hospital. I was one of the few who hadn’t. Maybe there was a bit of bravado in my stand—because most of them were eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds and I was a comparatively old man in my twenties—but there were two other reasons. Firstly, it was very often after I had got dressed and been unable to eat breakfast that I felt really ill. But by then it was too late. You had to report sick before seven o’clock or suffer till next day.

Another reason was that I didn’t like the look of the sick parade. As I went out to the corridor with my towel round my shoulders a sergeant was reading a list and inflating his lungs at the same time.

“Get on parade, the sick!” he shouted. “C’mon, c’mon, let’s be ’avin’ you!”

From various doors an unhappy group of invalids began to appear, shuffling over the linoleum, each draped with his “small kit,” haversack containing pyjamas, canvas shoes, knife, fork, spoon, etc.

The sergeant unleashed another bellow. “Get into line, there! Come on, you lot, hurry it up, look lively!”

I looked at the young men huddled there, white-faced and trembling. Most of them were coughing and spluttering and one of them clutched his abdomen as though he had a ruptured appendix.

“Parade!” bawled the sergeant “Parade, atten-shun! Parade stan’ at ease! Atten-shun! Le-eft turn! Qui-ick march! ’Eft-’ight, ’eft-’ight, ’eft-’ight, ’eft-’ight!”

The hapless band trailed wearily off. They had a march of nearly a mile through the rain to the sick quarters in another hotel above the Spa, and as I turned into my room it was with a renewed resolve to hang on as long as possible.

Another thing that frightened us all for a spell was the suggestion, drifting down from somewhere on high, that it wasn’t enough to go jogging around Scarborough on our training runs; we ought to stop every now and then and do a bit of shadow boxing like fighters. This idea seemed too outrageous to be true but we had it from the sergeant himself, who came with us on our runs. Some VIP had passed it down, claiming that it would instil belligerence in us. We were thoroughly alarmed for a while, including the sergeant, who had no desire to be seen in charge of a bunch of apparent lunatics dancing around punching at the air. Mercifully, somebody had the strength to resist this one and the whole thing fell through.

But of all these brilliant schemes the one I remember best was the one that decided we had to scream at the end of our physical training session. Apart from running miles all over the place, we had long periods of PT down on the rain-swept prom with the wind cutting in from the sea on our goose-pimpled limbs. We became so good at these exercises that it was decided to put on a show for a visiting air marshal. Not only our flight but several squadrons all performing in unison in front of the Grand.

We trained for months for the big day, doing the same movements over and over again till we were perfect. At first the barrel-chested PT sergeant shouted instructions at us all the time, then as we got better all he did was call out “Exercise three, commence.” And finally it all became so much a part of our being that he merely sounded a tiny peep on his whistle at the beginning of each exercise.

By spring we were really impressive. Hundreds of men in shorts and singlets swinging away as one out there on the square, with the PT sergeant up on the balcony above the doorway where he would stand with the air marshal on the day. The thing that made it so dramatic was the utter silence; the forest of waving limbs and swaying bodies with not a sound but the peep of the whistle.