Every Living Thing Read online

  Gobber backed away. “Bloody dog …siddown…gerrim away, Bendy.”

  “Whaaa! Whaaa! Whaaa!” went Blanco.

  The big man was half out of the door when Mr. Bendelow signalled with his needle. “Come next week.”

  “As I was sayin’, Mr. Herriot…” he continued.

  “I really do need…”

  “Next week, definite, but let me tell you…”

  “Must go, I’m afraid.” I escaped into the street.

  Out there my feelings were mixed, but on the whole, happy. I still hadn’t got my trousers, but Blanco was right back on the job.

  Chapter 20

  FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE morning and the telephone jangling in my ear. Ewe lambing at Walton’s, a lonely farm on the high moorland, and as I crawled from the haven of bed into the icy air of the bedroom and began to pull on my clothes I tried not to think of the comfortless hour or two ahead.

  Pushing my arms through my shirtsleeves, I gritted my teeth as the cloth chafed the flesh. In the pale dawn light I could see the little red fissures that covered my hands and ran up to my elbows. In lambing time I hardly ever seemed to have my jacket on and the constant washing in the open pens or in windy fields had turned my skin to raw meat. I could detect the faint scent of Helen’s glycerine and rose water which she applied to my arms every night and made them bearable.

  Helen stirred under the blankets and I went over and kissed her cheek. “Off to Walton’s,” I whispered.

  Eyes closed, she nodded against the pillow, and I could just hear her sleepy murmur. “Yes… I heard.”

  Going out of the door I looked back at my wife’s huddled form. When this happened she, too, was jerked into the world of work and duty. That phone could blast off again at any time and she would have to get in touch with me. And on top of this, she would have to get the fires lit, the tea made and the children started with their breakfast—the little tasks I tried to help her with and which weren’t easy in our big, beautiful icebox of a house.

  I drove through the tight-shut, sleeping little town, then onto the narrow road winding between its walls till the trees dwindled and disappeared, leaving the wide, windswept fells, bare and unwelcoming.

  I wondered if there were any chance of the ewe being inside. In the early fifties, it didn’t seem to occur to many of the farmers to bring their lambing ewes into the buildings and I attended to the great majority out in the open fields. There were happy occasions when I almost chuckled in relief at the sight of a row of hurdles in a warm fold yard, or sometimes the farmers would build pens from stacked-up straw bales, but my spirits plummeted when I drew up at the farm and met Mr. Walton, who came out carrying a bucket of water and headed for the gate.

  “Outside, is she?” I asked, trying to sound airy.

  “Aye, just ower there.” He pointed over the long, bracken-splashed pasture to a prone woolly form in the distance, which looked a hell of a long way ower there. As I trailed across the frosty grass, my medical bag and obstetric overall dangling, a merciless wind tore at me, picking up an extra Siberian cold from the long drifts of snow that still lay behind the walls in this late Yorkshire spring.

  As I stripped off and knelt behind the ewe I looked around. We were right on top of the world and the panorama of hills and valleys with grey farmhouses and pebbled rivers in their depths was beautiful, but would have been more inviting if it had been a warm summer afternoon and I was preparing for a picnic with my family.

  I held out my hand and the farmer deposited a tiny sliver of soap on my palm. I always felt that farmers kept special pieces of soap for the vet—minute portions of scrubbing soap that were too small and hard to be of any use. I rubbed this piece frantically with my hands, dipping frequently into the water, but I could work up only the most meagre film of lather. Not enough to protect my tender arm as I inserted it into the ewe, and the farmer looked at me enquiringly as I softly ooh’d and aah’d my way towards the cervix.

  I found just what I didn’t want to find. A big single lamb jammed tight. Two lambs are the norm and three quite common, but a big single lamb often spells trouble. It was one of my joys in practice to sort out the tangles of twins and triplets, but with the singles it was a case of not enough room and the big lamb had to be eased and pulled out as gently as possible—a long and tedious business. Also, often the single lamb was dead through pressure and had to be removed by embryotomy or a Caesarean operation.

  Resigning myself to the fact that I was going to spend a long time crouched on that windy hilltop, I reached as far as possible and poked a finger into the lamb’s mouth, feeling a surge of relief as the little tongue stirred against my hand. He was alive, anyway, and with a lifting of my spirits I began the familiar ritual of introducing lubricating jelly, locating the tiny legs and fastening them with snares and finally, as I sat back on my heels for a breather, I knew that all I had to do now was to bring the head through the pelvis. That was the tricky bit. If it came through I was home and dry, if it didn’t I was in trouble. Mr. Walton, holding back the wool from the vulva, watched me in silence. Despite his lifetime experience with sheep he was helpless in a case like this because, like most farmers, he had huge, work-roughened hands with fingers like bananas and could not possibly have got inside a ewe. My small “lady’s hand,” as they called it, was a blessing.

  I hooked my forefinger into the eye socket—my favourite trick, there was nothing else to get hold of except the lower jaw, which was dangerously fragile—and began to pull with infinite care. The ewe strained, crushing my hand against the pelvic bones—not as bad as in a cow but painful, and my mouth opened wide as I eased and twisted and pulled until, with a blessed surge, the head slipped through the bony pelvic opening.

  It wasn’t long, then, until feet, legs and nose appeared at the vulva and I brought the little creature out onto the grass. He lay still for a moment, snuffling at the cold world he had entered, then he shook his head vigorously. I smiled. That was the best sign of all.

  I had another wrestle with the morsel of soap, then the farmer wordlessly handed me a piece of sacking to dry my arms. This was quite common in those days. Towels were scarce commodities on the farms and I couldn’t blame the farmers’ wives for hesitating to send out a clean towel to a man who had just had his arms up the back end of an animal. An old soiled one was the usual and if not, the hessian sack was always at hand. I couldn’t rub my painful arms with the coarse material and contented myself with a careful patting, before pushing them, still damp, into the sleeves of my jacket.

  The ewe, hearing a high-pitched call from her lamb, began to talk back with the soft deep baa I knew so well, and as she got up and began an intensive licking of the little creature I stood there, forgetful of the cold, listening to their conversation, enthralled as ever by the miracle of birth. When the lamb, apparently feeling he was wasting time, struggled to his feet and tottered unsteadily round to the milk bar I grinned in satisfaction and turned on the way back to the car.

  After breakfast my next call was to a “cleansing,” the removal of the afterbirth from a cow, and again, after a struggle with a rock-hard marble of soap, I was offered a sack to dry myself, only this time it had recently contained potatoes and I found I was powdering my chapped arms with soil. Later in the morning, after a rectal examination for pregnancy diagnosis, I had the choice of a truly filthy “cow house towel” which must have had an astronomical bacterial count and declined it in favour of yet another piece of hessian.

  My arms were red-hot inside my sleeves when I drove into the Birrell farmyard, but I knew better things awaited me here. Wonderful things, in fact.

  I never knew what George Birrell’s attitude to towels might be or that of his wife, but his mother, old Grandma Birrell, had very clear views on the matter. When I had finished stitching a tear on the cow’s udder I stood on the cobbles, blood-spattered and expectant, waiting for the old lady. Right on cue, she came into the byre hand in hand with four-year-old Lucy, the youngest of her