All Creatures Great and Small Read online

  The knife really went in then. I was attached to those breeches. I had paid thirty shillings for them at the Army and Navy Stores and cherished a private conviction that they gave me a certain air. And Grier’s attack on them was all the more wounding when I considered that the man was almost certainly getting my services free; Siegfried, I felt sure, would wave aside any offers of payment.

  I had been here a week and it seemed like a lifetime. Somewhere, far back, I knew, there had been a brighter, happier existence but the memory was growing dim. Siegfried had been sincerely apologetic that morning back in Darrowby.

  “James, I have a letter here from Grier of Brawton. It seems he was castrating a colt and the thing threw itself on top of him; he has a couple of cracked ribs. Apparently his assistant walked out on him recently, so there’s nobody to run his practice. He wants me to send you along there for a week or two.”

  “Oh no! There’s a mistake somewhere. He doesn’t like me.”

  “He doesn’t like anybody. But there’s no mistake, it’s down here—and honestly, what can I do?”

  “But the only time I met him he worked me into a horrible rubber suit and made me look a right chump.”

  Siegfried smiled sadly. “I remember, James, I remember. He’s a mean old devil and I hate to do this to you, but I can’t turn him down, can I?”

  At the time I couldn’t believe it. The whole idea was unreal. But it was real enough now as I stood at the foot of Grier’s bed listening to him ranting away. He was at me again.

  “Another thing—my wife tells me you didna eat your porridge. Did you not like it?”

  I shuffled my feet. “Oh yes, it was very nice. I just didn’t feel hungry this morning.” I had pushed the tasteless mass about with my spoon and done my best with it but it had defeated me in the end.

  “There’s something wrong with a man that canna eat his good food.” Grier peered at me suspiciously then held out a slip of paper. “Here’s a list of your visits for this morning. There’s a good few so you’ll no’ have to waste your time getting round. This one here of Adamson’s of Grenton—a prolapse of the cervix in a cow. What would you do about that, think ye?”

  I put my hand in my pocket, got hold of my pipe then dropped it back again. Grier didn’t like smoking.

  “Well, I’d give her an epidural anaesthetic, replace the prolapse and fasten it in with retention sutures through the vulva.”

  “Havers, man, havers!” snorted Grier. “What a lot of twaddle. There’s no need for a’ that. It’ll just be constipation that’s doing it. Push the thing back, build the cow up with some boards under her hind feet and put her on to linseed oil for a few days.”

  “Surely it’ll come out again if I don’t stitch it in?” I said.

  “Na, na, na, not at all,” Grier cried angrily. “Just you do as I tell you now. I ken more about this than you.”

  He probably did. He should, anyway—he had been qualified for thirty years and I was starting my second. I looked at him glowering from his pillow and pondered for a moment on the strange fact of our uncomfortable relationship. A Yorkshire man listening to the two outlandish accents—Grier’s rasping Aberdeen, my glottal Clydeside—might have expected that some sort of rapport would exist between us, if only on national grounds. But there was none.

  “Right, just as you say.” I left the room and went downstairs to gather up my equipment.

  As I set off on the round I had the same feeling as every morning—relief at getting out of the house. I had had to go flat out all week to get through the work but I had enjoyed it. Farmers are nearly always prepared to make allowances for a young man’s inexperience and Grier’s clients had treated me kindly, but I still had to come back to that joyless establishment for meals and it was becoming more and more wearing.

  Mrs. Grier bothered me just as much as her husband. She was a tight-lipped woman of amazing thinness and she kept a spartan board in which soggy porridge figured prominently. It was porridge for breakfast, porridge for supper and, in between, a miserable procession of watery stews, anaemic mince and nameless soups. Nothing she cooked ever tasted of anything. Angus Grier had come to Yorkshire thirty years ago, a penniless Scot just like myself, and acquired a lucrative practice by the classical expedient of marrying the boss’s daughter; so he got a good living handed to him on a plate, but he also got Mrs. Grier.

  It seemed to me that she felt she was still in charge—probably because she had always lived in this house with its memories of her father who had built up the practice. Other people would seem like interlopers and I could understand how she felt; after all, she was childless, she didn’t have much of a life and she had Angus Grier for a husband. I could feel sorry for her.

  But that didn’t help because I just couldn’t get her out of my hair; she hung over my every move like a disapproving spectre. When I came back from a round she was always there with a barrage of questions. “Where have you been all this time?” or “I wondered wherever you’d got to, were you lost?” or “There’s an urgent case waiting. Why are you always so slow?” Maybe she thought I’d nipped into a cinema for an hour or two.

  There was a pretty full small animal surgery every night and she had a nasty habit of lurking just outside the door so that she could listen to what I was saying to the clients. She really came into her own in the dispensary where she watched me narrowly, criticising my prescriptions and constantly pulling me up for being extravagant with the drugs. “You’re putting in far too much chlorodyne—don’t you know it’s very expensive?”

  I developed a deep sympathy for the assistant who had fled without warning; jobs were hard to come by and young graduates would stand nearly anything just to be at work, but I realised that there had been no other choice for that shadowy figure.

  Adamson’s place was a small-holding on the edge of the town and maybe it was because I had just been looking at Grier but by contrast the farmer’s lined, patient face and friendly eyes seemed extraordinarily warming and attractive. A ragged khaki smock hung loosely on his gaunt frame as he shook hands with me.

  “Now then, we’ve got a new man today, have we?” He looked me over for a second or two. “And by the look of you you’re pretty fresh to t’job.”

  “That’s right,” I replied. “But I’m learning fast.”

  Mr. Adamson smiled. “Don’t worry about that, lad. I believe in new blood and new ideas—it’s what we want in farming. We’ve stood still too long at this game. Come into t’byre and I’ll show you the cow.”

  There were about a dozen cows, not the usual Shorthorns but Ayrshires, and they were obviously well kept and healthy. My patient was easy to pick out by the football-sized rose-pink protrusion of the vaginal wall and the corrugated uterine cervix. But the farmer had wasted no time in calling for assistance; the mass was clean and undamaged.

  He watched me attentively as I swabbed the prolapse with antiseptic and pushed it back out of sight, then he helped me build a platform with soil and planks for the cow’s hind feet. When we had finished she was standing on a slope with her tail higher than her head.

  “And you say that if I give her linseed oil for a few days that thing won’t come out again?”

  “That’s the idea,” I said. “Be sure to keep her built up like this.”

  “I will, young man, and thank you very much. I’m sure you’ve done a good job for me and I’ll look forward to seeing you again.”

  Back in the car, I groaned to myself. Good job! How the hell could that thing stay in without stitches? But I had to do as I was told and Grier, even if he was unpleasant, wasn’t a complete fool. Maybe he was right. I put it out of my mind and got on with the other visits.

  It was less than a week later at the breakfast table and I was prodding at the inevitable porridge when Grier, who had ventured downstairs, barked suddenly at me.

  “I’ve got a card here frae Adamson. He says he’s not satisfied with your work. We’d better get out there this morning and see what’