The Lord God Made Them All Read online

  Both the farmers sat up suddenly as I went on. “Those kids down there and all the people seem to be friends. And remember that waiter who thought it was funny to be offered money?”

  Just at that moment a handsome young couple appeared at the far end of the room, the man in a dark suit, the girl in a glittering, spangled bridal gown.

  “My God!” I said. “It’s a wedding reception!”

  And it was, indeed. The newlyweds moved around among their guests, and when they reached us, I half expected to be thrown out, but, on the contrary, they seemed to regard our presence as a gracious courtesy visit. They bowed and shook hands with us and made us welcome with smiles and gestures. Before they moved on, the bride gave each of us a long silver thread. She did this with some ceremony, and I deduced that it was an honoured local custom, the thread having possibly been taken from her gown. In any case, I took it in this spirit, and I carried that thread in my wallet for many years thereafter until it gradually disintegrated.

  We were still recovering from our surprise when two men in traditional Turkish dress appeared on a stage at the other end of the room. They were obviously entertainers and comedians to boot, because very soon the room was echoing with laughter. It was strange for the three of us sitting there to hear the totally unintelligible cross talk, followed by the roars of mirth, the little children jumping up and down and clapping their hands in delight.

  They were versatile chaps, those two. When they had finished being funny, one of them produced a one-string fiddle and began to play, while the other sang in that peculiar wail which is associated only with Eastern countries.

  I had no way of telling whether it was a love song, a happy song or a sad song, but as I listened to that strange ululation going on and on, I felt very far from home.

  It was about then that my eyelids began to droop. I remembered that I had had only two hours’ sleep the night before and that rather a lot had happened in a short time. I was very tired, and when I turned to look at my farmer friends, I saw that Joe was nodding and Noel was slumbering peacefully, his chin on his chest.

  I stood up and suggested that we ought to leave. They didn’t need much persuading.

  Back in the hotel, I descended to my basement room and made up the bed from the pile of blankets on the chair. I would have fallen asleep immediately but from somewhere quite close at hand came the same wailing which I had heard at the wedding reception. At first I thought I was dreaming but then I realised there was a party going on in one of the hotel rooms. It was a noisy party, too, with screams of laughter, outbursts of music, thumping of dancing feet. It went on and on, and it must have been the middle of the night before the din subsided and I fell into an exhausted sleep.

  Chapter

  33

  I STOOD, HEAD BOWED, leaning on my great guillotine which stood chest high. It occurred to me that my pose was exactly that of the executioner resting against his axe as I had seen in old pictures of the beheading of Sir Walter Raleigh and other unfortunates.

  However, I wasn’t wearing a hood; I was standing in a deep-strawed fold yard, not on a scaffold; and I was waiting for a bullock to be dehorned, not for a hapless victim to lay his head upon the block.

  In the fifties, bovine homs quite suddenly went out of fashion. To veterinary surgeons and most farmers their passing was unla-mented. Homs were at best a nuisance, at worst extremely dangerous. They worked their way under vets’ coats and pulled off the buttons and tore out pockets. They could whip round and bash the hand, arm or even the head of a man injecting the neck and, of course, in the case of a really wild cow or bull, they could be instruments of death.

  Homs were a menace, too, to other bovines. Some cows and bullocks were natural bullies, and one animal could impose a reign of terror on its more timid neighbours, driving them away viciously from food troughs in open yards and inflicting savage wounds on any that resisted. The farmers in Yorkshire used to call these injuries “hipes,” and they ranged from massive hae-matomata over the ribs to deep lacerations of the udder. It was strange how a boss cow would always go for the udder and the résulte were often ruinous. Since the passing of horns you never heard the word “hipe” now.

  There were farmers, notably pedigree breeders, who attached great importance to well-set horns and pointed out that a neat, “cocky” little horn looked well in the show ring and that their highly bred animals would be disfigured, but their voices were lost in the tumult for abolition.

  One down-to-earth dairyman said to me at the time, “You don’t get much milk out of a bloody horn,” and that seemed to be the general attitude.

  From my own point of view, the only thing I missed was that convenient handle to get hold of a cow. For many years I had smacked one hand down on the horn, then pushed the fingers of the other hand into the nose, but after the dehorning revolution there was nothing to grasp. Most cows were expert at tucking their noses down on the ground or round the other side where you couldn’t get at them, but that was a small thing.

  So, by and large, the disappearance of these dangerous and largely useless appendages was a great blessing but, oh dear, there was one tremendous snag. The horns didn’t just go away by themselves. They had to be removed by the vets, and that removal wrote a gory and ham-fisted chapter in veterinary history that still hangs like a dark cloud in my memory.

  I suppose Siegfried and I reacted just like the other members of our profession. As the situation arose and we looked out on a countryside apparently dominated by a waving forest of horns, we wondered how we would start. Was it to be general or local anaesthesia? Did we saw them off or chop them off?

  In the beginning the chop school appeared to hold sway, because there were many advertisements in the Veterinary Record for villainous-looking guillotines. We ordered one of these, but we both experienced a sense of shock when we unpacked it. As I said, it was nearly as tall as a small man and its weight was frightening.

  Siegfried, groaning slightly, hefted the thing by its long wooden handles till the huge, sliding blades were at eye level, then he lowered it quickly and leaned against the wall.

  He took a long, shuddering breath. “Hell, you need to be a trained athlete just to lift that bloody thing!” He paused in thought. “There’s no doubt we’ll need something like that for the big beasts, but surely we can find something else for the little stirks.” He raised a finger. “James, I believe I know the very thing.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. I saw some nice light hedge-clippers in Albert Kenning’s window yesterday. I bet they’d do the job. Tell you what—let’s go round and try them.”

  When Siegfried had one of his ideas, he didn’t mess about. Within seconds we were hurrying, almost at a trot, through the market place to the ironmonger’s.

  I followed close on Siegfried’s heels as he burst into the shop.

  “Albert!” he shouted. “Those hedge-clippers! Let’s have a look at them!”

  They certainly looked all right—round, gleaming, wooden shafts terminating in small, curved blades which crossed each other scissors-wise.

  “Mm, yes,” I said. “Do you think they’ll be strong enough to cut through a little horn?”

  “Only one way to find out.” Siegfried brandished his new weapon. “Fetch me one of those canes, Albert!”

  The little man turned towards a bundle of thick bamboos that were on sale for tying up flowers and shrubs. “These?”

  “That’s right. Look sharp.”

  Albert selected a cane and brought it over.

  “Now, hold it out towards me,” Siegfried said. “No, no, no, upright. That’s fine, fine.”

  Starting at the top, he began to clip off inch lengths of the bamboo at lightning speed. The fragments flew in all directions, and Albert had to duck several times as they flew past his ears. But he was more anxious about his hand as the blades worked rapidly downwards. Apprehensively, he kept lowering his grasp until Siegfried made his final slash an inch above his thumb. Hold