All Things Bright and Beautiful Read online

  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.”

  “Abortion, you mean?”

  “It’s possible, Frank. She may have calved before her time or she may have calved normally but still been infected. Anyway the blood will tell us. Keep her isolated in the meantime.”

  A few days later at breakfast time in Skeldale House I felt a quick stab of anxiety as I opened the lab report and read that the agglutination test on the blood had given a positive result. I hurried out to the farm.

  “How long have you had this cow?” I asked.

  “Just over three weeks,” the young farmer replied.

  “And she’s been running in the same field as your other cows and the in-calf heifers?”

  “Yes, all the time.”

  I paused for a moment “Frank, I’d better tell you the implications. I know you’ll want to know what might happen. The source of infection in Brucellosis is the discharges of an infected cow and I’m afraid this animal of yours will have thoroughly contaminated that pasture. Any or all of your animals may have picked up the bug.”

  “Does that mean they’ll abort?”

  “Not necessarily. It varies tremendously. Many cows carry their calves through despite infection.” I was doing my best to sound optimistic.

  Frank dug his hands deep into his pockets. His thin, dark-complexioned face was serious. “Damn, I wish I’d never seen the thing. I bought her at Houlton market—God knows where she came from, but it’s too late to talk like that now. What can we do about the job?”

  “The main thing is to keep her isolated and away from the other stock. I wish there was some way to protect the others but there isn’t much we can do. There are only two types of vaccine—live ones which can only be given to empty cows and yours are all in-calf, and dead ones which aren’t reckoned to be of much use.”

  “Well I’m the sort that doesn’t like to just sit back and wait. The dead vaccine won’t do any harm if it doesn’t do any good, will it?”

  “No.”

  “Right, let’s do ’em all with it and we’ll hope for the best.”

  Hoping for the best was something vets did a lot in the thirties. I vaccinated the entire herd and we waited.

  Nothing happened for a full eight weeks. Summer lengthened into autumn and the cattle were brought inside. The infected cow improved, her discharge cleared up and she began to milk a bit better. Then Frank rang early one morning.

  “I’ve found a dead calf laid in the channel when I went in to milk. Will you come?”

  It was a thinly-haired seven months foetus that I found. The cow looked sick and behind her dangled the inevitable retained placenta. Her udder which, if she had calved normally, would have been distended with milk, the precious milk which Frank depended on for his livelihood, was almost empty.

  Obsessed by a feeling of helplessness I could only offer the same old advice; isolate, disinfect—and hope.

  A fortnight later one of the in-calf heifers did it—she was a pretty little Jersey cross which Frank had hoped would push up his butter fat percentage—and a week after that one of the cows slipped a calf in her sixth month of pregnancy.

  It was when I was visiting this third case that I met Mr. Bagley. Frank introduced him somewhat apologetically. “He says he has a cure for this trouble, Jim. He wants to talk to you about it.”

  In every sticky situation t