All Things Bright and Beautiful Read online

  My next encounter with Mr. Pickersgill was on the telephone.

  “I’m speaking from the cossack,” he said in a subdued shout.

  “From the what?”

  “The cossack, the telephone cossack in t’village.”

  “Yes indeed,” I said, “And what can I do for you?”

  “I want you to come out as soon as possible, to treat a calf for semolina.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I ’ave a calf with semolina.”

  “Semolina?”

  “Aye, that’s right. A feller was on about it on t’wireless the other morning.”

  “Oh! Ah yes, I see.” I too had heard a bit of the farming talk on Salmonella infection in calves. “What makes you think you’ve got this trouble?”

  “Well it’s just like that feller said. Me calf’s bleeding from the rectrum.”

  “From the…? Yes, yes, of course. Well I’d better have a look at him—I won’t be long.”

  The calf was pretty ill when I saw him and he did have rectal bleeding, but it wasn’t like Salmonella.

  “There’s no diarrhoea, you see, Mr. Pickersgill,” I said. “In fact, he seems to be constipated. This is almost pure blood coming away from him. And he hasn’t got a very high temperature.”

  The farmer seemed a little disappointed. “Dang, I thowt it was just same as that feller was talking about. He said you could send samples off to the labrador.”

  “Eh? To the what?”

  “The investigation labrador—you know.”

  “Oh yes, quite, but I don’t think the lab would be of any help in this case.”

  “Aye well, what’s wrong with him, then? Is something the matter with his rectrum?”

  “No, no,” I said. “But there seems to be some obstruction high up his bowel which is causing this haemorrhage.” I looked at the little animal standing motionless with his back up. He was totally preoccupied with some internal discomfort and now and then he strained and grunted softly.

  And of course I should have known straight away—it was so obvious. But I suppose we all have blind spells when we can’t see what is pushed in front of our eyes, and for a few days I played around with that calf in a haze of ignorance, giving it this and that medicine which I’d rather not talk about.

  But I was lucky. He recovered in spite of my treatment. It wasn’t until Mr. Pickersgill showed me the little roll of necrotic tissue which the calf had passed that the thing dawned on me.

  I turned, shame-faced, to the farmer. “This is a bit of dead bowel all telescoped together—an intussusception. It’s usually a fatal condition but fortunately in this case the obstruction has sloughed away and your calf should be all right now.”

  “What was it you called it?”

  “An intussusception.”

  Mr. Pickersgill’s lips moved tentatively and for a moment I thought he was going to have a shot at it. But he apparently decided against it “Oh,” he said. “That’s what it was, was it?”

  “Yes, and it’s difficult to say just what caused it.”

  The farmer sniffed. “I’ll bet I know what was behind it. I always said this one ’ud be a weakly calf. When he was born he bled a lot from his biblical cord.”

  Mr. Pickersgill hadn’t finished with me yet. It was only a week later that I heard him on the phone again.

  “Get out here, quick. There’s one of me pigs going bezique.”

  “Bezique?” With an effort I put away from me a mental picture of two porkers facing each other over a green baize table. “I’m afraid I don’t quite…”

  “Aye, ah gave him a dose of worm medicine and he started jumpin’ about and rollin’ on his back. I tell you he’s going proper bezique.”

  “Ah! Yes, yes I see, right. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

  The pig had quieted down a bit when I arrived but was still in considerable pain, getting up, lying down, trotting in spurts round the pen. I gave him half a grain of morphine hydrochloride as a sedative and within a few minutes he began to relax and finally curled up in the straw.

  “Looks as though he’s going to be all right,” I said. “But what’s this worm medicine you gave him?”

  Mr. Pickersgill produced the bottle sheepishly.

  “Bloke was coming round sellin’ them. Said it would shift any worms you cared to name.”

  “It nearly shifted your pig, didn’t it?” I sniffed at the mixture. “And no wonder. It smells almost like pure turpentine.”

  “Turpentine! Well by gaw is that all it is? And bloke said it was summat new. Charged me an absorbent price for it too.”

  I gave him back the bottle. “Well never mind, I don’t think there’s any harm done, but I think the dustbin’s the best place for that.”

  As I was getting into my car I looked up at the farmer. “You must be about sick of the sight of me. First the mastitis, then the calf and now your pig. You’ve had a bad run.”

  Mr. Pickersgill squared his shoulders and gazed at me with massive composure. Again I was conscious of the sheer presence of the man.

  “Young feller,” he said. “That don’t bother me. When there’s stock there’s trouble and ah know from experience that trouble allus comes in cyclones.”

  6

  I KNEW I SHOULDN’T do it, but the old Drovers’ Road beckoned to me irresistibly. I ought to be hurrying back to the surgery after my morning call but the broad green path wound beguilingly over the moor top between its crumbling walls and almost before I knew, I was out of the car and treading the wiry grass.

  The wall skirted the hill’s edge and as I looked across and away to where Darrowby huddled far below between its folding green fells the wind thundered in my ears; but when I squatted in the shelter of the grey stones the wind was only a whisper and the spring sunshine hot on my face. The best kind of sunshine—not heavy or cloying but clear and bright and clean as you find it down behind a wall in Yorkshire with the wind singing over the top.

  I slid lower till I was stretched on the turf, gazing with half closed eyes into the bright sky, luxuriating in the sensation of being detached from the world and its problems.

  This form of self-indulgence had become part of my life and still is; a reluctance to come down from the high country; a penchant for stepping out of the stream of life and loitering on the brink for a few minutes as an uninvolved spectator.

  And it was easy to escape, lying up here quite alone with no sound but the wind sighing and gusting over the empty miles and, far up in the wide blue, the endless brave trilling of the larks.

  Not that there was anything unpleasant about going back down the hill to Darrowby even before I was married. I had worked there for two years before Helen arrived, and Skeldale House had become home and the two bright minds in it my friends. It didn’t bother me that both the brothers were cleverer than I was. Siegfried—unpredictable, explosive, generous; I had been lucky to have him as a partner. As a city bred youth trying to tell expert stock farmers how to treat their animals I had needed all his skill and guidance behind me. And Tristan; a rum lad as they said, but very sound. His humour and zest for life had lightened my days.

  And all the time I was adding practical experience to my theory. The mass of facts I had learned at college were all coming to life, and there was the growing realisation, deep and warm, that this was for me. There was nothing else I’d rather do.

  It must have been fifteen minutes later when I finally rose, stretched pleasurably, took a last deep gulp of the crisp air and pottered slowly back to the car for the six mile journey back down the hill to Darrowby.

  When I drew up by the railings with Siegfried’s brass plate hanging lopsidedly atop mine by the fine Georgian doorway I looked up at the tall old house with the ivy swarming untidily over the weathered brick. The white paint on windows and doors was flaking and that ivy needed trimming but the whole place had style, a serene unchangeable grace.

  But I had other things on my mind at the moment. I went ins