Every Living Thing Read online

  I looked up ruefully at the farmer and he burst into a roar of laughter. “It looks like t’apprentice knows more than the boss. Who taught you that, son?”

  “Dad did. He said you could often be caught out that way.”

  “And he was, wasn’t he!” The farmer slapped his thigh.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, and as I went out to the car for the penicillin tubes I wondered how many other little wrinkles my son had absorbed in his journeys with me.

  Later, as we drove back along the gated roads, I congratulated him.

  “Well done, old lad. You know a lot more than I think!”

  Jimmy grinned. “Yes, and remember when I couldn’t even milk a cow?”

  I nodded. Milking-machines were universal among the bigger farms, but many of the smallholders still milked by hand and it seemed to fascinate my son to watch them. I could remember him standing by the side of old Tim Suggett as he milked one of his six cows. Crouched on the stool, head against the cow’s flank, the farmer effortlessly sent the white jets hissing and frothing into the bucket held between his knees.

  He looked up and caught the boy’s eager gaze.

  “Does tha want to ’ave a go, young man?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes, please!”

  “Awright, here’s a fresh bucket. See if ye can fill it.”

  Jimmy squatted, grasped a teat in each hand and began to pull away lustily. Nothing happened. He tried two other teats with the same result.

  “There’s nothing coming,” he cried plaintively. “Not a drop.”

  Tim Suggett laughed. “Aye, it’s not as easy as it looks, is it? I reckon it ’ud take you a long time to milk ma six cows.”

  My son looked crestfallen, and the old man put a hand on his head. “Come round sometime and I’ll teach ye. I’ll soon make a milker out of ye.”

  A few weeks later, I returned from my round one afternoon to find Helen standing worriedly on the doorstep of Skeldale House.

  “Jimmy hasn’t come back from school,” she said. “Did he tell you he was going to any of his friends?”

  I thought for a moment. “No, not that I can remember. But maybe he’s just playing somewhere.”

  Helen looked out at the gathering dusk. “It’s strange, though. He usually comes home to tell us first.”

  We telephoned round among his school friends without result, then I began a tour of Darrowby, exploring the little winding “yards,” calling in at people we knew and getting the same reply, “No, I’m sorry, we haven’t seen him.” My attempt at a cheerful rejoinder, “Oh, thanks very much, sorry to trouble you,” became increasingly difficult as a cold hand began to grip at my heart.

  When I got back to Skeldale House, Helen was on the verge of tears. “He hasn’t come back, Jim. Where on earth can he have got to? It’s pitch black out there. He can’t be playing.”

  “Oh, he’ll turn up. There’ll be some simple explanation, don’t worry.” I hoped I sounded airy but I didn’t tell Helen that I had been dredging the water trough at the bottom of the garden.

  I was beginning to feel the unmistakable symptoms of panic when I had a thought. “Wait a minute, didn’t he say he’d go round to Tim Suggett’s one day after school to learn to milk?”

  The smallholding was actually in Darrowby itself and I was there in minutes. A soft light shone above the half-door of the little cow house and as I looked inside there was my son, crouched on a stool, bucket between his knees, head against a patient cow.

  “Hello, Dad,” he said cheerfully. “Look here!” He displayed his bucket, which contained a few pints of milk. “I can do it now! Mr. Suggett’s been showing me. You don’t pull the teats at all. You just make your fingers go like this.”

  Glorious relief flooded through me. I wanted to grab Jimmy and kiss him, kiss Mr. Suggert, kiss the cow, but I took a couple of deep breaths and restrained myself.

  “It’s very good of you to have him, Tim. I hope he hasn’t been any bother.”

  The old man chuckled. “Nay, lad, nay. We’ve had a bit o’ fun, and t’young man’s cottoned on right sharp. I’ve been tellin’ him if he’s goin’ to be a vitnery he’ll have to know how to get the milk out of a cow.”

  It is one of my vivid memories, that night when Jimmy learned how to get the milk out of a cow, so that he could diagnose mastitis and put one over on his old man.

  To this day I often wonder if I did the right thing in talking Rosie out of her ambition. Maybe I was wrong, but back in the forties and fifties life in veterinary practice was so different from now. Our practice was 90 per cent large animal and though I loved the work I was always being kicked, knocked about and splashed with various kinds of filth. With all its charms and rewards it was a dirty, dangerous job. Several times I was called to help out in neighbouring practices when the vet had sustained a broken limb, and I had myself been lame for weeks after a huge cart-horse whacked my thigh with his iron-shod hoof.

  Quite often I didn’t smell so good because no amount of bathing in antiseptics could wholly banish the redolence of delivering decomposing calves and the removal of afterbirths. I was used to people wrinkling their noses when I came too near.

  Sometimes after prolonged calvings and foalings, often lasting for hours, every muscle in my body ached for days as though I had been beaten by a heavy stick.

  It is all so different now. We have long plastic gloves to protect us when we are doing the smelly jobs, there are the metal crushes to hold the big beasts instead of having to plunge among them as they were driven into a passage on the farm, and the Caesarean operation has eliminated the rough side of obstetrics. Also, the gentler small-animal work has expanded beyond all expectations till it now makes up more than half our work.

  When I entered the veterinary college there was only one girl in our class—a tremendous novelty—but now young women make up at least 50 per cent of the students at the veterinary schools, and in fact excellent woman veterinary surgeons have worked in our practice.

  I didn’t know all this forty years ago and though I could imagine tough little Jimmy living my life I couldn’t bear the thought of Rosie doing it. Unfairly at times, I used every wile I could to put her off veterinary work and to persuade her to become a doctor of humans instead of animals.

  She is a happy doctor, too, but as I say, I still wonder….

  Chapter 8

  “NOT TO PUT TOO fine a point on it, Herriot, I think you are dishonest.”

  “What!” I had been called a few things in my time, but never that and it hit me hard, especially coming from a tall, patrician veterinary surgeon, looking down his nose at me. “What the devil do you mean? How can you possibly say that?”

  Hugo Mottram’s imperious blue eyes regarded me with distaste. “I say it only because I am forced to no other conclusion. I consider unethical behaviour to be a type of dishonesty and you have certainly been guilty of that. Also, your attempts to justify your actions seem to me to be sheer prevarication.”

  This was really nice, I thought, particularly here in Brawton where I was trying to enjoy my precious half-day. I had been browsing happily in Smith’s bookshop, and spotted Mottram walking along by the shelves, and in fact had been regarding him with some envy, wishing that I looked a bit like him. He was the perfect picture of my idea of a country vet; check cap, immaculate hacking jacket, knee breeches, stockings and brogues together with a commanding presence and hawk-like, handsome features. He was in his fifties, but as he paced among the books, head high, chin jutting, he had the look of a fit young man.

  I took a deep breath and tried to speak calmly. “Mr. Mottram, what you have just said is insulting, and I think you should apologise. Surely you realise that neither my partner nor I have any designs on your clients—it was just an unfortunate combination of events. There was nothing else we could have done in the circumstances and if only you would just think about it…”

  The tall man stuck out his chin even more. “I have thought about it and I mean what I sa