All Creatures Great and Small (46 page)

Tristan put down his coal bucket and looked at me thoughtfully. “There’s nothing much wrong with you, Jim, but I can tell you one thing—you’ve been just a bit edgy since you went out with the Alderson woman.”

“Oh God,” I groaned and closed my eyes. “Don’t remind me. Anyway, I’ve not seen her or heard from her since, so that’s the end of that and I can’t blame her.”

Tristan pulled out his Woodbines and squatted down by the coal bucket. “Yes, that’s all very well, but look at you. You’re suffering and there’s no need for it. All right, you had a disastrous night and she’s given you the old heave ho. Well, so what? Do you know how many times I’ve been spurned?”

“Spurned? I never even got started.”

“Very well then, but you’re still going around like a bullock with bellyache. Forget it, lad, and get out into the big world. The rich tapestry of life is waiting for you out there. I’ve been watching you—working all hours and when you’re not working you’re reading up your cases in the text books—and I tell you this dedicated vet thing is all right up to a point. But you’ve got to live a little. Think of all the lovely little lasses in Darrowby—you can hardly move for them. And every one just waiting for a big handsome chap like you to gallop up on his white horse. Don’t disappoint them.” He leaned over and slapped my knee. “Tell you what. Why don’t you let me fix something up? A nice little foursome—just what you need.”

“Ach I don’t know. I’m not keen, really.”

“Nonsense!” Tristan said. “I don’t know why I haven’t thought of it before. This monkish existence is bad for you. Leave all the details to me.”

I decided to have an early night and was awakened around eleven o’clock by a heavy weight crashing down on the bed. The room was dark but I seemed to be enveloped in beer-scented smoke. I coughed and sat up. “Is that you, Triss?”

“It is indeed,” said the shadowy figure on the end of the bed. “And I bring you glad tidings. You remember Brenda?”

“That little nurse I’ve seen you around with?”

“The very same. Well, she’s got a pal, Connie, who’s even more beautiful. The four of us are going dancing at the Poulton Institute on Tuesday night” The voice was thick with beery triumph.

“You mean me, too?”

“By God I do, and you’re going to have the best time you’ve ever had. I’ll see to that.” He blew a last choking blast of smoke into my face and left, chuckling.

“W
E’RE HAVING A ’OT
dinner and entertainers.”

My reaction to the words surprised me. They stirred up a mixture of emotions, all of them pleasant; fulfilment, happy acceptance, almost triumph.

I know by now that there is not the slightest chance of anybody asking me to be President of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, but if they had, I wonder if I’d have been more pleased than when I heard about the ’ot dinner.

The reason, I suppose, was that the words reflected the attitude of a typical Dales farmer towards myself. And this was important because, though after just over a year I was becoming accepted as a vet, I was always conscious of the gulf which was bound to exist between these hill folk and a city product like me. Much as I admired them I was aware always that we were different; it was inevitable, I knew, but it still rankled so that a sincere expression of friendship from one of them struck a deep answering chord in me.

Especially when it came from somebody like Dick Rudd. I had first met Dick last winter on the doorstep of Skeldale House at six o’clock on the kind of black morning when country vets wonder about their choice of profession. Shivering as the ever-present passage draught struck at my pyjamaed legs, I switched on the light and opened the door. I saw a small figure muffled in an old army greatcoat and balaclava leaning on a bicycle. Beyond him the light spilled onto a few feet of streaming pavement where the rain beat down in savage swathes.

“Sorry to ring your bell at this hour, guvnor,” he said. “My name’s Rudd, Birch Tree Farm, Coulston. I’ve got a heifer calvin’ and she’s not getting on with t’job. Will you come?”

I looked closer at the thin face, at the water trickling down the cheeks and dripping from the end of the nose. “Right, I’ll get dressed and come straight along. But why don’t you leave your bike here and come with me in the car? Coulston’s about four miles isn’t it and you must be soaked through.”

“Nay, nay, it’ll be right.” The face broke into the most cheerful of grins and under the sopping balaclava a pair of lively blue eyes glinted at me. “I’d only have to come back and get it another time. I’ll get off now and you won’t be there long afore me.”

He mounted his bike quickly and pedalled away. People who think farming is a pleasant, easy life should have been there to see the hunched figure disappear into the blackness and the driving rain. No car, no telephone, a night up with the heifer, eight miles biking in the rain and a back-breaking day ahead of him. Whenever I thought of the existence of the small farmer it made my own occasional bursts of activity seem small stuff indeed.

I produced a nice live heifer calf for Dick that first morning and later, gratefully drinking a cup of hot tea in the farmhouse kitchen, I was surprised at the throng of young Rudds milling around me; there were seven of them and they were unexpectedly grown up. Their ages ranged from twenty odd down to about ten and I hadn’t thought of Dick as middle-aged; in the dim light of the doorway at Skeldale House and later in the byre lit only by a smoke-blackened oil lamp his lively movements and perky manner had seemed those of a man in his thirties. But as I looked at him now I could see that the short, wiry hair was streaked with grey and a maze of fine wrinkles spread from around his eyes onto his cheeks.

In their early married life the Rudds, anxious like all farmers for male children, had observed with increasing chagrin the arrival of five successive daughters. “We nearly packed up then,” Dick confided to me once; but they didn’t and their perseverance was rewarded at last by the appearance of two fine boys. A farmer farms for his sons and Dick had something to work for now.

As I came to know them better I used to observe the family with wonder. The five girls were all tall, big-limbed, handsome, and already the two chunky young boys gave promise of massive growth. I kept looking from them to their frail little parents—“not a pickin’ on either of us,” as Mrs. Rudd used to say—and wonder how the miracle had happened.

It puzzled me, too, how Mrs. Rudd, armed only with the milk cheque from Dick’s few shaggy cows, had managed to feed them all, never mind bring them to this state of physical perfection. I gained my first clue one day when I had been seeing some calves and I was asked to have a “bit o’ dinner” with them. Butcher’s meat was a scarce commodity on the hill farms and I was familiar with the usual expedients for filling up the eager stomachs before the main course—the doughy slab of Yorkshire pudding or the heap of suet dumplings. But Mrs. Rudd had her own method—a big bowl of rice pudding with lots of milk was her
hors d’oeuvres.
It was a new one on me and I could see the family slowing down as they ploughed their way through. I was ravenous when I sat down but after the rice I viewed the rest of the meal with total detachment.

Dick believed in veterinary advice for everything so I was a frequent visitor at Birch Tree Farm. After every visit there was an unvarying ritual; I was asked into the house for a cup of tea and the whole family downed tools and sat down to watch me drink it. On weekdays the eldest girl was out at work and the boys were at school but on Sundays the ceremony reached its full splendour with myself sipping the tea and all nine Rudds sitting around in what I can only call an admiring circle. My every remark was greeted with nods and smiles all round. There is no doubt it was good for my ego to have an entire family literally hanging on my words, but at the same time it made me feel curiously humble.

I suppose it was because of Dick’s character. Not that he was unique in any way—there were thousands of small farmers just like him—but he seemed to embody the best qualities of the Dalesman; the indestructibility, the tough philosophy, the unthinking generosity and hospitality. And there were the things that were Dick’s own; the integrity which could be read always in his steady eyes and the humour which was never very far away. Dick was no wit but he was always trying to say ordinary things in a funny way. If I asked him to get hold of a cow’s nose for me he would say solemnly “Ah’ll endeavour to do so,” or I remember when I was trying to lift a square of plywood which was penning a calf in a corner he said “Just a minute till ah raise portcullis.” When he broke into a smile a kind of radiance flooded his pinched features.

When I held my audiences in the kitchen with all the family reflecting Dick’s outlook in their eager laughter I marvelled at their utter contentment with their lot. None of them had known ease or softness but it didn’t matter; and they looked on me as a friend and I was proud.

Whenever I left the farm I found something on the seat of my car—a couple of home-made scones, three eggs. I don’t know how Mrs. Rudd spared them but she never failed.

Dick had a burning ambition—to upgrade his stock until he had a dairy herd which would live up to his ideals. Without money behind him he knew it would be a painfully slow business but he was determined. It probably wouldn’t be in his own lifetime but some time, perhaps when his sons were grown up, people would come and look with admiration at the cows of Birch Tree.

I was there to see the very beginning of it. When Dick stopped me on the road one morning and asked me to come up to his place with him I knew by his air of suppressed excitement that something big had happened. He led me into the byre and stood silent. He didn’t need to say anything because I was staring unbelievingly at a bovine aristocrat.

Dick’s cows had been scratched together over the years and they were a motley lot. Many of them were old animals discarded by more prosperous farmers because of their pendulous udders or because they were “three titted ’uns.” Others had been reared by Dick from calves and tended to be rough-haired and scruffy. But half way down the byre, contrasting almost violently with her neighbours was what seemed to me a perfect Dairy Shorthorn cow.

In these days when the Friesian has surged over England in a black and white flood and inundated even the Dales which were the very home of the Shorthorn, such cows as I looked at that day at Dick Rudd’s are no longer to be seen, but she represented all the glory and pride of her breed. The wide pelvis tapering to fine shoulders and a delicate head, the level udder thrusting back between the hind legs, and the glorious colour—dark roan. That was what they used to call a “good colour” and whenever I delivered a dark roan calf the farmer would say “It’s a good-coloured ’un,” and it would be more valuable accordingly. The geneticists are perfectly right, of course: the dark roaned cows gave no more milk than the reds or the whites, but we loved them and they were beautiful.

“Where did she come from, Dick?” I said, still staring.

Dick’s voice was elaborately casual. “Oh, ah went over to Weldon’s of Cranby and picked her out. D’you like her?”

“She’s a picture—a show cow. I’ve never seen one better.” Weldons were the biggest pedigree breeders in the northern Dales and I didn’t ask whether Dick had cajoled his bank manager or had been saving up for years just for this.

“Aye, she’s a seven galloner when she gets goin’ and top butter fat, too. Reckon she’ll be as good as two of my other cows and a calf out of her’ll be worth a bit.” He stepped forward and ran his hand along the perfectly level, smoothly-fleshed back. “She’s got a great fancy pedigree name but missus ’as called her Strawberry.”

I knew as I stood there in the primitive, cobbled byre with its wooden partitions and rough stone walls that I was looking not just at a cow but at the foundation of the new herd, at Dick Rudd’s hopes for the future.

It was about a month later that he phoned me. “I want you to come and look at Strawberry for me,” he said. “She’s been doing grand, tipplin’ the milk out, but there’s summat amiss with her this morning.”

The cow didn’t really look ill and, in fact, she was eating when I examined her, but I noticed that she gulped slightly when she swallowed. Her temperature was normal and her lungs clear but when I stood up by her head I could just hear a faint snoring sound.

“It’s her throat, Dick,” I said. “It may be just a bit of inflammation but there’s a chance that she’s starting a little abscess in there.” I spoke lightly but I wasn’t happy. Post-pharyngeal abscesses were, in my limited experience, nasty things. They were situated in an inaccessible place, right away behind the back of the throat and if they got very large could interfere seriously with the breathing. I had been lucky with the few I had seen; they had either been small and regressed or had ruptured spontaneously.

I gave an injection of Prontosil and turned to Dick. “I want you to foment this area behind the angle of the jaw with hot water and rub this salve well in afterwards. You may manage to burst it that way. Do this at least three times a day.”

I kept looking in at her over the next ten days and the picture was one of steady development of the abscess. The cow was still not acutely ill but she was eating a lot less, she was thinner and was going off her milk. Most of the time I felt rather helpless as I knew that only the rupture of the abscess would bring relief and the various injections I was giving her were largely irrelevant. But the infernal thing was taking a long time to burst.

It happened that just then Siegfried went off to an equine conference which was to last a week; for a few days I was at full stretch and hardly had time to think about Dick’s cow until he biked in to see me one morning. He was cheerful as usual but he had a strained look.

“Will you come and see Strawberry? She’s gone right down t’nick over the last three days. I don’t like look of her.”

I dashed straight out and was in the byre at Birch Tree before Dick was half way home. The sight of Strawberry stopped me in mid-stride and I stared, dry-mouthed at what had once been a show cow. The flesh had melted from her incredibly and she was little more than a hide-covered skeleton. Her rasping breathing could be heard all over the byre and she exhaled with a curious out-puffing of the cheeks which I had never seen before. Her terrified eyes were fixed rigidly on the wall in front of her. Occasionally she gave a painful little cough which brought saliva drooling from her mouth.