James Herriot (56 page)

“Oh yes, of course, I’m sorry,” I said airily as though I’d just forgotten to mention it “She’s got cow pox. In fact you gave it to her.”

“I gave it …? What do you mean?”

“Well, the vaccine they use for babies is made from the cow pox virus. You carried it on your hands from the baby to the cow.” I smiled, enjoying my big moment.

Her mouth fell open slightly, then she began to giggle. “Oh dear, I don’t know what my husband’s going to say. I’ve never heard of anything like that.” She wiggled her fingers in front of her eyes. “And I’m always so careful, too. But I’ve been a bit harassed with the poor little chap’s arm.”

“Oh well, it isn’t serious,” I said. “I’ve got some ointment in the car which will cure it quite quickly.”

I sipped my tea and watched Giles’s activities. In a short time he had spread chaos throughout the kitchen and at the moment was busily engaged in removing all the contents of a cupboard in the corner. Bent double, small bottom outthrust, he hurled pans, lids, brushes behind him with intense dedication till the cupboard was empty. Then, as he looked around for further employment, he spotted me and tacked towards me on straddled legs.

My stocking-clad toes seemed to fascinate him and as I wiggled them at him he grasped at them with fat little hands. When he had finally trapped my big toe he looked up at me with his huge grin in which four tiny teeth glittered.

I smiled back at him with sincere affection as the relief flowed through me. It wasn’t just that I was grateful to him—I really liked him. I still like Giles today. He is one of my clients, a burly farmer with a family of his own, a deep love and knowledge of pedigree cows and the same big grin, except that there are a few more teeth in it.

But he’ll never know how near his smallpox vaccination came to giving me heart failure.

T
HEY HAD SENT ME
to Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppy and I knew it was the last stop.

As I looked along the disorderly line of men I realised I wouldn’t be taking part in many more parades. And it came to me with a pang that at the Scarborough ITW this would not have been classed as a parade at all. I could remember the ranks of blue outside the Grand Hotel, straight as the Grenadier Guards and every man standing stiffly, looking neither to left nor right. Our boots gleaming, buttons shining like gold and not a movement anywhere as the flight sergeant led the officer round on morning inspection.

I had moaned as loudly as anybody at the rigid discipline, the “bull,” the scrubbing and polishing, marching and drilling, but now that it had all gone it seemed good and meaningful and I missed it.

Here the files of airmen lounged, chatted among themselves and occasionally took a surreptitious drag at a cigarette as a sergeant out in front called the names from a list and gave us our leisurely instructions for the day.

This particular morning he was taking a long time over it consulting sheaves of papers and making laboured notes with a pencil. A big Irishman on my right was becoming increasingly restive and finally he shouted testily:

“For—sake, sergeant get us off this—square. Me—feet’s killin’ me!”

The sergeant didn’t even look up. “Shut your mouth, Brady,” he replied. “You’ll get off the square when I say so and not before.”

It was like that at Eastchurch, the great filter tank of the RAF where what I had heard described as the “odds and sods” were finally sorted out. It was a big sprawling camp filled with a widely varied mixture of airmen who had one thing in common; they were all waiting—some of them for remuster, but most for discharge from the service.

There was a resigned air about the whole place, an acceptance of the fact that we were all just putting in time. There was a token discipline but it was of the most benign kind. And as I said, every man there was just waiting … waiting …

Little Ned Finch in his remote corner of the high Yorkshire Dales always seemed to me to be waiting, too. I could remember his boss yelling at him.

“For God’s sake, shape up to t’job! You’re not framin’ at all!” Mr. Daggett grabbed hold of a leaping calf and glared in exasperation.

Ned gazed back at him impassively. His face registered no particular emotion, but in the pale blue eyes I read the expression that was always there—as though he was waiting for something to happen, but without much hope. He made a tentative attempt to catch a calf but was brushed aside, then he put his arms round the neck of another one, a chunky little animal of three months, and was borne along a few yards before being deposited on his back in the straw.

“Oh, dang it, do this one, Mr. Herriot!” Mr. Daggett barked, turning the hairy neck towards me. “It looks as though I’ll have to catch ’em all myself.”

I injected the animal. I was inoculating a batch of twenty with preventive pneumonia vaccine and Ned was suffering. With his diminutive stature and skinny, small-boned limbs he had always seemed to me to be in the wrong job; but he had been a farm worker all his life and he was over sixty now, grizzled, balding and slightly bent, but still battling on.

Mr. Daggett reached out and as one of the shaggy creatures sped past he scooped the head into one of his great hands and seized the ear with the other. The little animal seemed to realise it was useless to struggle and stood unresisting as I inserted the needle. At the other end Ned put his knee against the calf’s rear and listlessly pushed it against the wall. He wasn’t doing much good and his boss gave him a withering glance.

We finished the bunch with hardly any help from the little man, and as we left the pen and came out into the yard Mr. Daggett wiped his brow. It was a raw November day but he was sweating profusely and for a moment he leaned his gaunt six foot frame against the wall as the wind from the bare moorland blew over him.

“By gaw, he’s a useless little beggar is that,” he grunted. “Ah don’t know how ah put up with ’im.” He muttered to himself for a few moments then gave tongue again. “Hey, Ned!”

The little man who had been trailing aimlessly over the cobbles turned his pinched face and looked at him with his submissive but strangely expectant eyes.

“Get them bags o’ corn up into the granary!” his boss ordered.

Wordlessly Ned went over to a cart and with an effort shouldered a sack of corn. As he painfully mounted the stone steps to the granary his frail little legs trembled and bent under the weight.

Mr. Daggett shook his head and turned to me. His long cadaverous face was set in its usual cast of melancholy.

“You know what’s wrong wi’ Ned?” he murmured confidentially.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know why ’e can’t catch them calves?”

My own view was that Ned wasn’t big enough or strong enough and anyway he was naturally ineffectual, but I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “Why is it?”

“Well I’ll tell ye.” Mr. Daggett glanced furtively across the yard then spoke from behind his hand. “He’s ower fond of t’bright lights.”

“Eh?”

“Ah’m tellin’ ye, he’s crazed over t’bright lights.”

“Bright … what … where …?”

Mr. Daggett leaned closer. “He gets over to Briston every night.”

“Briston …?” I looked across from the isolated farm to the village three miles away on the other side of the Dale. It was the only settlement in that bleak vista—a straggle of ancient houses dark and silent against the green fellside. I could recall that at night the oil lamps made yellow flickers of light in the windows but they weren’t very bright. “I don’t understand.”

“Well … ’e gets into t’pub.”

“Ah, the pub.”

Mr. Daggett nodded slowly and portentously but I was still puzzled. The Hulton Arms was a square kitchen where you could get a glass of beer and where a few old men played dominoes of an evening. It wasn’t my idea of a den of vice.

“Does he get drunk there?” I asked.

“Nay, nay.” The farmer shook his head. It’s not that. It’s the hours ’e keeps.”

“Comes back late, eh?”

“Aye, that ’e does!” The eyes widened in their cavernous sockets. “Sometimes ’e doesn’t get back till ’alf past nine or ten o’clock!”

“Gosh, is that so?”

“Sure as ah’m standin’ here. And there’s another thing. He can’t get out of ’is bed next day. Ah’ve done half a day’s work before ’e starts.” He paused and glanced again across the yard. “You can believe me or believe me not, but sometimes ’e isn’t on the job till seven o’clock in t’morning!”

“Good heavens!”

He shrugged wearily. “Aye well, you see how it is. Come into t’house, you’ll want to wash your hands.”

In the huge flagged kitchen I bent low over the brown earthenware sink. Scar Farm was four hundred years old and the various tenants hadn’t altered it much since the days of Henry the Eighth. Gnarled beams, rough white-washed walls and hard wooden chairs. But comfort had never been important to Mr. Daggett or his wife who was ladling hot water from the primitive boiler by the side of the fire and pouring it into her scrubbing bucket.

She clopped around over the flags in her clogs, hair pulled back tightly from her weathered face into a bun, a coarse sacking apron tied round her waist. She had no children but her life was one of constant activity; indoors or outside, she worked all the time.

At one end of the room wooden steps led up through a hole in the ceiling to a loft where Ned slept. That had been the little man’s room for nearly fifty years ever since he had come to work for Mr. Daggett’s father as a boy from school. And in all that time he had never travelled further than Darrowby, never done anything outside his daily routine. Wifeless, friendless, he plodded through his life, endlessly milking, feeding and mucking out, and waiting, I suspected with diminishing hope for something to happen.

With my handle on the car door I looked back at Scar Farm, at the sagging roof tiles, the great stone lintel over the door. It typified the harshness of the lives of the people within. Little Ned was no bargain as a stockman, and his boss’s exasperation was understandable. Mr. Daggett was not a cruel or an unjust man. He and his wife had been hardened and squeezed dry by the pitiless austerity of their existence in this lonely corner of the high Pennines.

There was no softness up here, no frills. The stone walls, sparse grass and stunted trees; the narrow road with its smears of cow muck. Everything was down to fundamentals, and it was a miracle to me that most of the Dalesmen were not like the Daggetts but cheerful and humourous.

But as I drove away, the sombre beauty of the place overwhelmed me. The lowering hillsides burst magically into life as a shaft of sunshine stabbed through the clouds, flooding the bare flanks with warm gold. Suddenly I was aware of the delicate shadings of green, the rich glowing bronze of the dead bracken spilling from the high tops, the whole peaceful majesty of my work-a-day world.

I hadn’t far to drive to my next call—just about a mile—and it was in a vastly different atmosphere. Miss Tremayne, a rich lady from the south, had bought a tumbledown manor house and spent many thousands of pounds in converting it into a luxury home. As my feet crunched on the gravel I looked up at the large windows with their leaded panes, at the smooth, freshly-painted stones.

Elsie opened the door to me. She was Miss Tremayne’s cook-housekeeper, and one of my favourite people. Aged about fifty, no more than five feet high and as round as a ball with short bandy legs sticking out from beneath a tight black dress.

“Good morning, Elsie,” I said, and she burst into a peal of laughter. This, more man her remarkable physical appearance, was what delighted me. She laughed uproariously at every statement and occurrence; in fact she laughed at the things she said herself.

“Come in, Mr. Herriot, ha-ha-ha,” she said. “It’s been a bit nippy today, he-he, but I think it’ll get out this afternoon, ho-ho-ho.”

All the mirth may have seemed somewhat unnecessary, and indeed, it made her rather difficult to understand, but the general effect was cheering. She led me into the drawing room and her mistress rose with some difficulty from her chair.

Miss Tremayne was elderly and half crippled with arthritis but bore her affliction without fuss.

“Ah, Mr. Herriot,” she said. “How good of you to come.” She put her head on one side and beamed at me as though I was the most delightful thing she had seen for a long time.

She, too, had a bubbling, happy personality, and since she owned three dogs, two cats and an elderly donkey I had come to know her very well in her six months’ residence in the Dale.

My visit was to dress the donkey’s overgrown hooves, and a pair of clippers and a blacksmith’s knife dangled from my right hand.

“Oh, put those grisly instruments down over there,” she said. “Elsie’s bringing some tea—I’m sure you’ve time for a cup.”

I sank willingly into one of the brightly covered armchairs and was looking round the comfortable room when Elsie reappeared, gliding over the carpet as though on wheels. She put the tray on the table by my side.

“There’s yer tea,” she said, and went into a paroxysm so hearty that she had to lean on the back of my chair. She had no visible neck and the laughter caused the fat little body to shake all over.

When she had recovered she rolled back into the kitchen and I heard her clattering about with pans. Despite her idiosyncrasies she was a wonderful cook and very efficient in all she did.

I spent a pleasant ten minutes with Miss Tremayne and the tea, then I went outside and attended to the donkey. When I had finished I made my way round the back of the house and as I was passing the kitchen I saw Elsie at the open window.

“Many thanks for the tea, Elsie,” I said.

The little woman gripped the sides of the sink to steady herself. “Ha-ha-ha, that’s all right. That’s, he-he, quite all right, ha-ha-ho-ho-ho.”

Wonderingly I got into the car and as I drove away, the disturbing thought came to me that one day I might say something really witty to Elsie and cause her to do herself an injury.

I was called back to Mr. Daggett’s quite soon afterwards to see a cow which wouldn’t get up. The farmer thought she was paralysed.