Lord God Made Them All (26 page)

Over the schnapps the captain told me that they had intended to go to Danzig on the way back, but the plan has been changed. We are going instead to the Polish port of Stettin. At least, those were their names when they were part of Germany, but they are now called Gdansk and Szczecin, although the ship’s officers refer to them by their German names. We have to pick up 800 pigs to transport to Lübeck.

He hopes to arrive in Stettin (I think I’ll stick to the old spelling) on Sunday and get the pigs to Lübeck by Monday, but everything depends on the weather, which is still foul. With this gale against us, we are managing to do only six knots.

As I scribble in my diary I keep sliding down to the cabin door, then I have to drag myself back to the other end and start again. It looks like another sleepless night.

“I
LET MY HEART
fall into careless hands.”
Little Rosie’s voice piped in my ear as I guided my car over a stretch of rutted road. I had singing now to cheer the hours of driving.

I was on my way to dress a wound on a cow’s back and it was nice to hear the singing. But it was beginning to dawn on me that something better still was happening. I was starting all over again with another child. When Jimmy went to school I missed his company in the car, but I did not realise that the whole thing was going to begin anew with Rosie.

The intense pleasure of showing them the farm animals and seeing their growing wonder at the things of the countryside, the childish chatter that never palled; the fun and the laughter that lightened my days—it all happened twice to me.

The singing had originated in the purchase of a radiogram. Music has always meant a lot to me and I owned a record player that gave me a lot of pleasure. Still, I felt I wanted something better, some means of reproducing more faithfully the sounds of my favourite orchestras, singers, instrumentalists.

Hi-fi outfits hadn’t been heard of at that time, nor stereo, nor wrap-around sound, nor any of the other things that have revolutionised the world of listening. The best the music lover could do was to get a good radiogram.

After much agonising and reading of pamphlets and listening to advice from many quarters, I narrowed my list down to three models and made my choice by having them brought round to Skeldale House and playing the opening of the “Beethoven Violin Concerto” on one after the other, again and again. I must have driven the two men from the electric shop nearly mad, but at the end there was no doubt left in my mind.

It had to be the Murphy, a handsome piece of furniture with a louvred front and graceful legs, and it bellowed out the full volume of the Philharmonia Orchestra without a trace of muzziness. I was enchanted with it, but there was one snag; it cost over ninety pounds, and that was an awful lot of money in 1950.

“Helen,” I said when we had installed it in the sitting room, “we’ve got to look after this thing. The kids can put records on my old player, but we must keep them away from the Murphy.”

Foolish words. The very next day as I came in the front door, the passage was echoing with
Yippee ay ooooh, yippee ay aaaay, ghost riders in the skyyy!
It was Bing Crosby’s back-up choir, belting out the other side of the “Careless Hands” record, and the Murphy was giving it full value.

I peeped round the sitting-room door. “Ghost Riders” had come to an end, and with her chubby little hands Rosie removed the record, placed it in its cover and marched, pigtails swinging, to the record cabinet. She selected another disc and was halfway across the floor when I waylaid her.

“Which one is that?” I asked.

“ ‘The Little Gingerbread Man,’ ” she replied.

I looked at the label. It was, too, and how did she know, because I had a whole array of these children’s records, and many of them looked exactly the same. The same colour, the same grouping of words, and Rosie, at the age of three, could not read.

She fitted the disc expertly on the turntable and set it going. I listened to “The Gingerbread Man” right through and watched as she picked out another record.

I looked over her shoulder. “What is it this time?”

“ Tubby the Tuba.’ “

And indeed it was. I had an hour to spare, and Rosie gave me a recital. We went through “Uncle Mac’s Nursery Rhymes,” The Happy Prince,” “Peter and the Wolf” and many of the immortal Bing, to whom I was and am devoted. I was intrigued to find that her favourite Crosby record was not “Please,” or “How Deep Is the Ocean” or his other classics, but “Careless Hands.” This one had something special for her.

At the end of the session, I decided that it was fruitless to try to keep Rosie and the Murphy apart. Whenever she was not out with me, she played with the radiogram. It was her toy.

It all turned out for the best, too, because she did my precious acquisition no harm, and when she came with me on my rounds, she sang the things she had played so often and which were word-perfect in her mind. And I really loved that singing. “Careless Hands” soon became my favourite, too.

There were three gates on the road to this farm, and we came bumping up to the first one now. The singing stopped abruptly. This was one of my daughter’s big moments. When I drew up she jumped from the car, strutted proudly to the gate and opened it. She took this duty very seriously, and her small face was grave as I drove through. When she returned to take her place by my dog, Sam, on the passenger seat, I patted her knee.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” I said. “You’re such a big help to me all the time.”

She didn’t say anything but blushed and seemed to swell with importance. She knew I meant what I said, because opening gates is a chore.

We negotiated the other two gates in similar manner and drove into the farmyard. The farmer, Mr. Binns, had shut the cow up in a ramshackle pen with a passage that stretched from a dead end to the outside.

Looking into the pen, I saw with some apprehension that the animal was a Calloway—black and shaggy with a fringe of hair hanging over bad-tempered eyes. She lowered her head and switched her tail as she watched me.

“Couldn’t you have got her tied up, Mr. Binns?” I asked.

The farmer shook his head. “Nay, I’m short o’ room, and this ’un spends most of ’er time on the moors.”

I could believe it. There was nothing domesticated about this animal. I looked down at my daughter. Usually I lifted her into hayracks or onto the tops of walls while I worked, but I didn’t want her anywhere near the Galloway.

“It’s no place for you in there, Rosie,” I said. “Go and stand at the end of the passage, well out of the way.”

We went into the pen, and the cow danced about and did her best to run up the wall. I was pleasantly surprised when the farmer managed to drop a halter over her head. He backed into a corner and held tightly to the shank.

I looked at him doubtfully. “Can you hold her?”

“I think so,” Mr. Binns replied, a little breathlessly. “You’ll find t’place at the end of her back, there.”

It was a most unusual thing—a big discharging abscess near the root of the tail. And that tail was whipping perpetually from side to side—a sure sign of ill nature in a bovine.

Gently I passed my fingers over the swelling, and, like a natural reflex, the hind foot lashed out, catching me a glancing blow on the thigh. I had expected this, and I got on with my exploration.

“How long has she had this?”

The farmer dug his heels in and leaned back on the rope. “Oh, ’bout two months. It keeps bustin’ and fillin’ up over and over again. Every time I thought it’d be the last, but it looks like it’s never goin’ to get right. What’s t’cause of it?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Binns. She must have had a wound there at some time, and it’s become infected. And, of course, being on the back, drainage is poor. There’s a lot of dead tissue which I’ll have to clear away before the thing heals.”

I leaned from the pen. “Rosie, will you bring me my scissors, the cotton wool and that bottle of peroxide?”

The farmer watched wonderingly as the tiny figure trotted to the car and came back with the three things. “By gaw, tlittle lass knows ’er way around.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, smiling. “I’m not saying she knows where everything is in the car, but she’s an expert on the things I use regularly.”

Rosie handed me my requirements as I reached over the door. Then she retreated to her place at the end of the passage.

I began my work on the abscess. Since the tissue was necrotic, the cow couldn’t feel anything as I snipped and swabbed, but that didn’t stop the hind leg from pistoning out every few seconds. Some animals cannot tolerate any kind of interference, and this was one of them.

I finished at last with a nice wide, clean area onto which I trickled the hydrogen peroxide. I had a lot of faith in this old remedy as a penetrative antiseptic when there was a lot of pus about, and I watched contentedly as it bubbled on the skin surface. The cow, however, did not seem to enjoy the sensation because she made a sudden leap into the air, tore the rope from the farmer’s hands, brushed me to one side and made for the door.

The door was closed, but it was a flimsy thing, and she went straight through it with a splintering crash. As the hairy black monster shot into the passage I desperately willed her to turn left, but to my horror she went right and, after a wild scraping of her feet on the cobbles, began to thunder down towards the dead end where my little daughter was standing.

It was one of the worst moments of my life. As I dashed towards the broken door, I heard a small voice say, “Mama.” There was no scream of terror, just that one quiet word. When I left the pen, Rosie was standing with her back against the end wall of the passage and the cow was stationary, looking at her from a distance of two feet.

The animal turned when she heard my footsteps, then whipped round in a tight circle and galloped past me into the yard.

I was shaking when I lifted Rosie into my arms. She could easily have been killed, and a jumble of thoughts whirled in my brain. Why had she said, “Mama”? I had never heard her use the word before—she always called Helen “Mummy” or “Mum.” Why had she been apparently unafraid? I didn’t know the answers. All I felt was an overwhelming thankfulness. To this day I feel the same whenever I see that passage.

Driving away, I remembered that something very like this had happened when Jimmy was out with me. It was not so horrific because he had been playing in a passage with an open end leading into a field, and he was not trapped when the cow I was working on broke loose and hurtled towards him. I could see nothing, but I heard a piercing yell of
“Aaaagh!”
before I rounded the corner. To my intense relief, Jimmy was streaking across the field to where my car was standing and the cow was trotting away in another direction.

This reaction was typical because Jimmy was always the noisy one of the family. Under any form of stress he believed in making his feelings known in the form of loud cries. When Dr. Allinson came to give him his routine inoculations, he heralded the appearance of the syringe with yells of
“Ow! This is going to hurt! Ow! Ow!”
He had a kindred spirit in our good doctor, who bawled back at him,
“Aye. You’re right, it is! Oooh! Aaah!”
But Jimmy really did scare our dentist because his propensity for noise appeared to carry on even under general anaesthesia. The long quavering wail he emitted as he went under the gas brought the poor man out in a sweat of anxiety.

Rosie solemnly opened the three gates on the way back, then she looked up at me expectantly. I knew what it was—she wanted to play one of her games. She loved being quizzed, just as Jimmy had loved to quiz me.

I took my cue and began. “Give me the names of six blue flowers.”

She coloured quickly in satisfaction because, of course, she knew. “Field Scabious, Harebell, Forget-me-not, Bluebell, Speedwell, Meadow Cranesbill.”

“Clever girl,” I said. “Now, let’s see—how about the names of six birds?”

Again the blush and the quick reply. “Magpie, Curlew, Thrush, Plover, Yellowhammer, Rook.”

“Very good indeed. Now, name me six red flowers.” And so it went on, day after day, with infinite variations. I only half realised at the time how lucky I was. I had a demanding, round-the-clock job, and yet I had the company of my children at the same time. So many men work so hard to keep the home going that they lose touch with the families who are at the heart of it, but it never happened to me.

Both Jimmy and Rosie, until they went to school, spent most of their time with me round the farms. With Rosie, as her school days approached, her attitude, always solicitous, became distinctly maternal. She really couldn’t see how I was going to get by without her, and by the time she was five she was definitely worried.

“Daddy,” she would say seriously, “how are you going to manage when I’m at school? All those gates to open and having to get everything out of the boot by yourself. It’s going to be awful for you.”

I used to try to reassure her, patting her head as she looked up at me in the car. “I know, Rosie, I know. I’m going to miss you, but I’ll get along somehow.”

Her response was always the same. A relieved smile, and then the comforting words, “But never mind, Daddy, I’ll be with you every Saturday and Sunday. You’ll be all right then.”

I suppose it was a natural result of my children seeing veterinary practice from early childhood and witnessing my own pleasure in my work that they never thought of being anything else but veterinary surgeons.

There was no problem with Jimmy. He was a tough little fellow and well able to stand the buffets of our job, but somehow I couldn’t bear the idea of my daughter being kicked and trodden on and knocked down and covered with muck. Practice was so much rougher in those days. There were no metal crushes to hold the big struggling beasts; there were still quite a number of farm horses around, and they were the ones that regularly put the vets in hospital with broken legs and ribs. Rosie made it very clear that she wanted country practice, and to me this seemed very much a life for a man. In short, I talked her out of it.