All Creatures Great and Small (32 page)

Back to the tray again. “Just a touch of powder before I stitch the skin,” he said lightly and seized a two pound carton. He poised for a moment over the wound then began to dispense the powder with extravagant jerks of the wrist. A considerable amount did go into the wound but much more floated over other parts of the horse, over me, over the buttercups, and a particularly wayward flick obscured the sweating face of the man on the foot rope. When he had finished coughing he looked very like Coco the clown.

Siegfried completed the closure of the skin, using several yards of silk, and when he stood back and surveyed the tidy result I could see he was in excellent humour.

“Well now, that’s fine. A young horse like that will heal in no time. Shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t even leave a mark.”

He came over and addressed me as I washed the instruments in the bucket. “Sorry I pushed you out like that, James, but honestly I couldn’t think what had come over you—you were like an old hen. You know it looks bad trying to work with piddling little amounts of materials. One has to operate with a certain … well … panache, if I can put it that way, and you just can’t do that if you stint yourself.”

I finished washing the instruments, dried them off and laid them on the enamel tray. Then I lifted the tray and set off for the gate at the end of the field. Siegfried, walking alongside me, laid his hand on my shoulder. “Mind you, don’t think I’m blaming you, James. It’s probably your Scottish upbringing. And don’t misunderstand me, this same upbringing has inculcated in you so many of the qualities I admire—integrity, industry, loyalty. But I’m sure you will be the first to admit,” and here he stopped and wagged a finger at me, “that you Scots sometimes overdo the thrift.” He gave a light laugh. “So remember, James, don’t be too—er—canny when you are operating.”

I measured him up. If I dropped the tray quickly I felt sure I could fell him with a right hook.

Siegfried went on. “But I know I don’t have to ramble on at you, James. You always pay attention to what I say, don’t you?”

I tucked the tray under my arm and set off again. “Yes,” I replied. “I do. Every single time.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

“I
CAN SEE YOU
like pigs,” said Mr. Worley as I edged my way into the pen.

“You can?”

“Oh yes, I can always tell. As soon as you went in there nice and quiet and scratched Queenie’s back and spoke to her I said ‘There’s a young man as likes pigs’.”

“Oh good. Well, as a matter of fact you’re absolutely right. I do like pigs.” I had, in truth, been creeping very cautiously past Queenie, wondering just how she was going to react. She was a huge animal and sows with litters can be very hostile to strangers. When I had come into the building she had got up from where she was suckling her piglets and eyed me with a non-committal grunt, reminding me of the number of times I had left a pig pen a lot quicker than I had gone in. A big, barking, gaping-mouthed sow has always been able to make me move very smartly.

Now that I was right inside the narrow pen, Queenie seemed to have accepted me. She grunted again, but peaceably, then carefully collapsed on the straw and exposed her udder to the eager little mouths. When she was in this position I was able to examine her foot.

“Aye, that’s the one,” Mr. Worley said anxiously. “She could hardly hobble when she got up this morning.”

There didn’t seem to be much wrong. A flap of the horn of one claw was a bit overgrown and was rubbing on the sensitive sole, but we didn’t usually get called out for little things like that. I cut away the overgrown part and dressed the sore place with our multi-purpose ointment, ung pini sedativum, while all the time Mr. Worley knelt by Queenie’s head and patted her and sort of crooned into her ear. I couldn’t make out the words he used—maybe it was pig language because the sow really seemed to be answering him with little soft grunts. Anyway, it worked better than an anaesthetic and everybody was happy including the long row of piglets working busily at the double line of teats.

“Right, Mr. Worley.” I straightened up and handed him the jar of ung pini. “Keep rubbing in a little of that twice a day and I think she’ll be sound in no time.”

“Thank ye, thank ye, I’m very grateful.” He shook my hand vigorously as though I had saved the animal’s life. “I’m very glad to meet you for the first time, Mr. Herriot. I’ve known Mr. Farnon for a year or two, of course, and I think a bit about him. Loves pigs does that man, loves them. And his young brother’s been here once or twice—I reckon he’s fond of pigs, too.”

“Devoted to them, Mr. Worley.”

“Ah yes, I thought so. I can always tell.” He regarded me for a while with a moist eye, then smiled, well satisfied.

We went out into what was really the back yard of an inn. Because Mr. Worley wasn’t a regular farmer, he was the landlord of the Langthorpe Falls Hotel and his precious livestock were crammed into what had once been the stables and coach houses of the inn. They were all Tamworths and whichever door you opened you found yourself staring into the eyes of ginger-haired pigs; there were a few porkers and the odd one being fattened for bacon but Mr. Worley’s pride was his sows. He had six of them—Queenie, Princess, Ruby, Marigold, Delilah and Primrose.

For years expert farmers had been assuring Mr. Worley that he’d never do any good with his sows. If you were going in for breeding, they said, you had to have proper premises; it wasn’t a bit of use shoving sows into converted buildings like his. And for years Mr. Worley’s sows had responded by producing litters of unprecedented size and raising them with tender care. They were all good mothers and didn’t savage their families or crush them clumsily under their bodies so it turned out with uncanny regularity that at the end of eight weeks Mr. Worley had around twelve chunky weaners to take to market.

It must have spoiled the farmers’ beer—none of them could equal that, and the pill was all the more bitter because the landlord had come from the industrial West Riding—Halifax, I think it was—a frail, short-sighted little retired newsagent with no agricultural background. By all the laws he just didn’t have a chance.

Leaving the yard we came on to the quiet loop of road where my car was parked. Just beyond, the road dipped steeply into a tree-lined ravine where the Darrow hurled itself over a great broken shelf of rock in its passage to the lower Dale. I couldn’t see down there from where I was standing, but I could hear the faint roar of the water and could picture the black cliff lifting sheer from the boiling river and on the other bank the gentle slope of turf where people from the towns came to sit and look in wonder.

Some of them were here now. A big, shiny car had drawn up and its occupants were disembarking. The driver, sleek, fat and impressive, strolled towards us and called out: “We would like some tea.”

Mr. Worley swung round on him. “And you can ’ave some, maister, but when I’m ready. I have some very important business with this gentleman.” He turned his back on the man and began to ask me for final instructions about Queenie’s foot.

The man was obviously taken aback and I couldn’t blame him. It seemed to me that Mr. Worley might have shown a little more tact—after all serving food and drink was his living—but as I came to know him better I realised that his pigs came first and everything else was an irritating intrusion.

Knowing Mr. Worley better had its rewards. The time when I feel most like a glass of beer is not in the evening when the pubs are open but at around four-thirty on a hot afternoon after wrestling with young cattle in some stifling cow-shed. It was delightful to retire, sweating and weary, to the shaded sanctuary of Mr. Worley’s back kitchen and sip at the bitter ale, cool, frothing, straight from the cellar below.

The smooth working of the system was facilitated by the attitude of the local constable, P. C. Dalloway, a man whose benign disposition and elastic interpretation of the licensing laws had made him deeply respected in the district. Occasionally he joined us, took off his uniform jacket and, in shirt and braces, consumed a pint with a massive dignity which was peculiar to him.

But mostly Mr. Worley and I were on our own and when he had brought the tall jug up from the cellar he would sit down and say “Well now, let’s have a piggy talk!” His use of this particular phrase made me wonder if perhaps he had some humorous insight into his obsessive preoccupation with the porcine species. Maybe he had but for all that our conversations seemed to give him the deepest pleasure.

We talked about erysipelas and swine fever, brine poisoning and paratyphoid, the relative merits of dry and wet mash, while pictures of his peerless sows with their show rosettes looked down at us from the walls.

On one occasion, in the middle of a particularly profound discussion on the ventilation of farrowing houses Mr. Worley stopped suddenly and, blinking rapidly behind his thick spectacles, burst out:

“You know, Mr. Herriot, sitting here talking like this with you, I’m ’appy as king of England!”

His devotion resulted in my being called out frequently for very trivial things and I swore freely under my breath when I heard his voice on the other end of the line at one o’clock one morning.

“Marigold pigged this afternoon, Mr. Herriot, and I don’t think she’s got much milk. Little pigs look very hungry to me. Will you come?”

I groaned my way out of bed and downstairs and through the long garden to the yard. By the time I had got the car out into the lane I had begun to wake up and when I rolled up to the inn was able to greet Mr. Worley fairly cheerfully.

But the poor man did not respond. In the light from the oil lamp his face was haggard with worry.

“I hope you can do something quick. I’m real upset about her—she’s just laid there doing nothin’ and it’s such a lovely litter. Fourteen she’s had.”

I could understand his concern as I looked into the pen. Marigold was stretched motionless on her side while the tiny piglets swarmed around her udder; they were rushing from teat to teat, squealing and falling over each other in their desperate quest for nourishment. And the little bodies had the narrow, empty look which meant they had nothing in their stomachs. I hated to see a litter die off from sheer starvation but it could happen so easily. There came a time when they stopped trying to suck and began to lie about the pen. After that it was hopeless.

Crouching behind the sow with my thermometer in her rectum I looked along the swelling flank, the hair a rich copper red in the light from the lamp. “Did she eat anything tonight?”

“Aye, cleaned up just as usual.”

The thermometer reading was normal. I began to run my hands along the udder, pulling in turn at the teats. The ravenous piglets caught at my fingers with their sharp teeth as I pushed them to one side but my efforts failed to produce a drop of milk. The udder seemed full, even engorged, but I was unable to get even a bead down to the end of the teat.

“There’s nowt there, is there?” Mr. Worley whispered anxiously.

I straightened up and turned to him. “This is simply agalactia. There’s no mastitis and Marigold isn’t really ill, but there’s something interfering with the let-down mechanism of the milk. She’s got plenty of milk and there’s an injection which ought to bring it down.”

I tried to keep the triumphant look off my face as I spoke, because this was one of my favourite party tricks. There is a flavour of magic in the injection of pituitrin in these cases; it works within a minute and though no skill is required the effect is spectacular.

Marigold didn’t complain as I plunged in the needle and administered 3 c.c. deep into the muscle of her thigh. She was too busy conversing with her owner—they were almost nose to nose, exchanging soft pig noises.

After I had put away my syringe and listened for a few moments to the cooing sounds from the front end I thought it might be time. Mr. Worley looked up in surprise as I reached down again to the udder.

“What are you doing now?”

“Having a feel to see if the milk’s come down yet.”

“Why damn, it can’t be! You’ve only just given t’stuff and she’s bone dry!”

Oh, this was going to be good. A roll of drums would be appropriate at this moment. With finger and thumb I took hold of one of the teats at the turgid back end of the udder. I suppose it is a streak of exhibitionism in me which always makes me send the jet of milk spraying against the opposite wall in these circumstances; this time I thought it would be more impressive if I directed my shot past the innkeeper’s left ear, but I got my trajectory wrong and sprinkled his spectacles instead.

He took them off and wiped them slowly as if he couldn’t believe what he had seen. Then he bent over and tried for himself.

“It’s a miracle!” he cried as the milk spouted eagerly over his hand. “I’ve never seen owt like it!”

It didn’t take the little pigs long to catch on. Within a few seconds they had stopped their fighting and squealing and settled down in a long, silent row. Their utterly rapt expressions all told the same story—they were going to make up for lost time.

I went into the kitchen to wash my hands and was using the towel hanging behind the door when I noticed something odd; there was a subdued hum of conversation, the low rumble of many voices. It seemed unusual in a pub at 2 a.m. and I looked through the partly open door into the bar. The place was crowded. In the light of a single weak electric bulb I could see a row of men drinking at the counter while others sat behind foaming pint pots on the wooden settles against the walls.

Mr. Worley grinned as I turned to him in surprise.

“Didn’t expect to see this lot, did you? Well, I’ll tell you, the real drinkers don’t come in till after closing time. Aye, it’s a rum ’un—every night I lock front door and these lads come in the back.”

I pushed my head round the door for another look. It was a kind of rogue’s gallery of Darrowby. All the dubious characters in the town seemed to be gathered in that room; the names which regularly enlivened the columns of the weekly newspaper with their activities. Drunk and disorderly, non-payment of rates, wife-beating, assault and battery—I could almost see the headings as I went from face to face.