‘And you’d better be bloody quick abart it, too!’ were the last few words I heard before the telephone went dead.
This was ironic because Dave North had just spent the last twenty-five minutes talking me through the problems that this particular sheep was having, as well as the lambing problems of the last half a dozen sheep on his farm. He was renowned within the practice for his lengthy telephone conversations and this morning’s chat was no different. Had he been as succinct as most farmers were when they had a ewe to lamb, I would already have been kneeling beside the sheep and the lambs would probably already have been delivered.
So as soon as I’d finished my lengthy conversation, I wrote the visit in the daybook, signed my initials next to it and before long I was in my car, heading out to see him and his sheep. I was already steeling myself for a barrage of thoughts and theories about every imaginable farming and animal-related topic. Dave had a lot of theories.
Once I arrived at the end of his farm track, it took a further full ten minutes before I pulled up outside the farmhouse – an impressive stone and brick building that looked as if it dated back to the seventeenth century – because the track was one of those that wound through fields and therefore had a multitude of gates. These tracks are the nemesis of a vet in a hurry. Stop, climb out of car, open gate, climb back into car, drive through, stop, climb out of car, close gate, climb into car, drive fifty metres and repeat – as many times as there are gates. My first experience of gated farm tracks like this was when I was a veterinary student seeing practice in Skipton. The senior partner was heading out to calve a heifer and he went out of his way to come and find me.
‘Ah! You must be the student.’
Although I hadn’t been keeping a low profile, I had not spent any time with the senior vet, who was called Ian. He always seemed to be busy and I didn’t want to get in his way and slow him up.
‘Would you like to come and see this calving with me? It’s a bit of a trek, but this farmer is good at calving his cows, so if he’s called us in, it’s likely to be a caesarian. You should come along.’
I was pleased to have been asked, so I wasted no time in leaping into his four-by-four, even though it was a cold and dark March evening, just before the surgery was about to shut up for the night. I should have been getting on my bike to cycle back to the caravan that was acting as my lodgings for the fortnight.
The farm was right on the top of a moor and it was a cold and windy night. My job, it turned out, was not to fill syringes or assist with the surgery, but to open about twenty gates that were dotted every few hundred metres across the moor. By about the fifth I had worked this out.
‘I see why you wanted me to come to experience this calving now!’ I said and the serious face of the older vet cracked into a smile.
‘Yes, you’re right! But it’s a great help to me – you’ve saved me loads of time.’
The lane to Dave’s farm wasn’t quite as long as that one had been, but its gates were, nonetheless, numerous and it took me some time to reach the farm, where I expected to find Dave marching backwards and forwards impatiently, outside his lambing shed. But there was nobody around at all, so I went to knock on the door of the impressive farmhouse.
‘Come in,’ was the unusually terse response from within the kitchen. I ventured inside.
‘Ah! You’re here,’ he continued, looking relieved. ‘Thanks for coming. She’s having a few problems and I’ll be bloody buggered if I can lamb her. Too much of a bloody job for me, I’m afraid.’
Dave looked just like Claude Greengrass from the television programme Heartbeat. He was rather rotund, with bushy hair and, as he stood up from the kitchen table at which he had been sitting, it became evident he was wearing a long coat fastened around his middle with bailer twine. His cigar stayed in his mouth through all of this introductory chat.
‘She’s in here,’ he explained and I expected him to don his wellies and show me to the nearby farm building. But Dave walked from the kitchen into the adjacent utility room, in which there was a washing machine, a medicine cabinet and a lambing pen made of wooden hurdles along two sides, the other two sides being the washing machine and the wall.
‘It’s cold out and I thought she stood a better bloody chance in here where it was warm,’ he said, sensing that I was surprised to see a sheep in the house.
‘Okay. Well, let’s have a look. Has she been on long?’
‘Oh, she started last night. That’s when I brought her in. I’ve been watching her all night and nowt’s happened. That’s why you’re here. She’s abart bloody buggered, poor lass. That’s why I wanted you as soon as possible.’
The poor ewe did look exhausted from her attempts to give birth, lying as she was in the straw-lined pen, between the kitchen appliances. At least there was a hot tap nearby and I wasted no time in filling up my bucket with warm water for a change. This was shaping up to be a luxurious lambing experience and one that I would never forget!
After cleaning my hands and applying lubricant, I felt for the lamb. It was very clear why the sheep was not managing on her own. The lamb was enormous.
‘Dave, this lamb is massive. It’s never going to come out this way. We’ll need to do a caesarian.’
Well, it was as if I had just suggested that Dave sold his mother into slavery. He had very little knowledge or experience of this operation, and the idea obviously filled him with fear.
‘Oh, I’m not so sure abart that! Can you not get it art t’ normal route?’
‘Dave, the lamb is massive and that is why it’s not coming. Everything is lined up. The head and front legs are there, but it’s just too big. I can pull and pull with my lambing ropes, but it’ll never come out this way. Honest.’
Dave pulled heavily on his cigar, which seemed incongruous both because he was standing beside a washing machine and because it was still early in the day. It did, however, give him pause for thought.
‘Well, okay. It needs to bloody well come art and if that’s the only bloody way, it’s the only way. What do we do now?’
‘It’s fine, I’ll need some more warm water and I’ll get my stuff – don’t worry, it’s pretty straightforward.’
I gathered all my tackle – local anaesthetic, surgical kit, various injections and the all-important suture materials – and arranged the ewe so that she was lying on her right side with her left hind leg hoisted upwards, exposing her lower abdomen and groin. I explained to Dave, briefly, what I would be doing. If everything went according to plan, I would be finished in less than fifteen minutes.
I loaded the scalpel onto its handle and prepared for my first incision. At this point, bizarrely, the recollection of the first caesarian section I ever experienced came to mind, maybe because this was the first time Dave had seen the procedure, too.
I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy and was just coming to the end of a two-day placement at a local veterinary surgery in Wakefield. A yellow Labrador retriever was giving birth and the pups were not coming out as they should. The vet in charge, a brilliant surgeon called Peter Rhodes, was supervising. I should have left the practice an hour or so previously, to catch my bus home, but the prospect of watching this amazing operation was too exciting.
The bitch was placed under anaesthetic and her belly clipped and scrubbed. After just a few moments, Peter was making the same cut that I was about to make into the animal’s abdomen to reveal the distended uterus, full of puppies. I was enthralled by the spectacle and was peering in, as close as I dared. Just moments after Peter had made his incision, the bitch did a series of big puffs on the anaesthetic gas. This made the diaphragm contract and the result was that the mass of small intestines spewed out of the abdomen and headed straight towards my face! Clearly the intestines were well and truly attached to the inside of the Labrador and there was no danger of them spilling further than the draped area on the operating table, but I was a naïve schoolboy. Instinct took over and, oblivious to the sterility within the operating site, I stuck out my hands and caught the dog’s intestines. My games teacher at school would have been proud, but Mr Rhodes was not. In fact, he was furious. Prone to occasional bad language, even within the consulting room with clients, Peter let out a great torrent of expletives, not aimed directly at me, but at the general situation. As he summoned bags of sterile solution to wash any germs from the dog’s insides, I quickly realized my mistake and my face flushed a deep shade of crimson. It was a lesson well learnt.
If intestines spilled out today, I did not want Dave and his cigar reaching out to catch them. Luckily for the sheep and for me, we were on the floor of the utility room and Dave was perched against the washing machine. I knew full well that he was not quick or agile enough to dive to the rescue.
Dave talked continuously throughout the surgery, so much so that his cigar lost its light. I was concentrating hard on what I was doing, so there was precious little opportunity to reply or interject as he extolled his thoughts and theories about all aspects of life.
The operation went smoothly, and one enormous lamb was soon spluttering in the straw next to the washing machine, shaking its head and splattering the kitchen units with bloody mucus.
Dave didn’t seem to have any intention of moving the mother and baby out of the house and back to the proper place for a sheep and lamb, and he continued talking. I gathered up my kit and went out to find the hosepipe to clean off. I knew I would be on the farm for some time yet.
‘And I’ll tell you another bloody thing, that bullock you saw last year, you know, the one with the lump on its side, well, that bloody lump on that bloody bullock, it never did go away. And do you know what I think it was? I think it was – now I might be wrong here, but I don’t think I am – I think that lump was a big bloody version of a …’
Dave paused and I dared not imagine what his next conjecture might be. I considered running away to my car, but that seemed rude.
He took a deep draw on his long-dead cigar before uttering the unlikely words: ‘Lumpy jaw. I think it was a bloody version of lumpy jaw. I do.’
‘Well, it might have been, Dave. Where was the lump again?’ I could not bring to mind the particular lump to which he was referring.
‘That bloody lump was right on the end of his shoulder.’
It seemed unlikely that a lump on the shoulder was a version of the distinctly different condition called ‘lumpy jaw’, a chronic bacterial infection of the mandible, but Dave was convinced and I knew Dave well enough to know that to disagree was futile. I also knew that it would be a while before I was retracing my steps down his long farm track. When I did eventually manage to get away, I couldn’t help but smile at the outcome of my caesarian in the utility room, Dave’s cheerfully persistent conviction that he had the answers and the beautiful hawthorn blossom on the hedge along his lane. I knew that once this final lambing of the year had been done, at Dave’s farm, springtime was officially over.