After finishing in Thurso and before starting in Thirsk, my little reddish-orange Metro had one last mission. During my final year at vet school, I had received a bursary from the British Cattle Veterinary Association to undertake a research project, supported by the ever-calm and inspirational Dr Jackson. One of his areas of expertise was bovine obstetrics. We had devised a project to measure the oxygenation levels of calves during labour. This is done routinely in babies but veterinary medicine was lagging some way behind. During the project, I had been the first person to use this technique in calves and lambs and had written a paper setting out my findings. It was published in the Veterinary Record, our professional journal, while I was still a student. I had been invited to present my paper to a meeting of the BCVA in Exeter, Devon. I was in Thurso, Caithness. My little car had to make it pretty much from John O’Groats to Land’s End. I had to give my talk and then get back up to Yorkshire for the first day of my new job. My car and I made it, but only just.
Starting at Skeldale Veterinary Centre could not have been more straightforward. I already had some basic skills, which I had learnt in Scotland, and I was sharing a house with my university friend, Jon (he of the moustache). He had been at Skeldale as a student and, since two posts had arisen at about the same time, the partners had decided to employ both of us. Jon had started soon after graduation while I had been in Scotland, so he was familiar with some of the peculiarities of the area and the practice.
My first night on call was particularly memorable. It was also my very first night at the practice – there was no time for easing in gradually. After evening surgery had finished, I was sent out to see a ewe with orf. Orf is a viral infection that affects sheep, giving them painful, crusty swellings on the mouth and face. It can also affect the udder, so little lambs can catch it from their mothers and the sores make it painful for them when they try to suck. It is straightforward to diagnose and the treatment, while mainly symptomatic rather than curative, is simple. It was an easy first job for my first night on call. At about eight o’clock, the beeper went off again. In those days, mobile phones were not widely used so, when this happened, we had to find a telephone box, or borrow the phone of whichever farm we happened to be at or near. There was a cow to see with mastitis. The farmer had noticed it during evening milking. I took directions and went straight there. The farmer was a chap called Colin. He lived in the small village of Thirlby, which nestled in a very sheltered spot just below Sutton Bank. From his yard, you can see the white stone cliff from which the bigger village of Sutton-under-Whitestonecliffe gets its name. On this autumn evening, the bright limestone reflected the orange sunset and it looked spectacular. Colin came out to show me the cow. She had nasty mastitis. Her udder was massively swollen and she had a very high temperature. Mastitis in cows can usually be treated with antibiotic injections and intra-mammary tubes (tubes of antibiotics which are instilled into the udder via the teat). However, in this case the infection was too severe for this simple remedy, in part because the teat was blocked. The skin of the udder was tight and purple and without aggressive treatment there was a high risk of necrosis and then gangrene. This is very serious and leaves an enormous messy and smelly problem for weeks. I decided that the proper course of action was to take my scalpel and lance the udder, as if it were a huge abscess. As I explained my plan to Colin, I could see he wasn’t convinced. ‘Can yer not give her an injection then, Vetnery?’ he asked.
I noticed that some of his family had arrived in the gloomy cow byre. It was as if the whole family had come to coerce me into a more benign course of treatment. The last to arrive was Colin’s striking daughter, who was about eighteen. She had a shock of red hair and a very short nightie, made somewhat incongruous by knee-high wellies. I was somewhat flummoxed at the arrival of this siren, who had surely come along to distract me from the task in hand. I regathered my thoughts and made preparations for my bold incision. Sure enough, a river of fetid pus came spewing out of the cow’s udder, all over the floor and all over my Wellington boots. I felt quite pleased that my actions had been justified, as there were gasps of awe from the onlookers. I finally returned home, well after dark, and recounted the tale of my first evening on call to my housemate and colleague Jon, including the arrival of the red-headed siren.
‘D’you know what?’ he said, as he opened a bottle of beer, ‘the very same thing happened to me on my first night on call!’ We both chuckled.
At that time it was easy to gain, or lose, a reputation. It was a small community and gossip spread quickly. The arrival of two new young vets was unusual, especially since we were both the same age and of a similar disposition. Clients would often mistake us for the other one and we would sometimes play on this, especially if a case was not going to plan.
We were soon signed up to Ampleforth village cricket team, and played in the Ryedale evening league. Games would take us to villages further afield than our usual patch. We played one game on a beautiful ground in the garden of an enormous house called Hovingham Hall, on its front lawn. It was reputed to be the favourite cricket ground of the famous Fred Trueman. We felt honoured, because there could be no better person to judge it as the best. Not all pitches were of that quality, though. At the other end of the spectrum, the infamous ‘Spout House’ was almost impossible to play cricket on. Not only was it on an incredible slope, but the outfield was littered with both cow pats and actual sheep. Fielders had to be arranged along one boundary alone, at the bottom of the hill.
Games were usually played in spring and summer in the evenings and consisted of sixteen eight-ball overs for each team. It was always a rush to get to the venue after evening surgery and it was a standing joke: ‘Vet’s late again.’ Since it was unusual that we could both play in the same game, as one of us was invariably on duty, the team sheet would simply say ‘Vet’ and either Jon or I would take the place. The captain, Mike Dobson, would not usually know which of us was going to appear.
Neither of us was particularly talented at cricket but what we lacked in ability, we made up for in enthusiasm. We were certainly the most active and mobile in the outfield. Mind you, being active in the field was important, mainly to keep warm. In one early season game, the outfield was covered in snow.
Jon was a ‘Michael Vaughan’ kind of batsman, upright and technically precise. When he did make contact, he had a glorious cover drive. I, on the other hand, was more like a talentless version of Ian Botham. I would both bowl and bat, neither particularly well, although the high point of my short cricketing career was a 50 not out, and then two wickets in my first over. We had our own Fred Trueman, too, in the form of a massive farmer called Clive. He always opened the bowling, and when he was bowling we had a deep fine leg and a very fine third man to back up the creaking wicket keeper. Clive’s cricket season always ended early when he had to concentrate on getting the harvest in, from mid summer. Whatever the result, we would convene in the nearest pub for sandwiches and beer. The post match chat was always more important than the score.
We ate a lot of sandwiches in those days. It was a hungry business being a young vet. At lunchtimes, we had a habit of buying a large loaf of ‘Country Crunch’ from the bakers, as we lived close to the surgery and could easily go home for lunch. Without any discussion as to which of us would buy the loaf, our system seemed to work. The worst outcome was that we would end up with two loaves but since we ate voraciously, this did not present a problem. One day, the shop was particularly busy. I took my place at the back of the queue and had not been waiting long before one of the shop staff shouted, at the top of her voice, across the packed shop, ‘It’s OK, your friend has already been in to collect it already!’
A few months in and I thought my reputation as a decent vet was developing well. However, one evening it took something of a battering.
It was a Saturday night in mid winter, cold and very dark, when I was called to a local dairy farm. A cow was having difficulty calving. I had not been to this farm before and so I took detailed notes on how to get there and sped off at high speed. Calvings are always an emergency and tensions often run high, with farmers anxious about the outcome for both the cow and the calf. I arrived in the pitch-black yard, and eventually found the farmer, Steve, in the cow shed, already with his arm where mine should have been. ‘Ah’ve just about got this un,’ he grunted. It looked hard work, but Steve managed to deliver the calf, which, sadly, showed no signs of life. It was disappointing, but the calf had clearly been dead for some time and the outcome was nobody’s fault.
We looked at each other. I seemed somewhat redundant, but I offered to check the cow out for injuries or other problems, and to check for a second calf. It was what we had been taught to do. Always check for a second calf, or a third lamb. I felt smug as I quickly identified the presence of a twin. It became apparent that it was breach, that is, coming tail first, with both back legs pointing forwards towards the cow’s head. It is impossible for the calf to be born by itself in this presentation. The back legs need to be manipulated so they are pointing backwards, which then allows it to be delivered. All went according to plan. I repositioned the calf and pulled it out, much to everyone’s delight. The newborn, however, was not at all well. Its breathing was shallow and erratic and it looked close to death. I had a plan. I knew all about neonatal acidosis – my recent research project had been related to this topic, so I felt it was my area of expertise. I rushed to my car boot to get a vial of some powder which I knew would counteract the acidosis that I presumed was the cause of this calf’s problems. I explained my plan and administered the treatment. In my mind, the calf was going to splutter, lift its head and rise like Lazarus. I stood back, awaiting the miracle. Sadly, a miracle did not occur. The calf did indeed splutter, but then promptly expired. Suddenly the cow shed became silent. It was pretty silent before, actually, but I expected to see one of those tumbleweeds rolling through, as the atmosphere became leaden. We stood staring at a healthy cow, but two dead calves.
‘Well. Job’s a bad un!’ Steve blurted out, and stumped off back to his house, leaving me cold and traumatized in his cow shed. I had no torch and the lights had been turned off, so it took me several miserable minutes, avoiding farmyard obstacles and sleeping cows, before I could find my way back to the car and make a hasty retreat. My first visit to one of the practice’s biggest farm clients had been an unmitigated disaster. I got home and gloomily went straight to bed, feeling very dejected.
I slept soundly, despite the spectre of my beeper, which usually led to a broken night’s sleep, even if no calls came through. Early the following morning, I got a message to say there was an urgent call to see a foal with a laceration on its nose. The owner was very upset and so I rushed off, again, eager to get there as soon as I could. The visit was in the opposite direction to the previous night’s call, but I found my way there without any problem. A young lady, about my age, was there, holding the young foal. I opened the gate to the yard, hoping to make a good impression.
‘Oh no, not you!’ she said, which surprised me because I couldn’t recall meeting her before and certainly could not think of a reason why she should react quite so vehemently. I examined the injury and explained that it needed stitches.
‘Well, let’s hope you do a better job than you did on that calf last night,’ she grumbled.
‘Oh my God!’ I thought. Less than twelve hours had elapsed and now the whole of Yorkshire knew how rubbish I was. How could that have happened? The girl did not let on how she knew and I chose not to pursue this line of discussion. Rather, I concentrated on my local anaesthetic and making tidy sutures.
It was only two weeks later when I went back to remove the sutures, the wound having healed beautifully, that I plucked up courage to find out how she knew about the demise of the calf.
‘I’m Steve’s girlfriend,’ she explained.
‘Phew,’ I thought.