‘I was just watching the veterinary surgeon at work,’ Helen said softly.

  ‘Happy work, too,’ I said, not moving from my position, looking deeply into the green eyes, alight with friendship, fixed on mine a few inches away. ‘I’ll have you know that this is one of my greatest triumphs.’

  Chapter 10

  NEVER FAILS to GIVE RELIEF

  Farnon led me to the first of several doors which opened off a passage where the smell of ether and carbolic hung on the air. ‘This,’ he said, with a secret gleam in his eye as though he were about to unveil the mysteries of Aladdin’s cave, ‘is the dispensary.’

  The dispensary was an important place in the days before penicillin and the sulphonamides. Rows of gleaming Winchester bottles lined the white walls from floor to ceiling. I savoured the familiar names: Sweet Spirits of Nitre, Tincture of Camphor, Chlorodyne, Formalin, Salammoniac, Hexamine, Sugar of Lead, Linimentum Album, Perchloride of Mercury, Red Blister. The lines of labels were comforting.

  I was an initiate among old friends. I had painfully accumulated their lore, ferreting out their secrets over the years. I knew their origins, actions and uses, and their maddeningly varied dosage. The examiner’s voice – ‘And what is the dose for the horse? – and the cow? – and the sheep? – and the pig? – and the dog? – and the cat?’

  These shelves held the vet’s entire armoury against disease and, on a bench under the window, I could see the instruments for compounding them; the graduated vessels and beakers, the mortars and pestles. And underneath, in an open cupboard, the medicine bottles, piles of corks of all sizes, pill boxes, powder papers.

  The dispensary that Siegfried proudly shows to James in If Only They Could Talk belongs to a bygone era, when veterinary surgeons relied upon a variety of age-old remedies to treat their animals, with varying success. Antibiotics, vaccines and modern drugs were on the horizon but were yet to revolutionize veterinary treatment and in the pre-war years veterinary surgeons were working much as they had for decades. Instead of injecting drugs, vets often dispensed liquids that they or a farmer would pour down the throat of an animal – known as drenching – with the use of bottles or drenching horns. For skin conditions, they might slaver on tar or diesel oil or apply mustard plasters to an animal’s chest if it had pneumonia. The James Herriot books provide a fascinating insight into this former world and chronicle the huge impact the introduction of new drugs and methods had on veterinary practice in the 1930s and post-war years.

  As we moved around, Farnon’s manner became more and more animated. His eyes glittered and he talked rapidly. Often, he reached up and caressed a Winchester on its shelf; or he would lift out a horse ball or an electuary from its box, give it a friendly pat and replace it with tenderness.

  ‘Look at this stuff, Herriot,’ he shouted without warning. ‘Adrevan! This is the remedy, par excellence, for red worms in horses. A bit expensive, mind you – ten bob a packet. And these gentian violet pessaries. If you shove one of these into a cow’s uterus after a dirty cleansing, it turns the discharges a very pretty colour. Really looks as though it’s doing something. And have you seen this trick?’

  He placed a few crystals of resublimated iodine on a glass dish and added a drop of turpentine. Nothing happened for a second, then a dense cloud of purple smoke rolled heavily to the ceiling. He gave a great bellow of laughter at my startled face.

  ‘Like witchcraft, isn’t it? I use it for wounds in horses’ feet. The chemical reaction drives the iodine deep into the tissues.’

  ‘It does?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, but that’s the theory, and anyway, you must admit it looks wonderful. Impresses the toughest client.’

  Some of the bottles on the shelves fell short of the ethical standards I had learned in college. Like the one labelled ‘Colic Drench’ and featuring a floridly drawn picture of a horse rolling in agony. The animal’s face was turned outwards and wore an expression of very human anguish. Another bore the legend ‘Universal Cattle Medicine’ in ornate script – ‘A sovereign Remedy for coughs, chills, scours, pneumonia, milk fever, gargett and all forms of indigestion.’ At the bottom of the label, in flaring black capitals, was the assurance, ‘Never Fails to Give Relief’.

  Farnon had something to say about most of the drugs. Each one had its place in his five years’ experience of practice; they all had their fascination, their individual mystique. Many of the bottles were beautifully shaped, with heavy glass stoppers and their Latin names cut deeply into their sides; names familiar to physicians for centuries, gathering fables through the years.

  The two of us stood gazing at the gleaming rows without any idea that it was nearly all useless and that the days of the old medicines were nearly over. Soon they would be hustled into oblivion by the headlong rush of the new discoveries and they would never return.

  ‘This is where we keep the instruments.’ Farnon showed me into another little room. The small animal equipment lay on green baize shelves, very neat and impressively clean. Hypodermic syringes, whelping forceps, tooth scalers, probes, searchers and, in a place of prominence, an ophthalmoscope.

  Farnon lifted it lovingly from its black box. ‘My latest purchase,’ he murmured, stroking its smooth shaft. ‘Wonderful thing. Here, have a peep at my retina.’

  I switched on the bulb and gazed with interest at the glistening, coloured tapestry in the depths of his eye. ‘Very pretty. I could write you a certificate of soundness.’

  He laughed and thumped my shoulder. ‘Good, I’m glad to hear it. I always fancied I had a touch of cataract in that one.’

  He began to show me the large animal instruments which hung from hooks on the walls. Docking and firing irons, bloodless castrators, emasculators, casting ropes and hobbles, calving ropes and hooks. A new, silvery embryotome hung in the place of honour, but many of the instruments, like the drugs, were museum pieces. Particularly the blood stick and fleam, a relic of medieval times, but still used to bring the rich blood spouting into a bucket.

  In the early days of veterinary practice, vets were also required to mix up potions and powders to their own recipes. ‘Materia medica’, as it was called at veterinary college (today known as pharmacology), formed a key part of the curriculum in the 1930s and 1940s, and required students to learn the different medicines, liquids and relevant doses. When he was a student, it was Alf Wight’s least favourite subject, partly because he hadn’t taken science as a Higher at school and he had a poor grasp of maths, which was critical when working out the doses of medicines that might contain arsenic, turpentine and a variety of toxic substances.

  The job of grinding, weighing and mixing up potions often fell to the more junior members of the practice, as is the case at Skeldale House, where James and Tristan are frequently found blending up concoctions in the dispensary.

  Looking back, I can scarcely believe we used to spend all those hours in making up medicines. But our drugs didn’t come to us in proprietary packages and before we could get out on the road we had to fill our cars with a wide variety of carefully compounded and largely useless remedies.

  When Siegfried came upon me that morning I was holding a twelve-ounce bottle at eye level while I poured syrup of coccilana into it. Tristan was moodily mixing stomach powders with a mortar and pestle and he stepped up his speed of stroke when he saw his brother’s eye on him. He was surrounded by packets of the powder and, further along the bench, were orderly piles of pessaries which he had made by filling cellophane cylinders with boric acid.

  Armed with their various pills and potions, James and Siegfried then administer them to the farm animals of the Dales, exactly as Alf and Donald did in the late 1930s. Dispensary staples included stomach powders and bloat drenches which they gave cattle to reduce the potentially lethal build-up of gases in their digestive tracts which caused them to bloat up (a condition less frequently seen today as much more is known about cattle nutrition). For horses and cattle that had ‘stoppages’ in their bowels, they would pour liquid paraffin or castor oil down their throats in order to get things moving again.

  In the early days, Alf used great quantities of the antiseptic Acriflavine to wash out stomachs and to clean wounds or various orifices. Jim also remembers that his dad had one glass syringe – rather than the hundreds of disposable syringes used by vets today – which was stored in a black plastic cylindrical container filled with surgical spirit along with a supply of metal needles. Stimulant medicines were also a staple of the dispensary, including ‘Universal Cattle Medicine’, a rich red fluid that constituted the last line of defence in the battle with animal disease.

  It was a pity it didn’t do any good because there was something compelling about its ruby depths when you held it up to the light and about the solid camphor-ammonia jolt when you sniffed at it and which made the farmers blink and shake their heads and say ‘By gaw, that’s powerful stuff,’ with deep respect. But our specific remedies were so few and the possibilities of error so plentiful that it was comforting in cases of doubt to be able to hand over a bottle of the old standby. Whenever an entry of Siegfried’s or mine appeared in the day book stating ‘Visit attend cow, advice, I UCM’ it was a pretty fair bet we didn’t know what was wrong with the animal.

  Alf Wight and Donald Sinclair regularly resorted to using Universal Cattle Medicine for a variety of bovine complaints. Cows might splutter after being drenched with the stuff – unsurprising as it consisted, amongst other things, of ammonia and arsenic – but its stimulant properties often helped. Its powerful odour meant that just sniffing it was enough for most people but there was one raucous night at the Thirsk practice when Donald, after a few too many drinks, decided to take a few swigs from the bottle of UCM as a form of self-medication. Clutching his throat, he then staggered out into the garden and collapsed in the flowerbed. Thankfully, Donald survived the incident but it didn’t stop his younger brother Brian recreating the whole event in the pub afterwards. Lying on the floor, twitching and convulsing, the theatrics soon became a regular party piece of Brian’s, as entertaining as his ‘mad conductor’.

  The arrival of James Herriot comes with a certain amount of expectation by the farmers in the region, not least that the newly qualified vet will be acquainted with some of the modern drugs they’ve heard about. Dairy farmer Phin Calvert – who was based on the real farmer Fred Thompson, known by everyone as Atom Thompson – is hoping the young vet will come up with ‘summat real and scientific like’ when James visits to look at his sickly calves. But sometimes the old remedies work just as well and, having diagnosed lead poisoning, James prescribes Epsom salts, which work as an effective antidote to the poisoning, and the calves soon recover. James is then called in again to Mr Calvert’s, this time to see his prized pedigree shorthorn bull who’s ‘puffin’ like a bellows’.

  The bull was standing as though rooted to the middle of the pen. His great ribcage rose and fell with the most laboured respirations I had ever seen. His mouth gaped wide, a bubbling foam hung round his lips and his flaring nostrils; his eyes, almost starting from his head in terror, stared at the wall in front of him. This wasn’t pneumonia, it was a frantic battle for breath; and it looked like a losing one.

  He didn’t move when I inserted my thermometer and though my mind was racing I suspected the half-minute wasn’t going to be long enough this time. I had expected accelerated breathing, but nothing like this.

  ‘Poor aud beggar,’ Phin muttered. ‘He’s bred me the finest calves I’ve ever had and he’s as quiet as a sheep, too. I’ve seen me little grandchildren walk under ’is belly and he’s took no notice. I hate to see him sufferin’ like this. If you can’t do no good, just tell me and I’ll get the gun out.’

  I took the thermometer out and read it. One hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. This was ridiculous; I shook it vigorously and pushed it back into the rectum.

  I gave it nearly a minute this time so that I could get in some extra thinking. The second reading said a hundred and ten again and I had an unpleasant conviction that if the thermometer had been a foot long the mercury would still have been jammed against the top.

  What in the name of God was this? Could be anthrax . . . must be . . . and yet . . . I looked over at the row of heads above the half door; they were waiting for me to say something and their silence accentuated the agonized groaning and panting. I looked above the heads to the square of deep blue and a tufted cloud moving across the sun. As it passed, a single dazzling ray made me close my eyes and a faint bell rang in my mind.

  ‘Has he been out today?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye, he’s been out on the grass on his tether all morning. It was that grand and warm.’

  The bell became a triumphant gong. ‘Get a hosepipe in here quick. You can rig it to that tap in the yard.’

  ‘A hosepipe? What the ’ell . . .?’

  ‘Yes, quick as you can – he’s got sunstroke.’

  They had the hose fixed in less than a minute. I turned it full on and began to play the jet of cold water all over the huge form – his face and neck, along the ribs, up and down the legs. I kept this up for about five minutes but it seemed a lot longer as I waited for some sign of improvement. I was beginning to think I was on the wrong track when the bull gulped just once.

  It was something – he had been unable to swallow his saliva before in his desperate efforts to get the air into his lungs; and I really began to notice a change in the big animal. Surely he was looking just a little less distressed and wasn’t the breathing slowing down a bit?

  Then the bull shook himself, turned his head and looked at us. There was an awed whisper from one of the young men: ‘By gaw, it’s working!’

  I enjoyed myself after that. I can’t think of anything in my working life that has given me more pleasure than standing in that pen directing the life-saving jet and watching the bull savouring it. He liked it on his face best and as I worked my way up from the tail and along the steaming back he would turn his nose full into the water, rocking his head from side to side and blinking blissfully.

  Within half an hour he looked almost normal. His chest was still heaving a little but he was in no discomfort. I tried the temperature again. Down to a hundred and five.

  ‘He’ll be all right now,’ I said. ‘But I think one of the lads should keep the water on him for another twenty minutes or so. I’ll have to go now.’

  Phin Calvert offers James a drink before he goes and, sitting in the farm kitchen, he is a little lost for words over the miraculous recovery of his bull. However, he soon finds his voice again at the next meeting of the farmers’ discussion group, where various gentlemen are discussing the latest advances in veterinary medicine. It’s all too much for Phin and he jumps up and cries: ‘Ah think you’re talking a lot of rubbish. There’s a young feller in Darrowby not long out of college and it doesn’t matter what you call ’im out for he uses nowt but Epsom salts and cold water.’

  Much of Siegfried’s and James’s work is undertaken in stables, cow byres or fields, with owners helping to hold their animals or looking on, meaning they must also witness various medical procedures and the gore that goes with it. Most farmers are able to cope with the more visceral aspects of animal husbandry but there are some – and it’s often the big, burly types – who grow weak at the knees at the sight of a needle or blood.

  So this morning I looked with satisfaction at the two men holding the cow. It wasn’t a difficult job – just an intravenous injection of magnesium lactate – but still it was reassuring to have two such sturdy fellows to help me. Maurice Bennison, medium-sized but as tough as one of his own hill beasts, had a horn in his right hand while the fingers of his left gripped the nose; I had the comfortable impression that the cow wouldn’t jump very far when I pushed the needle in. His brother George, whose job it was to raise the vein, held the choke rope limply in enormous hands like bunches of carrots. He grinned down at me amiably from his six feet four inches.

  ‘Right, George,’ I said. ‘Tighten up that rope and lean against the cow to stop her coming round on me.’ I pushed my way between the cow and her neighbour, past George’s unyielding bulk and bent over the jugular vein. It was standing out very nicely. I poised the needle, feeling the big man’s elbow on me as he peered over my shoulder, and thrust quickly into the vein.

  ‘Lovely!’ I cried as the dark blood fountained out and spattered thickly on the straw bedding beneath. ‘Slacken your rope, George.’ I fumbled in my pocket for the flutter valve. ‘And for God’s sake, get your weight off me!’

  Because George had apparently decided to rest his full fourteen stones on me instead of the cow, and as I tried desperately to connect the tube to the needle I felt my knees giving way. I shouted again, despairingly, but he was inert, his chin resting on my shoulder, his breathing stertorous in my ear.

  There could only be one end to it. I fell flat on my face and lay there writhing under the motionless body. My cries went unheeded; George was unconscious.

  Mr Bennison, attracted by the commotion, came into the byre just in time to see me crawling out from beneath his eldest son. ‘Get him out, quick!’ I gasped, ‘before the cows trample on him.’ Wordlessly, Maurice and his father took an ankle apiece and hauled away in unison. George shot out from under the cows, his head beating a brisk tattoo on the cobbles, traversed the dung channel, then resumed his sleep on the byre floor.

  Mr Bennison moved back to the cow and waited for me to continue with my injection but I found the presence of the sprawled body distracting. ‘Look, couldn’t we sit him up against the wall and put his head between his legs?’ I suggested apologetically. The others glanced at each other then, as though deciding to humour me, grabbed George’s shoulders and trundled him over the floor with the expertise of men used to throwing around bags of fertilizer and potatoes. But even propped against the rough stones, his head slumped forward and his great long arms hanging loosely, the poor fellow still didn’t look so good.