A Wander in Vetland

by John Hicks

  I can only rejoice that I have been a part of this glorious, natural world.”

  ~

  Illness gives us time to reflect, time to sort out the past and plan the future. From now on my life would change. By happy chance, during the listless days that followed, I learned that my first book had been accepted for publication. Something I had been drawn to since childhood, but which had long lain dormant, seduced me as I wrote it: a love of words and the beauty of language. There was something else beyond vetting.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  To Travel Hopefully

  Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour. Robert Louis Stevenson

  The Victorians built solidly, and left a legacy of sturdy brick buildings the length and breadth of Britain. They placed an almost biblical emphasis on stable foundations. An amount of soil, at least equal to the estimated mass of the structure about to be constructed above the ground, was dug out for the foundations. It was then relatively easy to remove the surplus soil between them and cheaply create a space under the ground floor. This neat solution explains why so many of these houses have capacious cellars. What a blessing these were for city-dwellers blitzed during the last war. People in cellars were protected from all but a direct hit.

  On the other hand these damp, dark, creepy cellars have inspired numerous horror stories, and hidden many unspeakable crimes. My experience of cellars led me to regard them as anything but places of safety. During my earliest teens – an age of imagination and uncertainty – I left my parents’ coal cellar behind me for institutional life in the cellar of a large Victorian house. That cellar was the common room for the first-year boarders of my senior school.

  First year boarders in School House were known as trogs for this very reason. The school laid a traditional emphasis on the classics so, naturally, this was an allusion to the Greek troglodytes: cave dwellers. The trogs’ common room was no home away from home for the thirty or so boys who shared it. It was adjacent to a coke-fired boiler, which heated the whole building. Coke tipped down a hatch into the coal cellar and the surplus spilled into our locker room. The concrete floor was bare, patterned only by a filigree of coal-dust cracks. From a romantic point of view, bathed in sepia tones, it could be described as Dickensian, and even adorned the lid of a chocolate box. But lift the lid and soft-centred cockroaches, black and crunchy, scuttle forth; as they did. The Reverend Black, he of the chasubled incantations in the school chapel, was our housemaster. When it came to the business of running a boarding establishment he was an eminently practical man.

  As he explained to parents aspiring to board their children, these rooms were only a “temporary” arrangement, but the chronological timescale to which his use of this word applied was of biblical proportions. During my stay the décor and furnishings degraded further, into advanced dilapidation, as the boys afforded them the respect they deserved. The two settees moulted great clumps of horsehair. Their wheeled casters, continually abused in rough games by bored trogs, succumbed to the rutted floor. Eventually they subsided at uncertain angles, shabby relics slowly melding into the dim dinginess of their miserable surroundings.

  For the most part the Reverend deigned not to visit his boys’ common room, preferring to restrict himself to an elegantly furnished wing of the building, a world away from the nuisance of his charges. On Sunday mornings, after chapel, the first year boarders were herded into the large, sunlit study of this other world. There, the peace was palpable. After days of echoing concrete, the opulent red carpets, curtains and wall hangings were like a salve for the soul. Occasionally the slight and beautiful Mrs Black could be glimpsed flitting down the hall, a memorable sight for us boarders; the only other woman in our lives was the grim, squat, and formidable Matron. However, we were not in the Reverend Black’s study to ogle women, even if for some of us – yet to experience the perturbations of puberty – our longings were merely the innocent search for some mother substitute. Alas, it was apparent on our first herding into these Elysian bounds that our visits were to be short and productive. We were here expressly to write letters home, and to write letters home expressly …

  The raised lectern looked strangely out of place in the Reverend’s study; perhaps he used it to practice his sermons. He stood behind it and, looking down on us, drove his message into our lonely souls: “At this stage, boys, you are still adjusting to life away from home. No doubt many of you are feeling homesick. This is quite normal, and if you’ve got any spine, you will soon get over it. Remember, as you write, that this is also a wrench for your parents. It would be selfish, just because you are unhappy, to inflict your misery on them.” He glared at one of his cowed charges, raised his voice a tone, and snapped out a withering: “What are you snivelling for Stewart? For goodness sake pull yourself together boy!” Calmly, he resumed – confidently in control. “I want to see you all fill at least one side of paper and I will see your efforts before you can go. Come up to my desk when you think you’ve finished. You have half an hour.”

  Could it have happened?… He shuffled his notes. A piece of paper fell off the lectern and drifted to the floor. “Well boy! What are you waiting for? Pick it up, there’s a good fellow.” The Reverend Black may not have heard of Kereopa’s performance behind the lectern of the little church at Opotiki, but now I see it… Kereopa, on dropping Volkner’s head… less messy… but the parallels were there.

  But this did happen… Later, as we presented our letters to him, he dissected us in front of our peers: “This isn’t good enough, Makliski. I’ve never seen such selfish rubbish in all my life! How upset do you think your parents are going to be if they think you’re being picked on?”

  And, quite audibly, in response to a whispered explanation, “Well if your parents have just got divorced, you might have to write a letter to each of them, but I can promise you, it’s not going like that. Go away and rewrite it without that sentence. You have 10 minutes left.”

  With our letters duly written and censored by this man of God, we were dismissed to relax and celebrate the rest of our Sabbath with the horsehair sofas.

  Steep gabled, gothic-windowed, grey slate roofed, grime-bricked, smoke-stacked, tile-floored edifices are you, the Victorian buildings of my youth. Your reverend caretaker occupied but a small part of the journey: a memorable traveller who crossed my path and served to alert me to other footpads I might meet. Within your confines the scales fell from my eyes. The sanctioned injustices were part of a living satire in which we all partook. They fed my sense of irony such that any foreboding I felt in your presence has now vanished.

  As I revisit my schoolboy past, I can understand the shattering resonance I felt in later life when I first encountered Gormenghast, that brilliant fiction of Mervyn Peake. The ghouls of my youth were reincarnated in the Gothic vastness of his fantastical creation. And when I had absorbed one of many sentences of consummate beauty, I left the final portion of his sinister world unread and unknown to me. I had tasted literary perfection:

  Who are these dead – these victims of violence who no longer influence the tenor of Gormenghast save by deathless repercussion? For ripples are still widening in dark rings and a movement runs over the gooseflesh waters though the drowned stones lie still.

  What could be more flawlessly realised for those who have gazed into the clear barrenness of a mountain tarn and seen, beneath the gooseflesh waters, “the drowned stones lie still”? I did not wish to disturb their pristine peace. Perhaps if I read through to the last sentence of Gormenghast the magic would evaporate: the stones rest dry and lifeless. Let them lie as they are for me: literary markers in pages of fluid prose. For that is the important lesson. If you enjoy the journey, sometimes you should make the effort not to finish, not to arrive. This is contrary to our modern, never ending quest to set goals and achieve them.

  Likewise, I gaze west towards the mountains of Fiordland. What is important
to me is that they are there, with Gormenghast, on the bookshelf of my mind. What I have seen of them I have loved – but I can never know all their secrets, the best parts could be, are likely to be, those I do not know. It is the unknown that feeds the imagination. It is reassuring to find that this is so, and that we can all use our powers of imagination to take us where we will. Perhaps a younger generation will yet find that it is possible to create a virtual world without the aid of a computer programme and come to realise that computers could eventually cripple our imaginative powers. As long as I live I will wish my eyes to sweep the crest of some distant mountain range and imagine the unvisited wilderness of gooseflesh tarns and drowned stones they protect. In this acquisitive world we must learn that in our lives we can’t have everything. But if we have freedom of spirit: to imagine, to question, to explore; then we have everything we need. To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. The journey is the reward.

  My life as a vet, I now accept, was just one part of a journey. I feel immensely privileged to have reached my present milestone, never forgetting my constant and delightful travelling companion; without her the road would have been so much harder. My future lies ahead – paved with words, deliciously uncertain; but the drowned stones of history stretch behind, immutable and always there to haunt us.

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  About the author

  I am an English trained (Liverpool University) veterinarian, recently retired. Apart from a brief stint in a dog and cat practice in Yorkshire, I have spent most of my working life in various parts of rural New Zealand working in mixed practice with sheep, deer, dairy and beef cattle, horses, working dogs and pets.

  I have always been interested in writing and was the 'Vet Talk' columnist for The Southland Times for several years. My columns were usually of a quirky, or satirical nature - rather in the same style I have used for A Wander in Vetland and Pizzles in Paradise.

  I am currently working on an historical novel, which is altogether another matter...

  If you enjoyed this book, you might enjoy another veterinary title by John Hicks - also available at Smashwords.com:

  Pizzles in Paradise: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/139545

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