James Herriot's Dog Stories

by James Herriot

  Stewie seemed to read my thoughts. ‘It’s nothing great, Jim. I haven’t a smart practice and I don’t make a lot, but we manage to clear the housekeeping and that’s the main thing.’

  The phrase was familiar. ‘Clear the housekeeping’ – that was how he had put it when I first met him at Brawton races. It seemed to be the lodestar of his life.

  The end of the room was cut off by a curtain which my colleague drew to one side.

  ‘This is what you might call the waiting-room.’ He smiled as I looked in some surprise at half a dozen wooden chairs arranged round the three walls. ‘No high-powered stuff, Jim, no queues into the streets, but we get by.’

  Some of Stewie’s clients were already filing in: two little girls with a black dog, a cloth-capped old man with a terrier on a string, a teenage boy carrying a rabbit in a basket.

  ‘Right,’ the big man said, ‘we’ll get started.’ He pulled on a white coat, opened the curtain and said, ‘First, please.’

  The little girls put their dog on the table. He was a long-tailed mixture of breeds and he stood trembling with fear, rolling his eyes apprehensively at the white coat.

  ‘All right, lad,’ Stewie murmured, ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ He stroked and patted the quivering head before turning to the girls. ‘What’s the trouble, then?’

  ‘It’s ’is leg, ’e’s lame,’ one of them replied.

  As if in confirmation the little dog raised a fore leg and held it up with a pitiful expression. Stewie engulfed the limb with his great hand and palpated it with the utmost care. And it struck me immediately – the gentleness of this shambling bear of a man.

  ‘There’s nothing broken,’ he said. ‘He’s just sprained his shoulder. Try to rest it for a few days and rub this in night and morning.’

  He poured some whitish liniment from a Winchester bottle into one of the odd-shaped bottles and handed it over.

  One of the little girls held out her hand and unclasped her fingers to reveal a shilling in her palm.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Stewie without surprise. ‘Goodbye.’

  He saw several other cases, then as he was on his way to the curtain two grubby urchins appeared through the door at the other end of the room. They carried a clothes basket containing a widely varied assortment of glassware.

  Stewie bent over the basket, lifting out HP sauce bottles, pickle jars, ketchup containers and examining them with the air of a connoisseur. At length he appeared to come to a decision.

  ‘Threepence,’ he said.

  ‘Sixpence,’ said the urchins in unison.

  ‘Fourpence,’ grunted Stewie.

  ‘Sixpence,’ chorused the urchins.

  ‘Fivepence,’ my colleague muttered doggedly.

  ‘Sixpence!’ There was a hint of triumph in the cry.

  Stewie sighed. ‘Go on then.’ He passed over the coin and began to stack the bottles under the sink.

  ‘I just scrape off the labels and give them a good boil up, Jim.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s a big saving.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ The mystery of the strangely shaped dispensing bottles was suddenly resolved.

  It was six thirty when the last client came through the curtain. I had watched Stewie examining each animal carefully, taking his time and treating their conditions ably within the confines of his limited resources. His charges were all around a shilling to two shillings and it was easy to see why he only just cleared the housekeeping.

  One other thing I noticed: the people all seemed to like him. He had no ‘front’ but he was kind and concerned. I felt there was a lesson there.

  The last arrival was a stout lady with a prim manner and a very correct manner of speech.

  ‘My dog was bit last week,’ she announced, ‘and I’m afraid the wound is goin’ antiseptic.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Stewie nodded gravely. The banana fingers explored the tumefied area on the animal’s neck with a gossamer touch. ‘It’s quite nasty, really. He could have an abscess there if we’re not careful.’

  He took a long time over clipping the hair away, swabbing out the deep puncture with peroxide of hydrogen. Then he puffed in some dusting powder, applied a pad of cotton wool and secured it with a bandage. He followed with an antistaphylococcal injection and finally handed over a sauce bottle filled to the rim with acriflavine solution.

  ‘Use as directed on the label,’ he said, then stood back as the lady opened her purse expectantly.

  A long inward struggle showed in the occasional twitches of his cheeks and Bickerings of his eyelids but finally he squared his shoulders. ‘That,’ he said resolutely, ‘will be three and sixpence.’

  It was a vast fee by Stewie’s standards, but probably the minimum in other veterinary establishments, and I couldn’t see how he could make any profit from the transaction.

  As the lady left, a sudden uproar broke out within the house. Stewie gave me a seraphic smile.

  ‘That’ll be Meg and the kids. Come and meet them.’

  We went out to the hall and into an incredible hubbub. Children shouted, screamed and laughed, spades and pails clattered, a large ball thumped from wall to wall and above it all a baby bawled relentlessly.

  Stewie moved into the mob and extracted a small woman. ‘This,’ he murmured with quiet pride, ’is my wife.’ He gazed at her like a small boy admiring a film star.

  ‘How do you do,’ I said.

  Meg Brannan took my hand and smiled. Any glamour about her existed only in her husband’s eye. A ravaged prettiness still remained but her face bore the traces of some tough years. I could imagine her life of mother, housewife, cook, secretary, receptionist and animal nurse.

  ‘Oh, Mr Herriot, it is good of you and Mr Farnon to help us out like this. We’re so looking forward to going away.’ Her eyes held a faintly desperate gleam but they were kind.

  I shrugged. ‘Oh, it’s a pleasure, Mrs Brannan. I’m sure I’ll enjoy it and I hope you all have a marvellous holiday.’ I really meant it – she looked as though she needed one.

  I was introduced to the children but I never really got them sorted out. Apart from the baby, who yelled indefatigably from leather lungs, I think there were three little boys and two little girls, but I couldn’t be sure – they moved around too quickly.

  The only time they were silent was for a brief period at supper when Meg fed them and us from a kind of cauldron in which floated chunks of mutton, potatoes and carrots. It was very good, too, and was followed by a vast blancmange with jam on top.

  The tumult broke out again very soon as the youngsters raced through their meal and began to play in the room. One thing I found disconcerting was that the two biggest boys kept throwing a large, new, painted ball from one to the other across the table as we ate. The parents said nothing about it – Meg, I felt, because she had stopped caring, and Stewie because he never had cared.

  Only once when the ball whizzed past my nose and almost carried away a poised spoonful of blancmange did their father remonstrate.

  ‘Now then, now then,’ he murmured absently, and the throwing was resited more towards the middle of the table.

  Next morning I saw the family off. Stewie had changed his dilapidated Austin Seven for a large rust-encrusted Ford V Eight. Seated at the wheel he waved and beamed through the cracked side windows with serene contentment. Meg, by his side, managed a harassed smile, and at the other windows an assortment of dogs and children fought for a vantage-point. As the car moved away a pram, several suitcases and a cot swayed perilously on the roof, the children yelled, the dogs barked, the baby bawled, then they were gone.

  As I re-entered the house the unaccustomed silence settled around me, and with the silence came a faint unease. I had to look after this practice for two weeks and the memory of the thinly furnished surgery was not reassuring. I just didn’t have the tools to tackle any major problem.

  But it was easy to comfort myself. From what I had seen this wasn’t the sort of place where dr
amatic things happened. Stewie had once said he made most of his living by castrating torn cats, and I supposed if you threw in a few ear cankers and minor ailments that would be about it.

  The morning surgery seemed to confirm this impression; a few humble folk led in nondescript pets with mild conditions and I happily dispensed a series of Bovril bottles and meat paste jars containing Stewie’s limited drug store.

  I had only one difficulty and that was with the table, which kept collapsing when I lifted the animals on to it. For some obscure reason it had folding legs held by metal struts underneath, and these were apt to disengage at crucial moments, causing the patient to slide abruptly to the floor. After a while I got the hang of the thing and kept one leg jammed against the struts throughout the examination.

  It was about 10.30 a.m. when I finally parted the curtains and found the waiting-room empty and only the distinctive cat–dog smell lingering on the air. As I locked the door it struck me that I had very little to do till the afternoon surgery. At Darrowby I would have been dashing out to start the long day’s driving round the countryside, but here almost all the work was done at the practice house.

  I was wondering how I would put the time in after the single outside visit on the book when the door bell rang. Then it rang again followed by a frantic pounding on the wood. I hurried through the curtain and turned the handle. A well-dressed young couple stood on the step. The man held a Golden Labrador in his arms and behind them a caravan drawn by a large gleaming car stood by the kerb.

  ‘Are you the vet?’ the girl gasped. She was in her twenties, auburn-haired, extremely attractive, but her eyes were terrified.

  I nodded. ‘Yes – yes, I am. What’s the trouble?’

  ‘It’s our dog.’ The young man’s voice was hoarse, his face deathly pale. ‘A car hit him.’

  I glanced over the motionless yellow form. ‘Is he badly hurt?’

  There were a few moments of silence then the girl spoke almost in a whisper. ‘Look at his hind leg.’

  I stepped forward and as I peered into the crook of the man’s arm a freezing wave drove through me. The limb was hanging off at the hock. Not fractured but snapped through the joint and dangling from what looked like a mere shred of skin. In the bright morning sunshine the white ends of naked bones glittered with a sickening lustre.

  It seemed a long time before I came out of my first shock and found myself staring stupidly at the animal. And when I spoke the voice didn’t sound like my own.

  ‘Bring him in,’ I muttered, and as I led the way back through the odorous waiting-room the realisation burst on me that I had been wrong when I thought that nothing ever happened here.

  Doing locums is a fascinating way of seeing how the other man lives. There are an infinite number of ways of running a small animal practice and Stewie Brannan’s was one of the more bizarre ones. It was a strange quirk of fate that one of the most traumatic and demanding cases I can remember should crop up in Stewie’s surgery where drugs and equipment were frighteningly minimal . . .

  30. Kim

  I held the curtains apart as the young man staggered in and placed his burden on the table.

  Now I could see the whole thing: the typical signs of a road accident; the dirt driven savagely into the glossy gold of the coat, the multiple abrasions. But that mangled leg wasn’t typical. I had never seen anything like it before.

  I dragged my eyes round to the girl. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Oh, just in a flash.’ The tears welled in her eyes. ‘We are on a caravanning holiday. We had no intention of staying in Hensfield’ – (I could understand that) – ‘but we stopped for a newspaper, Kim jumped out of the car, and that was it.’

  I looked at the big dog stretched motionless on the table. I reached out a hand and gently ran my fingers over the noble outlines of the head.

  ‘Poor old lad,’ I murmured and for an instant the beautiful hazel eyes turned to me and the tail thumped briefly against the wood.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ I asked.

  ‘Surrey,’ the young man replied. He looked rather like the prosperous young stockbroker that the name conjured up.

  I rubbed my chin. ‘I see . . .’ A way of escape shone for a moment in the tunnel. ‘Perhaps if I patch him up you could get him back to your own vet there.’

  He looked at his wife for a moment then back at me. ‘And what would they do there? Amputate his leg?’

  I was silent. If an animal in this condition arrived in one of those high-powered southern practices with plenty of skilled assistance and full surgical equipment, that’s what they probably would do. It would be the only sensible thing.

  The girl broke in on my thoughts. ‘Anyway, if it’s at all possible to save his leg something has to be done right now. Isn’t that so?’ She gazed at me appealingly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said huskily. ‘That’s right.’ I began to examine the dog. The abrasions on the skin were trivial. He was shocked, but his mucous membranes were pink enough to suggest that there was no internal haemorrhage. He had escaped serious injury except for that terrible leg.

  I stared at it intently, appalled by the smooth glistening articular surfaces of the tibio-tarsal joint. There was something obscene in its exposure in a living animal. It was as though the hock had been broken open by brutal inquisitive hands.

  I began a feverish search of the premises, pulling open drawers, cupboards, opening tins and boxes. My heart leaped at each little find: ajar of catgut in spirit, a packet of lint, a sprinkler tin of iodoform, and – treasure trove indeed – a bottle of barbiturate anaesthetic.

  Most of all I needed antibiotics, but it was pointless looking for those because they hadn’t been discovered yet. But I did hope fervently for just an ounce or two of sulphanilamide, and there I was disappointed, because Stewie’s menage didn’t stretch to that. It was when I came upon the box of plaster of paris bandages that something seemed to click.

  At that time in the late thirties the Spanish Civil War was vivid in people’s minds. In the chaos of the later stages there had been no proper medicaments to treat the terrible wounds. They had often been encased in plaster and left, in the grim phrase, to ‘stew in their own juice’. Sometimes the results were surprisingly good.

  I grabbed the bandages. I knew what I was going to do. Gripped by a fierce determination, I inserted the needle into the radial vein and slowly injected the anaesthetic. Kim blinked, yawned lazily and went to sleep. I quickly laid out my meagre armoury, then began to shift the dog into a better position. But I had forgotten about the table, and as I lifted the hind quarters the whole thing gave way and the dog slithered helplessly towards the floor.

  ‘Catch him!’ At my frantic shout the man grabbed the inert form, then I reinserted the slots in their holes and got the wooden surface back on the level.

  ‘Put your leg under there,’ I gasped, then turned to the girl. ‘And would you please do the same at the other end. This table mustn’t fall over once I get started.’

  Silently they complied and as I looked at them, each with a leg jammed against the underside, I felt a deep sense of shame. What sort of place did they think this was?

  But for a long time after I forgot everything. First I put the joint back in place, slipping the ridges of the tibial-tarsal trochlea into the grooves at the distal end of the tibia as I had done so often in the anatomy lab at college. And I noticed with a flicker of hope that some of the ligaments were still intact and, most important, that a few good blood vessels still ran down to the lower part of the limb.

  I never said a word as I cleaned and disinfected the area, puffed iodoform into every crevice and began to stitch. I stitched interminably, pulling together shattered tendons, torn joint capsule and fascia. It was a warm morning and as the sun beat on the surgery window the sweat broke out on my forehead. By the time I had sutured the skin a little river was flowing down my nose and dripping from the tip. Next, more iodoform, then the lint, and finally two of the plaster band
ages, making a firm cast above the hock down over the foot.

  I straightened up and faced the young couple. They had never moved from their uncomfortable postures as they held the table upright, but I gazed at them as though seeing them for the first time.

  I mopped my brow and drew a long breath. ‘Well, that’s it. I’d be inclined to leave it as it is for a week, then wherever you are let a vet have a look at it.’

  They were silent for a moment, then the girl spoke. ‘I would rather you saw it yourself.’ Her husband nodded agreement.

  ‘Really?’ I was amazed. I had thought they would never want to see me, my smelly waiting-room or my collapsible table again.

  ‘Yes, of course we would,’ the man said. ‘You have taken such pains over him. Whatever happens we are deeply grateful to you, Mr Brannan.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not Mr Brannan, he’s on holiday. I’m his locum, my name is Herriot.’

  He held out his hand. ‘Well, thank you again, Mr Herriot. I am Peter Gillard and this is my wife, Marjorie.’

  We shook hands and he took the dog in his arms and went out to the car.

  For the next few days I couldn’t keep Kim’s leg out of my mind. At times I felt I was crazy trying to salvage a limb that was joined to the dog only by a strip of skin. I had never met anything remotely like it before, and in unoccupied moments that hock joint with all its imponderables would float across my vision.

  There were plenty of these moments because Stewie’s was a restful practice. Apart from the three daily surgeries there was little activity, and in particular the uncomfortable pre-breakfast call so common in Darrowby was unknown here.

  The Brannans had left the house and me in the care of Mrs Holroyd, an elderly widow of raddled appearance who slouched around in a flowered overall down which ash cascaded from a permanently dangling cigarette. She wasn’t a good riser but she soon had me trained, because after a few mornings when I couldn’t find her, I began to prepare my own breakfast and that was how it stayed.

  However, at other times she looked after me very well. She was what you might call a good rough cook and pushed large tasty meals at me regularly with a ‘There y’are, luv,’ watching me impassively till I started to eat. The only thing that disturbed me was the long trembling finger of ash which always hung over my food from the cigarette that was part of her.