by Jo Hardy
After giving me a warm hello hug, Elna got straight to the point.
‘My son cannot live here,’ she said. ‘London is just so … frightening. Everyone is looking at their phones as they walk along, and as for the tube system, I don’t understand it at all.’
It didn’t help that the weather was grey and gloomy. Their first trip to England and they were plainly not enjoying it. I did my best to reassure them.
‘London is a bit overwhelming, I know. But don’t just judge England by London – there’s so much more to see and you’ll love it. And if we do live here Jacques and I won’t be in London, I promise.’
Elna looked relieved, while Johan nodded. We had a nice meal and they talked about the coach trip they had planned to places all over the UK during the next couple of weeks, before we all got together in Cornwall. I left them that night hoping that their first impression of England would be swept aside once they saw some of its beauty.
While his parents travelled, Jacques flew over and came with me to look at the wedding venue and to meet the caterer, after which we drove down to Cornwall.
My family and Jacques’s family were each staying in separate holiday homes, but we’d be meeting up each day to spend time together. It was a good arrangement, not too much for anyone, and with lots of time to get to know each other. One evening both sets of parents went out to dinner together while Ross, Jacques and I stayed at home with a takeaway and a film.
‘How do you think it’s going?’ I said, every five minutes.
‘Fine – I hope,’ Jacques replied each time.
When they all came back at around 11pm they walked in stony-faced and said, ‘That’s it, the wedding’s off.’ We stared at them, horrified, until they all started laughing. They’d had a great time and were playing a joke on us. I had thought that Dad and Elna would get on well because they’re both extroverts and that my Mum and Johan would click as they are both quieter, but actually Elna is just a chattier version of Mum, so they got on really well, swapping phone numbers and pictures of their dogs.
It was a lovely week. We ate lots of fish and chips and pasties and, when the weather was good, we went to the beach. It was Roxy’s first trip to Cornwall; she had never seen the sea before. We had assumed that all springer spaniels loved water – Tosca and our previous dog, Bluff, certainly had – but Roxy ran up to it, then grabbed a mouthful of seaweed, shook it around and spat it out before running back to my parents. She tried a second time and a big wave came and sent her racing for cover again.
In the end Dad waded out knee-deep into the sea and coaxed her into the water. She went in, but she didn’t know how to swim and thrashed around so Mum and Dad had to teach her how. Once she got the hang of it you couldn’t get her out of the water. She was a typical springer after all.
One evening we took Jacques and his parents to Bedruthan Steps to watch the sunset. It is between Padstow and Newquay, in a National Trust conservation area, and when you stand on the top of the cliff, the sun sets directly in front of you. It’s stunning.
I’ve taken Jacques there before; he always stands right on the edge of the cliff to take photos and his dad did exactly the same thing. The rest of us watched in horror, yelping, ‘Don’t go so close,’ while they looked puzzled and said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re terrifying us,’ I yelled, followed by Elna yelling, ‘Please come away from there. You’re both too close.’
‘Now you know where I get it from,’ Jacques replied, with his schoolboy grin, and he turned back to photographing the birds and the sunset without stepping even an inch away from the cliff edge.
Towards the end of the week Mum got a message to say that a dog she had transported had gone missing. Mum regularly works as a volunteer for charities that rescue dogs. She’s part of a network of drivers who take the dogs to foster carers or new homes all over the country. Mum explained that Milo was a springer spaniel that she had transported to a foster carer a couple of weeks earlier. He was very young and scared of absolutely everything, so she hoped he was going to find a loving home where he would regain his confidence. The foster carer he went to had said that he needed rehabilitation training, but only days later he was rehomed. As soon as his new owners opened the car door, though, Milo had made a run for it. They found him, but he did it again and this time he was gone for days. As the search for him continued, a dog was spotted, scared and running, near a busy road. The searchers sent a picture of it to Mum to ask her to confirm that it was Milo. It was, and she was very worried about him.
A couple of days later we heard that they had managed to track him down and found him living wild, feeding himself on a deer carcass. It took them a while to catch him, staking out the deer carcass at night, but as soon as he was caught he was sent for the rehabilitation training he needed. He would be living with several other dogs who would show him what he needed to do, while at the same time he would be trained to go for walks off the lead and answer to recall.
Hearing that Milo was safe was a happy note at the end of our holiday. With promises to stay in touch, Jacques’s parents headed for their flight home, Jacques and I headed back to Kent to meet a wedding photographer and my parents and Ross stayed on in Cornwall for a few more days.
Jacques flew back to South Africa a few days later. This time we would only be apart for a matter of weeks, as I was going to be flying out for his birthday the following month, so I managed not to flood Heathrow with my tears as I saw him off. Another year – and a bit – and we would be together, always. I couldn’t wait.
By early July I had been a qualified vet for a whole year. And what an incredible year it had been, with all my travels abroad and the variety of practices I had worked in. I felt very lucky. It had been exciting, eye-opening and a wonderful start to my life as a vet.
Back at Dacre House the following week I celebrated my first year as a qualified vet by asking Bradley to sign off my records. I had carefully recorded, every day, the hundreds of cases I’d seen over the year in my Professional Development Record (PDR), which was an online record monitored by the veterinary governing body, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. They had judged it good enough for me to be signed off on my first year and declared competent as a year-one vet. They had sent a certificate saying so, which a senior staffer had to sign.
I took the certificate to Bradley, who had agreed to mentor me at the start of the year. He’d just finished a night shift and after three overnight emergencies and two hours’ sleep, he looked pretty tired.
‘You’ve been competent for ages, Jo,’ he said. ‘You’re a good vet, and I’m happy to sign you off. Now I need to get some rest.’
It will never be an easy life, being a vet.
But as long as I’m making a difference to people’s lives by helping their animals, it’s a good one.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to take this opportunity to mention and thank the many people who got me through this hugely tough first year of being a qualified vet. I want to especially thank my friends and family, and my wonderful other half, and soon-to-be husband, Jacques, for encouraging me through some incredibly arduous times and supporting me when I told them I wanted to go and work in remote and often dangerous areas of the world. I love you all.
I’d also like to thank the charities that supported me while I was abroad, either with inner-country assistance and housing, or with supplies and finances that I needed for the trips: World in Need, SPANA, SPCA, the Worldwide Veterinary Services, the British Goat Society, the Veterinary Christian Fellowship, the British Veterinary Association and WAHL – you are all amazing people with such generous hearts.
Also, I can’t thank Kate Latham and the HarperCollins team enough for backing a second book. Every day I think how lucky I am to be working with such brilliant people. And, of course, my incredible editor Caro, for dedicating so much time to putting this together and shaping the book with me, plus putting up with me constantly wanting to change how
to describe all the medical cases. I’m sure by now she must be halfway there to being able to become a vet herself.
Finally, I want to thank my brother Ross, firstly because I didn’t mention him in the acknowledgements of my first book, which he was pretty sore about, for his support during my final year of training, including letting me crash at his house during a work placement. Sorry! And thanks! But on a more serious note, I want to thank him for being the inspiration that sowed a seed in my mind to want to follow in his footsteps one day. In 2011, he dedicated some time to serving an impoverished community in Tanzania, and seeing how his actions changed lives, and how volunteering changed him, it made me start to contemplate whether I could use my veterinary skills one day to help people like that.
No matter how hard and tiring this profession is, I will be forever grateful that I have a skill that can change peoples’ lives through helping their animals so dramatically.
Read Jo’s first book.
Tap the cover to get Tales from a Young Vet now.
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