Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

  I went through the long job list and saw that there was one in northern Wales. That sounded interesting. A lot of people in northern Wales still spoke Welsh as their first language. It was a genuine enclave of isolated farmers who were fiercely proud and vociferously hated the English. That’s what I’m looking for. A bit of an experience wider than drinking Foster’s in a youth hostel.

  I put in an application and soon after, while I was wandering along the road out the front of the British Museum getting a rare dose of culture, I received a call from the practitioners, a husband-and-wife team, John and Caroline Evans.

  ‘Hello James,’ a cheery voice chirped over the phone in an accent that I hadn’t much heard before, but with which I would become very familiar. We chatted on the phone as cabs and busses whirled by then John offered me the job. ‘Great, I’ll see you there in two weeks.’

  I set my alarms sufficiently early to escape the Generator and travelled north, where I hooked up with some mates, Nick and Alice, who were doing the same thing in Yorkshire as I was doing in Wales. We carried on around the dales and moors where the famous vet and writer James Herriott had practised, and had a great time soaking it all in. And then it was onto the train for Wales.

  I could see long before I got there that I was in for a visual treat. Impossibly green hills and picture-book farms rose up to the left of the train and, to the right, the Irish Sea drifted away into a blue haze. My new boss, John Evans, was waiting for me at the nearby Colwyn Bay railway station. He piled all my things into his car and took me to the clinic, giving me the rundown as we went.

  John was Welsh, had grown up in north Wales and spoke Welsh, he said. He’d met Caroline at university in Liverpool. They’d married and set up practice in Abergele, but her being English made life difficult for her.

  We drove under the North Wales Expressway and he pointed up ahead to the huge mountains looming in front of us to the right. ‘That’s Snowdonia and Mount Snowdon is over there behind those clouds.’

  I was suitably impressed.

  Abergele, population 10,000, wasn’t the prettiest town, nestled in behind the motorway as it was. But it was Wales! There were castles on the hilltops. (I’d even end up being mates with a guy who lived in one. A group of us went over there for beers and he had an inflatable adventure course inside the walls. It was wild.)

  ‘Our clinic is called the Bryn Vet Surgery,’ John said after we’d passed through the centre of town and started up a steep incline. ‘Bryn means “hill” in Welsh.’ Good name for it, I thought. He explained that I was replacing a female vet who’d been bitten by an Akita, a Japanese fighting dog, and who had lost the use of her arm as a result.

  We pulled up at a beautiful old three-storey house just outside town. The bottom floor was the clinic. The staff rooms were on part of the second floor and then I had the remainder of the second floor plus the third floor and the attic to call home. The deal as a locum, on top of the generous wage, was that I also got accommodation and a car. The digs were great, very roomy for one bloke. The car, a beaten-up Rover, was less impressive.

  It was wonderful, however, to have arrived after having spent the better part of a month travelling around. I remember going to the supermarket, Tesco, and buying a big load of groceries to set myself up. It was all exciting. All the brands were new and the packaging different. I settled into my flat on that first afternoon and made myself an extravagant meat-and-three-veg dinner. I’m not the best cook so I kept it simple and just amped up the spices and sauces. Then, with a full belly and a sense of adventure I wandered down the hill, long after dark at 5.30 p.m.

  Town was about a mile away. I stuck my head into the first pub I came to, The Bull. It was quiet and a little seedy. I had a beer there. Not much going on. So I wandered around the corner to a pub that I’d seen on my way to Tesco, The Bee, which I deduced from the signs was famous for carrying on the ancient Welsh tradition of karaoke. But all was quiet there too, so I started to venture back towards the clinic, skipping a quiet-looking pub called the Harp along the way and ducking out of the cold night air into the George and Dragon. It was a very old pub, probably Georgian era. I walked into the crowded bar and ordered a beer. The motherly woman behind the counter whose name I later learnt was Mary Lynham looked at me inquisitively.

  ‘Ooooo, where are you from, dear?’

  ‘Australia.’

  ‘Heeeeee’s from Australia,’ she announced to the rest of the pub. The word rippled around the packed bar. The guy next to me looked me up and down. ‘Australian, eh? Do you play cricket?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Great. We’ve got training tomorrow. Where are you staying?’

  ‘At the vet clinic.’

  ‘Great. I’ll pick you up at 9 a.m. and take you. There’s two other Australians in Abergele and they both play – but I have to say that they’re pretty shit by Australian standards; they go okay in Wales, though. I’ll introduce you. I’ve got to go but I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Then a girl came over. ‘What part of Australia are you from? I travelled around Australia last year. Come over and have a beer.’

  There was a table of about a dozen people of a similar age to me. I started chatting to them and more kept coming in. There were soon twenty people there. A lot of them had been to Australia so we had a lot to catch up on. What was fascinating to me was that all their parents were on the other side of the pub drinking with their own generation.

  There was a real family feel to the pub that I’d never experienced before. I’d be chatting to some bloke and then his daughter would join us, then his father. The George and Dragon became a hub of my Welsh existence. These families were to become like second families to me. But all that was still ahead.

  On Monday morning I looked out the window, ready to start my new job, and I couldn’t get over how green and beautiful everything was. It was late February, so the days were still very short but there was just a hint of spring touching the glistening earth. Everything was wet.

  As a vet, it’s an enormous transition to go to a different country. Things have different names. They do things differently. So you’re like a new grad again. You don’t know the name of the drug you want. You’re saying Clavulox and they’re looking at you like you’re mental because it’s called Synulox over there. When they spay cats they go through the flank as opposed to the midline, where we do them in Australia. They use different suture patterns to stitch things up. It’s important as the outsider to fit in and learn their ways.

  Two years out of uni was a good time to do it. By the end of my time in Barraba I’d started to get comfortable. I had a bit of experience, I knew what I was doing, and the clients knew me, so it all got a lot easier. I needed a real mind shift. While I had my way of doing things from Barraba, I wasn’t too set in my ways to re-learn. And so I learnt a lot. They had more advanced equipment than Barraba. Things like small-animal ultrasound machines. And the large-animal side was different too. Instead of having graziers with 300 or 3000 cows, their farmers had only a handful of animals which were more intensively looked after – and they usually had names.

  The horses and cows were different breeds. Some of the horses were huge; Shires were seventeen or eighteen hands. You needed a stepladder to give them an IV injection when they had colic. It was a very different kind of practice. Everything was new, fresh, exciting and scary.

  Caroline handled the small-animal side of things. She was very serious, methodical and organised. Everything she did was professional and conscientious. I learnt a lot from her.

  John was a funny bloke. We spent a lot of our time laughing. And John spent a lot of his time in trouble with Caroline for being disorganised and laid-back. They were a chalk-and-cheese kind of couple, which made them a great combination to work for. I’d often go to their place for dinner and hang out with their kids. They were really welcoming and they looked after me. But I worked very hard for them too.

  One of my first jobs was to see to som
e sick calves in a barn for a farmer by the name of Mr Evans. All the cows were in barns in February. I’d drive around and wonder where all the animals had gone. But it was so wet and cold that the animals were inside because, for one, they do much better being warm in the barn, but also because if they were out on grass they’d destroy it by pugging it up into mud. But the downside of being in a barn was that, by the end of winter, they often developed respiratory-tract infections and other diseases. And they were just sick of being cooped up. They wanted to get outside and eat some grass.

  Pulling up at the farm, the first task was to locate the farmer, which could at times be a challenge. Some of these sheds were modern, like the type of iron sheds you’d find in Australia, but Mr Evans had one of the sheds that I loved. It was ancient, made of stone and with a very low ceiling and exposed beams. It was built at a time when people weren’t as tall as they are now, so all of the doors were tiny (maybe this is why I liked it so much, it was about my size). The thick stone walls made it warm and provided great shelter, but it was dark and the ventilation was poor. After an entire winter locked up in here, the animals had exuded a lot of smells. The most pungent and pathological of these was the ammonia from cow urine.

  There were about sixty calves in the shed, they’d been born there over the winter and they hadn’t seen the outside world, nor breathed the beautiful crisp air just outside the door. I knew what the problem was without looking, but I dutifully examined the ten calves that were sick. I placed the stethoscope on their chests: wheezes, rasps, rattles and rales – a cacophony of bad sounds that just shouldn’t have been there. Some also had high temperatures, and two in particular were very sick.

  ‘’Tis their lungs, eh lad?’

  Mr Evans had his suspicions, but I think my facial expression had given it away. It was a very bad respiratory-tract disease that could kill them unless we turned things around. Mr Evans told me that he changed the flooring every so often, but maybe not as often as he should. This allowed the urine and hence the ammonia to build up, causing the problem. I’d seen this sort of disease in feedlots in Australia. To cure it we were going to have to use very strong antibiotics, but even then I wasn’t confident of overcoming the underlying problem.

  I turned to Mr Evans. ‘You’ve got sixty calves and these ten are sick. Those fifty over there are about to get sick. We’ve got to do something about it. Can we get them outside?’

  ‘Ooo, nooo. We can’t. They’ve got to stay in the shed.’

  I knew if they stayed in the shed he was facing a disaster. We had to come up with a plan, and eventually we worked one out whereby he let the cows and calves out into a little field next to the shed for most of the day, before bringing them back in at night. That allowed him to clean out the shed more and ensure better hygiene. He had to sacrifice the grass in that field, but the calves thrived. They flourished, and the respiratory-tract disease dissipated with all the clean air.

  With Caroline focused on the small animals, John and I did all the on-call work. When the farmers rang you in the middle of the night, they would often start speaking Welsh expecting to get John. It was quite a disorientating thing to hear this strange babble on the other end of the line when you’d just woken up. Who am I and what am I doing here?

  ‘Sorry. What? Who? Sorry, I don’t speak Welsh.’

  ‘Ooo. Where are you from?’ I could tell they were almost daring me to say England so that they could adjust their contempt accordingly.

  ‘I’m from Australia.’

  ‘That’s good, then,’ and they would continue on in friendly tones. They were very proud of their language, with all its quirks. Double ‘l’ sounds abounded, vowels seemed in short supply and the words were impossibly long. The older farmers spoke Welsh as their first language, but it had petered out until it was re-embraced a few years ago. My age cohort in Abergele almost all attended Welsh-speaking schools. Northern Wales was a real stronghold of the language; it was less frequently spoken in the south where they also had a different dialect. One farmer, an avid rugby fan, blamed this difference for the national team’s poor performances. ‘One half of the team has no idea what the other half is saying.’

  I learnt most of my Welsh from road signs, which were in Welsh and English, providing a direct translation for me as I drove around lost. I spent a lot of time being lost. Many of the roads don’t have names or signposts. John would give me directions like: ‘You go along there for 3 miles and you take the second real turning on the left after the church, which is just on the bend. You go up there for a while, then cross the river in the glen and there’ll be a sign to a church and you take that for 2 miles and the farm’s on the left.’

  ‘Right. Okay.’

  So I’d write it all down and leave confidently with these directions. But soon my certainty would evaporate, and I’d be wondering if that was a ‘real turning’ or an ‘unreal turning’. I spent a lot of time completely bamboozled in the Rover. All the lanes were hedged. The hedges acted as fences and windbreaks between fields. The problem was that they also acted as mazes. And there was the constant threat of an oncoming car; the lanes only fitted one vehicle. Thankfully, most of the farmers got around in high-top vans. It rained so much that open utes like we use in Australia were impractical. I could see the Ford Transit vans over the hedges so I could at least get out of the way. The Rover had a lot of bumps and scratches and I added a few more having to ditch it into the hedge when I met another vehicle at speed in the lanes, grinding to a halt with a squeal of brakes, a rustling of the hedge and the dull thud of the front bumper hitting soft earth.

  But I loved getting lost. Every day I’d see the rolling hills, so green, with beautiful crumbling dark-stone walls around tiny paddocks. The ocean off to the north moved from blue to black with the weather, and on rare days I saw Mount Snowdon.

  I was convinced I was in the prettiest pocket of earth on the planet. And I got to spend so much time soaking it up while looking for the second real turning on the left that I became quite an expert at taking photos of it.

  HOLEY COW

  Anthony

  Jack Roberts was on the phone. ‘I’ve got a cow with a bit of a hole in the side of her,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yeah? A hole?’ People tend to exaggerate these problems. ‘You mean she’s cut herself. Is it bleeding?’

  ‘No, it’s not bleeding.’

  ‘Okay so it’s not that big a hole?’

  ‘Nah, it’s quite big.’

  ‘Okay, let’s quantify this. Are we talking a golf ball or a soccer ball?’

  ‘Yeah, no . . . Maybe a soccer ball. Might be bigger though. Depends how you look at it.’

  ‘Okay, I’m coming out straight away. Make sure you’ve got the cow in the yards. We don’t want to spend half an hour chasing a cow with a hole in it.’

  Jack’s place was a beautiful stud that ran a big red French breed of cattle called Limousin. It was owned by his brother, a wealthy lawyer from Sydney who called the shots. But Jack did all the work and he kept the place and cattle immaculate. I drove out there, up a quiet country lane, wondering what this guy was talking about. He certainly didn’t have a way with words.

  I arrived to find Jack waiting for me, nervously pacing about, and I could see the deep red form of the cow waiting in the crush as requested. I went straight over to look and it took a while for my brain to adjust to what my eyes were seeing. This cow’s skin had been stripped off from the pin bones, back near the tail, forward to the ribs and down to the bottom of the abdomen, so the hide hung down in a huge triangle, dangling to the ground.

  I couldn’t comprehend it. The cow stood in the crush like she was in a trance. Swaying slowly, but twitchy. I examined her and noticed that she was overtly sensitive to noise and touch. But at the same time she was quiet and absent – like I’d imagine a drug addict who was out to the world to be. I was sure it was a coping mechanism given to her by nature to deal with pain.

  ‘What on earth happened to her?’<
br />
  ‘Oh, well, we were moving the cows from one paddock to the next. We brought them past the tractor which was parked on the bend and she was on the inside of the herd as they rushed past the tractor and she got pushed onto the silage forks. Kebabed her. We had to pull her off.’

  Silage forks are like the forks on a forklift truck, only bigger and sharper. They’re designed to lift those great big bales of fermented hay that you see sitting in paddocks wrapped in light green plastic. So knowing how long the forks were, I went round to the other side of the cow to see if there was any sign of damage there, and sure enough there were two smaller holes – one right up at the top rear and one further forward at the ribs – where the silage forks had gone right through the body and come out the other side. How those forks hadn’t hit something vital in their passage and killed her already was a mystery. But it didn’t mean she would survive.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do for her,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to put her down immediately. We can’t manage her with these wounds.’

  ‘We can’t put her down,’ he said. ‘It’s not my cow. It’s my brother’s and he always wants to save them. Surely we can do something.’

  ‘I can’t. Even if I could fix the internal wounds, I couldn’t stitch the skin back. Once a wound gets to a certain size, the blood supply won’t come back. So even if I stitched all that skin back, most of it would die from a lack of blood supply.’

  Jack scratched his head and looked at the ground. ‘Well I can’t give you permission to put her down.’

  ‘But I can’t manage this cow’s pain. We can’t manage her with painkillers for the amount of time it would take to heal. And we don’t have those types of painkillers anyway.’

  ‘Well, you have to do something because we can’t put her down. I’ll try to contact my brother to see what he wants.’