by John Hicks
In my imagination I would start from the green plains, and follow the straggling line of a river up through the light browns, to halt firmly on one of the highest bits that represented the snowy summits of the highest peaks. There I would stop and dream, trying to picture great mountain ranges lifting far above the world: the dull walls of the schoolroom would recede, and vanish, great peaks of dazzling white surrounded me, the airs of heaven caressed me, the blizzards lashed me. And so I would dream until the harsh voice of the Geography master broke in with its threats and promises of punishment for slackness and gross inattention. If he had known, perhaps he would have left me there on my dream summits, for he was an understanding soul. (The Kanchenjunga Adventure, F.S. Smythe.)
For me, geography lessons were one of the highlights in a rather bleak academic landscape. During weekends in North Wales, long walks in the hills and mountains brought those hanging valleys, truncated spurs, drumlins and ancient moraines to life. As a family we avidly consumed books on the geology, history and natural history of the countryside surrounding the farms where my parents placed their small caravan. Each magic weekend my brother and I experienced the delights and discomforts of nights under canvas. We played with the farmers’ children and ‘helped’ on their farms. The exquisite smell of bacon and freshly gathered mushrooms fried in butter on a purring gas stove, the anticipatory tympanic splatter of first raindrops on the tent fly, the wonder awakened by the prehistoric dolmen—gothically inscribed on the cloth-backed, inch-to-the-mile maps; or the rare mystery of cow-wheat in the oak copse: these were the disparate experiences that bound me spiritually to the countryside. To this day I have retained my uncle’s framed tract from the writings of the nineteenth century geologist, Adam Sedgewick:
And in the darkest hours of urban depression ~ I will sometimes take out that dog eared map and dream awhile of more spacious days ~ and perhaps a dried blade of grass will fall out of it to remind me that I was once a free man on the hills.
Thousands of British city-dwellers would empathise with these sentiments. I was imbued with an intense longing to escape the confines of city life. From an early age I knew that I wanted to be a country vet.
~
In my early teens I started to discover what being a vet was about. Mr Betts had attended our dearly-loved family dog, Meg, on several occasions and like most of his colleagues, then and now, was most willing to give a young student the opportunity to sample veterinary practice. I can still picture a stocky man with magnificent bushy eyebrows. One day I turned up to find that these adorning features had mysteriously disappeared. Politeness forbade me asking the reason for their loss, but his receptionist later volunteered the details. In short, my veterinary career had come close to starting with a bang. Like many of his generation Mr Betts was a smoker. He was a careful and skilled veterinarian, but I wonder what induced him to smoke when he was performing surgery, especially when using an ether anaesthetic. Ether is extremely volatile and an explosive outcome was almost inevitable.
With Mr Betts I had the opportunity to explore a totally new world. He dealt exclusively with pets—mostly dogs and cats. This was what veterinarians designate ‘small-animal’ or, more usually these days, ‘companion-animal’ practice. Some practices are predominantly ‘large-animal’ dealing mostly with farm animals and possibly horses, but many are ‘mixed’, as is my current practice in New Zealand. Individual veterinarians increasingly specialise within practices, so that even in a mixed practice there tend to be large-animal vets and small-animal vets. Some vets specialise in just one species such as horses, poultry, pigs, and even, in some large cities, cats. There are vets specialising in even narrower fields, dairy nutrition, small-animal dermatology, canine orthopaedic surgery and so on.
When Barry Hargreaves was bitten by a dog and trodden on by a horse, in close succession, he opined, to his fellow students that intensive guinea pig practice would suit him down to the ground. For all I know he could by now have acted on that facetious whim and may well be trimming guinea pigs’ teeth in a Manchester suburb at this very moment.
With an ever widening and deepening pool of veterinary information there is little doubt that the move to specialisation will increase, but that does leave a dilemma for those vets servicing isolated communities. They have to be mindful of their limitations in an ever more litigious environment and still provide an effective service for all the varied creatures in their domain.
Mr Betts dealt patiently with my endless questions, gave me small jobs to do and took me with him on his rounds. These days house visits are the exception rather than the rule. It is far less time consuming if you can persuade the owner to bring the patient to you than to spend half the morning in traffic jams, only to find that Felix doesn’t like strangers and is hiding under the bed … typically a very large double bed with ultra-short legs. Felix has the advantage of being on his own territory and no one wants to hold him because he scratches. Besides, they want to get back to watching football on t’ telly. It will take an age to catch, examine and treat him ...
The demise of the house visit is a loss to students, because they are now deprived of the opportunity to observe the lairs of the pet-owning public. In time I experienced—with unalloyed fascination—the homes of Liverpool slum dwellers, London suburban housewives (maybe they were bored, but, alas, never enough to demonstrate it in front of a student), Watford film directors, and Scottish gentry. Sometimes there was time to sit down and relax over a nice cup of tea at a spotless, scrubbed kitchen table—‘Get it down you while it’s still hot, love’. Other abodes were a disgusting mess of filthy washing, mature chop bones, half-chewed crusts and greasy carpets, and that was before you’d raised your eyes above floor level. In such abodes you felt you could catch hepatitis, merely by looking at the draining board. It was all a highly instructive aspect of my veterinary education.
During my time with Mr Betts I was privileged to gain an insight into what it meant to be a professional. Never assume you know the solution to a problem: weigh up the situation by taking a detailed history—allowing for the selectivity of human memory—and make a considered diagnosis. Notwithstanding, there were some conditions for which he had ‘sovereign’ remedies, some of which I wish I had recorded. One was his treatment of constipated dogs. This is not the favourite job of any vet that I know, aesthetics aside, precisely because there is rarely an easy answer for what tends to be a recurring problem.
Owners of constipated dogs tend to troop into veterinary clinics late on a Friday afternoon. They might retrospectively recall, ‘he hasn’t been for days’. Since they were coming into town to do some shopping, and he was looking a bit seedy, they thought they might bring him in for a check-up before weekend closing. What was a chronic problem has now become acute. No matter that it could have been sorted out so easily if presented earlier.
There is no question about it: this dog needs treating straight away. You are the duty vet, this is going to take an hour, and everyone else is knocking off for the weekend after a busy week. But this is a job for two people. You ask the nurse if she minds doing a bit of overtime. Being dedicated she accepts without hesitation. Half an hour later the dog is on a drip and you are administering a lubricant enema and painstakingly breaking down dried faeces filled with shards of undigested bone. No wonder the dog was unwilling to pass them. They have lacerated the double pair of gloves that you put on to start with. Think what they were doing to his rectum. That smell will be with you for at least twenty-four hours (unless you have a rotten calving to do on the way home). No finger food for you tonight. Yes, he had eaten a whole heap of cooked chop bones on Sunday. Yes, that is asking for trouble. However, to complicate matters, it may not have been chop bones. His constipation could equally have been triggered by an enlarged prostate, or arthritic changes at the root of his tail. For a dog, the pathways to constipation are many and various.
The point is Mr Betts didn’t seem to worry about any of this. He had an injection. I wo
uld dearly love to know what that injection was, but I suspect that, in these more circumspect days, the risk of drastic side-effects would preclude its use.
People could waltz into his evening clinic.
‘Old Fergy hasn’t been for days.’
After establishing the niceties of what, precisely, this meant:
‘Well we could try an injection.’
‘Ta, that would be great.’
People were so unquestioning. They had faith in Mr Betts. Before I put on my gloves today, I have to explain the procedure, get the owner to sign a consent form, and field numerous ‘what if’ worst case scenarios. Oh for the old days of blind faith and recklessness!
Injection duly given, I recall that the timing became critical. Mr Betts would become rather more brisk and business-like.
‘It should work in about a quarter of an hour. I suggest you take Fergy up the road, you have just enough time to get to The Green. If it hasn’t worked in half an hour bring him back and I’ll check him over.’
Those dogs never seemed to come back. Mr Betts never had to forego finger food of an evening. However, I often wondered about the residents in the more salubrious houses overlooking The Green. They had the privilege of witnessing the legacy of that little injection: hunched and straining dogs, closely watched by anxious owners, leaving voluminous deposits in their wake. Liverpool could be a shit of a place to live in.
Chapter Five
Blanco, Brasso, Bootpolish, Bullshit ... and locusts
public school, noun. in England, traditionally, an independent, single-sex school open to the paying public with an emphasis on a classical education, physical activities and administration of discipline by senior pupils.
A system of education designed to expose its recipients to the worst aspects of human nature at an early age, constrained only by antediluvian concepts of honour.
The boys queued up at the quartermaster’s store for their dung-coloured uniforms (‘khaki’ is a euphemism). Woollen shirt, woollen trousers, woollen jacket—for the wearing of. Canvas belt and gaiters with brass accoutrements, beret with fiddly brass badge—for the cleaning of. From now on, Thursday afternoons would never be the same. We had joined our school’s CCF (Combined Cadet Force) and were destined to play soldiers. We had been sucked in by the promise of playing with real guns on the playground, rather than pretend ones. It would be a long time before we would use them for their intended purpose rather than as props for endless parade ground drilling, or as instruments of punishment. We were required to hold our nine-pound Lee Enfield rifles at arm’s length for torturous periods of time. It was enough to thoroughly disenchant some of us fifteen-year-old victims with these battered relics of the First World War, and put paid to any notions of a glamorous military career.
Even in this not-so-modern world eccentrics were accommodated, and those who eschewed violence (or who had pacifist parents, like Michael Bamber) were put on display—and given menial tasks, like weeding the flowerbeds or cleaning the school toilets—while we strutted around in our regalia. Bamber carried his supposed debasement with style and, after we had had a year or two of toting our heavy Lee Enfields, he even succeeded in making some of us envious of his choice.
We spent Wednesday nights sprucing up our uniforms. This was not so demanding for the boarders in School House, who had the luxury of having the sprucing done for them by a fag. I had spent two years as a boarder and understood the hierarchical culture, a culture that dovetailed beautifully with army philosophy. The Duke of Wellington had declared that the battle of Waterloo (a mere 150 years earlier) was won on the playing-fields of Eton, and my school had yet to abandon the proud tradition of institutionalised bullying. It continued in many public boarding schools. What else would you expect when boys of seventeen have the power to beat and otherwise discipline their younger peers? Flashman was here. I was a late developer and I couldn’t rely on Tom Brown being around when I needed him. I learned not to be noticed and developed a severe distrust of peer pressure. I learned not to be a victim; I was to be nobody’s fag. That was the bottom line. I learned to distrust the establishment, for they had implemented the system. I learned to distrust organised religion, because their representatives had sanctioned it. Boys selected as prefects (usually on the basis of their prowess on the sports field) had sworn on the Holy Bible in the school chapel that they would uphold their duties with divine assistance ‘God being my helper’. When one such snake-in-the-grass swore this oath on the lectern with angelic face and unctuous tones, it may have deceived the masters who had elected him to office; however, I suspect that very few of the boys present were surprised when he was implicated in a major government scandal some thirty years later.
And that, dear reader, was the glory of the British public school system. It made you or broke you. The playing-fields of Eton spawned centuries of Empire-builders. They shaped the world. They made or broke countries. New Zealand would undoubtedly be a very different place without the influence of generations of their old-boys. Without that fiercely contested game developed at Rugby school there would be no All Blacks.
The boys in School House were as Spartans, emotionally and physically hardened, by comparison with the soft day boys. During my boarding years I became inured to strange and eclectic hardships such as ironing my trousers without—on pain of detention—creating tramlines, to wearing uncomfortable detached and stiffly-starched collars, to avoiding bullies and to navigating long periods of boredom. Ideal preparation for an army career?
After a staff shake-up in the boarding school the incumbent housemaster, a minister of religion, decamped to Lahore. I had been inspired by his Christian charity on the occasion of a prolonged and alarming nosebleed I had incurred during a snowball fight. ‘I don’t think you understand how much inconvenience this has caused me Hicks. I may even have to call the doctor.’
When the extent of his mismanagement was revealed, my parents once again made me a day boy and I swapped the golden dragon badge of School House for the less imposing red porcupine of Selwyn’s. This symbolically suited my frame of mind and my identification with the cult of the anti-hero. A pink hedgehog would have been even better. By this stage my two years of conditioning as a boarder were well ingrained and I felt a real sissy in the presence of my parents. Part of the survival strategy for children abandoned to such ‘care’, where parental access is strictly denied throughout each term, is to ruthlessly suppress any sentimental feelings towards one’s parents. If you didn’t your mates would sneeringly root out such weakness. No one wants to be seen as a mummy’s boy. Besides which, most parents encouraged their boys to be independent and, with stiff upper lips, disdained overt displays of affection. Anything more than a paternal handshake would have been acutely embarrassing for both parties. Hugging your mother? Well, certainly not in public.
Looking back, it amazes me to realise how difficult it is to break down these psychological barriers. Eight or nine years later, at my university graduation ceremony, I was totally unwilling, even unable, to let my proud parents film the moment. But, thirty years on, the ceremonies for our own daughters were recorded with the love, shared pride and gratitude such events should be accorded.
Back to the uniforms. Emphasis was put on presentation. Badges were Brasso-ed, belts and gaiters Blanco-ed. Keen types played around with warm teaspoons, smoothing polish into their leather boots, and then spat-and-polished them till they glowed like mirrors. We were all keen types to start with, but for most of us the novelty wore off and some of us started to manifest signs of precocious cynicism. A prefect in School House could make his fag prepare his uniform repeatedly if the task wasn’t completed satisfactorily. Or he could go the whole hog, deliberately dirty it, and make the fag repair the damage again and again and again. Power corrupts—a very valuable lesson.
The New Zealand Wool Board has since done a lot of research to remove the itch factor from wool, but as the shirts and trousers with which we were issued pre-dated the Se
cond World War and had the consistency of tweed, those of us with sensitive skin were destined for several hours of purgatory a week. Another remarkable property of this material, shared with sphagnum moss, was its ability to hold up to ten times its own weight of water. Even when dried, a good ironing would release noisome clouds of steam. A bus full of boys in wet CCF uniforms was excellent preparation for me in later life when visiting poorly run dog kennels.
I felt the weight of history when I donned that uniform. Though we never had television at home during my school years, nor indeed in the boarding school, a defining moment in my education was an epic BBC series on the Great War. As a special treat I was permitted to watch the weekly episodes at a friend’s house. Here were harrowing black and white pictures of trench warfare. Miserable, haunted, smeared faces peered out of desolate, body-littered mudscapes. I felt doubly for those soldiers in their damp, itchy and vermin-infested clothing.
Apart from the parade ground drilling, we did learn a few skills in the CCF. Unpleasant experiences can be enlightening and there were occasions when we positively enjoyed ourselves and actually squeezed a trigger, or did a field exercise. One such was the annual ‘Gallipoli Shield’ competition contested by the six houses.
On the day, each house ‘embussed’ at 0800 hrs for the trip to the chosen area. There we duly leopard crawled, completed right flanking attacks, had blanks fired over our heads, did an assault course, stripped and assembled Bren guns—the works. Day’s end (1630 hrs) saw teams of tired boys slowly assembling beside their respective buses. At this juncture I happened to notice that some of the buses had a tap recessed into the side panel with a clear label << Fuel Line – on/off >
