by John Hicks
‘Well there wouldn’t be an abscess if he had been poisoned. Look there is pus dripping out of that hole.’ [This is a big mistake, Mr Cowvet. You have yet to learn that clients like Mrs Catfancy prefer a diagnosis that involves blame.]
She puffs out her chest, ‘It looks more like a bullet hole to me. Some of the neighbours’ kids have been mucking around with air rifles.’
‘But if you look closely, Mrs Catfancy, you can see a couple of other skin marks. I’m sure this abscess is the result of a bite, perhaps from another cat.’ [A very common occurrence.]
At which our disgruntled client delivers her coup de main: ‘I’d be far happier if Mr Felinevet was here to see Cadburyears.’
‘Fair enough, I’ll see if he’s free.’ ... he was just having a catnap when I last saw him ... [Mr Cowvet’s feeble pun is sarcasm, for his own benefit, and not intoned.]
Mr Cowvet returns with Mr Felinevet, who has been briefed. He examines the cat with due obsequiousness.
‘Ah, Mrs Catfancy, these Marquies do seem to be very prone to infections.’ [As a clinical observation this may well be bullshit, but it is inspired bullshit because it reinforces just how special this cat is. Owners of unusual breeds revel in their pets’ propensity to suffer from unusual conditions. If they don’t suffer from them, they are unhappy. It’s but a short step to Munchausen by proxy.]
‘We will have to be extremely careful with his anaesthetic.’ [No more careful than with any other moggy, but Mrs Catfancy is lapping it up.]
‘Oh, Mr Felinevet,’ looking disdainfully at Mr Cowvet, ‘I’d be very happy if you could deal with Cadburyears for me.’
How things proceed from here very much depends on whether the practice works as a team, or if Mr Felinevet feeds on such adulation. If he does, this will be a Pyrrhic victory and he will probably end up working by himself. But solo practice is a stressful option with the demands of modern veterinary practice to keep up to date. In a world full of litigious nutters it pays to be a team player.
~
Apart from brief forays into the Welsh hills, Viv and I mostly restricted ourselves to the confines of our small flat at the veterinary field station in Cheshire. We had a radio, a record player and textbooks for company. We were stressed, happy and focused, a heady mixture. There were a few months of effort ahead of us: and then? There was no shortage of veterinary jobs, but closer inspection revealed that many were in depressed urban areas. The box number concealed the location. Did I really want to work in Wigan, even if the advert implicated that the successful applicant would be working with a bevy of Christians? The denomination was of no consequence, but we did seek a rural district and I wanted to try and build as many skills on the foundation of my degree as possible. A veterinary degree is very broad. You are equipped to cope with a range of species and it seems a shame to specialise too early. After a couple of years dealing entirely with dogs and cats it is a major effort to diverge into rural practice. Ideally I sought a mixed practice where I could do both small- and large-animal work, and we both needed somewhere close to the wild places to feed our souls. That left out most of the south England and much of the industrial Midlands. Wales and its borders, the far north of England and much of Scotland would have suited, but then an advert appeared on the university notice board.
‘Viv, how would you like to go to New Zealand?’
Almost at once we were caught up in the adventure. It seemed too good to be true. New Zealand was short of veterinarians. The first New Zealand-trained vets were only just starting to emerge from Massey University, and to make up the shortfall the New Zealand government ran a scheme to entice vets from overseas. They would pay travelling expenses to New Zealand for Viv as well as me, plus a provision for furniture removal. The only condition was that we would be bonded to work for a rural veterinary club for three years.
The job vacancy was in Taranaki in a predominantly dairy practice on the slopes of Mount Egmont (now officially reverting to its more poetic Maori name of Mount Taranaki). We pored over maps. Mount Egmont was a dormant volcano over 8000 feet high and there was a 9000-foot volcano (Ruapehu) in the centre of the North Island. Between them was a wilderness of forest, forest that we would soon refer to as ‘bush’, a diminutive that scarcely does justice to such vast tracts. Everywhere there was high ground and, as we glanced down, the South Island looked to be a mountaineer’s dream. The Southern Alps stretched its length: the white, purple and brown contours interweaving with a skirt of green plain on the east and a narrower margin to the west. For the meantime we would settle for Mount Egmont; but there were a few obstacles to surmount first.
Our preliminary interview with the New Zealand government’s representative at New Zealand House in London was successful. We were duly approved, even though our assessor seemed a bit perturbed that I didn’t drink much. This was just after NZ had abandoned its notorious ‘six o’clock swill’, the era when all pubs closed at 6 pm and ‘everyone’ rushed down to the pub when work finished to tank up for the evening. Prodigious volumes were downed in a short space of time. New Zealand still suffers from the binge mentality this engendered. I was perturbed that he was perturbed (and also because he thought that Mount Cook was as high as the Matterhorn), but he deemed us suitable immigrants even though we weren’t potential alcoholics, and so I forgave him his lapse in altitudinal esoterica.
As it transpired, my trepidation of pub culture was misplaced. No one can force you to drink alcohol to excess and my moderate consumption in the local cricket team was tolerated and respected, if not emulated. It would be another decade or so before respectable women would be socially accepted in rural pubs in New Zealand, but we weren’t emigrating for the pub scene.
The hardest task was to inform our parents of our decision. New Zealand is a very mobile society; young people come and go on their overseas experiences. OE is considered a rite of passage whereas, for the majority of English people, emigration is a scarcely-contemplated option. My colleagues couldn’t understand me, even the more mercenary among them who knew from the advert that my salary and working conditions would be significantly better than any they stood to gain. For our parents it was an entirely unexpected outcome from my graduation and, even though the initial term was three years, they expected the worst: that this would be a permanent move.
Emigration is, for a reflective person, one of the ultimate tests of character. We did not have the maturity to handle the wrench from our families in the most tactful manner, and there was initially considerable bitterness on their part about the inexplicable decision we had made. Time is a great healer. My parents-in-law have been frequent visitors to this beautiful country, and I was touched when after twenty-five years my father informed me that I had made the right move, something we weren’t sure of ourselves till we had been many years in our adopted country. Emigration can tear you apart; it is dangerous medicine and not to be taken lightly.
Chapter Sixteen
An Irishman, a Yorkshireman and a Dutchman
It would be dishonest to claim that I breezed through my finals, but my performance was adequate. Seeing my name on the notice board in the right place was a cause for sweet relief rather than wild exultation. There was a lot to be done in a few days. We hadn’t been tempted to finalise any travel arrangements because, without the certainty that I had passed, we felt we would have been tempting fate. Less than two weeks after graduating we were on a plane to Auckland and two weeks later, in late July 1973, I was calving cows in Taranaki.
It wasn’t till we arrived in Auckland that the enormity of what we had done began to sink in. This was an alien landscape. Others had told us that New Zealand is very English. True, a similar language is shared, but these are two very different countries. It was obvious that our informants must have been architecturally, botanically and topographically blind.
First impressions can take a long while to shake off. Some people arrive here and love the country at first sight. They know they have come to the land o
f their dreams. For us there was a suppressed feeling of disappointment; suppressed because neither of us dared voice it, because we feared our judgement was impaired by our jetlagged state, because we had no option than to accept our fate. For a while three years seemed like a long time.
It would be easy to become a ‘whinging Pom’. Just look at those houses with their tin (corrugated iron) roofs. In Britain corrugated iron is only used on farm sheds and shacks, it doesn’t last at all in the corrosive atmosphere of the big cities, but here it is entirely practical, versatile and colourful. The whole place has an air of impermanence, because it has only been settled since the 1830s. There is a history, a fascinating history of pioneering settlement, but forget the Roman remains, and the twelfth-century cathedrals. Try to ignore the ghastly wild-west signage festooning the approach to each rural town. This country is only just starting to realise its own past and teach its own history in its schools. A generation of brilliant New Zealand historians are beginning to explore and interpret this past for us. The bush has been ripped out to make way for farm land and there is little biodiversity. Very few wild flowers line the roadside verges. Willows, pines and macrocarpas (Monterey Cypress) with boxthorn hedges, seem to have been the limit of the settlers’ plantings: robust, functional, uninspiring. But wait till you see the bush: so much of it destroyed, but so much now preserved in National Parks and reserves. In time you will see a quantum leap in imaginative landscape design and amenity plantings. Slowly you have to learn that you are not going to like everything, why did you want to come in the first place? Look at the unpopulated countryside; see the friendly, smiling people. The potential here is enormous.
And so it has proved. The New Zealand of today is very different to that we saw out of David’s car window as he drove us south to Taranaki.
David was a Yorkshireman who had emigrated eight years earlier. It is interesting to observe the social baggage that English immigrants bring to their adopted country. David proudly acclaimed his working-class origins. This may seem pointless in a country which conspicuously lacks class boundaries, but he had had a ‘guts full’ of dealing with the ‘nobs’ in a Norfolk practice, one of the main reasons he and his wife had decided to leave. Although he was always friendly towards me and Viv, I could feel that he immediately put me in the ex-public schoolboy pigeon-hole. I represented privilege, snobbery, the old-school-tie system. My parents had paid for my education, whereas he had made his way through the school of hard knocks. In England, at the age of eleven, it was crucial to know, for example, that of the three: a tractor, a table and a cow, the tractor is the odd one out (because it hasn’t got legs). I had failed my eleven-plus exam and had had no chance of entering a state grammar school. I was lucky that my parents refused to consign me to the educational scrapheap that was the local secondary school. But I was tired of fighting this resentment of the English public school system. I wasn’t particularly enamoured of it myself, but to come to New Zealand and be branded a willing accomplice was a bit rich. I was going to have to gain David’s respect the hard way.
Despite this undercurrent, relationships were very cordial and the other two vets were also openly welcoming. Roy was charming in the way only Irish people can be, and my boss was a warm-hearted and kindly Dutchman, Hank. It promised to be a supportive team for an apprehensive new graduate about to start his career.
For a few days I was taken round the practice, introduced to farmers, and given a brief insight into their farming systems. It was the end of July (equivalent to the end of a northern hemisphere January) and yet it wasn’t that cold. For those who take the term ‘antipodes’ literally it comes as some surprise to realise that New Zealand occupies latitudes comparable to those of Italy. With its softly temperate climate it is a farmer’s dream. Nowhere else in the world is superior for pasture production. If you can grow grass well, milk, beef, lamb and wool will follow. Even during the coldest months animals can be wintered outside without the expense of housing them. New Zealand farmers are able to compete globally, despite their long distance from markets, because of their efficient management of their low cost, grass-based systems.
Most of the dairy farms produce milk destined for export in the form of cheese, milk powder and other by-products such as casein and rennet. Only a small proportion is used for local consumption. Consequently, there are very few herds that milk round the year; most are seasonal suppliers. Utilising cows’ natural cycle of birth in spring, milk through summer, dry-off in autumn and rest in winter is the most efficient way to farm. It follows the growth pattern of grass.
In Taranaki, July is the month when the cows start calving. Over the next two months nearly every cow in our district would give birth. A large number, even if a small percentage, would need veterinary assistance. This was why I was needed so soon after qualifying. Springtime in dairy practice in New Zealand is hectic. I may have been commencing at the deep end, but my apprehensiveness wasn’t going to last long.
By the end of the calving season Roy, perusing the day book, reckoned we had each attended at least one hundred calvings. These dystocias had been hard going for me, at first, but I knew that I could call on a colleague for assistance and to start with I did. On one occasion I was unable to straighten the neck of a calf with its head tucked back deep down within a recumbent cow. Because she was lying down, she was squashing any free space for me to align the calf’s head and neck, and I felt that I had reached my limit. David answered my call for assistance over the radio-telephone and got stuck in straightaway. There was plenty of sweating, grunting and odd expletive as he rolled around seeking points of purchase. I was secretly gratified that my difficulties seemed to have been justified. Finally, he had the head up and soon a new-born calf sucked the cool night air.
‘How did you do that?’ I asked innocently.
‘I kept on f***ing trying,’ was the stern reply. (He didn’t need to add ‘you soft little public schoolboy, twat’; it was implicit in his tone). From then on I managed every calving without further assistance. As a vet the buck has to end with you. You have to provide the solution; there is no referring to specialists and, really, my colleagues were by now busy enough themselves without having to do my job.
One of the problems with big herds is that farmers, too, are under stress over spring. With herds of only twenty or thirty cows, as in Mike’s practice back in the Yorkshire Dales, it was different. If Daisy was due to calve Jonty Capstick would sit up all night waiting for trouble. The situation I am about to describe scarcely happens in Britain.
The average herd size in Taranaki in those days was a hundred cows. The farmer needed his sleep. He couldn’t stay sleepless for two months, so there was the odd cow that missed the system. Let’s say old 73 starts to calve one Saturday afternoon. When George Brown does his nightly check she is away from the main mob in a gully. He misses seeing her. All night she strains to no avail, the calf is a breech (coming backwards but with the back legs tucked forwards) and the calf is wedged in her pelvic canal. In this case not even the calf’s tail is showing. Around dawn she gives up trying. It is pouring with rain.
George misses her again on his morning rounds; he has a later calving date for her anyway, so he doesn’t notice her, and there are three other cows requiring his immediate attention. Cows are tough, stoical, and naturally resistant to uterine infections. It’s not till Monday night that he sees number 73 with her tail out, straining. By now the calf has been dead and cooking away at body temperature inside her for forty-eight hours. It is blown up with the gases of putrefaction and her placental fluids have dried. 73 has become what is known as a ‘fizzer’, so much more expressive than the prosaic ‘emphysematous calf’ of my exam papers. This is no academic exercise. She’s really straining now. Time to call the vet.
‘Vet base to Vet 4.’
‘Vet 4 receiving.’
‘George Brown has got a cow he’d like you to look at.’
‘OK, what seems to be the problem?’
&
nbsp; It helps to be able to mentally prepare for the next little escapade and run through the list of possibilities.
‘She’s straining and she hasn’t calved. She smells a bit, too. He’ll try and get her to the shed, but she’s a bit reluctant to move.’
Blast! Only one possibility. Wish I’d never asked. Now I’ve got twenty minutes driving time to contemplate one of the most awful jobs a vet has to do.
‘Thanks a lot, if you haven’t heard from me in a couple of hours send out the ambulance with oxygen and a gallon of rosewater.’
Fortunately, George has got her to the shed by the time I arrive. At least we’ll have light, a clean working area, and lashings of hot water.
‘Hello, George, my name’s John. I’m the new vet.’
‘Gidday, John. Welcome aboard. How long have you been out from home?’ They often referred to Britain as ‘home’, these older generation New Zealanders. They had been brought up on British history, British literature and were generally well imbued with British culture. They (mostly) understood British humour, while their children laughed at the American stuff. A higher proportion of New Zealanders had been killed in two world wars fighting on Britain’s side than those of any other colony. During the Great War over seven per cent of all New Zealand men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five died in the service of His Majesty. The ties with Britain were very strong, but Britain’s destiny with the European Union changed that, and Britain is no longer ‘home’.
George is an older man. Mid fifties. Been through the desert campaigns of the Second World War. He has an open smiling face.
After a preliminary procrastinatory chat we were down to business. 73 was crouching and straining as I put my well-lubricated arm into her dry, dry vagina. I flicked the calf’s tail out.
