Memoirs of a Cotswold Vet

by Ivor Smith

  When the telephone rang at 11 o’clock that night the last thing I imagined I would hear was, ‘For Christ’s sake get here quick mister, he’s grown another bleedin’ leg!’ I was about to say ‘Pull the other one’, when I recognised the genuine panic in the caller’s voice. I parked up under a bright streetlamp and walked down the road to the owner, who was leaning on his wooden gate puffing away ferociously on a cigarette.

  ‘He was all right earlier, but when we went into the kitchen later on he had five legs!’

  It was difficult to keep a straight face. I examined my lively patient on the kitchen floor. I do not know how, but he had somehow managed to remove his injured leg from the plaster cast. With the original leg shape of the cast intact and still attached firmly to his shoulder and chest, the illusion was perfect. I explained to the owners, who were now recovering from their shock, that it would be necessary to apply another cast and agreed to keep him sedated for a couple of days until he was used to the cast. I wished them goodnight as the reassured owner lit up another cigarette.

  There was one particular RTA to which I have to confess guilt and embarrassment. Towards the end of a busy day I had called in for a quick afternoon cup of tea with Angela at our home, a semi-detached house on the Wyman’s Brook estate. I drove off to evening surgery along Swindon Lane and was astonished by a black cat that appeared from nowhere and was determined to get across the road before I arrived at his starting point. The cat lost the race and I felt a bump on my nearside. I jumped out of my car – thinking that at least he can’t complain about the veterinary service – with the intention of whizzing rapidly back to surgery with my patient, but he had disappeared. I spent the next twenty minutes searching for him without success.

  ‘I’ve done my best old chap, wherever you may be’, I muttered to myself, hoping that he hadn’t gone to the great cats’ resting place in the sky.

  However, to my great relief he was still very much in this world and an hour later an extremely worried lady from Swindon Lane presented her rather subdued and wobbly black cat in my surgery, complete with a prominent bump on his head. He was a little concussed but was suffering from nothing worse than that and I knew he would make a complete recovery.

  ‘Do you think he’s been in a car accident, Mr Smith?’ his owner asked?

  ‘Yes I do, Mrs Jones, there’s no doubt about that’, I replied, as I gave the cat an antibiotic and painkilling injection, ‘but I don’t think he’s too badly hurt and I am sure he will be back to normal in a couple of days.’

  My sympathetic comments were not enough to prevent her angry rhetoric on car owners who drive too fast and hadn’t the decency to stop after hitting a poor animal. I agreed wholeheartedly, but in fact I hadn’t been driving that fast and her cat did seem hellbent on destruction, and I did stop afterwards. How could I possibly give her a bill knowing that I was responsible for the accident? I don’t know, but I did, and it’s played heavily on my conscience for the last forty years, occasionally.

  Wynn and I settled quickly into the routine of being the practice assistants. During the week we were each on duty for two nights and alternated the Friday and weekend duties. One of the partners acted as back-up for those rare occasions in the middle of the night when clients needed you to be in two places at the same time. One morning in the very early hours Wynn hauled himself out of bed to attend a cow having a difficult time calving. He called at the surgery en route to the farm to collect instruments and the ropes and tackle he needed to do the job. Most of it was stored in one of the upstairs rooms at the top of the creaky wooden staircase. He had been sorting out gear for about ten minutes when he was more than a little perturbed to hear heavy breathing and footsteps creeping up the stairs. Feeling a little perturbed was not quite how he described his anxiety to me, instead he thought he was sitting on bricks and his intestinal spasms only stopped when he discovered that it wasn’t the surgery phantom coming up the stairs but Mr Hull. He too was relieved to find his assistant upstairs and not a couple of burglars. He had come for some calving gear because, against the odds, two farmers had telephoned within minutes of each other at 2.30 a.m., both wanting the vet out to calve a cow. Most night-time visits to farms involved the inevitable problems that went hand-in-hand with farming; the difficult calvings, the milk fevers and other metabolic diseases associated with the high milk-producing cow, and which were normal events even on the best of dairy farms. Sometimes there was an evening visit to cases that were truly avoidable.

  One such occasion was a visit to see a group of young Friesian steers that had been castrated a week or so before. The operation, if you can call it that, had been carried out by the owner using an instrument called an emasculator. The technique, carried out legally by a skilled operator, results in relatively little discomfort to the young animal and within hours the calf’s behaviour returns to normal. The pinching of the skin surrounding the structures that lead to the testicles in the jaws of the instrument causes the speedy disappearance of the animal’s masculinity. It is a simple and safe way of castrating young calves. It was never meant to be used as a method of castrating cattle approaching maturity, but this is exactly what had been attempted on this occasion.

  I arrived at a small field enclosure near Andoversford at about 7.30 on a warm summer’s evening where I had arranged to meet the farmer. I was not prepared for what greeted me. Two of the ten young bulls were already dying and it was clear that a couple more, even with treatment, would soon join them. It would at least be relief from the agony they were suffering. The testicles of each of the animals were swollen to at least four times their normal size. Some seemed to resemble little footballs and serum and blood-tinged pus oozed from the traumatised skin where an attempt had been made to sever the spermatic cords a week or so ago. Flies buzzed around the wounds in the evening sun. The animals seemed past caring and most showed some of the classic signs of bovine tetanus. The toxins produced by the clostridial tetanus bacteria were causing acute muscular spasms and a rigidity that caused the wretched animals to feel as though they walked on stilts. Others were recumbent, bloated and cruelly dying unnecessarily of tetanus.

  I arranged for several of the cattle to be shot and within hours their misery and suffering ended. The remainder I loaded to the maximum with antibiotics, analgesics, tetanus anti-serum and anything else I had in the boot I thought might be helpful. I hoped the farmer would still be paying off his vet’s bill five years later.

  Although this kind of farming atrocity was fortunately a rarity, there were others of the same ilk who somehow or other always seemed to find some way of avoiding prosecution. That said, however, I enjoyed the farm side of the practice enormously.

  Young vets thought a lot about their cars back then and undoubtedly do today. How you reached a particular farm or how quickly you attended an emergency situation was important. Wynn sensibly drove his own reliable Hillman Minx and the practice funded the running costs. I had opted to drive the practice’s Ford Cortina even though I knew it had a chequered history. We knew the previous driver. He was a very likeable assistant vet named Mike Hinton, who was leaving the practice to take up a position with MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food), the government department known today as DEFRA. For some inexplicable reason Mike didn’t get on too well with this car and it seemed to spend more time off the road than on it. On one occasion the gears failed, or at least some part of the system did, and Mr Hull was surprised when his assistant walked into his office with a Cortina gearstick in his hand. Once Mike had the misfortune to be involved in an accident that resulted in considerable damage to the front end of the car. The practice philosophically repaired the damage and soon he was off again in the car to do his farm rounds.

  Soon after the last event Mike was carrying out a cattle TB herd test on a local farm near Charlton Kings and had parked on the steep Ham Hill. In the middle of the morning the driverless Cortina decided to roll boot-first down the hill and Mike and the farmer could on
ly watch in amazement as the car picked up speed. Eventually it came to a stop against a collapsing brick wall. This time it was just the rear end of the car that needed replacing. It was believed that the handbrake had failed.

  The practice back-up vehicle was a super white Austin Mini. Driving this little car was tremendous fun and most members of staff found regular excuses to go out in it. One afternoon when the Cortina was off the road again, on this occasion for a routine service, I jumped into the Mini and headed out of Cheltenham through Battledown towards Hewletts Farm, and was soon climbing Harp Hill and Aggs Hill. As I rounded one corner I was a bit surprised to see a Morris Minor descending the hill towards me, on the same side of the road. It wasn’t quite déjà vu Crudwell, despite the screech of brakes, but there was the now-familiar sound of bending metal and breaking glass. I stepped out of the Mini to confront the hysterical lady driver. She got in first.

  ‘Oh my God’, she wailed. ‘What on earth will my husband say?’ There was only one thing I could think of.

  ‘What does your husband usually say to you when you drive on the wrong side of the road?’ Back at her house and after half an hour of telephone calls to the six most important people in her world whilst swigging a large G&T, I finally had the chance to ring my practice office. Later, I eventually arrived at Hewletts Farm and offered the farmer a strange excuse for being an hour late to disbud and castrate his calves. The young cattle no doubt appreciated the delay and enjoyed their last hour of uninterrupted manhood.

  Most days passed quickly and were happily rewarding. I would often arrive home to be told by Angela; ‘Have a quick shower because we’re meeting up with Tom, Dick, Harry and Wynn and the wives for a bite to eat at 8 at the usual place.’ Eating out was starting to become part and parcel of our social life in Cheltenham. The ‘usual place’ could well have been one of several popular local pub steak houses. It was probably the start of the cafeteria society and the adventurous type of restaurateur that remains popular today, and none could be more so than the young couple who ran Bistro 42. Unsurprisingly, this immensely popular eating house could be found at no. 42 on the High Street.

  Bistro food was a little different from the usual restaurant menus of the time. The meals were generally meaty, spicy, and invariably cooked in French wine. We were happy to eat by flickering candlelight, sitting on old benches and stools at bare wooden tables. Glass ashtrays were naturally in abundance. The walls were decorated with numerous modern art prints to stimulate chat in case you ran out of conversation, interspersed with solid metallic items, including heavy brass circular objects resembling medieval shields.

  One memorable evening found Wynn and me with our young wives and some friends sitting under one of the bistro’s prize bronzes putting the farming and veterinary world to rights. At a convenient time Wynn and I excused ourselves to take a trip to the gents’ and at that very moment the enormous brass ornament above us inexplicably decided to part company with its wall fixture. It must have been one of the most fortuitous calls of nature ever. Broken glasses, ashtrays, cutlery and china flew in all directions as the enormous shield smashed down onto the space we had just vacated.

  Later that same evening the appetites of some of the diners in the restaurant were tested to the limit. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had met our young waitress earlier in the day. I’d had the pleasure of castrating her beloved cat at the surgery that morning.

  ‘Oh, you’re Ivor Smith, aren’t you?’ our waitress exclaimed. I nodded acknowledgement.

  ‘You operated on Hendrix today, didn’t you?’ she announced loudly to everyone in the restaurant.

  ‘I certainly did’, I replied. ‘How is he this evening?’

  ‘Oh he’s fine now I’m sure, but he disgraced himself when we got him home. His tummy was really upset,’ she said a little more quietly.

  ‘Nothing to worry about really’, I told her reassuringly. ‘Vomiting is often a problem after a general anaesthetic.’

  ‘Oh no, he wasn’t sick’, she corrected, speaking more loudly now. ‘It was the other end; there was stinky diarrhoea everywhere! It was me being sick!’

  I cringed and hoped that no one in the restaurant had been put off their mulligatawny soup.

  Regrettably, this inappropriate restaurant banter was just one of the first of its kind for me, and many more appetite-ending conversations would take place over the years. Restaurants are fine places to bump into clients and have a social chat but, before saying hello, I soon learned to rack my brains to be sure I remembered their pets’ ailments and hoped that above everything else, digesting their food satisfactorily was not a problem.

  The 1960s social life in Cheltenham was fantastic. When Ange and I were not eating we were partying. Deep down we knew these halcyon days were numbered and it was a time of packing in the fun while we still could. An immensely popular annual event at the Town Hall was the Students’ Arts Ball. Naturally it was a fancy dress event, and one memorable year the theme was the Time of the Romans. Unsurprisingly, most revellers dressed in the style of the corrupt and debauched era of the Fall of the Roman Empire. Our band of centurions, gladiators and slave girls met for a warm-up drink in a subterranean bar at a well-known Irish pub on Montpellier. An hour or so later, the fortified slave women led the way towards the direction of the Town Hall and the ball. The skirted centurions and Roman riff-raff followed. Lagging behind I stopped halfway up the stairs to to the Town Hall to tie a flapping bootlace. As I was bending down, a centurion climbing the stairs behind me passed by and, looking back, uttered with relief, ‘Oh, thank God for that, it’s a bloke. For a moment I thought it was the hairiest woman’s legs I’d ever seen in my life!’

  The ball ended in the early hours and soup was served at about 4 a.m. For most it was sobering sustenance for the journey home. For one of us it was breakfast before the equally sobering telephone rang again, probably in less than two hours’ time. Soon we would be back with the animals.

  Each day we routinely dealt with the problems of pets, farm animals and loveable ponies, and on the whole we felt that our efforts were truly appreciated. Yet some of the horse-owning fraternity were a breed of their own. There was a type of owner who seemed to have more money than sense, was ridiculously demanding and believed they had more knowledge of horse medicine than any vet on the planet. Certainly heaps more than one particular vet whom had only been qualified a few years.

  One occasion that springs to mind arose on a Friday afternoon when Mr Hull was returning from his BVA secretarial duties in London. When I returned to the surgery after lunch Tim grabbed me and said almost apologetically that Mrs Fitzroy-something or other wanted a visit without delay to look at a hunter that had now been lame for a couple of days. It was a forty-five minute drive to her Cotswold residence some 20 miles beyond bustling Cirencester, and a further couple of minutes up the drive to the magnificent historic house. I eventually pulled into the stable yard and it became immediately obvious from her aloof presence whose horse I had come to see. I opened my car door as she approached and prepared to introduce myself, as we hadn’t met before. She was clearly expecting Peter Hull. It took all of five seconds to realise that I was not welcome.

  ‘Who are you?’ she demanded, in a way that suggested that the plum in her mouth was the largest ever grown. I suspected she knew darn well who I was without further explanation.

  ‘Well, I am Mr Hull’s veterinary assistant and I have come to … ’

  ‘Nobody other than Mr Hull looks at my horses’, she interrupted, ‘so don’t bother to get out of your car.’

  I could easily have said the pleasure was all mine as I turned round and headed back to Cheltenham. I was cross and frustrated by the woman’s arrogance. No doubt Mr Hull would attend in person at the earliest opportunity, but in the meantime the lame horse would remain in discomfort, possibly developing an increasingly severe infection. Who knows?

  Despite having to tolerate a few difficult horse owners, the majority
were fun characters and enjoyable to work with. One in particular was a wealthy businessman farmer who had moved to the Boddington area from the Midlands and spoke with a strong regional accent. At times he could be a bit of a tartar but I got on well with him and his large family. The farm was mainly a dairy one, but it was clear that his main interest was his racehorses. One day I was asked to examine a horse called Ward Arms that was becoming increasingly sluggish in training. A clinical examination revealed nothing of significance and the usual action under these circumstances was to give the traditional symptomatic treatment, an injection of vitamin B12. It did no harm and often seemed to do some good.

  Perhaps to demonstrate I was a little enterprising I thought I would give the horse something extra, this being a big oily shot of anabolic steroids which were just becoming available. Today it is illegal to administer these to improve performance but it was quite permissible at the time and I gave the biggest dose that I could within the limits of the pharmaceutical company’s recommended doses. Ward Arms ran at the end of that week. I cannot remember what the odds against him were, but he won by a mile. I was quite popular on that farm for a long time.

  We took our work seriously and as professionally as young vets could, but from time to time things happened that our governing body would have frowned upon. Ignorance was not bliss as far as the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons was concerned. How they may have reacted to a complaint about me driving to Cheltenham with a body part hanging from the back of my car we shall fortunately never know.