: The Life of a Yorkshire Vet

by Norton, Julian

  A-levels came and went. As I checked my results on the window at school in the summer of 1990, with a face as fat as a hamster, having just had my wisdom teeth removed, I knew that hard work and determination, luck and fate had given me the opportunity that I wanted.

  And so I began my six-year stint at Cambridge to learn how to become a veterinary surgeon. It was an amazing time. Everything was vibrant, full of colour, fun, humour and vitality, and everyone there was larger than life. It was a place full of opportunity, equality and enthusiasm, drive and passion, and it was a wonderful place to spend six years. I would urge any aspiring schoolchild to aim for Cambridge, if they want to be immersed in the heady atmosphere of academia and talent, where anything seems possible and you are judged only upon your merits.

  My first few days at Pembroke were spent getting used to the college and its traditions, many of which had probably remained unchanged during its 600-year history. Everything was new to me, a youngster from a Yorkshire mining town, but I quickly felt at home and settled into its peculiar ways. One of our first jobs on arrival was to acquire a gown. A gown was required for formal occasions, and the first of these was the matriculation ceremony, which was a grand affair held on our first weekend. The gown would see us through our undergraduate careers. A few people would buy one, but the sensible approach was to ‘borrow’ one from the college for three years, in return for a donation to the charity of choice for that year. I was instructed to go into a cloakroom to pick one. There, I found a row of short, black gowns, hanging on pegs. They were all of a similar size, except one, at the end, which had long tassles and extended to the floor. Without thinking, or really knowing what I needed, I immediately picked this one, paid my money and took it back to my room. Little did I know that this was a graduate gown, reserved for students who already had a degree, unlike the short, undergraduate gowns, which all my contemporaries had. I attended every formal occasion wearing this incorrect and completely inappropriate gown. I had many comments – ‘Why is your gown so long?’ – but I was never reprimanded, simply looked upon with gentle amusement.

  My next major error in etiquette and decorum came the very next day. I had resolved to attend evensong at the chapel. This was not particularly because of a strong religious conviction, but more to see what it was all about. The chapel was designed and built by Sir Christopher Wren, the same chap who built St Paul’s Cathedral. It was an impressive building and I thought it appropriate to experience it as soon as I could. Evensong started at 6.30 p.m. and finished at 7.15 so most people would eat at formal hall afterwards. However, I decided to opt for the basic option of normal hall at six o’clock, which meant I was running late. As I rushed to the chapel, the congregation was already seated. The choir was just about to begin its procession, followed by the Dean and the Master of the college. As the organ fell silent, to announce the arrival of the important guests, I burst in. This would have been dramatic enough, but the scenario was made worse by the presence of a six-inch step and an excessively long gown. The step was almost invisible since it was very dark. Needless to say, I tripped over the step, and the gown, and made a most spectacular and ridiculous entrance. I picked myself up, straightened my long robes, and looked for a seat. It was very full, being the first evensong of the term, but I spotted an empty seat at the end of a row, opposite the choir stalls. It looked ideal, and was very comfortable with a big cushion. It even had a special place to rest my hymnbook. I settled down, trying to look inconspicuous. Sadly, this was not to be. The choir came in, followed by the Master, who took his place directly opposite me, in an identical seat. Then came the Dean, who looked bemused and then squeezed himself in with the rest of the congregation. It slowly dawned on me that I was sitting in his seat, the most important seat in this historic chapel. No wonder it was so comfy.

  After these first few days, settling into our individual colleges, it was time to begin the serious business of learning to be a vet. I nervously made my way to the anatomy department, where I met, for the first time, the fellow veterinary students with whom I would spend the next six happy years, and with whom I would forge some life-long friendships. Our very first task was to be photographed for identification purposes, to allow us entry to the anatomy building. This was necessary because we shared the building with the medics. While we dissected greyhounds, the medics didn’t, so there was attendant security. The photos were pinned to the notice board for all to see. It was a good way of checking people’s names, especially when you realized, slightly too many weeks after being introduced, that you couldn’t remember someone’s name at all. One face sprung out immediately. It was that of a bloke sporting an eighteen-year-old’s moustache. He stood out like a sore thumb. That sort of facial furniture was not common or popular in the early 1990s, unless you were co-pilot to Tom Cruise in Top Gun. What I couldn’t know, though, was that six years later I would be sharing a house and working with this guy, as a friend and colleague at Skeldale Veterinary Centre in Thirsk.

  Pembroke College was a great place to be a vet student, mainly because it was right next to the Downing Site, where first year teaching took place. This was good for me, because I could walk to lectures rather than risk life and limb cycling through the rush-hour traffic in the middle of Cambridge. It also meant I could stay in bed for an extra ten minutes in the morning. Some days would start at 5 a.m. with a trip to the river for rowing, and every day would end at 1 a.m. in someone’s room after an evening in the college bar, so any opportunity for extra sleep was to be grabbed with both hands.

  Equally, it was a bad place to be a vet student, because unlike most of the colleges, which would have anything from two to eight vets, Pembroke rarely took veterinary students at all and, if they did, it was only in ones or twos. There were no vets in either of the two years above me and, as I was the only vet in my year at Pembroke, I was actually the only one in the college. However, I was one of four Julians in the year, so I quickly became known as ‘Julian the Vet’. This nickname was soon abbreviated to ‘the Vet’ and that was my name for the next three years. Obviously it disappeared once I moved up to the vet school for my last three years of clinical training, because there I was one of about sixty others!

  Terms only lasted eight weeks and, during this time, every moment was crammed with lectures, dissection, laboratory sessions, supervisions (the Cambridge term for tutorials), sport, drinking and all the other things that happen at university. It was a magical place and stimulating on so many levels. As I was situated so close to lectures, I had no need for a bike, unlike nearly everyone else at Cambridge (although my friend Cindy didn’t have a bike because she couldn’t ride one). I could walk or run everywhere I needed to go and I think this gave me more time to appreciate the city. Walking to the little supermarket in the middle of town took me right past the laboratory where Watson and Crick discovered DNA. It was humbling to be studying at such a famous and illustrious establishment. I can remember one autumn evening walking back to college as the sun was setting orange. Someone was practising the flute with the window open. The whole of New Court was filled with beautiful music that sounded like an open-air concert. Everybody did things well at Cambridge.

  The first three years of the veterinary course were referred to as pre-clinical. This was the theoretical bit before you got your hands on real animals. Nowadays the courses are more integrated but back then, many of the veterinary students were somewhat frustrated by the lack of animal contact. The science was great, and I relished its academic challenges. But it was during the last three years that we really grew into actual vets. At the beginning of the fourth year, veterinary students moved out of town, to the School of Veterinary Medicine on Madingley Road, and many of us left our rooms in college and found houses to rent. I was lucky to get a room in a lovely house in the village of Newnham. I shared the house with two medics, who were studying at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, and two other vets – Siân and Cath, who are both still great friends. Siân now lives and works just 1
0 miles away from Thirsk and is a good friend of my wife, Anne. Cath is one of the very few of us from the class of 1996 who is still working in mixed practice, working with all species from cattle to cats. There is a growing tendency in the profession to specialize in just a narrow field.

  During these last three years we spent all our time at Madingley Road. We were taught in small ‘clinical groups’ of six or seven students. We had to choose these groups ourselves, so there was much discussion and debate, as we knew we would have to spend almost every waking hour for the next three years in one another’s company. I can’t quite remember how my clinical group arose, but this time was amongst the happiest of my whole life, due largely to the good-natured, carefree, but diligent atmosphere that pervaded my group.

  My closest friend in the group was Ben. We had been firm friends since the first year, as we sparred with one another to woo the attractive girls in our year. We usually consoled ourselves in mutual failure in this field. Cath, my housemate, was also in our group. She had a gentle manner with animals and her quiet patience was inspiring to us all. There was also Jenny, with whom I had spent two pre-clinical years dissecting a formalin-pickled greyhound in anatomy classes. She was hilarious and wore a permanent smile. Only once did I see her gloomy. This was on the occasion we had been dispatched to disbud calves. This is the process whereby the small, developing horns of young cattle are removed – a good job to send vet students on. We had to work our way through them in batches, injecting local anaesthetic around the base of each horn. We then had to burn out the little rubbery nobble of horn bud, using a red-hot burner. This was completely painless to the little calf because the area was numbed by the anaesthetic, but we still had to be careful. I know one vet who burned down a whole barn when his disbudding iron got knocked out of his hand. There was no such drama this time, but Jenny lost control of the red-hot iron and plunged it straight into my face as I held the calf for her. The circular end of the iron, about the size of a ten-pence piece, hit me right on the upper lip and left a deep red circular burn, rendering me unable to smile or laugh for about a week. Jenny was mortified and extremely apologetic. For me it was a painful inconvenience, mainly because we did a lot of smiling and laughing at that time.

  The final member of our group was Claire. I did not know her particularly well at the outset – she was a good friend of Ben’s – but by the end of our clinical years we were very close. She was keen on equine work and always felt somewhat out of her depth with farm animals. On one particular day, Claire had been doing early morning inspections of her cases, one of which was a young calf, about three months old. It had been poorly with abdominal pain and weight loss and Claire had examined it thoroughly at 7.30 that morning. At 8 a.m., we had ‘rounds’ where we would present our hospitalized cases to our fellow students and tutors, discuss their progress and plan their treatment. Claire stood confidently in front of the calf pen, describing how the poor calf was a little bit brighter this morning, had suckled some milk, and had a normal temperature and heart rate. It was still recumbent, she said, but making some progress. Dr Jackson, one of our favourite tutors, stood by, wisely nodding his head. He waited patiently for Claire to finish her soliloquy, and then quietly and politely as ever, simply said, ‘Thank you, Claire. But the calf is actually dead.’ The poor animal had expired in the minutes between her examination and the start of hospital rounds. I can still picture the redness of Claire’s embarrassed face to this day.

  Dr Jackson was a popular clinician at the vet school. He was an elderly gentleman, hugely experienced and the epitome of polite calmness. He had the utmost respect for the animals he treated. He never lost his temper and was an inspirational teacher to us all. In winter he always wore a cap and overalls, which made him look exactly like the driver of a steam train.

  His finest hour, though, was the final Friday afternoon of the large animal rotation. Our clinical years were divided up into blocks called ‘rotations’, each lasting two weeks. We would concentrate on specific subjects and Dr Jackson was in charge of the ‘large animal, reproduction and obstetrics’ rotation. This was timetabled for the demonstration of semen collection in the dog, which was part of our reproduction and obstetrics course, which Dr Jackson also taught. Stories of this lesson were fabled at the vet school, so we all knew what sort of spectacle to expect. So did the large black Labrador who was the subject of the demonstration. Friday afternoons were his favourite part of the week. He leapt out of his kennel with the enthusiasm of a thousand men and, without hesitation, jumped straight onto the examination table. I now know that it is extremely unusual for a dog to jump, voluntarily, onto the table of a veterinary surgery, but Bruno knew what was in store for him on a Friday afternoon. The main challenge was for a group of twelve students (we attended this demonstration with a second clinical group) to remain calm and contain the rising swell of giggles. Veterinary students had even been known to stab themselves in the back of the hand with their scissors, or pinch themselves with artery forceps to curb the impending and uncontrollable hysterics. We just about managed to contain ourselves during the demonstration of the semen sample collection, despite the hilarious grin on the dog’s face and the soothing and encouraging words of our tutor. However, his final comment, when he was looking for a volunteer to keep the test tube containing the sample at the correct temperature for analysis, was just too much for most of us: ‘Now then, who’s got nice warm hands?’

  We worked hard and played hard during those years, and it wasn’t long before our skills were honed. Term times were intense, and during the university holidays, particularly over our last three years, we were required to ‘see practice’ at veterinary surgeries to gain experience. This was a crucial part of our training and I quickly realized that spending as much time as possible with veterinary surgeons, good ones, was the way to learn the most.

  Seeing practice was fantastic because it meant that I could get back to Yorkshire, the hills and the outdoors. I spent most of my holidays at practices in Wetherby, Skipton and York, as well as further afield in the north of Scotland. This was a great time and I set about trying to ensure that I had seen every procedure at least once and that I had actually done as many as I could. It was an opportunity to get your hands dirty and hopefully not make too many mistakes. Cleaning kennels, washing down lambing pens and cleaning calving jacks were all part of a veterinary student’s remit. On one occasion I was dispatched to refill the bottles of antiseptic in the practice’s lambing shed. I searched to see which of the large brown bottles I should use. The brown liquid in brown bottles all looked the same to me and I refilled one bottle with what appeared to be the right stuff, thinking nothing more of it until the following day. As I was heading out to help one of the vets with a blood test on a beef suckler herd, I heard a commotion in the lambing shed. A furious vet burst out with a red face and dark brown stained arms. I had topped up the bottle of hand antiseptic with Wellington boot disinfectant! I quickly grabbed the blood sampling tubes and hopped in the car. The mixture of enthusiasm and naïvity, I was realizing, could be a hazard.

  Despite these occasional mishaps, my student path was progressing nicely and I collected a handful of prizes during my final year. It was time to look for a job …

  Directly after graduation I had arranged to work for a few weeks as a locum in a practice in Thurso in Scotland, where I had spent some time as a student, but my first actual job was to be in Thirsk and this, again, came largely by good fortune. My girlfriend (now wife) Anne was in the year above me at vet school and was already working by the time I was looking for a job. Her close friend from Cambridge, David Sutton, was working in the practice at Thirsk. David is an amazing chap, another of those people who is passionate about his job and life in general. He had been in London acting as veterinary advisor to a children’s television programme, and called in to visit me at Cambridge on his journey back to North Yorkshire. He mentioned that there might be a job coming up in Thirsk. I pricked up my ears. This wa
s a mixed practice job – just what I wanted – and it was in North Yorkshire – exactly what I was looking for – so I arranged to call in for an interview.

  I was travelling up north the following weekend to organize a stag weekend in the Peak District for my friend Pete, so it fitted in fairly well. I squeezed into my little red Mini Metro and headed up the A1. The Metro was one of those cars that was red when it left the factory and slowly became more and more orange over the years – the equivalent of going grey in the car-ageing process. It was a source of much mirth at vet school because I stubbornly refused to acknowledge that it was orange. To me it was red, because that was its colour when it arrived. I loved that car. My mother had won it in a competition at the Castleford branch of Asda many years earlier. It was an incredibly complicated competition but the winner from each Asda store in the country received a brand-new Mini Metro. My sister, Kate, and I shared the car when we were sixth-formers, and then I inherited it for my trips to and from university, and to get me to the various vet practices that I had to visit. It never failed me, although I did periodically have to reach out of the window to make the windscreen wipers work.

  My interview at Skeldale was not like most job interviews. There were no chairs, no questions like ‘Where do you see yourself in five or ten years’ time?’ or ‘What are your thoughts on the government’s policies on tuberculosis control?’ Instead I had a prolonged and rambling chat with the partners, Jim, Peter and Tim. Jim is the son of Alf Wight, and he wanted to reduce his hours at the practice to enable him to write a book about his father’s life. Our interviews for new vets are still like this – disorganized and rambling – but we usually find the right person for the job, and it worked on this occasion. We quickly realized that we were mutually suited.