That girl nearly causes a pile-up when she crosses the road on market day
. . . and she can cook – marry her NOW! The typically blunt advice from Siegfried that changed James Herriot’s life for ever
ALL Creatures Great And Small was the adored TV drama about a young vet’s adventures in the Yorkshire Dales. And, in tribute to star Robert Hardy, who played Siegfried Farnon and has died at 91, all this week we’ve been revisiting James Herriot’s magical memoirs on which the show was based. Today, in our final extract, James recalls a farm operation that went pungently wrong — and how his boss bullied him into making the best decision of his life . . .
UNFORTUNATELY, it was during one of Siegfried’s efficiency drives that his good friend Colonel Merrick’s cow swallowed a piece of wire. Everybody suffered when my boss had these spells. They usually came on after he had been reading about some amazing new high-tech procedure. He would rampage around, calling on the cowering household to stir themselves and be better people. He would be obsessed, while it lasted, with a craving for perfection.
‘We must put on a better show at these operations on the farms,’ he announced one morning. ‘It just isn’t good enough to fish out a few old instruments from a bag and start hacking at the animal. We must have cleanliness, asepsis if possible, and an orderly technique.’
So he was jubilant when he diagnosed traumatic reticulitis (foreign body in the second stomach) in the colonel’s cow. ‘ We’ll really show old Hubert something. We’ll give him a picture of veterinary surgery he’ll never forget.’
Tristan and I were pressed into service as assistants, and our arrival at the farm was really impressive. Siegfried led the procession, looking unusually smart in a brand new tweed jacket of which he was very proud. He was a debonair figure as he shook hands with his friend.
The colonel was jovial. ‘ Hear you’re going to operate on my cow. Take out a wire, eh? Like to watch you do it, if it’s all right with you.’
‘By all means, Hubert, please do. You’ll find it very interesting.’
In the cowshed, Tristan and I arranged tables alongside the patient, and on these we placed new metal trays with rows of shining, sterilised instruments. Scalpels, probes, artery forceps, hypodermic syringes, suture needles, gut and silk in glass phials, rolls of cotton wool and bottles of spirit and other antiseptics.
Siegfried fussed around, happy as a sandboy. He had clever hands and, as a surgeon, he was worth watching. I could read his mind. This, he was thinking, was going to be good.
When all was to his liking, he took off his jacket and donned a brilliantly white overall. He handed the jacket to Tristan and almost instantly gave a roar of anger.
‘Hey, don’t just throw it down on that meal bin! Here, give it to me. I’ll find a safe place for it.’ He dusted the new garment down tenderly and hung it on a nail.
Meanwhile, I had shaved and disinfected the operation site on the flank and everything was ready for the local anaesthetic. Siegfried took the syringe and quickly infiltrated the area. ‘This is where we go inside, Hubert. I hope you aren’t squeamish.’
The colonel beamed. ‘ Oh, I’ve seen blood before. You needn’t worry — I won’t faint.’
With a bold sweep of the scalpel, Siegfried incised the skin. The smooth wall of the rumen (the large first stomach) lay exposed. My boss reached for a fresh scalpel and looked for the best place to cut into the rumen.
He inserted the knife and cut sharply downwards.
I was glad I had moved away because no sooner had he done so than a high-pressure jet of semiliquid stomach contents — a greenish-brown, evil- smelling cascade — erupted from the depths of the cow as if from an invisible pump.
The first direct hit was on Siegfried’s face. He couldn’t release his hold of the rumen for fear of contamination. So he hung on to each side of the opening while the vile torrent poured on to his hair, down his neck and all over his lovely white overall.
Now and then, the steady stream would be varied by a sudden explosion which sent the fermenting broth spouting viciously over everything in the immediate vicinity. In no time the trays with their gleaming instruments were thoroughly covered.
The tidy rows of swabs, the snowy tufts of cotton wool disappeared, but it was the unkindest cut of all when a particularly powerful jet sent a liberal spray over the new jacket, hanging on the wall.
Siegfried’s face was too obscured for me to detect any change of expression, but the colonel’s eyebrows were raised to the maximum and his mouth hung open as he gazed in disbelief at the chaotic scene. Siegfried, still hanging grimly on, was at the centre of it all, paddling about in a reeking swamp which came halfway up his Wellington boots. His hair was stiffened and frizzy and his face completely brown.
Eventually, the flood slowed to a trickle and stopped. I was able to hold the lips of the wound while Siegfried inserted his arm and felt his way inside. A satisfied grunt told me he had located the piercing wire and within seconds he had removed it.
Tristan had been frantically salvaging and washing suture materials, and soon the incision in the rumen was stitched. Silently and neatly, he secured the skin and muscles and swabbed around.
Everything looked fine. The cow seemed unperturbed; under the anaesthetic she had known nothing of the titanic struggle with her insides. In fact, freed from the discomfort of the wire, she appeared to be feeling better.
It took quite a time to tidy up the mess and the most difficult job was to make Siegfried presentable. We did our best by swilling him down with buckets of water while, all the time, he scraped sadly at his new jacket with a flat stick. It didn’t make much difference.
The colonel was hearty and full of congratulations. ‘Come in, my dear chap. Come in and have a drink.’
But the invitation had a hollow ring and he took care to stand at least ten feet away from his friend.
Siegfried threw his bedraggled jacket over his shoulder. ‘No thank you, Hubert. It’s most kind of you,
An evil-smelling cascade erupted all over him
but we must be off.’ He went out of the shed. ‘I think you’ll find the cow will be eating in a day or two. I’ll be back in a fortnight to take out the stitches.’
In the confined space of the car, Tristan and I were unable to get as far away from him as we would have liked. even with our heads stuck out of the windows, it was still pretty bad.
Siegfried drove for a mile or two in silence, then he turned to me and his streaked features broke into a grin.
There was something indomitable about him. ‘You never know what’s round the corner in this game, my boys, but just think of this — that operation was a success.’ eVeN though it was only my second year of practice, I was already formulating my own theories about the reaction of our clients to the sight of blood, guts and general mess such as we’d just witnessed. One was that it was always the biggest, strongest, super- confident ones who went down first.
(I had, by this time, worked out a few other unscientific theories, e.g. big dogs were kept by people who lived in little houses and vice versa. clients who said ‘spare no expense’ never paid their bills, ever. When I asked my way in the Dales and was told ‘you can’t miss it’, I knew I’d soon be hopelessly lost.)
I had begun to wonder if perhaps country folk, despite their closer contact with fundamental things, were perhaps more susceptible than city people. ever since Sid Blenkhorn had staggered into Skeldale House one evening, his face ghostly white.
‘Have you got a drop o’ whisky handy, Jim?’ he quavered, and when I had guided him to a chair and Siegfried had put a glass in his hand he told us he had been at a first aid lecture given by Dr Allinson, a few doors down the street.
‘He was talking about veins and arteries and things,’ groaned Sid, passing a hand across his forehead. ‘God, it was awful!’ Apparently Fred ellison the fishmonger had been carried out unconscious after only ten minutes. It had been a shambles.
Only once did I discover a means of immediate resuscitation, and that was by accident.
It was when Henry Dickson asked me to show him how to castrate a pig. Henry was going in for pigs in a big way and had a burning ambition to equip himself with veterinary skills.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said on a visit to his farm one day. ‘How about if I do this one as a demonstration for you, and see what you think?’
‘right, that’s a good idea. What’ll you charge me to do ’im?’ ‘Seven and six.’ ‘Well, I suppose you have to have your pound of flesh. Let’s get on.’
I injected a few ccs of Nembutal into the little pig and he rolled over in the straw and lay still. Henry had rigged up a table in the yard and we laid the animal on it.
I was preparing to start when Henry pulled out a ten- shilling note. ‘ Better pay you now before I forget.’
‘All right, but my hands are clean now — push it into my pocket and I’ll give you the change when we finish.’
I rather fancied myself as a teacher and soon warmed to my task. I carefully incised the skin. ‘See there, Henry,’ I began. ‘I am taking the spermatic cord now and winding it in its coverings tightly down to the . . .’
But my audience was no longer with me. My student had sunk down on an upturned oil drum and lay slumped across the table. Doing the rest of the job was a sad anti-climax.
I put the pig back in his pen and gathered up my gear: then I remembered I hadn’t given Henry his change. I don’t know why I did it, but instead of half-a- crown, I slapped down a shilling and sixpence on the wood a few inches from his face.
The noise made him open his eyes and he gazed dully at the coins for a few seconds, then with almost frightening suddenness he snapped upright, ashen-faced but alert and glaring.
‘ Hey!’ he shouted. ‘ I want another shillin’!’ AFTer I had finally plucked up the courage to ask Helen Alderson for a date, I seemed to drift into the habit of dropping in to see her on an occasional evening.
And before I knew what was happening I had developed a pattern: at around eight o’clock my feet began to make their way of their own accord to her father’s farm, Heston Grange.
We went to the little dances in the village institutes, we walked for miles along the old grassy mine tracks in the hills, or sometimes she came on my evening calls. There wasn’t anything spectacular to do in Darrowby but there was a complete lack of strain, a feeling of being self- sufficient in a warm existence of our own that made everything meaningful and worthwhile.
Things might have gone on like this indefinitely, but for a conversation I had with Siegfried. We were sitting in the big room at Skeldale House as we often did before bedtime, talking and laughing over the day’s events.
‘Tell me this,’ he said suddenly. ‘Are you or are you not courting Helen Alderson?’
‘Well, I’m . . . I’ve been . . . oh I suppose you could call it that.’ Siegfried settled back comfortably on his chair, put his fingertips together and assumed a judicial expression. ‘Good, good. You admit you’re courting the girl.
‘Now let us take it a step further. She is, from my own observation, extremely attractive — in fact, she nearly causes a traffic pile-up when she walks across the cobbles on market day. It’s common knowledge that she is intelligent, equable and an excellent cook. Perhaps you would agree with this?’
‘Of course I would,’ I said, nettled at his superior air. ‘But what’s this all about? Why are you going on like a high court judge?’
‘I’m only trying to establish my point, James, which is that you seem to have an ideal wife lined up and you are doing nothing about it. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, I wish you’d stop playing around and let us see a little action.’
I don’t suppose I am the first person to have had his life fundamentally influenced by one of Siegfried’s chance outbursts. I thought his opinions ridiculous at the time, but he planted a seed which germinated and flowered almost overnight.
There is no doubt he is responsible for the fact that I was the father of a grown-up family while I was still a young man, because when I brought the subject up with Helen she said yes, she’d like to marry me and we set our eyes on an early date. She seemed surprised at first — maybe she had the same opinion of me as Siegfried and expected it would take me a few years to get off the ground.
I can’t remember much about our wedding: my strongest memory is of Siegfried, standing just behind me booming ‘Amen’ at regular intervals throughout the service — the first time I’d ever noticed a best man doing this.
As we were driving away past Skeldale House, Helen grabbed my arm. ‘Look!’ she cried excitedly. ‘Look over there!’
Underneath Siegfried’s brass plate, which always hung slightly askew on the iron railings, was a brand new one. It had a black background and bold white letters which read: ‘J. Herriot MrcVS, Veterinary Surgeon.’ It was screwed very straight on to the metal.
I looked back down the street to see if I could see Siegfried, but we had already said our goodbyes. Thank-yous would have to wait.
I drove out of Darrowby with a feeling of immense pride. I knew what that plate meant: that I was a partner, somebody with a real place in the world.
It meant, too, that after all the trials and tribulations, I had been accepted by my adopted county of Yorkshire — a truly humbling and wonderful thought. I could not have asked for a better wedding present.
ALL Creatures Great And Small: The Classic Memoirs Of A Yorkshire Country Vet by James Herriot (Pan Books, £9.99). To order a copy for £7.49 (25 per cent discount) visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640. P&P is free on orders over £15. The offer is valid until September 8, 2017.
A partnership — what a perfect wedding present