Джеймс Хэрриот: Every Living Thing

I incised through skin, abdominal muscles and peritoneum and when I reached forward towards the diaphragm I could feel a doughy mass inside the stomach. I cut through the stomach wall and my heart leaped. There it was, a large, matted hair-ball. The cause of all the trouble. Something that wouldn’t show up on an X-ray plate.

Siegfried grinned. “Well, now we know!”

“Yes,” I said as the great waves of relief swept over me. “Now we know.”

And there was more. After I had evacuated and stitched the stomach, I found other, smaller hair-balls, bulging the intestine along its length. These had all to be removed and the bowel wall stitched in several places. I didn’t like this. It meant a bigger trauma and shock to my patient, but finally all was done and only a neat row of skin sutures was visible.

When I returned Alfred to his home his master could hardly bear to look at him. At length he took a timid glance at the cat, still sleeping under the anaesthetic. “Will he live?” he whispered.

“He has a good chance,” I replied. “He has had some major surgery and it might take him some time to get over it, but he’s young and strong. He should be all right.”

I could see Geoff wasn’t convinced, and that was how it was over the next few days. I kept visiting the little room behind the shop to give the cat penicillin injections, and it was obvious that he had made up his mind that Alfred was going to die.

Mrs. Hatfield was more optimistic, but she was worried about her husband.

“Eee, he’s given up hope,” she said. “And it’s all because Alfred just lies in his bed all day. I’ve tried to tell ’im that it’ll be a bit o’ time before the cat starts runnin’ around, but he won’t listen.”

She looked at me with anxious eyes. “And, you know, it’s gettin’ him down, Mr. Herriot. He’s a different man. Sometimes I wonder if he’ll ever be the same again.”

I went over and peeped past the curtain into the shop. Geoff was there, doing his job like an automaton. Haggard, unsmiling, silently handing out the sweets. When he did speak it was in a listless monotone and I realised with a sense of shock that his voice had lost all its old timbre. Mrs. Hatfield was right. He was a different man. And, I thought, if he stayed different what would happen to his clientele? So far they had remained faithful, but I had a feeling they would soon start to drift away.

It was a week before the picture began to change for the better. I entered the sitting room, but Alfred wasn’t there.

Mrs. Hatfield jumped up from her chair. “He’s a lot better, Mr. Herriot,” she said eagerly. “Eating well and seemed to want to go into t’shop. He’s in there with Geoff now.”

Again I took a surreptitious look past the curtain. Alfred was back in his place, skinny but sitting upright. But his master didn’t look any better.

I turned back into the room. “Well, I won’t need to come any more, Mrs. Hatfield. Your cat is well on the way to recovery. He should soon be as good as new.” I was quite confident about this, but I wasn’t so sure about Geoff.

Soon afterwards, the rush of spring lambing and post-lambing troubles overwhelmed me as it did every year, and I had little time to think about my other cases. It must have been three weeks before I visited the sweet shop to buy some chocolates for Helen. The place was packed and as I pushed my way inside all my fears were rushing back and I looked anxiously at man and cat.

Alfred, massive and dignified again, sat like a king at the far end of the counter. Geoff was leaning on the counter, with both hands, gazing closely into a lady’s face. “As I understand you, Mrs. Hird, you are looking for something in the nature of a softer sweetmeat.” The rich voice reverberated round the little shop. “Could you perhaps mean a Turkish delight?”

“Nay, Mr. Hatfield, it wasn’t that…”

His head fell on his chest and he studied the polished boards of the counter with fierce concentration. Then he looked up and pushed his face nearer to the lady’s. “A pastille, possibly…?”

“Nay…nay.”

“A truffle? A soft caramel? A peppermint cream?”

“No, nowt like that.”

He straightened up. This was a tough one. He folded his arms across his chest and as he stared into space and took the long inhalation I remembered so well, I could see that he was a big man again, his shoulders spreading wide, his face ruddy and well-fleshed.

Nothing having evolved from his cogitations, his jaw jutted and he turned his face upwards, seeking further inspiration from the ceiling. Alfred, I noticed, looked upwards, too.

There was a tense silence as Geoff held his pose, then a smile crept slowly over his noble features. He raised a finger. “Madam,” he said, “I do fancy I have it. Whitish, you said…sometimes pink…rather squashy…May I suggest to you…marshmallow?”

Mrs. Hird thumped the counter. “Aye, that’s it, Mr. Hatfield. I just couldn’t think of t’name.”

“Ha-ha, I thought so,” boomed the proprietor, his organ tones rolling to the roof. He laughed, the ladies laughed, and I was positive that Alfred laughed, too.

All was well again. Everybody in the shop was happy— Geoff, Alfred, the ladies and, not least, James Herriot.

Chapter 4

“YOU CALL YOURSELF A vet, but you’re nowt but a robber!”

Mrs. Sidlow, her fierce little dark eyes crackling with fury, spat out the words and as I looked at her, taking in the lank black hair framing the haggard face with its pointed chin, I thought, not for the first time, how very much she resembled a witch. It was easy to imagine her throwing a leg over a broomstick and zooming off for a quick flip across the moon.

“All t’country’s talkin’ about you and your big bills,” she continued. “I don’t know how you get away with it, it’s daylight robbery—robbin’ the poor farmers and then you come out here bold as brass in your flash car.”

That was what had started it. Since my old vehicle was dropping to bits I had lashed out on a second-hand Austin 10. It had done twenty thousand miles but had been well maintained and looked like new with its black bodywork shining in the sun, and the very sight of it had sparked off Mrs. Sidlow.

The purchase of a new car was invariably greeted with a bit of leg-pulling by most of the farmers. “Job must be payin’ well,” they would say with a grin. But it was all friendly, with never a hint of the venom that seemed to be part of the Sidlow ménage.

The Sidlows hated vets. Not just me, but all of them, and that was quite a few because they had tried every practice for miles around and found them all wanting. The trouble was that Mr. Sidlow himself was quite simply the only man in the district who knew anything about doctoring sick animals—his wife and all his grown-up family knew this as an article of faith and whenever illness struck any of his cattle, it was natural that Father took over. It was only when he had exhausted his supply of secret remedies that the vet was called in. I personally had seen only dying animals on that farm and had been unable to bring them back to life, so the Sidlows were invariably confirmed in their opinion of me and all my profession.

Today I had been viewing with the old feeling of hopelessness an emaciated little beast huddled in a dark corner of the fold yard taking its last few breaths after a week of pneumonia while the family stood around breathing hostility, shooting the usual side glances at me from their glowering faces. I had been trailing wearily back to my car on the way out when Mrs. Sidlow had spotted me from the kitchen window and catapulted into the yard.

“Aye, it’s awright for you,” she went on. “We ’ave to work hard to make a livin’ on this spot and then such as you come and take our money away from us without doin’ anythin’ for it. Ah know what it is, your idea is to get rich quick!”