Free Lord God Made Them All by James Herriot Page B

carrying, they opened gates and they were company on our lonely rounds. In return, they absorbed a lot of knowledge from us in our discussions in the car, and it was priceless experience for them to be involved in the practical side of their education.
    Since the war, however, my relationships with these young men had undergone a distinct change. I found I was learning from them just about as much as they were learning from me.
    The reason, of course, was that veterinary teaching had taken a leap forward. The authorities seemed to have suddenly discovered that we weren’t just horse doctors and that the vast new field of small-animal work was opening up dramatically. Advanced surgical procedures were being carried out on farm animals, too, and the students had the great advantage of being able to see such things done in the new veterinary schools with their modern clinics and operating theatres.
    New specialist textbooks were being written that made my own thumbed volumes with everything related to the horse seem like museum pieces. I was still a young man, but all the bursting knowledge I had nurtured so proudly was becoming irrelevant. Quittor, fistulous withers, poll evil, bog spavin, stringhalt—they didn’t seem to matter much anymore.
    Norman Beaumont was in his final year and was a deep well of information at which I drank greedily. But apart from the veterinary side we had a common love of books and reading.
    When we weren’t talking shop the conversation was usually on literary lines, and Norman’s companionship lightened my days and made the journeys between farms seem short.
    He was immensely likable, with a personality that was formal and dignified beyond his twenty-two years and which was only just saved from pomposity by a gentle humour. He was a solid citizen in the making if ever I saw one, and this impression was strengthened by his slightly pear-shaped physique and the fact that he was determinedly trying to cultivate a pipe.
    He was having a little trouble with the pipe, but I felt sure he would win through. I could see him plainly twenty years from now, definitely tubby, sitting around the fireside with his wife and children, puffing at that pipe which he had finally subjugated; an upright, dependable family man with a prosperous practice.
    As the dry stone walls rolled past the car windows, I got back onto the topic of the new operations.
    “And you say they are actually doing Caesarians on cows in the college clinics?”
    “Good Lord, yes.” Norman made an expansive gesture and applied a match to his pipe. “Doing them like hot cakes, it’s a regular thing.” His words would have carried more weight if he had been able to blow a puff of smoke out after them, but he had filled the bowl too tightly and, despite a fierce sucking which hollowed his cheeks and ballooned his eyeballs, he couldn’t manage a draw.
    “Gosh, you don’t know how lucky you are,” I said. “The number of hours I’ve slaved on byre floors calving cows. Sawing up calves with embryotomy wire, knocking my guts out trying to bring heads round or reach feet. I think I must have shortened my life. And if only I’d known how, I could have saved myself the trouble with a nice straightforward operation. What sort of a job is it, anyway?”
    The student gave me a superior smile. “Nothing much to it, really.” He relit his pipe, tamped the tobacco down and winced as he burned his finger. He shook his hand vigorously for a moment, then turned towards me. “They never seem to have any trouble. Takes about an hour, and no hard labour.”
    “Sounds marvellous.” I shook my head wistfully. “I’m beginning to think I was born too soon. I suppose it’s the same with ewes?”
    “Oh yes, yes, indeed,” Norman murmured airily. “Ewes, cows, sows—they’re in and out of the place every day. No problem at all. Nearly as easy as bitch spays.”
    “Ah, well, you young lads are lucky. It’s so much easier to tackle these jobs