Pizzles in Paradise Read online

  PIZZLES in PARADISE

  A vet’s journey

  by

  John Hicks

  Illustrated by Carol Lanfear Montgomery

  Smash words edition

  Copyright 2016 John Hicks

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  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Chapter One - Of Pigs and Christians

  Chapter Two - Ryebank Rhymes with Spank

  Chapter Three - Ferry ’Cross the Mersey

  Chapter Four - It’s Not the Leaving of Liverpool that Grieves Me

  Chapter Five - Blanco, Brasso, Bootpolish, Bullshit and ... Locusts

  Chapter Six - I Wanted to Be a Vet, but I Never Had the Brains

  Chapter Seven - Much Ado About Women

  Chapter Eight - Norwegian Interlude

  Chapter Nine - Teasers and Pizzles

  Chapter Ten - Anatomy of a Veterinary Student

  Chapter Eleven. - Student in the Dales

  Chapter Twelve - And Then There was You

  Chapter Thirteen - Horses for Courses

  Chapter Fourteen - Highland Holiday

  Chapter Fifteen - Antipodean Anticipation

  Chapter Sixteen - An Irishman, a Yorkshireman and a Dutchman

  Chapter Seventeen - What do You Think about New Zealand?

  Chapter Eighteen - What’s in a Word?

  Chapter Nineteen - I don’t Like Cricket: I Love it. Yeah!

  Chapter Twenty - Alpine Adventure

  Chapter Twenty-one - Communication is the Key

  Chapter Twenty-two - Life and Death on the Canterbury Plains

  Chapter Twenty-three - Return of the Natives

  Chapter Twenty-four - Toy Repair Man

  Chapter Twenty-five - Image is Everything

  Chapter Twenty-six - Dear Deer

  Chapter Twenty-seven - Litany and Litigation

  Chapter Twenty-eight - Holiday in Hospital

  Chapter Twenty-nine - Sold on Southland

  Chapter Thirty - Reproduction Revisited

  Chapter Thirty-one - Moon-Metal Madness

  Chapter Thirty-two - Redwater Reveries

  Chapter Thirty-three - Money for Nothing and the Kicks for Free

  Chapter Thirty-four - Valour and Discretion

  Chapter Thirty-five - Change, Success and Failure

  Chapter Thirty-six - League of Nations

  Chapter Thirty-seven - Dismantling the Barriers of Distaste

  Chapter Thirty-eight - Southland’s Secrets

  About the author and illustrator

  Dedication

  In memory of my uncle—John Longton Hicks—missing in action, Malta 1942.

  Acknowledgements

  In spite of the impression some readers may gain of my experiences at an English public school, life there was not unremittingly bad. My first acknowledgement is to my old English master, Peter Stott. His inspirational teaching has lived with me through the years.

  I also owe a great debt to those vets who tolerated my questioning presence and gave me early encouragement to pursue a career as a veterinarian: in particular Mr Betts in Liverpool and Mike Harkness of Sedbergh, with whom I spent many happy holidays. Later in life I had the privilege of working with practice principals who were either kind, supportive or progressive and I would particularly like to mention ‘Hank’ de Jong of Eltham and Craig Harrison of Menston, in Yorkshire.

  My thanks are also due to Conor Quinn, literary assessor, for his support and expertise during the daunting early stages of my first major writing project.

  Lastly I would like to thank my wife, Viv, and daughters, Emily and Morwenna, for their proofreading skills, helpful criticisms and constant encouragement; and Viv’s sister, Carol, for bringing my ideas to life with her wonderful illustrations.

  John Hicks

  July 2005

  Preface

  What is a vet? The public perception has been stimulated in recent years by the wonderful but historic James Herriot series of books and their widely viewed television adaptation. Recent documentaries and drama series have portrayed vets as they are trained and followed the first tentative steps of their careers.

  The danger of stereotyping is ever present. Let us cut to a conversation at my university hall of residence. A medical student confronts her veterinary peer across the dining table.

  ‘I can’t understand why anyone would want to be a vet. I think it’s sick preferring animals to humans.’

  To which the rejoinder given, ‘That’s absurd, it’s like saying a greengrocer prefers cabbages to humans’, is totally appropriate.

  Being a vet is not about liking animals, although it does help. For the most part it involves dealing with people and adjusting to their varied and legitimate attitudes to their animals: be they for companionship, recreation, or as a source of income.

  Vets occupy positions around the world in research, industry and government departments. Clinical practice is but one avenue open to those who have qualified with a degree in veterinary science; nevertheless it is the road that most aspiring vets initially choose to follow, the one most revealed to the general public, perhaps the one about which you think you already know.

  This is the story of my journey to find and follow that road: twisting, rough, grotesque or hilarious as you may find it.

  Apart from a couple of anecdotes which will, I hope, be categorised as jokes, each incident I have described is true to memory. Unfortunately, modern research demonstrates that this is a most unreliable beast. As a child trusting to the honesty of adults it was always a mystery to me that authors could recall dialogue many years after an event without the benefit of a recording. I suspect they did as I have: created reconstructions designed to simulate the perceptions occurring in the author’s memory. Well of course they did, didn’t they? The resultant blurring of the lines between reality and imagination may concern the scientist, for whom objectivity and accuracy are paramount. But, too often, the glorious ambivalence of the English language is vandalised by him into jargon-laden submission. Conversely an enriched language enables us to express subtler nuances of feeling more in tune with the complexity of our perceptions and thought patterns.

  This is no scientific tract, and I apologise to any seriously scientific colleagues whom I may have offended by straying from the path of strict accuracy. Veterinarians are trained to revere science beyond all other modalities, but it is my contention that the practising veterinarian as a communicator needs skills in rhetoric and hyperbole. I may, of course, have been guilty of exploiting these on occasion. Grossly untrue statements have been made when I felt the need to rub the tip of my tongue against the mucous membrane of my cheek.

  Whilst in apologetic mode: my spelling. Female readers may note that on occasions I have spelled ‘she’ as ‘he’. Oh for the lack of a gender-neutral, singular, third person designation in these days of sexual equality! One does what one can.

  To those people with whom I have shared my journey, and who happen to encounter their alter egos within these pages, please forgive me any infelicities. No harm is intended.

  Preface to second edition

  Faults and errors can be found in most manuscripts. Pizzles in Paradise proved no exception and since, with modern publishing innovations, it is relatively easy to rectif
y them, I have taken this opportunity to do so. I have made changes in the light of new knowledge; for example, in relation to the disappearance of my Uncle John in his Spitfire over Malta. I have also restored, upon request in some cases, the names of those whom I had disguised (in the mistaken belief that they would be offended). I have tightened the text in places where I felt that my writerly exuberance became carried away. Perhaps there are yet more darlings I should have murdered, and some—Dr Rinkle-Sachs comes to mind—escaped by the narrowest of margins ...

  John Hicks

  July 2016

  Chapter One

  Of Pigs and Christians

  The beautiful landscapes and relaxed and friendly people of New Zealand belong to my present homeland, but my formative years were spent in Britain, parts of which still retain a special magic for me. If I cannot physically inhabit such places I file them in a treasury of spiritual homes, free to visit at whim.

  Join me then as I glide over an idyllic rural England, across the undulating, sunlit downs. There below is the village enfolded between wooded hills. Church bells peal on the soft spring air. The recently-appointed vicar, released from the strictures of city life, strides out on his rounds, eager to acquaint himself with his new flock. He is a gentle soul.

  Soon he falls in with a little girl being towed along by a rather large dog. In keeping with this idiom his language would have to be archaic—along the lines:

  ‘Pray tell me little girl, what is your name?’

  ‘I be called Petal, surr.’

  ‘And how come you have such a charming name?’

  ‘Well it be a bit of a long story surr, but Mummy and Daddy wanted a name from the Bible for me. They were a-looking there for names when out fell a pressed rose that Daddy had given to Mummy on their first wedding anniversary, and that’s why they called me Petal.’

  ‘That, my child, is a wonderful tale. And your dog, by what name is he known?’

  ‘He be Porky, surr.’

  ‘Porky?’

  ‘Aye… He goes round shagging all the pigs.’

  This ‘story’ was Barry Hargreaves' contribution to an informal study period in the anatomy laboratory at the Liverpool University Faculty of Veterinary Science—somewhere in the late 1960s. From it you will appreciate the quality of my fellow veterinary students in those early years. But also this story, in a nutshell, exposes a paradox which I had, as a youth, long wrestled with: the ironic juxtaposition of Church of England ideals and the cruder realities of life. My veterinary education showed great promise of sorting this out for me.

  ~

  Jean Sinclair’s religion was more basic than Petal and Porky’s gentle Anglican fable; and the setting more primitive. She and her husband had wrested their land from the bush. Across the mighty Waiau river from their farm lay the Fiordland National Park, a primordial backdrop of beech forest, marvellously textured, with wreaths of mist draped over its sombre green. And so it continues, ridge after craggy ridge—bush, tussock, rock and snow—falling eventually into a wild and lonely part of the Tasman Sea.

  The house itself, to be blunt, was a mess—but a clean mess. Religious icons, framed tracts and Jesus figurines presided over masses of washing and ironing generated by several teenagers. This Jesus was of the type that would have made an arresting presence among the Jews 2000 years ago: milk white complexion, Viking-blond hair and china-blue robes.

  As I drove up the gravelled track I had other things on my mind. Jean was now widowed, but still hanging onto the farm. I couldn’t rely on much help and my immediate problem was to castrate Boris, a mature and frisky boar. This was part of a cunning plan Jean had adopted over the years to get the absolute maximum out of her boars. Phase one was to use her boar as a sire over her sows for a few seasons until he was old and knackered. Everyone knows that boar meat has a taint that renders it particularly unpalatable so, once the siring was over, phase two was to remove the boar’s testicles. After a month or so without testicles the boar taint was supposed to disappear. Phase three involved slaughtering the boar and turning him into sausages; phase four, gagging them down until your family rebelled; phase five, donating the remainder to ‘friends’.

  Pigs are awkward animals to handle at the best of times and in this case Boris had sole possession of an acre of bush and scrub. I immediately foresaw problems with the plan to ‘walk him behind a gate and give him his injections’ there. Unlike other domesticated animals, reliable sedatives that could be injected intramuscularly into pigs just weren’t around at this stage of world history. You were meant to use a vein. The textbook solution was to restrain the head with a noose round the upper jaw and tie it to a post, followed by an intravenous injection into an ear vein. Ear veins are temptingly visible on a pig’s ear, but they are fragile and positioned on a very sensitive part of its anatomy. Putting a large dose of anaesthetic into the ear of a large boar just isn’t practical. The first prick elicits a forceful and lightning-fast headshake likely to snap the stoutest cord, and the hands of the would-be anaesthetist are uncomfortably close to razor-sharp tusks.

  Fortunately, an ingenious trick has been devised for just this situation. Concentrated anaesthetic can be injected into the substance of a pig’s testicle with surprisingly little resentment, and from here it is readily absorbed into the system. Once the pig is nicely comatose the testicles can be removed—simultaneously removing the source of anaesthesia—and the pig duly recovers. I had used this trick with success on smaller pigs induced to run headfirst into metal bins which were up-ended, pig-and-all—and in a perfect exhibition of strength and timing—by a stalwart farmer. This had given me safe access to the relevant anatomy. Somehow I couldn’t see this working with a 300-kilo Boris and a fifty-kilo Jean. The gate plan, however, seemed equally flawed.

  Boris rubbed contentedly against the concrete post of the fence once he was positioned there, but it was immediately obvious that the gate—even with Jean’s weight behind it and allowing for Archimedes’ principle of leverage—was not going to hold him once the action started.

  At this stage one of Jean’s sons turned up with what seemed a possible solution. Boris was squeezed between the fence and gate with strong nylon webbing tie-downs, tightened by ratchets. The pipe gate bent ominously around Boris as the pressure was applied. It was obvious that he was getting a tad suspicious by this stage. I hastened to inject the anaesthetic solution through his scrotum, knowing that there would be no second chance.

  There wasn’t. At the first prick on that tender skin, Boris started to effect his escape. As I frantically pressed the plunger of the syringe he crouched down, snout under the gate, and with one disdainful lurch lifted the gate off its hinges. The webbing ties snapped as though they were cotton thread and Boris took off for the refuge of some trees. All was not lost; I had injected about a quarter of a dose before he was totally free. Before long we realised that he bore us no malice and that, for him, this was merely a matter of personal freedom.

  My scattered assistants were persuaded to regroup and we were able to coax a by now slightly wobbly Boris into the woolshed and up a narrow race—an idea that we should have tried in the first place (and which proved entirely satisfactory for Boris’ successor).

  As the deed was completed, more of Jean’s children and friends rolled up in a beat-up Holden and joined the spectators. This was a devoutly Christian family and, although I was aware that Christianity comes in many forms, I was surprised by the directness of the question asked by a young, sweet, and obviously not-so-innocent teenage girl.

  ‘Will he still be able to have a hard-on?’ My mind raced, this was not the sort of information to be found in any veterinary textbooks of which I was aware, but vets are just expected to know these things. As I fumbled for words Jean came to my rescue:

  ‘Not for a wee while, dear.’

  Which was, of course, the perfect answer.

  The kindness and gratitude of some clients knows no bounds. A month later a large package was left on
my desk at work. In retrospect it probably signalled a family rebellion. Boris didn’t taste too good.

  Bess, our dog, enjoyed the contents immensely.

  Chapter Two

  Ryebank Rhymes with Spank

  I can’t remember whether they used our Christian or surnames at Ryebank Primary School, but it sure as hell didn’t matter. The day started peacefully enough with morning prayers, but their message of love and mercy never seemed to reach the zealous hearts of the teachers who controlled our lives.

  For joining your Os up at the bottom, getting less than five out of ten in a spelling test and other real or imagined peccadilloes, it was the flat side of a ruler on the backs of the knees (all little boys wore shorts) or palms of the hands. For mass punishment, where most of the class were deemed to have under-performed, both hands had to be held out and, with an economy of effort, a mistress could muscularly whack her way down a whole row of cringing pupils. The psychological effect of this was more telling than the temporary physical discomfort it caused. More serious infringements merited the sharp side of a ruler across the back of the hand. An osteal clunk may lack the auditory appeal of a slap, but to the cognoscenti it is an infinitely more effective punishment.

  Hurry, little boy! If you don’t finish those sums soon you won’t be allowed to go into the next room with Mrs Longbottom to hear the story. Look, you’re the last one left and you can already hear the others shrieking at the antics of Professor Brainstorm. You haven’t a clue, have you? No one knows why you don’t understand ‘simple’ arithmetic. It will be a while before someone links those days of earache you suffer with deafness; longer still before you are released from your cotton-wool-world of incomprehension. Ten sums to do, some of the numbers are big. Three numbers long. There’s Miss Rowe busily marking all the other children’s answers.