Four years on we were still together. In fact, I couldn’t imagine wanting to be with anyone else. Jacques was studying for his Masters alongside work, he’d got the university job and I was on the last leg of my training. Between us we had criss-crossed the world many times, visiting one another, meeting each other’s families and getting to know our very different cultures.
As soon as I got back home after each visit I started saving for my next air ticket and planning my next trip. But inevitably it could only be a handful of times a year and there were key moments in each other’s lives that we missed.
This time I was combining my visit to Jacques for a short holiday with a work placement. College always encouraged us to get experience abroad and they were very happy to let me do some of my extra-mural weeks in South Africa.
I had been taken on by Thys, an old Afrikaner vet, deeply tanned with a white beard and an accent so strong I couldn’t always understand him. I had first contacted him the previous year, when I’d emailed several vets working in the area where Jacques lived, but only Thys replied, warmly inviting me to go and work with him. That summer I flew out to see Jacques and met up with Thys, who immediately took me under his wing and treated me like a daughter. He called me Jo the Englishman, and when we were out working he’d call me Englishman and so would his clients. He was a real family man and he included me in his family with his wife, Johma, and son, Johannes, taking me back to their home for cold drinks and snacks in the breaks in between jobs. Thys lived on a large farm in the middle of nowhere, and despite the long days on the road he loved to come home in the evenings to help out on the farm. Johannes ran it while he was away, looking after the cattle they were rearing for market and the horses they bred for people who wanted to compete in endurance events.
As well as the cattle and horses, Thys had some rather interesting pets, which he took great delight in showing me. He had a whole pack of pitbull terriers, which he would let out at night to guard the house. I was a little nervous of pitbulls, given that they were illegal in England and all I had ever heard were horror stories about them, but Thys’s dogs were far from savage. They were bouncy and playful, and true testament to the fact that dogs respond primarily to the way they are raised and treated.
But the pitbulls were definitely not the most unusual of Thys’s pets. In a large pen behind his house he had a caracal, a species of wild cat with long ears. He had rescued it as a kitten after a farmer had killed its mother when she was hunting his sheep. Thys had raised it and now it stood about the size of a medium dog, but because it was tame he couldn’t release it back into the wild. In addition to the caracal, Thys kept four crocodiles in a fenced area on his farm. He took great pride in his crocs, which were all fully grown and incredibly large.
‘Come meet them,’ he said to me one day.
‘Erm, really? Are they not dangerous?’ I enquired nervously.
‘Yes. But it’s a cold day. They will be slow, and you look fast,’ he joked, and walked through the gate. I hesitantly came in after him. ‘Watch where you’re going, Englishman! I can only see three of them. I don’t know where the last one is.’
I followed him, always making sure I had a clear path to the exit should something go wrong, but Thys was far from worried. He loved a bit of danger and thrived on the adrenaline.
‘Look, you can touch it,’ he exclaimed, demonstrating. The crocodile didn’t stir. ‘Go on!’
‘Wow, um, OK.’ I reached down to touch the bumpy skin at the base of the crocodile’s tail, constantly keeping an eye on his head, which thankfully didn’t move.
I turned to Thys. ‘This is really surreal and fascinating, but equally terrifying. Can we please go now?’
‘All right, Englishman.’ With a last pat he turned from the croc and we headed for the gate.
Thys was always full of surprises. He spent his life in turquoise overalls, white wellington boots and a safari hat. He saw the occasional dog and did some wildlife work, but the bulk of what he did was looking after cattle on local farms. We would rattle up the red dirt roads in his old truck while Thys talked philosophy and I tried to ask him about his practice. He’d give me a brief answer and then go back to discussing existential theories and ideas about the origins of the universe, which all fascinated him.
The farms we visited were much more basic than British farms, and there was a far greater variety in size. The average farm in the UK has between 150 and 300 cows; in South Africa they either just have a few animals or upward of 1,000.
When we arrived at each remote farmstead, Thys got me involved in everything he did and was confident about throwing me in at the deep end. We’d herd the cows from the field into a smaller yard and then shoo them down the race. (A cattle race is also known as a chute, a run or an alley, depending on which country you’re in. Both the UK and South Africa use the term ‘race’ for the narrow corridor built of parallel wooden fences into which cattle are herded, single file, so that we can line them up for examination.)
Thys and I would then go along the line of cows, checking them rectally for pregnancy, taking blood to look for any indicators of foot and mouth disease, or injecting the antigen for TB into their necks.
The problem was that these cows were wild Brahman beef cows, notorious for being jumpy and unpredictable, if not plain crazy. Brahmans have a hump and a dewlap – a big flap of skin beneath the neck – and they’re so highly strung that, unlike well-behaved (well, mostly) British cows, they regularly tried to jump out of the race and a couple always ended up hanging on the fence, front legs over and back legs still inside.
It was Thys who taught me the best way to do a pregnancy check on a cow. He insisted I go in with my left hand as the stomach is on the left-hand side of the cow, so the uterus is always pushed to the right. That makes it much easier to examine the uterus, instead of trying to contort the right arm backwards into an uncomfortable position.
It felt odd using my left hand at first, as I’m right-handed, but it was much easier to press down on the rim of the pelvis to feel for the uterus and see whether it was enlarged.
Thys was keen to give me experience, so when I mentioned to him that I hadn’t done much work with pigs and didn’t feel very confident with them he said, ‘OK, Englishman, leave it with me.’ A couple of days later, he said, ‘There’s a small rural community near here and I owe them a favour, so I offered to repay it by having you come and castrate their two boars.’
‘Their what?’
‘Boars. Don’t worry, they’ll be fine.’
When we arrived on the smallholding Thys turned to me. ‘The owners have got no money for anaesthetic so the way we’re going to do this is the old-fashioned way. We will inject the boars’ testicles with barbiturates, and that will send them off to sleep as it is absorbed into the blood. But barbiturates are pretty dangerous drugs, so time is of the essence to castrate them before too much is absorbed.’
I looked at him in disbelief. Barbiturates are used to put animals down, and using minute amounts as an anaesthetic is old school and very dangerous. Use too much and they’re dead. On the other hand, it’s a whole lot cheaper than using modern anaesthetics. I made a mental note that I would never do this when I was qualified, but at that moment Thys was in charge.
‘We’ll get them up on the tailgate of my truck and you’ll need to cut off the testicles while they’re asleep. Just try not to be too slow about it,’ Thys said, peering at me from under the rim of his safari hat.
‘Thys, I’m not sure I can do this,’ I said, looking anxiously at the emasculators he was laying out.
‘Of