With this confidence in myself I was prepared to wade in to whatever was presented to me. But much more than this: sadly the modern generation of graduates has had the fear of God drilled into it so much about potential client litigation and disciplinary action from the RCVS, that they are scared to do anything they have not been shown to do many times previously and performed under direct supervision on several more occasions.
This first stint as a locum led to another four weeks in the same practice but on the large animal side. After the practice owner came back from his vacation he was amazed by how much more money I’d made than he usually would, simply from following practice pricing policy, so I requested and got a pay rise from £50 a week to the princely sum of £80 which was top dollar for a graduate in those days (how things have changed). Clearly I had justified their faith in me. The first story in this book relates my experiences on the farms during that happy time.
After this first taste of employment was over I had already found a more permanent position in a very up-market small animal practice in South West London, but despite feeling I did a good job, I was replaced after six months because my down-to-earth attitude didn’t really fit in with the practice philosophy and posh clientele. However, breaking a window with a football (from the inside!) probably didn’t help my case.
At this point I realised that I was missing working in the country and on farms and moved to a mixed practice in Nottinghamshire mining country. The word grim is not descriptive enough for a village that didn’t seem to have moved on since DH Lawrence lived there and wrote his novels about the area. Plus I was put in digs with an a ogre of a woman who would not let my girlfriend visit and whose cooking made my pathetic efforts as a bachelor look like haute cuisine. I didn’t feel I had the support I needed from the practice either so, realising I’d made a mistake, I gave in my notice and left after a month of purgatory.
So on to another mixed practice in the Somerset. By this time I was beginning to realise that the idyll of working in the country was not what I had dreamed of and was already steering towards specialising in small animal work. I was finding the difference between large animal and small animal work difficult to reconcile.
I may spend a day mainly dealing with preventative herd health or routine hoof trimming and disbudding and, all too often, the interesting work of in-depth diagnosis, treatment and surgery were impossible due to economics. I would then return, sweaty and dirty, with no time to freshen up, to an evening surgery where cases needed extensive working up, but I didn’t have time after all day on the farms and where client expectation was sometimes beyond what was practically possible at any cost, which required a totally different mind-set. I realised that I found the greatest challenges and interest from internal medicine and surgery and opportunities for these are rare in farm practice. I enjoyed my stay there, but due to the conflict between the different workloads and because I felt I was being taken advantage of with unfair large animal work rotas which were not in the original job description, I left after six months. I’ll admit this was with a little push because I wouldn’t give in and toe the line.
Next stop was a practice in Kent which was one hundred per cent small animal and, although I also enjoyed my stay there, there was, as in other practices, always a conflict between what I wanted to do and the restrictive practice philosophy. This position was anyway only a temporary position in my mind as I had already found the ideal practice in West Middlesex, but couldn’t start there for several weeks.
So my last period of employment ultimately became my own practice. Having had six jobs now in less than eighteen months, I went back to the future as it were and was in sole-charge of a branch of a larger practice. The practice principal, the aforementioned Clive Matthews, had a similar ethos and philosophy on life and practice to myself and we got on famously without the conflicts that had occurred when working with others whose working practices I did not always agree with. I was at last again given my clinical freedom. Clive and I agreed to differ: if we had opposing opinions on a case he never interfered and he let me do things my way. If it meant making the odd mistake from which I learned, then this was accepted, indeed encouraged, and I revelled in this working environment. It confirmed what I’d always really known: that I wanted to work by myself from now on, being able to make all my own decisions and this was where I wanted to stay.
The fact that my girlfriend was also now living in the area and the opportunity to regularly go and see my beloved Arsenal play, in no small measure helped with this decision of course! I made Clive an offer on the branch surgery, which he very generously accepted, although the price was barely market value, and we remained friends and co-operated together until his recent death. When the day came for takeover I proudly replaced his nameplate for mine and the rest, as they say, is history.
Cross country runner
Being a fraction short of six foot yet weighing only a tad over ten stone in my cotton socks, I’ll be the first to admit that I am not built for large animal work. These are proportions which are not conducive to wrestling recalcitrant steers or pulling out calves reluctant to face the outside world. Brute strength is not everything as I know there are some tiny female vets out there who can perform calvings like shelling peas, but clearly they possess skills that I never had. I have long realised that my future lay in small animal practice, but for a short while after qualification I tried to live the dream of working as a country vet. The trouble was that my physique was the source of amusement for the farm hands. They were not impressed that I regularly cycled over one hundred miles in a day or could run a marathon in well under three hours, and whereas I consider, somewhat vainly maybe, that I have the frame of a finely honed athlete, to them I was just a weed.
Their world was one where the biggest and the toughest got the most respect and a vet who couldn’t restrain a cow single-handed while trimming its foot at the same time was not made of the right stuff. For the events they preferred to prove their prowess, maybe like tossing hay bales with a pitchfork or arm wrestling while drinking twelve pints in the Ploughman’s Arms, I was not even on the start line. Also, being a fairly shy young man from a rather protected background, although pretty self-confident, I was not (maybe somewhat surprisingly after five years at vet school) at ease with the excessive usage of what you may call agricultural language and had my leg pulled for that. However, one particular day on the farm was to change their perception of this skinny, polite vet.
A long hot afternoon was in store at Avondale Farm. There were twenty or so calves to disbud and a number of pregnancy diagnoses to perform, as well as few odd problems left to tidy up. Things didn’t get off too well when I was greeted by the farmer’s wife with the words, “We were expecting Mr Jones, but I supposed you’ll have to do”, in an ‘Are you sure you’re up to the job?’, sort of way. We began with the P.D.s and one by one the cows were led into the rather fragile makeshift race that led to the crush. I started off dressed in my calving gown over a shirt, but, as this was a summer’s day that makes global warming now look old hat, I was soon soaked through with sweat. In the interests of comfort, I stripped to the waist to finish off the last few cows, much to the mirth of the farmer and his especially muscular son who suggested, “You’d better not turn sideways Martin or you’ll disappear”.
The crush race, which was partly made up of a farm gate secured to a fence by bailer twine and had been creaking under the strain of its reluctant captives, finally gave way and a prize cow, buoyed by her sudden release, headed at a canter down the narrow lane with just a short distance to go to the busy trunk road. Farmer and son set off in pursuit, but the more they chased the faster Buttercup made her bid for freedom towards the speeding traffic. Realising that the only way to save the day was to try and cut her off, I scrambled over the fence into the adjoining fields and ran parallel to the fleeing cow, vaulting the odd gate, until I had overtaken the escapee just short of the end of the lane. I then jumped back over the fence to drive her back.
Unfortunately, unbeknown to me, what looked like a firm bank turned out to be a deep ditch filled with nettles into which I plunged, bare-chested. Now you know what one nettle