All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot Read Free Book Online

moving pall of blue smoke with Clancy as always bringing up the rear.
    “There he is!” Siegfried exclaimed. “Would you believe it? At the rate he’s going he’ll get to the surgery around three o’clock. Well we won’t be there and it’s his own fault.” He looked at the great curly-coated animal tripping along, a picture of health and energy. “Well, I suppose we’d have been wasting our time examining that dog in any case. There’s nothing really wrong with him.”
    For a moment he paused, lost in thought, then he turned to me.
    “He does look pretty lively, doesn’t he?”

5
    “T HEM MASTICKS,” SAID M R. Pickersgill judicially, “is a proper bugger.”
    I nodded my head in agreement that his mastitis problem was indeed giving cause for concern; and reflected at the same time that while most farmers would have been content with the local word “felon” it was typical that Mr. Pickersgill should make a determined if somewhat inaccurate attempt at the scientific term.
    He didn’t usually go too far off the mark—most of his efforts were near misses or bore obvious evidence of their derivation—but I could never really fathom where he got the masticks. I did know that once he fastened on to an expression it never changed; mastitis had always been “them masticks” with him and it always would be. And I knew, too, that nothing would ever stop him doggedly trying to be right. This, because Mr. Pickersgill had what he considered to be a scholastic background. He was a man of about sixty and when in his teens he had attended a two week course of instruction for agricultural workers at Leeds University. This brief glimpse of the academic life had left an indelible impression on his mind, and it was as if the intimation of something deep and true behind the facts of his everyday work had kindled a flame in him which had illumined his subsequent life.
    No capped and gowned don ever looked back to his years among the spires of Oxford with more nostalgia than did Mr. Pickersgill to his fortnight at Leeds and his conversation was usually laced with references to a godlike Professor Malleson who had apparently been in charge of the course.
    “Ah don’t know what to make of it,” he continued. “In ma college days I was allus told that you got a big swollen bag and dirty milk with them masticks but this must be another kind. Just little bits of flakes in the milk off and on—neither nowt nor something, but I’m right fed up with it, I’ll tell you.”
    I took a sip from the cup of tea which Mrs. Pickersgill had placed in front of me on the kitchen table. “Yes, it’s very worrying the way it keeps going on and on. I’m sure there’s a definite factor behind it all—I wish I could put my finger on it.”
    But in fact I had a good idea what was behind it. I had happened in at the little byre late one afternoon when Mr. Pickersgill and his daughter Olive were milking their ten cows. I had watched the two at work as they crouched under the row of roan and red backs and one thing was immediately obvious; while Olive drew the milk by almost imperceptible movements of her fingers and with a motionless wrist, her father hauled away at the teats as though he was trying to ring in the new year.
    This insight coupled with the fact that it was always the cows Mr. Pickersgill milked that gave trouble was enough to convince me that the chronic mastitis was of traumatic origin.
    But how to tell the farmer that he wasn’t doing his job right and that the only solution was to learn a more gentle technique or let Olive take over all the milking?
    It wouldn’t be easy because Mr. Pickersgill was an impressive man. I don’t suppose he had a spare penny in the world but even as he sat there in the kitchen in his tattered, collarless flannel shirt and braces he looked, as always, like an industrial tycoon. You could imagine that massive head with its fleshy cheeks, noble brow and serene eyes looking out from the