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

financial pages of the Times. Put him in a bowler and striped trousers and you’d have the perfect chairman of the board.
    I was very chary of affronting such natural dignity and anyway, Mr. Pickersgill was fundamentally a fine stocksman. His few cows, like all the animals of that fast-dying breed of small farmer, were fat and sleek and clean. You had to look after your beasts when they were your only source of income and somehow Mr. Pickersgill had brought up a family by milk production eked out by selling a few pigs and the eggs from his wife’s fifty hens.
    I could never quite work out how they did it but they lived, and they lived graciously. All the family but Olive had married and left home but there was still a rich decorum and harmony in that house. The present scene was typical. The farmer expounding gravely, Mrs. Pickersgill bustling about in the background, listening to him with quiet pride. Olive, too, was happy. Though in her late thirties, she had no fears of spinsterhood because she had been assiduously courted for fifteen years by Charlie Hudson from the Darrowby fish shop and though Charlie was not a tempestuous suitor there was nothing flighty about him and he was confidently expected to pop the question over the next ten years or so.
    Mr. Pickersgill offered me another buttered scone and when I declined he cleared his throat a few times as though trying to find words. “Mr. Herriot,” he said at last, “I don’t like to tell nobody his job, but we’ve tried all your remedies for them masticks and we’ve still got trouble. Now when I studied under Professor Malleson I noted down a lot of good cures and I’d like to try this ’un. Have a look at it.”
    He put his hand in his hip pocket and produced a yellowed slip of paper almost falling apart at the folds. “It’s an udder salve. Maybe if we gave the bags a good rub with it it’d do t’trick.”
    I read the prescription in the fine copperplate writing. Camphor, eucalyptus, zinc oxide—a long list of the old familiar names. I couldn’t help feeling a kind of affection for them but it was tempered by a growing disillusion. I was about to say that I didn’t think rubbing anything on the udder would make the slightest difference when the farmer groaned loudly.
    The action of reaching into his hip pocket had brought on a twinge of his lumbago and he sat very upright, grimacing with pain.
    “This bloody old back of mine! By gaw, it does give me some stick, and doctor can’t do nowt about it. I’ve had enough pills to make me rattle but ah get no relief.”
    I’m not brilliant but I do get the odd blinding flash and I had one now.
    “Mr. Pickersgill,” I said solemnly, “You’ve suffered from that lumbago ever since I’ve known you and I’ve just thought of something. I believe I know how to cure it.”
    The farmer’s eyes widened and he stared at me with a childlike trust in which there was no trace of scepticism. This could be expected, because just as people place more reliance on the words of knacker men and meal travellers than their vets’ when their animals are concerned it was natural that they would believe the vet rather than their doctor with their own ailments.
    “You know how to put me right?” he said faintly.
    “I think so, and it has nothing to do with medicine. You’ll have to stop milking.”
    “Stop milking! What the ’ell…?”
    “Of course. Don’t you see, it’s sitting crouched on that little stool night and morning every day of the week that’s doing it. You’re a big chap and you’ve got to bend to get down there—I’m sure it’s bad for you.”
    Mr. Pickersgill gazed into space as though he had seen a vision. “You really think…”
    “Yes, I do. You ought to give it a try, anyway. Olive can do the milking. She’s always saying she ought to do it all.”
    “That’s right, Dad,” Olive chimed in. “I like milking, you know I do, and it’s time you gave it up—you’ve done it ever since