Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

© Bruce Fogle 2020

Cover layout design Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Cover photographs © Author (man’s portrait), Shutterstock.com (all other images)

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Bruce Fogle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008424305

Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008424336

Version: 2020-09-28

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Dedication

To the kind staff and volunteers at Hearing Dogs for Deaf People (www.hearingdogs.org.uk) who provide such incredible dog buddies for people, young and old, that find themselves isolated by impaired hearing. And to the diligent, dedicated people at Humane Society International, especially those in Canada (www.friendsofhsi.ca). You operate under the radar, sometimes in dreadful circumstances, but you do brilliant work defending animals worldwide.

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Note to Readers

5  Dedication

6  Contents

7  Introduction

8  1

9 2

10 3

11 4

12 5

13 6

14 7

15 8

16 9

17 10

18 11

19 12

20 13

21 14

22 15

23 16

24 17

25  18

26  19

27  20

28  21

29  22

30  23

31  24

32  25

33  26

34  27

35  28

36  29

37  30

38  31

39  32

40  33

41  Postscript

42  Acknowledgements

43  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Introduction

Another overcast, moody, gunmetal grey day. London, 1970. Drizzle. I am a 26-year-old Canadian, fresh out of the Ontario Veterinary College, working as an assistant in a veterinary practice in Knightsbridge in the heart of the city. I’m here because … well, I don’t actually know why I’m here.

It’s far from home. That’s exciting. I speak their language, so I can make my way around, get a job, have fun. I think of myself as British. At home in Toronto I grew up singing ‘God Save the Queen’ as often as ‘O Canada’. The Queen is on my Canadian money. I vote for Members of Parliament, not Congressmen. But three months in London has me questioning that assumption. What I’m learning is that although I share their language, I don’t share how they think.

A distinguished looking man in his sixties, in a tailored pinstripe suit, brings in his dog, a sad, grey-faced, female black Labrador, for me to put down. Not a twitch of emotion from him. His mother comes with him. Except it isn’t his mother. It’s his nanny. Not his children’s nanny. His nanny. The woman who looked after him when he was a child. Where is his wife? His grown children? Why is there no feeling, no passion?

I am already feeling a bit antsy today, a bit out of place.

‘Bruce, I’ve received a complaint about you,’ my boss Brian Singleton politely but firmly tells me when he arrives at his surgery. ‘Meet me in my office at 8.45.’

I can’t finish my coffee, can’t do anything but go over in my mind all the dogs and cats I have seen in the last few days, trying to work out where I’d made such a grievous diagnosis that the animal’s owner had gone out of their way to complain about me. I have limited clinical experience, so my confidence in my ability to diagnose and treat effectively is years away. At that time in my life, I still reacted to events. I didn’t yet have the ability, the maturity, to understand that life is more likely to go in the direction you want it to go in if you make things happen, not just respond to stuff.

That’s it, I think. I’ve killed someone’s pet, but if I go back to Canada now, I can start afresh and no one there will ever know what’s happened.

I meet Brian in his office.

‘Bruce, the lady who you saw yesterday, Mrs Pilkington, has complained about your attire.’

‘My clothes?’ I burst with relief.

Brian wears a dark suit and tie to work and expects me to as well. I do. I have no problem with that. The Beatles wear ties. My own father wears a tie when he crawls under our summer cottage each spring to turn the water supply back on.

‘She didn’t like my tie?’ I mock, and Brian replies, ‘You were wearing sandals. She doesn’t feel, nor do I, that sandals are appropriate footwear at a veterinary surgery.’

This is 1970. In Canada, I had flower decals on my car. My suits are velvet. My trousers have flares. My thick chestnut-coloured hair tumbles down my neck. Of course I wear sandals. How on earth could that be so reprehensible that someone would complain to my boss? And why would Brian agree?

I don’t get it. It is another seed in my mind that although we speak the same language, there really is a gulf between the English and me.

I come from a demonstrative family. The Fogles can be reserved but my personality comes from my mother’s side, the Breslins, and they don’t do reserve. They can be loud. They laugh outrageously. They question authority. They argue for the simple joy of words. They cry liberally. And when you need emotional support, they’re with you, like an infantry platoon of aunts, uncles and cousins.

So when it comes to putting down this Labrador, the dog’s sweet, gentle face looking up at me, at her owner and at her owner’s nanny, I feel just awful. Why doesn’t the owner feel as upset as I do? How can this man be so cold on such a poignant day, when his dog is to die? Why isn’t his family with him? What is it with you Brits?

I was in my twenties before Canada had her own red maple leaf flag. The schools my brother and I went to in Toronto, Allenby Public School and Earl Haig Collegiate, both named after World War I British field marshals, flew either the Union Flag or the Red Ensign, a flag with the Union Flag in the corner and Canada’s coat of arms on its red background. English-speaking Canadians of my era were raised more British than the British. The Queen was my queen. Britain’s Parliament was the mother of all parliaments. I read Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy at school. I knew the names of every British prime minister of the twentieth century. That’s why when I arrived in Britain, I thought I understood the British.

But inside I really wasn’t British and part of me already knew that. My father was born in Glasgow, so I proudly claimed patriality (and I continue to feel a strong affiliation with Scotland). His family emigrated to Canada in 1907 when he was a year old, but enough of Scotland remained in him for him to name me Bruce, my brother Robert and our dog Angus. My father’s grandfather, a blacksmith, was born in a town with different names in German (Lasdein), Russian (Lozdzee), Polish (Lozdzeije), Lithuanian (Lazdijai) and Yiddish (Lazdei). The Fogles called the town Lazdei because they were part of the great Jewish emigration out of Eastern Europe that began in the 1870s. My mother’s family, the Breslins, were also part of that biblical exodus. They came to Canada from what they called in Yiddish Tolotshin, the Lithuanians called Talacynas, the Russians Tolochin. They too were part of the Great Other that arrived in Britain, the United States and Canada at the end of the nineteenth century. And as much as my parents’ families had become part of the weft of twentieth-century Canadian life, prominent in medicine and business, I knew I was an outsider, that I wasn’t part of Canada’s founding British or French heritage.

Seeing this man and his nanny, both seemingly emotionless, the nanny telling the man to go out in the hall while I give his dog a lethal injection, the man doing so without question, hits me like a bolt. I’m not part of them. I don’t want to be part of them.

Yet I think I also intuitively understood even then that what I was watching was a performance. An act. A veneer. Learned behaviour. British theatre. I didn’t yet fully understand how deep the relationship can be between us and other animals, but I instinctively knew it was impossible for this man not to feel some emotion at the end of his dog’s life, or for this woman not to feel deeply for a man she had known since his infancy. There is a common thread of compassion running through all cultures. It is part of all of us.

It would also be years before I understood that the people I was meeting in Knightsbridge were but a sliver of Britain’s then class-addled culture, a strand that, but for a few diehards (blowhards?), has now almost disappeared.

During the following decades, like some of Britain’s colonial administrators, inch by inch I went native. (I see the same happening today with many of my American clients, posted to London by their financial institutions, initially despairing that Britain isn’t America, then never wanting to leave.) It didn’t take long, certainly no more than a decade, for me to accept the weather. Accepting the Brits, going whole hog and becoming British, took longer. It was easiest with, I hate to use the term, ‘real people’. Almost the first Londoner to invite me out for a drink was Mick, one of the local dustmen. He was someone I could relax with. With other clients I saw at the clinic, it took longer for me to warm to them.

In my first years as a practising vet, I would discover that although I had a good grounding in the mechanics of medicine and how to sensibly diagnose and treat animals, l had no training at all in how to understand either my patients or the people who brought them to me. I didn’t yet realise how uplifting pets are, how they make us smile and feel good. This is a story of how someone who was trained that animals have no feelings or emotions, at one of the best veterinary schools in the world, came to understand how dreadfully wrong that part of my education was. This is a memoir of my first years as a vet in what was the most exciting time and place to be one, London in the early 1970s. It is an outsider’s view of the Britain that then existed, how that outsider went native and found a perfect home, and how caring for animals evolved from ‘make do and mend’ to the more sophisticated but not necessarily wholly better level it has reached today.

1

There is a rhythm to life that is greater than years. A natural order. We repeat our mistakes because evolution is too foolish to retain accumulated wisdom. But joyously we experience pleasures through ever-repeated personal discoveries: a dog’s head on your lap, a cat rubbing against your leg. Life is exciting when we are young because there is so much to find out about. Some of us are lucky enough to continue to feel that way even when we are no longer young.

At the end of my formal education I was in London, embarking on, although I didn’t understand it at the time, a transition in life. I could be doing what I ‘should’ be doing, what my family expected me to do, setting up life as a working vet in Toronto. But I wasn’t. I still don’t know whether I took the opportunity to come to London because it was an exciting prospect or because it was an opportunity to get away from my family, to be myself, whoever that was. A niggle in me says it was probably the latter.

Through a sequence of chances – a Canadian travel fellowship to work at Regent’s Park Zoo followed by an unplanned meeting with Brian Singleton, a vet with a practice in central London – I was now on a two-year contract working for Brian. His surgery, five minutes’ walk from Harrods, was from my Canadian perspective a tired, old shoebox, although I soon learned it was better equipped than most other London surgeries. On the corner of Pont Street and Cadogan Lane, the only indication that it was a veterinary surgery was a seven-by-nine-inch brass plaque with the words ‘Woodrow & Singleton Veterinary Surgeons’ on it. That was the maximum size allowed by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS), and as Brian was president of that organisation, he knew and respected the regulations. The RCVS was, in effect, the vet’s union. Only union members could practise veterinary medicine and I had become a member, an MRCVS. That was a wonderfully grand way to add five letters after my name by doing no more than pay my union fees.

The reception room’s two frontages of ceiling-to-floor shop windows were defended by always closed yellowing Venetian blinds. Marbled blue linoleum covered the floor. Four fluorescent strip lights clung to the ceiling. It never smelled of animals, only of cigarette smoke wafting from the bookkeeper’s office to the right of the reception area. Along each windowed wall were four grey plastic and metal chairs. By the back wall was the receptionist’s desk, with a passageway immediately to its right to the narrow stairs leading to the first floor ‘consultation’ rooms. I thought it endearing that we ‘consulted’ rather than ‘examined’. To the right of that passageway were even narrower stairs leading to the basement housing the kennels, treatment and operating rooms. X-ray developing was in a cupboard on a landing going downstairs. The X-ray machine itself was in the bookkeeper’s office. When I wanted to take an X-ray, she vacated and puffed in reception.

There is something inherently good about people who choose to spend their discretionary income caring for pets. That too was a discovery that would take time to make. You can rightfully argue that pets parasitise our hardwired, lifelong need to nurture. But if that’s your argument, then houseplants and gardens are parasites too. For whatever reason people kept pets, from my first experience in clinical practice I enjoyed meeting owners as much as I did their pets. That doesn’t mean I understood them or found everyone easy to deal with.

Appointments were scheduled at fifteen-minute intervals, with the nurse on reception buzzing me upstairs via the intercom phone with who was next. Pat House, Mr Singleton’s head nurse, buzzed me. Mrs Wax has arrived.

‘Oy vey, those stairs,’ Mrs Wax exclaims as she walks wearily into my consulting room, carrying her dogs’ medical files, given to her by Pat.

‘I’m only seeing you because Mr Singleton isn’t here,’ she says, handing me the files.

It’s true that some people look like their dogs. Dogs are extensions of our personalities, although occasionally they also fill gaps – they behave or look the way we would like to if we could. Mrs Wax is a woman with a shiny helmet of lacquered black hair, not one strand of which I bet is ever out of place. Her three black toy Poodles follow at her heels, keeping her between them and me. They have their hair cut for showing and look like canine topiary. Back then, I thought that a dog’s hair coiffed into pom poms and rosettes was no more than just stupid looking. It didn’t take much time before I realised those haircuts were demeaning to what is a dazzling breed of dog.

Another thing. Mrs Wax is Jewish. I know her, where she is from, how she behaves. I might not understand other people I meet but I understand her. Her home looks like Versailles, except all the furniture is covered in plastic. If she has a daughter, my parents will steer me elsewhere. With their ancestry in the Baltic States, my parents’ families pretentiously look down on ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Jews, the ones with a passion for gold-plated water taps. They are ‘nouveau’. That was a way of thinking I hadn’t yet completely lost.

‘Mitzi has kennel cough,’ Mrs Wax tells me.

‘How do you know?’ I ask, trying to mask the superiority I feel. I am the professional she has come to for advice. She is simply Mitzi’s owner and I think she shouldn’t make her own diagnosis.

‘How do I know? Do you need a veterinary diploma to know when a dog has kennel cough? I showed her last week. There was a coughing dog. She’s coughing!’

‘Putz!’ I hear her mutter under her breath.

‘Are they all coughing?’ I ask.

‘No, young man, but they will be unless you do something.’

‘Let’s have a look and a listen,’ I say, and ask Mrs Wax to lift Mitzi onto the examination table. As she does so, Mitzi produces a soft, moist cough.

I look at Mitzi’s file and see she is eight years old and spayed. Her two younger canine companions, also females, are not spayed.

Mitzi’s eyes are bright, her teeth surprisingly clear of tartar and her ears devoid of the forest of hair I expect to see. The glands in her neck feel normal, but when I pinch her windpipe she gags and coughs, a cardinal sign of irritation typically caused by one of the bacteria or viruses that, lumped together, get called ‘kennel cough’.

I put my stethoscope in my ears and listen to her lungs. They sound moist and fruity. Then I concentrate on her heart, and the valve sounds are muffled and loud. I have a 33 rpm LP of canine heart sounds that I’d brought with me from Canada. This is my cutting-edge continuing education and according to that LP, Mitzi has a grade six out of six heart murmur. The maximum. She is in the earliest stage of heart failure.

‘Let’s have a listen to the others,’ I say, and when I examine them, their hearts and lungs sound normal and they just look at me querulously as I pinch their throats.

‘Mitzi may have picked up kennel cough at the show and the others might be incubating it, so >tetracycline antibiotics and honey in their water can help. You should keep them away from other dogs for the next three weeks. No dog shows. But Mitzi has a loud heart murmur. She’s coughing because she has heart disease and her heart’s not coping very well.’

Mrs Wax looks shocked.

‘That’s impossible. She just won the Veteran Class. Last week! The judge said she is in excellent condition. Where’s Mr Singleton? I want to see Mr Singleton.’

‘He’s working at the Royal College today, but he’s back tomorrow. I’d like to start Mitzi on digitalis and Lasix* now and you can see Mr Singleton tomorrow.’

‘Don’t you start any treatment until I know what’s wrong with my dog!’ she warns. ‘I want a real vet, not some apprentice who doesn’t know the difference between kennel cough and a heart attack.’ She lifts Mitzi from the floor and holds her tightly to her chest. I am about to tell her it is important we start treatment today, but when I look at Mrs Wax’s face, wet mascara is streaming from her eyes.

‘I’ll buzz Pat and arrange an appointment with Mr Singleton for tomorrow morning.’

When Brian offered me a job I asked my professor of surgery from Ontario, Jim Archibald, for his advice. Jim was on a year’s sabbatical at the Royal College of Surgeons. ‘Woodrow and Singleton is the best practice I know of,’ Jim explained. ‘It’s a good place to make your mistakes, four thousand miles from home.’ He added, ‘You’ll establish a good ethical basis for your future.’ Of course, I was too green to appreciate that Brian would have asked Jim about me.

Affable, angular Cuthbert Erskine ‘Woody’ Woodrow, then in his late sixties, godson of Lady Cadogan, was first president of the British Small Animal Veterinary Association, a relatively new organisation of companion animal vets that was less than fifteen years old. Its American equivalent, the American Animal Hospital Association, had been founded far earlier, in the 1930s. Woody had great presence but was also relaxed and approachable. He had just retired but still came in occasionally to do Saturday morning consults. Handsome, reserved Brian Singleton, in his late forties, was its third president, a world-respected orthopaedic surgeon and my boss. Vets in Canada wore white lab coats or green scrub tops when they examined pets. Woody and Brian consulted in dark Savile Row suits.

The following day, Mrs Wax returns and sees Brian, who admits Mitzi for more tests. After I finish my morning consultations, I go downstairs, where Mitzi is housed in one of the recently installed stainless steel kennels, not in isolation.

‘Bruce, the patient doesn’t have Battersea Cough.’†

Brian never calls pets by their names. They are always ‘patients’.

‘I’ve given her 20 milligrams of Lasix,’ he says. ‘Pat, please walk her in the mews every hour. Bruce, take lateral and VD X-rays of the chest.’ VD means ‘ventrodorsal’, with Mitzi on her back. He then goes back upstairs to attend to Royal College matters.

‘Did Mrs Wax give you a hard time yesterday?’ Pat asks as I carry Mitzi up from the basement to the X-ray room.

‘She didn’t believe my diagnosis,’ I answer.

‘That’s because you look like you’re fourteen,’ Pat giggles.

In 1970, the Royal College of Nursing refused to allow the word ‘nurse’ to be used by anyone other than a member of that association, so ever-smiling, over-permed Pat was a Registered Animal Nursing Auxiliary, or RANA, one of the first, the even-keeled mother-hen of Pont Street. Assisting Pat was Jane, a younger RANA, and Brenda, a trainee.

‘You’ll look old soon enough after dealing with the people you’ll meet here,’ she smiles, as we enter the accountant’s smoke-filled room to use the ex-hospital X-ray machine.

‘Gertrude, we’ll just be five minutes,’ Pat tells the surgery accountant, who picks up her pack of cigarettes and lighter and leaves to have another cigarette in the waiting room. Gertrude, in her late fifties with skin like cracked china, is also the receptionist when the RANAs are busy with pets. She reminds me of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Throughout my time at Pont Street, I simply avoid her.

We don lead aprons and while Pat holds Mitzi, I place the X-ray cassette on the table then pull on lead-lined gauntlets and take Mitzi back while Pat adjusts the machine’s settings. I lay Mitzi on her side, stretching her out, and when the dog stops coughing, Pat, standing behind me, clicks the dial in her hand. I place a new cassette on the table, stretching Mitzi out once more, this time on her back, and once more when her coughing stops, Pat clicks.

Speaking soothingly to Mitzi, telling her what a good girl she is, Pat takes her back to her kennel while I stop off at the darkroom, the closet on the stairs landing, and under a red light remove the X-ray film from the cassette, slide it in a hanger, then dip it in developer until it looks developed, then in water and finally fixer. I hang the X-rays over a radiator until they are dry and go back downstairs.

‘So how do I make myself look older?’ I ask Pat.

She smiles back and after a pause replies.

‘Have an unhappy love affair.’

‘No. Be serious. What should I do to make people see that I know my medicine?’

Pat pauses once more, then looks up at me and with a seriousness I haven’t seen before replies, ‘You vets are taught that dogs and cats are cases. Well, they’re not. They are family. People’s sons and daughters. Their husbands and wives. Don’t preach to people. Listen. Then they’ll think you’re older.’

That isn’t the first important lesson I learn from nurses. Long before vets understood what was happening in small animal clinics, nurses knew. My profession is still, by culture, masculine.

The X-rays show typical changes brought on by valvular heart disease, fluid throughout the lungs. After Brian looks at the X-rays, he asks me to join him when he meets with Mrs Wax and a discharged Mitzi.

Pat brings Mitzi to his room. ‘Mrs Wax, as soon as you left I immediately gave the patient an injection of Lasix to clean her lungs,’ says Brian. ‘It would have been much better if this had been done yesterday as my colleague suggested. I asked Dr Fogle to examine her lungs this afternoon, and he tells me the injection is already working and her heart cough will continue to improve this evening.’

Brian moves to the X-ray viewer mounted on the wall, where both X-rays are backlit.

‘Mrs Wax, Dr Fogle was able to diagnose the patient’s heart disease without the need for X-rays. You will see how large her heart is,’ and he points out the bulge in the shadow on the left side. ‘You will also see that the patient’s lungs, that should be dark indicating air, are white indicating congestion. Dr Fogle was able to determine this yesterday by listening to your dog’s breathing sounds.’

Mrs Wax has taken Mitzi from Pat and is holding her tightly. I say nothing.

‘What about her kennel cough?’ she asks Brian.

‘Complete the course of tetracycline that Dr Fogle advised. If we’re lucky, the other dogs won’t need any treatment. Pat will give you this, and the medicines for her heart. I would like to see her again in a week. Dr Fogle has experience interpreting ECGs and has recommended that we acquire a machine. He will run an ECG on Mitzi when we see her.’

After she leaves, I turn to Brian. ‘Thanks for that. Are we really getting an ECG?’

‘We are now. Mrs Wax may be tricky but she’s influential in the Kennel Club, and it’s best to keep her in the tent. And Bruce, I don’t know how to interpret ECGs, but you’re a fresh graduate so I expect you do. And if you don’t, I want you to know how to by next week.’

I waltz out of his room. I think Brian is scary but know that even though I’m in London, away from my family, at least professionally, I’ve got my own infantry platoon behind me.

Digitalis is a heart medicine (found naturally in foxgloves) and Lasix was the brand name of the diuretic (‘peeing’ pill) furosemide. At that time, there was no generic alternative to Lasix.

Dogs taken to Battersea always picked up a cough while there but it wasn’t caused by the known cause of ‘Kennel Cough’, a bacterium called Bordetella bronchiseptica (a relative of Bordetella pertussis, which causes whooping cough in us). Twenty-five year later it was discovered that ‘Battersea Cough’ is caused by a canine respiratory coronavirus. Although a vaccine was developed it was never licensed for use in dogs.

2

There is a lyrical fantasy that vets are more clever than doctors because our patients can’t tell us what’s wrong with them. That may not be true, but you’ll have a hard time finding a vet who will argue against it. Another trope is how we actually use the verbs ‘to vet’ and ‘to doctor’. ‘To vet’ is to make a careful and critical examination of something, while ‘to doctor’ is to change something in order to trick somebody, or to add something harmful. What would you like to be known for? As a Canadian vet in London, I was able to have the best of both worlds. While UK vets graduated with bachelor’s degrees and so were Mr, Ms, Miss or Mrs, Canadian vets graduated with doctorates so I could rightly claim to be a Dr. And I did, certainly for a year or so until I realised it created a barrier and I was happier with people calling me Bruce.

A common feature of my extended Canadian family is that we don’t swear. None of us: my parents, siblings, aunts, uncles or first cousins. My kids don’t either. Swearing was a cop-out. As teenage smart alecs, we sometimes used French-Canadian swear words, sacrement or tabarnak, but that was really to show each other how clever we were. When I got frustrated by the antics of my closest cousin, I’d call him a toton, a complete idiot, but never a ‘tit’. I spent the first 25 years of my life hearing an occasional ‘darn’ or ‘holy moly’ and not much more. Then I arrived in Britain.

Brian didn’t like going on home visits so I went on all of them, several each week so early one afternoon on a leaden, monochrome day I am standing on the pavement in Berwick Street Market in Soho, on a home visit to see two Dobermans that have drawn blood from each other in a lunchtime dispute.

After morning appointments finished, I’d exchanged a luncheon voucher, given to me instead of cash as part of my weekly salary, for a Scotch egg from Express Dairy, and with my mock leather doctor’s bag filled with what I thought I’d need, I’d walked past the regal Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons headquarters in one of the great mansions in Belgrave Square, up past the ambulance entrance at St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, along Piccadilly to cacophonous Piccadilly Circus. I continued past the theatres on Shafetsbury Avenue until I reached the bustling street market. I love that walk. Still do.

‘Woodrow and Singleton’ had a cream-coloured Morris Minor estate or ‘shooting brake’, as Brian called it, that I could use on home visits, or I could take taxis if I wanted. But if I had the time, I walked. That’s a habit I haven’t lost. I looked at the grand buildings I was strolling past and it was exciting to think they were older than the country I was from. It was like walking through an old black and white movie – recognisable but still alien.

I haven’t been to Berwick Street Market before. Awnings from the Georgian shops and houses that line the street overhang the tarpaulins that roof the individual fruit and veg stalls, each lit by one or two naked light bulbs. Dogs – all mutts – lie on the pavement or simply wander around. They probably belong to stallholders. I don’t know and don’t ask. The stallholders shout out the prices of their produce, although at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of the market there is one stallholder selling used clothes and another old fur coats and stoles, neither of whom give away their prices. I walk along the pavement until I get to the address I’ve been given, a tailor’s shop, and press the buzzer for Flat Two. I notice the sign beside the buzzer says, ‘Cindy – Large Chest for Sale’. I think to myself that if I had a large chest for sale, I’d make a big, proper sign, glue a Polaroid of the chest on it and have it on my front door at eye level, not little and faded beside the bell.

An elderly Italian woman answers the door.

‘Hi, I’m Bruce Fogle, the veterinarian,’ I say.

‘Meester Veta. You comma with me,’ she replies, and I follow her up the stairs. I know from visiting my dad’s relatives in Glasgow that the British don’t like bright light, but the naked red bulbs in the hallway and landing cast no light at all, and I hope Cindy doesn’t have them in her flat too. I won’t be able to see which parts of the Dobies are bleeding and which aren’t.

She opens a doorway from the hall into a room overlooking the market. I don’t see any chests of drawers in that room.

‘You waita heera, Meester Veta,’ the old woman commands, and of course I do. I’ve always done what I’m told to do, although with time I’ve learned to question authority.

Good, I think. At least there’s a little natural light through the net curtains.

‘Miss Sharona!’ she calls out. ‘Meester Veta issa heera.’

‘Thank fuckin’ god!’ Sharon replies.

‘Come in, darlin’,’ she calls out, and I walk through the door into a tiny, narrow kitchen where two female Dobermans are curled like black commas on blue linoleum floor identical to the flooring at Pont Street. Neither gets up to greet me. Both look sad, some would say embarrassed, as dogs are so capable of appearing.

‘I knew when the butcher gave me them bones there’d be trouble. They was real miserable wiv each other, a real cat fight.’

‘Hi. What’s her name?’ I ask, as I lean down by the dog nearest me.

‘Joni,’ her owner answers.

I say hello to Joni, and when she shows no resentment to my touching her head I feel around her neck for signs of damage. My fingers land on raw flesh on the far side. She’ll need a stitch-up.

I move over to the other dog.

‘And her name?’

‘Jayni. You know what fuckin’ sisters are like, luv. Was a real cat fight.’

Jayni is just as calm as her sister, and when I call out her name she gets up, walks over to me and presses her head against my legs, asking to be touched. She limps, and I see two clean, oval puncture wounds on her front leg near the elbow. She flinches when I touch the leg but shows no aggression towards me, only that mournful look. Dobies have an unfair image as aggressive dogs. That’s wrong. Many are real mamma’s babies. I open my leather doctor’s bag, get out my stethoscope and listen to Jayni’s heart, then Joni’s. Both are fine.

‘Sharon, I’m just going to give Jayni some antibiotics. Her wounds will heal. They’re easy for her to lick, so they’ll stay clean. Joni needs stitches. I can do that here if you like, but I’ll need you to hold her firm for me.’

‘A proper nurse, I am,’ Sharon tells me and I open my bag, take out a glass cylinder of xylocaine and drop the local anaesthetic into its metal syringe gun, then add a needle.

‘Fuckin’ ’ell! She won’t like that!’ Sharon blurts out.

‘It’s a very thin needle. I’ll drip local anaesthetic over the wound, then inject around the edges.’ I do this, first cleaning the area using cotton wool wetted with disinfectant. Then I rinse the wound with surgical spirit. Joni flinches but shows no anger.

While I prep, instil and clean, the transistor radio beside the sink plays in the background. In 1970s London I’d expected radio stations to play mostly British songs but Radio Luxembourg, the station Sharon has tuned into and the one I listen to in the sparsely furnished flat above the surgery where I am living, plays mostly American music. Today, it is cringe-making stuff, Lee Marvin singing ‘Wand’rin’ Star’, then Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’.

‘I’m glad she’s a Dobie. I don’t have to clip any hair. It’s a clean, fresh wound.’

From another compartment in my bag I take a spool of black surgical silk, cut off the length I need and thread it on a long needle with a curved cutting tip. I know from the last time I used that needle that it is getting blunt and is due for replacement. I place a long, narrow stainless steel bowl on the floor, part fill it with surgical spirit and drop a pair of scissors, a needle holder and the needle and silk in it. Nowadays, all of these items come in pre-sterilised packets.

Joni is an angel. The local anaesthetic works and she stands stoically, with Sharon on the other side of her from me, one arm around her neck by her head to slow down any snap she might make if I accidentally hurt her, and one arm around her chest. I think of how I love dogs. They’re so much more noble than we are.

‘That’s the singer what Joni is named for,’ Sharon says as I sew. Paul Burnett the DJ is playing Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’.

‘I actually heard her live a few summers ago, at a bar called Le Hibou in Ottawa, with Leonard Cohen,’ I comment.

‘You finished yet, darlin’?’

The wound is a hanging flap and stitching is simple, first a holding stitch at the apex, then filling in on both sides. Doberman skin is supple, but with a blunt needle I have to push ever harder with each stitch to complete the job. After I finish, I give both dogs their injections of Pen-Strep antibiotics and fill an envelope with pain-reducing phenylbutazone tablets, bute,* that will last for two days.

‘That’s wonderful, luv. It starts to get busy here around five. Now I don’t have to be away from work. How much is it?’

I answer two guineas for the home visit and five pounds for the stitch-up and injections.

‘Fuckin’ hell. You make more by the minute than I do!’ she replies.

Sharon takes seven green one pound notes and two shillings from a jar in the kitchen cupboard and gives them to me. I thank her and we walk back into her front room where a man is sitting on the sofa reading the Daily Mirror.

He looks up, stares blankly at me, then a wide grin bursts across his face. ‘Dr Fogle! Fancy meeting you here an’ all.’

I have no idea who he is.

‘Don’t you remember me? I brought the dogs to you to get ’em Epivaxed when Sharon was busy an’ all.’

I still don’t recognise him. At that time in my career, I was so concerned about the worthiness of my diagnoses and treatments, all I ever saw were the animals, never the people who accompanied them.

‘Oh, yes. Hi. How are you?’ and I shake his hand.

‘Miserable buggers!’ he says nodding his head towards the dogs in the kitchen. ‘’Ad a dust-up, did they?’

‘Yes, over a bone. They’re okay but they gave each other a chew. Same breed. Same age. Same sex. They tick all the boxes for having fights with each other. Do you know them?’

‘They’re mine. They live wiv Sharon when she’s workin’. They’re here for protection.’

What does she need protection from, I think, and only then work out why the lights in the hallway are red. I turn to Sharon. ‘If either one of them goes off her food, phone the surgery. They’ll need more antibiotics. The stitches can come out in 10 days. I can send a nurse to do that or you can bring Joni to the surgery.’

‘Mick’ll bring her in for her stitches,’ Sharon answers. I shake Mick’s hand and Sharon walks me to the door and out into the hallway where I shake hers.

I start down the stairs, then stop and turn back to Sharon.

‘Sharon, one more thing.’

‘Yes, luv?’

‘Any chance you can show me that large chest of yours?’

I’m as pleased as punch that I can do irony too.

More efficient pain-reducing ‘non steroid’ anti-inflammatory drugs will not become available for another 20 years.

3

Sensible people get pets directly from breeders and see litters of puppies or kittens with their mothers. In 1970s London, upper-class families often got their dogs from friends, the middle class got their dogs and cats mostly from pet shops, while the working class got theirs from unplanned litters or from Club Row, a Sunday street market at the top end of Brick Lane in the East End. Two pet shops, Town & Country Dogs and Harrods’ pet department, were vital customers for Brian. There were two distinct types of dogs in Britain, purebreds and mongrels. Although mutts or mongrels made up the vast majority of Britain’s dogs, at Brian’s clinic well over half of the dogs I met were purebreds. It was an era where ‘well-bred’ people provided homes only for ‘well-bred’ dogs.

‘Our most important client is Harrods,’ Brian explains in my first week working for him. ‘You will visit their pet department at lunchtime each Monday, whenever new stock arrives and whenever they ask you to. All new stock gets Epivaxed, and most important, you complete a partial vaccination certificate with the date of the animal’s next Epivax with us. Our other important client is Jane Grievson at Town & Country Dogs. Her son Christopher Grievson brings their stock here to be checked and Epivaxed.’

Harrods was a nearby upscale department store, synonymous with the British upper classes and to my eyes fustier than the people they served. It flaunted its royal warrants, to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother for china, to Queen Elizabeth herself for ‘provisions’ or what I called ‘groceries’, and to the Duke of Edinburgh for ‘outfits’. I called outfits ‘clothes’.

Brian had an appointment system at the surgery. Most vets didn’t.

‘Time is important to our clients,’ he tells me. ‘They are not used to sitting around waiting. And they don’t suffer fools gladly.’ I don’t know what he means by that. The term is too English for me, but I take it as a warning not to waste their time. ‘And we don’t socialise with our clients,’ he continues. ‘That compromises our relationship with them. No drinks after work. No dinner in their homes.’

As always, morning consultations started at 9 am and ran through to noon. It was a blazingly sunny and unexpectedly hot and humid summer Monday and I packed my medical bag with what I thought I might need for my weekly Harrods visit: stethoscope, thermometer, surgical spirit, a sterilised glass syringe, twelve needles and twelve doses of the dog vaccine Epivax.* I walked along Pont Street, across Sloane Street, through red-brick Hans Crescent to Harrods.

The pink buff terracotta building itself was so grand. Imposing, bronze-framed display windows and seven floors of expensive shopping, although not so expensive that I hadn’t already bought myself a suit at the new, fashionable Way In department on the fourth floor. The dollars I had brought with me from Canada, that I used to supplement my meagre salary, went a long way back then. I entered by the back door, at the corner of Basil Street and Hans Road, where chauffeurs stood formally by their Rolls-Royces, and took two stairs up at a time to the second-floor pet department and the Manager’s office.

The Manager, a bushy-browed, beige man in his forties in a Viyella shirt, green wool tie and tan warehouseman’s coat, with a rural accent that I sometimes found difficult to understand, formally greets me with a ‘Good morrow, Vet. Do you wish to do rounds?’

With me leading, we systematically walk the aisles of his department, stopping first at the enclosure of baby alligators, where I scan their pen for any that look skinny or have removed themselves from the general cluster.

‘The water looks a bit murky,’ I comment.

‘We are late changing it, Vet. It will be done.’

On their adjoining aisle the parrots, cockatoos, cockatiels and macaws are incredibly noisy. I look in each cage, at the inhabitants, at their food and water trays and at the floors to check the consistency of their droppings. I check the tanks of tropical fish for the health of the inhabitants and signs of excess feeding by the weekend staff, a common problem that might lead to contamination in a tank, and then on to the most enjoyable part of the department, the mammals. There are three skunks, a puma, and kennels filled with pups and kits.

‘Where did you get the skunks?’ I ask.

‘We find homes for surplus stock from zoos,’ the Manager explains. ‘Three years ago we sold an elephant to the King of Albania.’

‘I didn’t know Albania had a king,’ I say.

‘I thought it was a posh area at the bottom of Savile Row,’ he replies with a chuckle. A bit of irony there. ‘But it’s a country, and King Zog or his son lives in Switzerland. I know it’s Zog because it rhymes with snog.’ He chuckles again.

The skunks looks like they are six to eight weeks old. I am somewhat familiar with them, not just from their odour on my family’s Yorkies after the dogs had been sprayed while chasing them, but from one I had found falling over in a creek and had brought home to nurse back to health. ‘It probably has rabies,’ my father told me when he came home from work, and he phoned Animal Control and had the skunk removed from our backyard.

‘Did the zoo vaccinate them?’ I ask.

‘I will check on that, Vet,’ the Manager says.

‘What are you feeding them?’

‘PAL and vegetables, Vet.’

‘Good. Don’t give them cat food. It’s too rich for their livers. And the puma?’

‘It’s also surplus. We get them frequently. They sell well. This one arrived with the skunks.’

‘What does it eat?’ I ask.

‘Fresh beef from the Food Halls, Vet.’

‘Make sure it’s beef on the bone,’ I add. ‘She needs calcium. And give her a tablespoonful of cod liver oil each day.’ I had learned at London Zoo that big cats can suffer from Vitamin A deficiency, and cod liver oil was a well-balanced supplement.

I get down on my haunches, and the puma comes over and rubs her head against the inside of her enclosure. I put my fingers through the cage and feel the silkiness of her hair. ‘That’s a cat I’d be proud to be seen in public with,’ I say.

‘We had a lion cub here last year. I sold him for 250 guineas. Mind you, I would have given him away.’

‘Why’s that?’ I ask.

‘Sly creature, Vet. He got out one night and I found him over there in Carpets the next day. He’d shredded the goatskins.’

The last part of rounds today is the kitten and puppy kennels. There are no additions since my visit the previous week.

‘The Persians sell well, but I am finding it difficult to obtain kittens, Vet. The breeders now want to sell them directly.’

The cat kennels are sparse, with one remaining Persian, two Siamese and two blue Burmese.

‘Two litters of Yorkshire terriers arrive today, Vet. I hope they are here before you leave.’

Of the six Old English Sheepdogs I had vaccinated the week before, only two remain. They look surprisingly lonesome without their siblings, and stand on their hind legs wagging and smiling as I visually check them over. Beside them are four Dachshund pups, curled tightly together, and in the next kennel two Pug pups.

‘Vet, the Pugs are sniffling.’

I rinse my hands with disinfectant, lift out the first Pug and listen to its chest. The heart and lungs are fine, and I hear referred noises coming from the throat.

‘Her nostrils are so tight she has to breathe through her mouth,’ I tell him. ‘It’s causing irritation in the back of her throat, and that’s leading to her snorts and sniffles.’

Her littermate also has small nostrils.

‘Do breeders send you Polaroids before you buy pups?’ I ask.

‘No, Vet. I know what sells best and I put in orders, although breeders ring me up when they have surplus stock they can’t shift. If they’re the right breeds, I’ll buy them.’

‘Okay, then. That’s it?’

‘As I say, I’d like you to see the Yorkshire terrier pups before you leave. Would you like a cup of tea? The train is due in at Paddington at half past the hour so they should be here momentarily.’

‘Yes, fine. Thank you,’ I answer and we walk through the ‘Staff Only’ door into a corridor leading to his office.

‘Where are the pups coming from?’ I ask.

‘Most livestock comes from Wales, Vet.’

The Manager boils water in a kettle warmed on an electric ring and as it heats he adds several teaspoons of Harrods English Breakfast tea to a white teapot. He swirls the tea in the pot then pours it through a strainer into two flower-decorated teacups, and as he does so one of his shop assistants, a lean woman in her early twenties, with a brown fringe hanging over an intelligent face, comes to his door and says, ‘The puppies have arrived, Sir. They’re in the corridor.’

‘Vet is having tea,’ he replies.

‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘I’ll come and have a look now.’ I pick up my medical bag and walk down the corridor to a large wooden crate with rope handles. There is no door.

‘How do you open it?’ I ask.

‘The top is nailed shut so they can’t escape,’ the Manager says. He is carrying a claw hammer and, with the claw end, pries off the top. There is silence from inside the crate.

I look in. One pup sits up and unhappily looks at me. Another, with its hair pasted to its face by its own profuse saliva, lies on its side, glassy eyed, panting and drooling. A third pup is twitching and salivating. The rest are lifeless.

I pick up the sitting pup, give it a cursory look and hand it to the Manager. ‘Put it somewhere with water.’

Without looking at her I say to the shop assistant, ‘Get two of those fabric dog beds from the floor.’

I pick up the salivating pup and with my stethoscope listen to its chest. The heart sounds good. I listen to the twitching pup’s heart. It sounds the same. I lift a lifeless pup and listen to its chest. No breathing or heart sounds. Then the next pup. It has a heartbeat. So does the next. So do all the rest. Only one is dead. I guess this is probably a low blood sugar crisis.

The shop assistant returns with the round fabric dog beds. The Manager places the healthiest pup in one of them.

‘Do you have any maple syrup or honey for your tea?’ I ask the Manager.

‘I don’t. But they do in the Food Hall. Come with me.’

I turn to the shop assistant. ‘As fast as you can, run to the surgery, ask them for a vial of 50 per cent glucose and get back here, to wherever honey is in the Food Halls.’

‘The surgery is on Pont Street, the other side of the lights,’ the Manager adds.

I pick up the bed full of unconscious or frothing pups and follow the Manager across his department. He quick marches.

‘Faster!’ I shout and he moves from a brisk walk into a run, down the flights of stairs to the ground floor, through Menswear and into the Food Halls, straight to a selection of honey.

I take a jar from the display, open it, give it to the manager and say, ‘Dip your finger in it and smear it in the mouths of the conscious pups.’

I take another jar and do the same with the unconscious pups, applying honey under their tongues and inside their cheeks.

‘Animals are not allowed in the Food Halls,’ I hear over my shoulder.

‘These are not animals!’ the Manager barks back. ‘They are Harrods inventory!’ No one seems upset that I have taken honey from the shelf without purchasing it.

It amazes me how fast sugar gets absorbed from the mouth into the bloodstream. The pups are small. They have little or no sugar reserve. They had been enclosed in a wooden crate since sometime in the early morning somewhere in Wales for a long, hot train journey to London before another hot ride in a taxi to Knightsbridge. I am burning with anger at how these pups have been treated, but I don’t say anything.

The shop assistant arrives with the injectable glucose vial. I break it open and fill the syringe I have brought along to give vaccinations with, add a sharp new needle, place my finger on an unconscious pup’s throat to raise its jugular vein, insert the needle and inject one millilitre of the concentrated sugar. Within a minute, the pup is moving and within five minutes sitting up. I do the same with the remaining two pups that have not responded to honey under their tongues. Both come back from the dead.

‘Get me a towel, please,’ I ask the Manager’s shop assistant, and she instantly produces a tea towel. I give the brightest pup a rub then place it on the floor, where it gives a little shake that is too much for it and it sits down. I repeat the rub downs with the other five pups, and when I am convinced that their low sugar crisis is at least temporarily over, I put them in the dog bed and return with the Manager and his assistant to the second floor, this time by the lift.

‘Oh, aren’t they cute,’ the lift operator says as we get in.

We return to the Manager’s office.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t even know your name,’ I say to him.

‘Grimwade,’ he replies. ‘And this is Miss Clark.’

‘Annabelle,’ she adds.

In the corridor, the bed in which we placed the unharmed pup is empty when we return.

‘Miss Clark, find that puppy,’ Grimwade tells his assistant, and as he does so the pup scampers out from under his desk with a piece of wrapping tissue in its mouth.

I speak to them. ‘Annabelle, please give that one a little honey with its dog food. Mr Grimwade, I’m taking these pups back to the surgery for the rest of the day. I want to make sure they’re over their crisis. They shouldn’t be left alone tonight.’

‘Mr Grimwade, if you can arrange for a taxi I can take all of them home with me tonight. I can stay up with them,’ Annabelle adds.

‘We shall see,’ he says.

‘That’s a terrific suggestion, Annabelle. Thank you very much. That’s what we’ll do. Mr Grimwade, considering the amount of money Annabelle saved Harrods with her Olympic-standard run to Pont Street, I think you can afford to provide her with the taxi fare home and back. I’ll discuss the events with Mr Singleton, then give you written advice on where Harrods should get its puppies and kittens, how they should get here and what to do when they arrive.’

‘I look forward to that, Vet,’ Grimwade replies.

I think about asking him out for a drink that evening. I already know what I want to change in his set-up, but remember that Brian has told me no socialising, so I don’t.

Back at the surgery, late in the afternoon, Brian calls me into his office.

‘Bruce, may I introduce you to Mrs Jane Grievson from Town & Country Dogs and her son Christopher.’

Each has two Shih Tzus in their arms, a breed I have never heard of, let alone seen.

‘Good afternoon,’ they reply in unison.

Mrs Grievson has immaculately permed, bottle-blonde hair, is petite and vivacious, younger than my mother, an English rose whom I am instantly frightened of. Christopher, my age but more heavy set and a little taller, a man with an artlessly happy face, tickles the pups in his hands as his mother speaks.

‘I was just thanking Mr Singleton for sending me to Mr Startup in Worthing. I was considering buying a new toy Poodle as a potential stud, and wise Mr Startup asked me to bring the pup’s grandmother for him to examine. He found eye disease in the grandmother that he says is hereditary and leads to blindness, so I did not purchase the pup.’

Brian turns to me. ‘There are no eye specialists at the Royal Veterinary College, but Geoff Startup in Worthing is very knowledgeable about eyes and sees referred cases.’

‘And I was also telling Mr Singleton that you will be seeing more of Christopher,’ says Mrs Grievson. ‘My husband Bob and I enjoy dabbling in property. We have an old mill in Italy we are about to fix up.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ Christopher adds. ‘Mother has convinced me to join her permanently. Bruce, have you visited our shop?’

I tell him I haven’t and agree to visit after I finish the afternoon appointments.

‘What type of pups are they?’ I ask before I return to my list of clients, and I am impressed that Christopher answers before his mother can.

‘They are Shih Tzus. Very rare. Oriental. We get them from a breeder friend of my mother’s in Trevor Square.’

‘We sell oriental breeds but we don’t sell breeds to Orientals. They treat their dogs abominably!’ Mrs Grievson adds.

Early that evening I walked up luxurious Sloane Street then left onto Hans Crescent. Town & Country Dogs was the second shop on the left, although its address is 35B Sloane Street. I assumed that Mrs Grievson managed to secure a better address because other people found her just as scary as I did when I’d met her a few hours earlier. I felt more relaxed when Christopher told me she had gone for the day and suggested that after a quick look around we go to a local pub for a drink.

The shop was elegant and feminine, with pastel, floral wallpaper, dark wooden floors, hanging lace in the north-facing windows that were set up for litters of pups to be displayed in and a pendant light fitting of smoked glass. Christopher takes me downstairs to see the pups’ holding kennels and their clipping, washing and grooming facilities, then we walk over to the Nag’s Head on Kinnerton Street, a mews street five minutes away.

‘Have you been here before? It seems a suitably named drinking hole for a veterinary surgeon,’ Christopher chuckles as he steps aside to let me enter the tiny, dimly lit, packed pub. The Nag’s Head is simply a tiny mews house, no more than 15 feet wide, on a narrow lane, surrounded by private homes. It’s like walking into someone’s small, dark-panelled living room, 15 feet of standing room in front of a bar with stairs going down to the left and stairs going up to the right. The walls are densely covered in framed cartoons and art. I instantly fall in love with the place and decide that this will be my ‘local’. I have a Carling Black Label, and we take our drinks outside and find room to stand between two parked cars in front of the pub. I had already learned during the shop tour that Christopher has the ability to speak so loudly and so fluently there are virtually no pauses where I can ask any questions.

‘How did your mother come to set up Town & Country Dogs?’ I spot an opportunity and Christopher embarks upon a resumé of his mother’s life. Earlier that day, I had pigeonholed him as his mother’s gofer. Now I hear the pride in his voice as he tells me the back story of the pet shop.

‘My mother is not your typical British dog breeder. Much too glamorous.’

I’m relaxed with Christopher, so I ask, ‘What’s a typical British dog breeder?’ and Christopher says, ‘A woman who reached marriageable age just after World War I, found there were no men left to marry and so has devoted herself to dogs. Do you know Betty Conn Ffyffe? Wonderful woman. Enormous. Ever so loud. Only wears tweeds. Monocle. Barks ferociously. If a dog is reluctant to perform she shouts, “Pull yourself together,” wanks it until it’s blue in the face and two months later Mother has another litter to sell.’

I sip my ale and let his riff roll on.

‘Mother has been breeding Poodles and Yorkies for over twenty years. After the War, her family – she lived in Kent – had nothing. She knew dogs and started out making clothing for them. Very upwardly mobile, she was. Mother saw that no one was catering to the top end of the market. She managed to convince Tatler to give her an enormous picture spread. That made her, her shop and her dogs well known to society. That’s why we are around the corner from Harrods. Mother breeds most of the dogs she sells. She has an enormous facility in Cornwall. Or she knows breeders personally. But Bruce, you know what has really made the business so successful? Hollywood loves her. Simply adores her. They love her energy, her theatricality. Cary Grant or Ethel Merman or Elizabeth Taylor come into the shop and they think they are in an Edwardian film set, which is exactly where they are. We still can’t find enough good Old English Sheepdogs for the Americans.’

‘Is that why Harrods always has Old English Sheepdogs?’ I ask.

‘They get theirs from breed-to-order hill farmers in Wales. Dreadful places. Riddled with parasites. The pups don’t meet a soul until they’re put on a train to London.’

‘Why Old English Sheepdogs though?’

‘Because of Doris Day and David Niven and their Old English,’ Christopher replies. ‘In Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, the film. It might be ten years old now, but it started a craze in America for Old English.’

‘Did your mother supply the dog for the film?’ I ask.

‘It wouldn’t surprise me, but I’ve never asked,’ Christopher answers. ‘Mind you, if she did, they would have had to pay for it then and there. Mother has very firm rules. No one is given extended credit, not President de Gaulle, not Princess Grace of Monaco.’

‘They buy dogs from you?’ I am impressed and wonder whether I’ll meet them at Brian’s.

‘Yes, and they were not allowed to leave her shop until they paid for them. In full. In cash.’

‘I’m trying to convince Brian to accept payment with Barclaycard,’ I say, and I pull out of my pocket my Chargex credit card issued by my Canadian bank. ‘It’s identical to this, right down to the colours. Brian says it’s only for shopping in department stores, but vets in Canada get paid this way and the card holder is liable if someone else uses it.’

‘Too technical for mother,’ Christopher replies. ‘Cash rules.’

The vaccine came with a two-inch serrated saw, to abrade the necks of the vials to make them easy to snap open. I routinely cut my fingers when snapping vaccine vials so I also took finger plasters for myself.

4

I talk with Brian about the low blood sugar Yorkies at Harrods and he asks me to give him in point form a short list of recommendations. With help from Christopher, I list:

 Wormed pups from reliable sources

 Bred for physical health

 Checked by breeder’s vet before dispatch

 Open kennels for travel, accompanied by a person

 No crowding

 Sugared water available during transit

 Seen by us when arrive at Harrods.

Brian approves the list with one alteration:

 Seen by us at Pont Street before arrival at Harrods.

He asks Pat to flesh out each point into a single sentence, make two carbon copies and bring them to him for his signature. ‘It’s best that this letter comes from me,’ he explains.

I tell him how good Annabelle the shop assistant was, and he says, ‘Keep an eye on her. I think Jane is pregnant, and if she is we’ll have to look for a new junior RANA.’

In the 1970s, pregnancy often meant you lost your job.

In the following weeks, I continued to do around twenty to twenty-five consultations each day, mostly dogs but some cats, a few birds and the occasional monkey or snake. At that time, I was too preoccupied with whether or not I was making accurate diagnoses to notice much about the owners, but I was aware they were mostly women and regardless of age almost invariably tall and well dressed. When I became more familiar with Britain’s social orders, I realised that Knightsbridge acted like a magnet for tall, thin women. I imagine it still does.

I’d also noticed that we saw a large number of elderly Poodles owned by over-made-up, fleshy women, mostly in their late forties or early fifties.

‘Those dogs can thank the Street Offences Act for the good lives they lead,’ Brian tells me when I ask why Poodles had once been so popular.

‘How’s that?’ I ask.

‘The Act made it an offence for streetwalkers to solicit for business in public places. So the girls equipped themselves with Poodles. The dog’s colour indicates the service its owner provides. They’re mostly Shepherd Market Poodles. That’s part of our catchment area.’

‘So would you call them working dogs?’

Brian grinned.

My relationship with Brian was very much employee and employer. My instinct was to joke about what Brian had told me, but I didn’t think I should so I didn’t. In fact, I never relaxed enough with Brian to joke or make small talk with him about anything much. To a fresh grad like me, Brian was intimidating, more like a father figure you always wanted to prove yourself to.

Brian did all the complicated surgery, leaving me with mostly cat spays, dog and cat castrations and wound repairs, although I also did emergency ops and fortunately for me we saw lots of emergencies when Brian was out of the surgery. His responsibilities as Junior Vice-President of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons were extensive, so Pat and I met all the pharmaceutical company trade reps. I was obliged to stay at the surgery most nights and alternate weekends to take telephone calls and see any emergencies. If I wanted to go out in the evening, I arranged with the Post Office telephone operator to answer calls to us and refer them to Keith Butt, a vet in Kensington.

A nurse joins me in the surgery on Saturday mornings, and it is Pat rather than Jane or Brenda who is on duty when a distraught women bursts in with her rag of a little dog cradled in her arms.

‘Oh god, she’s been attacked by an Alsatian! Please! Help!’

I am sitting on the corner of the reception desk idly talking to Pat and can see visible flesh in the Maltese’s chest. I take my stethoscope from my neck to listen to its heart but before I have a chance to do so, Pat takes the dog from the woman.

‘I’m just taking her downstairs.’

I follow her down.

‘Turn on the oxygen,’ she tells me as she opens the dog’s mouth, inserts an endotracheal tube into its windpipe and blows into it. I watch candy floss pink lung tissue inflate and bulge out of the torn chest.

Pat continues to blow into the tube until I have oxygen flowing through anaesthetic tubing and she can breathe for the little thing by compressing an inflated anaesthetic bag.

‘Now you can listen to its heart,’ she tells me, and I do. It’s beating perfectly.

‘Where is Mr Singleton when you need him,’ she says, more I think to herself than to me.

I feel stupid, reaching for a stethoscope rather than doing something to save the dog’s life. Pat, the instinctively good nurse, doesn’t comment on my foolishness. I examine the ragged wound and see that one lobe of lung is punctured and damaged beyond repair, but the others on the injured left side are untouched. Two ribs are broken. It is the dog’s own rib that damaged her lung, not the Alsatian’s teeth. Pat continues to inflate the dog’s lungs by compressing the oxygen bag, but now with oxygen in her circulation she regains consciousness and is trying to get up.

‘Add ether,’ I tell Pat, and she opens the valve on the anaesthetic machine to run the oxygen through liquid ether. She opens the valve on the nitrous oxide cylinder and adds that gas to the mix. That settles the dog into anaesthetic unconsciousness.

‘Give her pethidine,’ I tell Pat.* Pethidine will lighten her breathing.

I tell Pat to continue ‘bagging’ the dog – inflating its lungs for it – while I prepare a tray of surgical instruments, and as I do we hear the telephone ring in reception.

‘Everything’s fine down here,’ Pat calls through the closed door. ‘Can you please answer that and get the caller’s telephone number?’

‘This is what’s called on the job training,’ she says, as I carefully cut away the little Maltese’s long white hair that has been sucked into its chest and prep the surgical site. If the dog is to survive, I have to remove two ribs and one lobe of lung, sew off the air passage and lung tissue so that there is no leakage of air whatsoever, then sew up the chest wall air-tight, coordinating the last stitches going in with Pat inflating the repaired lung back to its maximum.

‘I’ve done this before,’ I say.

‘Never!’ Pat replies. ‘At the zoo?’

‘No. We had surgical exercises at college. I’ve done one of just about everything.’

As I scrub up, the Maltese’s owner puts her head around the door to the prep room.

‘May I come in? Is she all right?’

‘She has dreadful injuries, but Dr Fogle is familiar with the surgery she needs and he’s just about to start. If you can answer the door and the telephone, I can stay with her. Right now she needs me to help her breathe. This is Bianca, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it is,’ the owner says.

‘Mr Singleton spayed her last summer. She’s a sweety.’

‘And you’re Felicity Templeton-Ellis?’ Pat asks.

‘What a good memory you have.’

‘Well, I do read the papers.’

My interest and competence in surgery had been honed back in Canada by Jim Archibald, my professor of surgery, who co-authored the textbook Experimental Surgery and edited the first surgery text for small animal vets, Canine Surgery. He was the dominant personality at the Ontario Veterinary College, and the curriculum committee gave him extensive time for his students to perform ‘surgical exercises’.

He chose his favourite students, and I was one of them, to work their final summer at the College as salaried employees performing experimental surgery – taking a dog’s kidney from the abdomen and transplanting it into the neck, opening a sow’s belly then her womb, then her unborn piglets, punching holes in their diaphragms then sewing everything back together so that human obstetricians could try to keep the piglets – born with the equivalent of torn diaphragms – alive long enough for full-time surgeons to arrive to save them. I never thought about the welfare of the animals I was experimenting on, only the challenge of operating successfully.

For surgical exercises, each group of four students was given a dog and a sheep to operate on in alternate weeks. We would open the dog’s abdomen – a ‘laparotomy’ – then sew her up, let the incision repair, then two weeks later do another laparotomy but this time remove her spleen then sew her up, play with her for another two weeks, then open her up again, open and close her bladder, then sew her up once more. As long as the dog survived we kept operating on her, removing a section of her intestines, or a kidney or a lobe of lung. If you think that what I was doing was barbaric, all I can do is utterly agree. What makes be shiver as I write this is that the welfare of these poor, innocent dogs never even entered my mind, or as far as I’m aware, the minds of my classmates. Most of us were men – only three women were accepted each year. Most of us were off farms or ranches, and those of us who weren’t, including me, didn’t have the basic thoughtfulness to question what we were doing. We wanted our dogs to survive to the next operation, to prove to Professor Archibald we were proficient surgeons. Being given a replacement dog was a sign of failure. What does that say about human nature?

I’m not saying that veterinary students should not practise on live animals. I am in favour of surgical exercises where a dog that is going to be killed because no one wants it is anaesthetised and operated on, then immediately killed without regaining consciousness. Today, I wasn’t ‘learning on the job’ when I was confronted with the difficult surgery that Bianca needed if she was to survive. I had learned to do a lobectomy and rib resection on a stray dog that no one had a continuing emotional investment in. But I still don’t fully understand why throughout my training as a vet I never once considered the welfare of the defenceless animals that I did surgical exercises on. They must have been family pets. Had they got lost? Were there families somewhere wondering what had happened to their dogs? How did the dogs feel? What did the dogs feel? It’s just horrific.

Bianca’s surgery is uneventful. We don’t paralyse her breathing with curare-like drugs,† something we did during surgical exercises, simply because we don’t have these drugs at the surgery. That means Pat coordinating the compression of the anaesthetic bag in synchrony with Bianca trying to take a breath herself. The challenge comes when we turn off her ether. The narcotic effect of pethidine keeps her breathing light, but even when she groans and screams, the stitches hold and her lungs remain inflated. By now the air in the operating room is heavy with ether that has seeped from Bianca’s torn lung.

‘We really should use halothane,’ I say to Pat. That’s the new and much safer anaesthetic gas we used at college.

‘Tell Mr Singleton,’ she replies.

While Pat wraps Bianca’s chest in gauze bandage, I go upstairs to reception.

‘She’s not out of the woods yet, but so far so good,’ I say to her owner.

‘Can she come home?’

‘Not today. I’ll keep her with me upstairs over the weekend. I’m on call anyways. Give me your number and I’ll call to give you progress reports.’

Felicity Templeton-Ellis writes down her number and gives it to me then says, ‘How can I thank you? She means more to me than anything.’ And she embraces me in a whole body hug and holds me tight.

Is this what Brian calls ‘socialising with clients’? I walk her to and through the front door and return downstairs. Pat has placed Bianca in a cage and fed an oxygen line into it. ‘I’ll keep an eye on her and you can write up her notes, then I can write up her invoice,’ Pat says.

‘I’m impressed,’ she adds. ‘You may look like you’re fourteen but that was a job well done under fire. And fast. You should tell Mr Singleton you want to do more sophisticated surgery. And you’d like, what did you call it, halothane?’

‘Yes, halothane. By the way, who’s the owner?’

‘She’s part of the Clermont Set. Her husband is a notorious gambler. The Express says she is one of the most beautiful women in England.’

‘I noticed,’ I add with a smile.

I don’t tell Pat but I feel like a hero. I’m brilliant! I’m omnipotent! No one else could have done that. That dog would have died without me.

In 1970, that’s how I felt each time I saved a life. Now, with time and failures behind me, when I carry out a similar procedure there is satisfaction but with a far more profound feeling of humility. What I’ve learned is that when there are successful outcomes like with Bianca, and I make others happy, it can only lead to personal happiness and contentment. Success isn’t just good for your patients and their families, it’s just as important for our own personal happiness.

I kept Bianca upstairs in my flat above the consulting rooms over the weekend, on a bed of bath towels. These days, I’d keep her on painkillers for a week, but over fifty years ago we didn’t give pets much painkiller. We were taught that pain was a perception and only humans were capable of the abstract thought needed to perceive it. Bianca cried and moaned as I expected her to do after surgery. Background noise in the kennel room – it’s what all dogs did, though cats didn’t, and it took my profession much, much longer to accept that cats too feel intense pain. They just don’t vocally express it.

Bianca cried out each time I picked her up and carried her outside to the mews to let her empty her bladder. She lapped a little water on the Saturday evening but refused food until late Sunday, when she ate some Express Dairy sausage.

Today I lie on the floor with her. ‘Good girly,’ I tell her, and stroke her head. She looks up at me sadly, but then a tiny sparkle comes back into her eyes. I telephone Felicity with the good news, she comes to the surgery, picks up Bianca, and I arrange a home visit for Wednesday lunchtime.

‘You should have kept her here,’ Brian sternly tells me on Monday morning when I recount her injuries and surgery. His policy was to do all significant surgery, even simple dog spays, at the veterinary hospital built in the outbuildings of his home in Surrey. Every Tuesday, Brian transported all elective surgical cases in his Alfa Romeo Giulietta down to Limpsfield, operated all day Wednesday and hospitalised the dogs until they were fully recovered and had their stitches removed. If he performed an emergency operation at Pont Street, a ruptured spleen for example, he took that dog home with him that evening, and his Surrey RANA nursed it back to health.

Pet owners never saw the pain their dogs experienced after surgery. It took me some time before I fully questioned what I’d been taught, and started to use painkillers during and after not just surgery but any event that was potentially painful. When a canine parvovirus that caused acute gastroenteritis suddenly appeared nine years later, it was the dogs treated with painkillers together with more conventional treatment for serious gastroenteritis that were most likely to survive.

‘She’s walking on her own,’ Pat reports on Monday afternoon.

‘She went down the steps into the garden on her own,’ Pat reports on Tuesday morning.

‘She gave one of her toys a shake this morning,’ I’m told on Wednesday.

Isn’t it spectacular how dogs just get on with getting better, even after such pain and trauma? It impresses me as much today as it did then.

I had arranged to visit Bianca at lunchtime on the Wednesday, but ops took longer than expected and the afternoon was filled with appointments. I promised a quick visit to the nearby Wilton Arms, also on Kinnerton Street, to do a post-op check on their two cats I’d spayed on the Monday, so I asked Jane to rearrange the home visit for between 7.30 and 8 pm. After a pint with the publican, it wasn’t until just before nine that I got to Bianca’s sky blue painted terrace home off the Kings Road.

It is only when she answers the doorbell that I realise just how deliciously tall Felicity is, my height in her stockinged feet. In a short, dark skirt her legs are as long as Twiggy’s but her curves are pure Italian movie star.

‘Darling Vet. You’re such a sweet man to visit,’ she says, louder than I expect and kisses me on my lips.

‘It’s Bruce,’ I say.

‘Come in. Meet my friend Barbara. Stay. Have a drink? Have something to eat. Bianca is a miracle. A miracle! That fucking bastard Alsatian! I’ll kill him if I see him again. I’ll fucking castrate his owner. My husband will see to that. You’ve had such a busy day. I’m famished. Come in. Meet Barbara.’

Felicity’s eyes are extraordinarily beautiful, their aquamarine sparkle enhanced by pinhead-sized pupils.

‘Hi, I’m Barbara.’

Felicity’s friend, a fringed willowy brunette in matching white top and hot pants, offers her hand then kisses me on both cheeks.

‘Look at Bianca. It’s as if nothing’s happened to her. Isn’t she marvellous?’

Bianca is resting alertly on a white leather sofa, and I go over and sit down beside her. She flinches and pulls away as I reach out to touch her.

‘Hello, little girly. You’re quite a tough nut, aren’t you?’ I say and offer her a finger to sniff, and she does.

For most operations, the surgical site is shaved. We used a noisy electric Oster clipper followed by a men’s razor at Pont Street, but I’d worried that clipped hair might get inside Bianca’s chest so I’d just scissored away the long white hair from the edges of her wound. Once I’d sewn the skin back together, there wasn’t much sign of the trauma she had suffered. With her white hair covering her wound, I couldn’t even see her skin stitches.

‘What’s her appetite like?’ I ask.

‘She adores prawn cocktails,’ says Felicity, as she offers me a glass of red wine, spilling some as she fills my glass. ‘Oh, fuck. Do you adore prawn cocktails? You must be starving. I’m starving. You must eat. You must.’

‘Thanks, I’m okay,’ I reply.

‘No, you must. We’re going to Annabel’s. Please come. It’s my thank you for what you did for Bianca. You must.’

Barbara adds, ‘Do come. It’s much more comfortable having dinner with a man.’

‘Are you sure you’re happy to leave Bianca alone?’ I ask.

I can see that Bianca could safely be left but am looking for a reason to avoid ‘socialising with clients’, especially a married one.

‘Of course she is! Thanks to you!’

‘Will your husband join us?’ I ask.

‘Our husbands are shooting in Italy,’ Barbara replies.

‘Or something,’ adds Felicity.

‘I’m almost ready,’ Felicity tells Barbara, and she leaves the room, only to return a few minutes later. Her long blonde hair, parted on the left and previously in a ponytail, now flows over her shoulders. Her platform heels make her tower over me. The only likeness between Felicity and me is our similar age and language. Otherwise we are from different leagues and hers is a lot more professional than mine.

I worked in San Francisco in 1968, at a hippy vet’s clinic on Haight near Ashbury. Mort, my boss, would offer me a joint each lunchtime, and each lunchtime I refused with a ‘Thanks, Mort. I don’t smoke. Asthma.’ One evening, after dinner with two friends, Jinny his wife provided us with just-baked brownies for dessert.

‘Hash brownies,’ Mort explained after I’d eaten three of them. ‘Specially for non-smokers.’

That evening Mort and his friends minutely examined his Navaho woven-container collection.

‘Wow, look at that!’ Mort pronounced. ‘There’s a diamond-back rattler crawling around this one.’

I took the container in my hands.

‘No, Mort. That’s dark, dyed grass geometrically woven at a perfect 45-degree angle to make a symmetrical diamond pattern.’

I was too uptight to be affected, even by the concentrated THC drug in hash, but became familiar with its physiological effect.

Here in London’s Belgravia, looking into Felicity’s beautiful but now bloodshot eyes, I know that she is blown away on an industrial amount of it.

A Bentley car and driver mysteriously arrive outside her home and takes us to Berkeley Square. I am taken first upstairs to the Clermont Club, where Felicity and Barbara kiss seemingly everyone, then down a flight of stairs to Annabel’s for dinner.

The staff know both of them and we’re greeted with genuine smiles. There’s a table waiting and we sit down and drink. Then order. Then drink more. And eat. And we talk non-stop, but it’s so loud in the restaurant I don’t know if what I’m saying has anything to do with what Felicity is saying. I don’t mind because I’m having fun and I have two stunning women for company

‘Let’s dance,’ Felicity says to me between the main course and dessert and we do. She is a hugger. My love life is parched, but she is married and I am, you know, a Canadian.

When we return to the table, Barbara unexpectedly announces, ‘Felicity. Must go. I have a doctor’s appointment first thing tomorrow.’

She kisses Felicity goodbye and I see her lips say, ‘Don’t overdo it.’ Barbara kisses me goodbye and leaves, and we return to the dance floor.

‘Bruce is my vet. He saved Bianca’s life,’ Felicity says to a couple she obviously knows.

‘Hello!’ they greet me in unison, then continue dancing. Everyone seems to know Felicity, and their ease at seeing her with a man who is not her husband makes me feel more relaxed.

It is now after 1 am. I’ve always envied people who can live for the moment. I couldn’t then and still find it hard to do. As I’ve mentioned, Brian had told me not to socialise with his clients. And this one is married. I explain to Felicity that I have to be at work in a few hours and she gathers up her things.

The doorman hails us a cab and Felicity tells the driver to take us to her address and then 14 Pont Street. As soon as the cab pulls away, without a word she leans over and kisses me – passionately. Nice.

We drive around Berkeley Square.

She hold my hand and places it on her breast. Very nice.

The cab drives down Piccadilly, through the tunnel under Hyde Park Corner, past Harrods and down Beauchamp Place, and we keep kissing.

Then Felicity takes my hand from her breast and guides it to her knee and along her thigh onto velvet skin. She is wearing garter and stockings.

Our kissing becomes more ardent and she moves my hand further. When did you manage to rearrange everything that way? But then it dawns on me, No, it’s not rearranged! Felicity, do you know that between there and there your knickers have no knickers?

‘You have reached your destination,’ the cabbie announces.

Maybe not, but we are parked outside Felicity’s home and we both sit back in our seats.

She opens her handbag and gives me a crisp £20 note.

‘Pay the cabbie when he drops you home,’ she says, then, ‘Mmmmm’ and gives me a last long kiss and leaves the cab.

‘Got anything smaller?’ the cabbie asks when we arrive at Pont Street and I proffer the £20 note. I think, I have now, but don’t say it. When I see Felicity the following week, to remove Bianca’s stitches, I give her a £20 note and explain she had given me too much for the cab. Felicity has no recollection of giving me the money but from the look in her eyes remembers the rest of the evening. Bianca still doesn’t want me to touch her.

I ask Christopher when he next visits with a litter of Pekingese pups if he knows of the Templeton-Ellises.

‘Felicity Templeton-Ellis is very alluring,’ I remark casually.

‘She may be moreish but avoid her with a barge pole,’ he cautions. ‘It doesn’t matter how charming she is, he’s ex-SAS and provides mercenaries for African dictators. Mostly former Foreign Legionnaires. His best friend Lord Lucan has just separated from his wife. They’re both heavy gamblers at the Clermont Club. Ruthless. Completely ruthless. Brian pales into insignificance in comparison.’

‘You’re comparing Brian with the SAS?’ I ask incredulously.

‘Aren’t you as frightened of Brian as I am?’

I say that I am intimidated by Brian but also see that he behaves as he does because he exemplifies the reserved Englishman.

‘There’s someone inside who wants to get out and have fun,’ I remark.

‘Well, all I see is a perfectionist who frankly I find quite scary,’ Christopher says. ‘And what’s scarier is that tomorrow I have to take one of these bloody Pekes on a Swissair flight to Geneva, and I hate flying!’

‘Okay, Christopher,’ I reply. ‘I have two questions: why don’t you like flying and do people actually pay your airfare for you to personally deliver pups to exotic places – because if they do, I want to swap jobs with you.’

‘I hate flying because I feel claustrophobic in planes, and yes, we provide a door-to-door service if that’s what our customers want. This one here?’ and he lifts the pup in his left hand. ‘I’m delivering it to Yul Brynner in France next Friday.’

‘Right then, the pub after work? I’ve got more questions and I owe you.’

We meet as arranged at 7 pm at the Nag’s Head.

‘There’s a charity gala event in Belgrave Square this evening and I’m taking my girlfriend to it. British Red Cross. So just one drink,’ Christopher explains.

Inside it is heaving as always, so once more we take our drinks outside.

‘Do you seriously hate flying?’ I ask.

‘Everything about it. Going to Piccadilly to buy the bloody ticket. Checking in at BEA in Victoria. The coach trip to Heathrow. Walking across the tarmac. Climbing those rickety stairs. Finding myself incarcerated in a sardine can without a bloody can opener. Going through bloody Customs. Filling in the bloody tax forms because I’m importing goods. The bloody French. I hate it all.’

‘So why don’t you have one of your shop or kennel staff do the deliveries?’

‘Because our customers want mother to deliver their pups, and if it’s not mother then it’s me. That litter of Pekes I brought in today? Royalty. Singlewell Pekes. And royalty have their own chauffeurs. The mother of that litter was a debutante at last year’s Crufts. Are you going to Crufts? Dog royalty. You should. It’s not simply a dog show, it’s the start of the London Season.’

‘The London Season?’ I quiz.

‘Bruce, you must go. It’s the doggy equivalent to the Debutantes’ Ball. Bossy women and moustachioed men. Only those with aristocratic credentials – they’ve won best in their class – are eligible to attend. Fresh-faced virgins displayed not just to eligible bachelors but to professional seducers. Parents choosing who will mate with whom. Stagey pomp. The participants all nervously eyeing each other. It’s absolutely hideous and wonderful all at the same time.’

‘But you said it’s the start of the London Season. What’s that?’ I ask.

‘Bruce, to understand the British you need to know what makes us tick. I’m sure just as I do you meet some wonderful people, but we also meet people who are utter snobs, who go to events because it’s what aristos have always done. Go to Crufts. You’ll see more ex-Colonial officers and their wives and retired colonels and their wives than anywhere else in Britain, unless of course you follow them through the London Season, to the Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge on the Thames, then the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy and the Chelsea Flower Show, Trooping the Colour, racing at Royal Ascot, the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall and if you are willing to move up the Thames a little, to the Henley Regatta.’

Christopher laughs. ‘Do you think they see the irony of an aristocratic event sponsored by Pedigree Chum?’

Before I can get a word in, Christopher adds, ‘Listen, Bruce, must leave. That Peke pup I’m delivering to Yul Brynner on Friday? I’m taking my girlfriend with me. He lives at Le Manoir de Criqueboeuf about ten miles from Deauville. He’s always sending us photos of his Pekes with his children. We’ve sold three to him. I’ve booked a hotel for Susannah and me in Deauville for the weekend, and I’m hoping we might be invited to his chateau for a meal. I’m picking her up now, then we’re off to the Red Cross fundraiser in Belgrave Square. Why not grab a girl and join us there? But not Felicity Templeton-Ellis.’

Grab a girl? That was like, ‘Why don’t you fly to the moon?’

I did wander over to Belgrave Square. It’s minutes from Kinnerton Street. The railings around the gardens had just been replaced. They were removed during World War II when the gardens were used as an Army vehicle compound. I felt out of place, on my own. I looked for Christopher, but in the thick crowd didn’t see him. An artist, Feliks Topolski, was sketching people, with his fees going to the Red Cross. I sat for a sketch. Seventy-five pounds. Almost four weeks’ salary. Still have it.

Pethidine is a narcotic painkiller. It’s still used sometimes but was succeeded by methadone.

Curare (from a tree bark) was used on arrow tips by South American people to paralyse prey. It works by paralysing motor nerves. Synthetic drugs were developed to do the same.

5

It was July and London was sunny, although the mood in the country sure wasn’t. I was on a decent salary for the British, £21 a week when the basic wage was £11. But dock workers had called a national strike and the Queen, who had been visiting Canada, signed a State of Emergency within ten minutes of landing back in London.

There was a surly feeling in London. Lots of talk of ‘us’ and ‘them’, lots of national strife, but even so this was the best time ever to be a vet. That’s because my profession was on a cusp. I was trained as an animal mechanic, but I already had a hunch I should be more than that. The equipment at my disposal was just starting to improve in capability. We were about to be the first clinic in London with an electrocardiogram (ECG) machine, although that depended on the strike ending and supplies coming through the ports once more. There were a few specialists around, but a vet like me was still a jack of all trades, expected to handle any animal emergency. I was able to do things my professional liability insurers would never let me do today.

‘Bruce, St George’s Hospital just rang. A horse has been injured by a lorry outside the hospital and needs help. Brian wants you to go.’

It is lunchtime and I am reading the ECG section of Canine Cardiology, one of the American textbooks I brought with me to London.

‘Do you know how bad it is?’ I ask Pat.

‘The horse is standing and has a large flesh wound to its shoulder. That’s all I know. It’s probably one of Lilo Blum’s. Her stables are in Grosvenor Crescent Mews.’

‘Does Brian know I’m allergic to horses?’ There’s a hesitation in my voice.

‘You mean you don’t like treating horses?’ Pat queries.

‘No, I mean I’m allergic to horses. They make me seize up.’

‘How did you get through college, then?’ she asks.

‘With friends covering for me.’

‘Don’t forget the bute. It’s in the fridge,’ Pat reminds me.

I packed my medical bag with Betadine,* a new skin antiseptic we had just purchased, developed by NASA for the recent lunar landings, xylocaine cartridges and the cartridge gun, a spool of autoclaved surgical silk ready for use, a selection of sterilised surgical needles, a surgical pack of forceps, needle holder, scalpel, scissors and swabs, the phenylbutazone, or bute, a painkiller and ACP, a sedative, in case the horse was difficult to manage.

‘Did the knife-sharpener sharpen all the scalpel blades and scissors?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ says Pat, ‘and Mr Singleton has ordered new, disposable blades, so we’ll be hearing less bloody grinding from that sodding cart in the future.’

At a brisk walk in a fresh autumn wind it took less than five minutes to get to St George’s, where the injured horse was standing on the crescent-shaped ambulance entrance, surrounded by a crowd. There were several girls in nurses uniform in the throng. All of them looked gorgeous, even the ones who probably weren’t.

A ginger-bearded man, blue-green eyes, my height – a little over six feet tall – and my age – late twenties – wearing an olive-green tweed hacking jacket, tan riding breeches and brown boots, was holding the reins and halter. He looked great. I was envious.

‘Hi, I’m Bruce Fogle, the vet. How’s the horse?’ It is a little Arab-Welsh grey pony.

‘I’m Jeremy Livingston and this is Euripides. He’s surprisingly relaxed considering what has happened to him. I ride Euripides at lunchtime each day. He’s immune to the traffic but today, as we turned into Hyde Park Corner towards the park, for no reason at all he came to a full stop. He has never done that before. The traffic stopped, but then a lorry tried to go around us and caught him on his port side. It looks rather angry, and so am I.’

By now, between working at the zoo and for Brian, I had been in London for almost a year, was getting more familiar with British understatement, and I liked it. It sat well with how I felt. I walked around to Euripides’ left side and saw the damage, a raw, ragged skin tear about fifteen inches long, with many red trails of both dripping and drying blood running down his leg. Fortunately, there was minimal muscle damage under it.

‘Nasty,’ I say to the rider. ‘Jeremy, are you his owner?’

‘Yes. I stable him at Lilo Blum’s.’

‘Do you have your own vet?’

‘Yes, Mr Eaton. In Sutton.’

‘Before anything else, I want to give Euripides some painkiller,’ I say. I get the bute from my bag, raise his right jugular vein and inject a few millilitres of it.

‘Is Mr Eaton on his way?’ I ask.

‘I have had people ring from the hospital but they can’t get hold of him. Will you please take care of the wound?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I say.

So far so good. In a horse stables, thanks to my allergy my lungs would have sounded like bagpipes by now, but outdoors at Hyde Park Corner they produce no whistles and breathing is easy.

Euripides is an experienced urban pony, wonderfully relaxed, so I don’t use the ACP sedative. Pat’s grinning advice as I left the surgery – ‘If the horse is a male and you use ACP, remember you’ll probably have to carry his penis back slung over your shoulder’ – influences my decision to avoid it. ACP relaxes the muscles that keep a horse’s penis where a horse penis should stay.

While Jeremy holds Euripides by his halter, I cleanse the tear with Betadine. On the upper edge of the laceration, one region of skin is raised and rounded. I feel both sides of the mass and it’s as if a pellet has lodged just under the skin. I squirt xylocaine over the open flesh, then inject the surrounding skin, including on the far side of the pellet. On dogs I usually use about half a cartridge of xylocaine. Euripides needs six cartridges.

‘How old is Euripides?’ I ask.

‘Fifteen this month.’

The hundred-yard spool of sterilised surgical silk is in a separate autoclaved bag, but as I open it the spool unexpectedly rolls out, not onto relatively clean pavement but into Euripides’ fresh green manure. I am surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. I’ve dropped my suture material in horse poo. Can you imagine how I feel?

‘Damn!’ I mutter under my breath, but before I even think of asking someone to go back to Pont Street for more, one of the pretty nurses steps forward and says, ‘Would you like me to get you some suture material?’

‘If you could, that would be great.’

‘What size?’ she asks and I tell her ‘2–0’, a size I feel comfortable with.

‘Thank you so much. I’m Jeremy and this is Mr Fogle,’ the rider says to the nurse.

‘Hi, I’m Nicole,’ she replies with such cute dimples in such rosy, soft cheeks that I forget about Euripides. I hadn’t been on a date since I started working at Pont Street. My last date was with an American girl whom I met while working at the zoo. She’d come over to talk while I was examining a rhea, a South American ostrich-like bird that had a lolly stick stuck in its mouth, and asked me out. When she kissed me goodbye the following morning she said, ‘You’re cute. You’re fun, but you need to be more assertive. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.’ (But I did get, I thought at the time.)

Minutes later, desirable, shiny-haired, well-formed Nicole is back.

‘This is what we use,’ she says, and hands me a packet labelled ‘Dexon’. ‘It’s absorbable, with swaged needles.’†

Nicole strips open the outer packaging and inside is further packaging. When I tear this open there is twelve inches of suture material, with a small, attached needle. I grasp the needle with my needle holders and push it through the horse’s skin. It feels like putting a warm knife in soft butter – no resistance at all, and Euripides doesn’t flinch. Using mattress sutures, each package of Dexon stitches no more than three inches, but Nicole is there, smiling, radiating hormone, peeling open the outer packaging each time she sees I need more material.

‘If it’s okay with you, I’m going to remove that little pellet of skin at the edge of the tear,’ I tell Jeremy. ‘I think it’s a skin melanoma.’

‘That sound’s bad!’ he says.

‘Not as bad as they are in us. Melanomas are pretty common in grey horses as they get older. Usually around the bum. If you see one and it’s easy to remove, it’s best to remove it.’

‘Would you like some formalin?’ Nicole asks.

‘Yes, please, if you have any,’ and she asks one of the other nurses to get some while she continues to hand me more Dexon. Her hands are perfection. I continue to tidy the edges of the wound and place tension-bearing mattress sutures.

‘Under the circumstances, your horse has a good name,’ I comment to Jeremy as I place more stitches.

‘Why is that?’ he asks.

‘Well, your horse gets back to his stables, the Italian groom goes over to sponge him down, looks at his shoulder and says, “Euripides?”’

I’m still the smart alec.

‘Rather good that,’ Jeremy replies.

In less than fifteen minutes, the wound is closed and Euripides looks rather good too. And my lungs are still clear.

‘That’s wonderful suture material,’ I say to Nicole as I pack away my instruments. ‘I’ll tell my boss about it.’

‘The surgeons here are always opening the outers but not using it,’ she says. ‘I’m supposed to throw it out, but that’s such a waste so I keep it. The material is still sterile inside the inner packaging. I’ve got hundreds of packets. Do you want some?’

I want to say, ‘I want some of you.’ But instead I say, ‘Yes, please,’ and Nicole disappears through the emergency entrance to St George’s. I decide that when she returns, I’ll ask her out.

‘That was excellent work, Bruce. I very much appreciate what you have done for Euripides. Will you walk with us back to the stables?’

‘Yes, but the nurse is getting something,’ and as I speak, delectable Nicole returns through the hospital door with a shopping bag bulging with Dexon packets.

‘Nicole, I don’t know how I could have managed without you,’ chirps Jeremy. ‘You are Euripides’ guardian angel. If you are free this evening, would you like to join me for a glass of champagne at the Grenadier?’

Before I can say anything, Nicole accepts smooth Jeremy’s invitation. I envy his utter ease with women. After a few more thank yous to those who had helped, Jeremy, Euripides and I walk up the mews by the side of the hospital to the stables.

‘Jeremy, I’ve learned something today,’ I say as we arrive and one of the stable cats comes over to greet us.

What I want to say is, ‘What I’ve learned is that my last date was right. I have to be more assertive, like you,’ but I find that too difficult. I find talking about feelings or emotions too difficult. I still do. That might be why I feel so comfortable with animals. We intuitively understand each other’s feelings without having to put them into words.

‘What I’ve learned,’ I say, ‘is that I’m allergic to horses in their stables but seem to cope pretty well if they’re in fresh air.’

‘Why not go riding, then?’ Jeremy suggests. ‘You might get less sensitive to them. Miss Blum charges £2 an hour, and now that you know him you can ride Euripides if you like.’

‘I might just do that,’ I reply.

And do something about my appearance too, I think but don’t say.

A brand of povidone-iodine.

A swaged needle is attached to suture material without the need of an eye to thread the suture material through. It can also be called an atraumatic needle.