she was clearly very ill. I took her to my local vet to get some antibiotics and an intravenous drip and brought her back home. I set up a drip, hanging it over our living-room door and putting her bed on the floor below it. Mum decided to sleep on the sofa next to her so that she wouldn’t be alone.
In the middle of the night Tosca began howling with pain. Tosca was the toughest dog I’d ever known. If she was howling, she must feel awful. I came downstairs to where Mum was sitting with her and stroked her head and her silky ears. She’d had enough and though my heart ached, I knew it was time to let her go.
My parents agreed to take her straight to the vet. Ridiculous, since part of my job was putting animals to sleep, but I couldn’t face seeing Tosca go. She had been my world for half my life.
Tosca was always needle-phobic and the last thing we wanted was for her to feel frightened, so I reminded Mum to ask the vet to sedate her first with an injection in the lumbar region.
In the event, that was enough. Before she was given the final injection, which is an overdose of anaesthetic, Tosca slipped peacefully away.
We buried her in the garden the next morning, close to my first spaniel, Bluff, who had died when I was 10. When Bluff went Dad had been redoing the garden with a mini-digger, which made the digging easy. This time we dug the hole by hand, all of us taking turns.
Tosca had been obsessed with tennis balls. They were banned in the house, due to the havoc she’d wreak with them, so we’d chuck the balls back outside when she brought them in and she would grab them and bury them in holes all over the garden. She was great at digging the holes, but being blind she neglected to fill them in and we were forever tripping into her mini-trenches. When we buried her, we tucked several of her beloved tennis balls in with her.
Dogs live short lives, and if you have a dog you know that most likely at some point you will be faced with making the decision to let it go. Even knowing that, saying goodbye is never easy. We were all quiet for the next few days, missing Tosca’s ebullient presence and painfully aware of the great big gap she had left in our lives.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Is that you, Englishman? I’ve got a job for you.’
It was my old friend Thys on the phone, an Afrikaner vet I first met when he took me on for work experience as a student three and a half years earlier. I loved working with Thys, but this time I was in South Africa for a friend’s wedding, not to work with animals.
I hesitated. ‘What’s the job, Thys?’
‘I’ve got to implant embryos into six wildebeest. You game?’
How could I say no? It sounded like a fantastic opportunity to try something new. Working with Thys was always an adventure; he expected me to handle some extraordinary situations, to think on my feet and to be resourceful.
‘I’m game. Tell me when and where.’
Thys told me to meet him at a junction a few miles up the road at seven the next morning. ‘You can follow me to the farm where the job is,’ he said.
I had arrived in Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, two days earlier. As always, the 16-hour journey from London, including changing flights at Johannesburg, had left me tired, stiff and sore, but, as always, the minute I stepped off the plane into the sweet-scented air of Africa, filled with the magical sounds of cicadas, my tiredness fell away.
Minutes later I was through the terminal and into Jacques’s arms. We headed out to his truck, where he had a beautiful bunch of purple flowers waiting for me. This was part of the ritual of our many reunions over the five years we had been together.
Jacques and I had first met when I took a gap-year trip to South Africa to work on a game reserve where Jacques helped to manage the volunteers. I had fallen in love with South Africa – the warmth, the stunning scenery, the wide open spaces, the generous, welcoming people and the unique mix of animals that roamed in the bush. And a couple of visits later, I had fallen in love with Jacques, too.
At six-foot-six, broad and muscular, at first he appeared intimidating, but I soon discovered that he was actually a big softie, as well as being hugely knowledgeable, great to talk to and a lot of fun.
For the next five years, all the way through my studies at vet school, we saw one another three or four times a year; Jacques coming to England or me going out to South Africa. I saved every penny I could for my fares, living on meagre student rations, and I organised some of my university work placements in South Africa so that I could combine my studies with seeing Jacques. We knew early on that we wanted to be together permanently, but living and working on opposite sides of the world we also knew that there would be a lot to negotiate and sort out before we could find a way to do that. I couldn’t imagine tearing Jacques from the land that he loved so passionately, but neither could I envisage leaving my family and my work to live thousands of miles away from home. We knew that when it eventually came to decision time, though, we’d find a solution. What mattered most was being with one another.
Jacques is an environmentalist. Passionate about wildlife, with a Masters in Environmental Management, he is a walking encyclopaedia of information about South African habitats and animals as well as being an expert in environmental impact assessments – which is now a requirement before any building work can begin on any land almost anywhere in the world.
For the past couple of years he had been lecturing in wildlife management at a local university and he was living in a small two-bedroom house in Alicedale, a tiny village about 70 miles inland from Port Elizabeth and 50 or so miles from the main university campus in Port Alfred. Alicedale was so small it had just a handful of houses, a pub, a convenience store and a hotel backing onto a golf course. The university had a small satellite campus next to the pub, where Jacques taught his wildlife students and which he referred to as the ‘Middle of Nowhere’ campus.
The morning after the call from Thys I was up at dawn. I borrowed Jacques’s pick-up truck, known as a bakkie, and headed for the rendez-vous point. I assumed Thys would stop, but he just hurtled past me and waved. I set off in pursuit, but keeping up was impossible. Thys drove, as he always does, at 100 miles an hour, even on the little dirt roads, some of which wound up hillsides with a sheer drop on one side. I couldn’t attempt to match his speed, so I trailed along in his wake, occasionally catching a glimpse of his truck. Eventually I arrived to find Thys waiting for me at the gates to the farm. As I drew to a stop he leaped out of his truck and came over to give me a big hug.
‘Well done, Englishman,’ he said, beaming with pride. ‘You made it; you’re a proper vet now.’
Thys is a one-off – a charming, eccentric, talented vet who has been a friend and mentor to me. His skin is deeply tanned to a leathery hide, he has a white beard and an accent so strong that I can’t always understand what he is saying. He has spent his life in turquoise overalls, white wellington boots and a safari hat. In his work he sees the occasional dog and does some wildlife work, but the bulk of what he does is looking after cattle on the region’s many remote farms. Most of them are more basic than British farms, and some are vast, with upward of 1,000 animals, compared with between 150 and 300 on the average British dairy farm.
As a student searching for placements abroad as well as at home, I had written to several vets in South Africa. Thys had been the only one to answer, warmly inviting me to come and work with him any time. A talented and unconventional vet, Thys may have been past what most
