Herriot delivers twin calves at the Dumblebys’ farm

The twin calving at Mr. Dumbleby’s farm turns an exhausting night of veterinary work into a test of both clinical persistence and human generosity. At three in the morning, James Herriot is called to a difficult birth and discovers that the cow is carrying twins whose bodies are obstructing one another. He eventually delivers both calves alive, but the encounter’s final surprise comes not in the byre: Mr. Dumbleby offers Herriot sausages, then charges him for them.

A Call in the Small Hours

By this point, Herriot had tried to put Mr. Dumbleby out of mind. The butcher’s visits had become so trying that Herriot had stopped going to the place, despite Tristan’s fondness for its draught bitter. The relationship was also marked by an unpaid veterinary bill: Mr. Dumbleby had not paid for more than a year. When the bedside telephone rang at three in the morning, however, the familiar urgency of a calving brought Herriot straight back into the butcher’s affairs.

Mr. Dumbleby’s call was unusually peremptory. He did not apologize for ringing at such an hour and wanted to know exactly how many minutes Herriot would take to arrive. Herriot tried a sleepy, sarcastic account of the time needed to get dressed and bring out the car, but the joke made no impression. In the sleeping village, a light burned in the butcher’s shop. Mr. Dumbleby paced outside while Herriot unloaded his ropes and instruments, impatient despite the long-standing debt.

The surroundings were more accommodating than the hour or the client. It was a modern cowhouse, with electricity rather than a smoke-blackened oil lamp, and its six cows kept the building warm. Herriot stripped to the waist, soaped and disinfected his arms, and began examining the cow.

Two Calves in the Passage

The diagnosis emerged from the physical arrangement of the birth. Herriot found a head and two legs, but they did not belong to one calf: the legs were hind legs, while the head in the passage belonged to the other twin. The first calf was therefore presenting posteriorly, and the two calves were entangled in a way that made delivery a tight squeeze.

Herriot pushed the first calf back into the uterus to clear the passage for the other. The cow’s straining repeatedly drove his hand and arm back, undoing his progress; each time he had to maintain pressure and work the calf toward the brim of the pelvis. He instructed Mr. Dumbleby to take hold of the other calf’s feet and pull, but the butcher’s effort did not move the calf. By then it was four in the morning, and Herriot was tiring. When he tried again to reach the feet, another contraction forced the calf’s head into the passage and jammed it there.

The turning point was an epidural. Herriot fetched local anaesthetic from the car and injected eight cubic centimetres into the epidural space. With the cow’s uterus numbed, her straining stopped; she even began chewing hay. The change did not make the delivery effortless: without uterine contractions to assist, the work depended on pulling once Herriot had straightened the calves. But it allowed him to hold the necessary positions rather than have each one forced back by the cow’s heaves.

The Rescue and Its Reward

Herriot and Mr. Dumbleby pulled the posterior-presenting calf free. The calf had inhaled placental fluid, so Herriot held him upside down until he coughed it up; laid on the byre floor, he shook his head and tried to sit up. Herriot then reached inside for the second calf, which had moved well back into the uterus. He brought it out snuffling and kicking. After the prolonged alternation of pushing and pulling, the sight of two live calves wriggling on the floor gave Herriot the familiar pleasure of a successful delivery. Mr. Dumbleby rubbed them down with straw and acknowledged that they were large for twins.

Herriot pointed out that the calves were in good condition and that twins so mixed up were often dead. He also reminded Mr. Dumbleby that the pair must be worth a fair amount. The butcher did not answer, leaving Herriot uncertain whether the observation had affected him. After gathering his equipment, Herriot followed him out of the byre and through the shop, past hanging beef, trays of offal, and freshly made sausages.

At the outside door, Mr. Dumbleby stopped and offered Herriot some sausages. The gesture seemed so unlikely, after the unpaid bill and the night’s impatient summons, that Herriot accepted it with astonishment. Mr. Dumbleby cut about a pound of links, wrapped them in greaseproof paper, and handed them over. Herriot then tested whether the gift was truly a gift by jingling the loose change in his pocket and asking what he owed. Mr. Dumbleby froze, his face nearly expressionless as he struggled visibly before answering in a husky whisper: the sausages cost two shillings and sixpence.

Clinical Persistence and the Final Reversal

The calving’s central problem is not simply that the birth is difficult, but that the calves’ positions and the cow’s contractions repeatedly defeat Herriot’s attempts to make room. He has to identify which parts belong to which calf, push one fetus back without losing ground, and change his method when the cow’s strength makes continued manual restraint futile. The epidural changes the conditions of the work: once the straining stops, the calves can be repositioned and delivered, though the absence of contractions leaves the pulling to the men.

The episode’s closing exchange brings the physical labor into contact with the economic tension running through Herriot’s dealings with Mr. Dumbleby. The safe delivery of two valuable calves and the offer of sausages briefly suggest a thaw in the relationship. Yet the charge immediately punctures that hope: even after a night call and a difficult rescue, Mr. Dumbleby treats the sausages as a sale. Herriot’s astonishment supplies the scene’s dry reversal, while the old unpaid account remains an unspoken measure of the difference between the butcher’s apparent kindness and his actual terms.