‘I’ll try my best,’ I said, feeling terrible. Of course I had heard that solo two hundred times over the past month, but surely it would sound better in the context of the entire orchestra (I hoped). In the end I skipped ambulatory clinic to go, and missed out on a visit to a farm where three cattle had tested positive for TB. Still, it was worth it to see the smile on my daughter’s face when she spotted me in the audience. She sat straight-backed and proud on the stage, her pale bare knees vulnerable. The children were at the age where I spent equal amounts of time wanting to hold them close beneath my wing and longing to push them out into the world like fledglings from the nest. Without trying they’d never learn to fly, but I couldn’t bear to see them fail.

Jim and I still met for lunch in the campus dining hall, but now I was often the one who had to rush off for a class or a study group, a practicum or a lab. Sometimes he grew short-tempered when dinner was late, when the house was a mess, but I could still manage to find a way to make him smile or laugh. We could still laugh at most things.

There was so much to learn: respiratory, digestive, vascular, diagnostic. Anatomy and cell biology, nutrition and physiology, virology and immunology, bacteriology and dermatology, parasitology and pharmacology, pathology and epidemiology, dentistry and ophthalmology, neurology and toxicology, endocrinology and urology, cardiology and oncology, animal behaviour and anaesthesia, surgery and post-operative care. It was like learning an entirely new vocabulary, a new language. Sometimes I doubted that I could—I was too old, too weary, I had wasted too much of my life. I could read the textbooks until my eyes ached but so much was practical too—how a tumour felt, how a cow’s ovaries changed when she was pregnant, what a blocked intestine felt like and a swollen spleen. I quickly lost any squeamishness I’d had; when your arm is up a cow’s vagina there is no pretending to be dignified. Thankfully, even when I forgot the names of things I knew how they felt; my hands found things which my mind sometimes couldn’t.

When Caroline was fourteen and Andy sixteen I walked in the graduating procession at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine; the year was 1964. They were all there to watch, my family, and it was worth the arguments to see how proud they were of me.