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‘You’d better watch out for my Hyla cinera,’ he said one day as he placed a clear plastic jar in front of me.

It appeared to contain nothing but a bunch of fresh leaves. Only when I unscrewed the lid and one of the leaves hopped on to the consulting table did I spot the tree frog. I didn’t have to ask what was wrong as it flopped round in a circle, its right leg trailing behind it.

Mandy refused to handle it.

‘No way,’ she exclaimed, her chins wobbling, her rotund body all of aquiver. ‘It gives me the creeps.’ And she did just that by creeping out of the prep room.

‘I’ll do it myself then,’ I said and X-rayed the frog between hops. The radiograph revealed a fractured tibia which healed of its own accord without intervention from me.

Occasionally, Mr Hargreaves would bring in a more familiar animal. ‘Here’s my Canis familiaris for her booster,’ he’d quip as Judy, his Springer Spaniel plodded in. But invariably there would be an accompanying exotic for my perusal. His Trituris vulgaris, for example. It took me several minutes of searching the tangle of weeds in his aquarium before I spotted the newts.

That November afternoon, he presented me with a real banger of a challenge. He slid the vivarium on to the consulting table. In it was a layer of sand, some small rocks and a log, its bark cracked, streaked silver and brown. I peered at the log intently, half-expecting it to slither away.

Mr Hargreaves chuckled. ‘That’s a real one … the Trachysaurus rugosus is underneath, probably buried in the sand.’

I placed a hand on the vivarium lid, stopped, wondered what sort of creature he was talking about, lost my nerve and said, ‘You dig it out.’

Mr Hargreaves heaved his thin shoulders, spread out his stick-like arms. ‘Just as you wish.’ He lifted off the lid, pushed the log to one side and sank his bony fingers into the sand. A scaly, grey head poked out, slowly followed by the rest of the stump-tailed skink’s body. Mr Hargreaves levered it on to the table. ‘Its innards seem to be coming out.’

Gingerly, I grasped the reptile round the neck, its rough, dry skin rasping on my fingers as I twisted it over. It wriggled and thrashed, its tail whipping from side to side. Any minute, I expected the tail to be jettisoned across the room. Just under the tail base was a coil of red, glistening tissues – bowels. The skink had a prolapsed rectum.

‘Wondered if it was something like that,’ said Mr Hargreaves.

I explained to him that to get the loops of bowel back in, the skink would have to have an anaesthetic and that it might not be too easy to do.

So it proved. The difficulty was not the actual anaesthetic but finding someone to assist in administering it.

‘Honestly, Paul, I can’t,’ declared Mandy, adamant in her refusal to help. And her fear seemed genuine enough, her dark eyes full of apprehension and her chins quivering yet again. And Lucy? She, too, backed away, muttering vague excuses about needing to exercise the dogs.

‘They’re just a load of namby-pambies,’ said Eric bouncing into the theatre, the ends of his white coat, as usual, swirling round his ankles. ‘Give it here.’ He rammed the skink’s head into the face mask and spun the ether valve on to full.

The skink lay inert, not a tremor, not a flicker of its tail.Both Eric and I peered closely at it, our noses almost touching, as we tried to determine whether the reptile was breathing or not.

‘Guess you’d better chance it, eh?’ said Eric when several minutes had ticked by and we were still waiting for some movement of the skink’s chest. ‘Go on … shove the thermometer up the blighter’s arse.’

I lubricated the loops of intestine with antibiotic cream and gently began to prise them back in, only using the thermometer when the last loop had slipped out of sight, pushing it into the rectum to ensure the intestines had completely inverted themselves.

‘There, that wasn’t so difficult was it?’ Eric declared smugly and tossing the face mask on to the anaesthetic trolley, he reached over to turn off the ether valve.