Young James Herriot

by John Lewis-Stempel

  As a diarist, Alf was naturally enough interested in the master of the genre. After a visit to the public library at Whiteinch next to Yoker, Alf wrote in his journal:

  While I was there [in the library] I saw a volume of Pepys’ diary which interested me as I am emulating him through this tome. I think I’ll begin each day with ‘Up betimes and did go to the institution’.

  Alf’s diary was not the usual angsty teenage confessional or bare aide-memoire; it was like Pepys’ journal – a full record of his life, particularly in 1933. He also wrote the diary, not kept it. Some of his enjoyment of words is evident in a note about ‘school and its appurtenances’:

  For English we have Mr Barclay [‘Big Bill’] who is large, and at times, genial. I like him. For Latin we are in the care of Mr Buchanan [‘Buckie’] whom I can’t make much of. He is aged, tall, unhandsome and rather frail … at times I think he’s not bad and at times he gives me a pain in the neck. Mr Clark [‘Brute Force’] who is small, dapper and likeable takes us for maths and Miss Chesters [‘Soppy’] endeavours to pump French into us. Chesters is frank and almost boyish – I like her very well. Twice a week we get Mr [‘Tarzan’] Brooks for Elocution. This bird, tho’ probably well meaning is nothing but a funiosity.

  Alf’s ‘elocuted’ ear for speech is clear in his recording of Buckie’s droning on about the need for the class to work harder for the Highers: ‘Ah’m tellin’ ye, ye’ve no go’ a ghost o’ a chance o’ getting your Higher Latin – it takes students tae get it, no a lot’ o’ flibberty, gibberties like you.’

  * * *

  When Alf was 12, and still in his first year at Hillhead, there bounded into his life a character that would fix its course. Don was a Red Setter dog, given to Alf by his parents, partly as a reward for passing the entrance exam to the school. Although Alf already had pet cats in the apartment, a dog was different, more companionable than the solipsistic felines. However, as Alf found, the Red Setter (aka the Irish Setter) has certain drawbacks as a household pet, due to its gundog breeding. A genetic pot pourri of Irish Water Spaniel, Gordon Setter and Pointer, the Irish Red Setter was bred for brains and endurance, the latter quality requiring a lengthening of the leg. At 27 inches high and 70 lbs in weight, the Red Setter was a big dog for a small ‘hoose’ in a tenement. Worse, Don’s intelligence combined with his desire for activity meant he quickly got bored. And when he got bored, he became destructive. More than once, Don caused mayhem in the apartment at 2172 Dumbarton Road. He also ran off. Often.

  7/2/33: Don ran away tonight, the rascal, and hasn’t returned – he’ll be for it when he does.

  15/2/33: Don ran away from mother tonight and has just arrived, very penitent and sorry for himself. He’s a scream when he’s in that condition – tail between his legs and rolling eyes – a picture of dejection.

  21/2/33: I had to bath Don today as he ran away from Sadie and paid a visit to a particularly filthy field and returned smelling like a cow-bire.

  For Alf these negatives of Don’s were outweighed by the positives of the breed, which Don, ‘lean, glossy and beautiful’, had in abundance. Since Red Setters are used to close co-operation with humans, they are boundlessly affectionate, innately good-humoured and thoroughly responsive. A dog is a boy’s best friend. Maybe especially so when it is a Red Setter.

  On one occasion, at least, Don was put out to stud. Alf wrote in his diary on 12/2/33: ‘Our Don has become the father of 11 thoroughbred Irish Setter puppies and so my reason for going to Hardgate was to see them. They were great wee things. Fat as barrels and squeaking away like anything.’ Alf gave one of the pups to his friend Curly Marron, who lived in the same tenement block, and who had been a loyal companion on walks with Don. Curly christened the pup Rex. Soon after Rex became ill, teenage Alf dosed him with castor oil. This did little to cure Rex, and Curly’s mother and sisters became terrified by the puppy’s ‘frequent outbursts’ and wanted rid of him. Alf said the dog should see a vet. The vet said the illness would pass in a day or two. And, much to Alf and Curly’s relief, it did. With Don at his heel, and sometimes Rex and Curly, sometimes with other friends and their dogs, Alf walked along the canal, along the ‘Boulevarde’ (Dumbarton Road), but also regularly tramped out into the countryside at the top of Kelso Street.

  There were expeditions further afield too. ‘Living in the extreme west where the city sprawl thinned out into the countryside,’ Alf recalled in James Herriot’s Dog Stories, ‘I could look from my windows on to the Kilpatrick Hills and Campsie Fells in the north and over the Clyde to Neilston Pad and the hills beyond Barrhead to the south. Those green hills beckoned to me and though they were far away, I walked to them.’ Those green hills were at least 15 miles away but he walked to them often. ‘I spent the whole day,’ he wrote on 25 June 1933, ‘in a tramp to the Whangie & over the O.K. hills with Jimmy [Turnbull] & Jock Davy. It was simply wonderful.’

  On the repeated road to the hills, Alf had a change of perspective. Hitherto he had been a city boy. Somewhere in those green remembered hills around Glasgow, he became a country lover.

  Something else happened to Alf out in the scented, intoxicating Lanarkshire hills. Watching Don and the other dogs romp and run, Alf realized that he was intrigued by the behaviour of canines – and that he wanted to work with dogs, rather than with words. He did not abandon writing, but the animals had begun trumping the words.

  The light-bulb moment came when Alf was 15 (he tended to misremember it as 13), when he read an article in Meccano Magazine’s ‘What Shall I Be?’ series entitled ‘No. XXVI – A VETERINARY SURGEON’, by G. P. Male, President of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, in December 1931. Male wrote:

  Veterinary surgery is one of the few professions in which the number of entrants has shown a considerable decline in recent years. This decline is probably due to the belief that the expansion of motor traffic and similar changes have reduced the prospect of success in the profession. The belief is a mistaken one, however, for the decline in the importance of the horse is being at least partially counteracted by a growing demand for the services of the veterinary surgeon in other directions. The prospects of those now entering this comparatively neglected profession are bright, particularly if they approach it with a real liking for animals and for the open-air life that it entails.

  As Alf read, he ‘felt a surging conviction’ that veterinary medicine was the career for him. ‘As a vet, I could be with dogs all the time, attending to them, curing their illnesses, saving their lives.’ The conviction that his destiny was to become a dog doctor was cemented by a visit to Hillhead High from Dr A. W. Whitehouse, the principal of Glasgow Veterinary College. Like Male, ‘Old Doc’ Whitehouse refused to believe that the veterinary profession was on its last legs because of the motor car and the tractor, and went to Hillhead as a convinced recruiter for his occupation in general, his college in particular. He told the assembled pupils, Alf recalled later, ‘If you decide to become a veterinary surgeon you will never grow rich but you will have a life of endless interest and variety.’

  One boy, at least, was persuaded by Dr Whitehouse’s evangelizing. Henceforth, Alf Wight knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life. But the obstacles, he realized, were enormous. Veterinary science was, well, science, and Alf Wight was, in his own words, ‘certainly not a scientific type’. He had already chosen to specialize in Arts subjects over science at school, and with his ‘Highers’, the Scottish equivalent of A-levels, already on the horizon he could not swap midstream. So the 15-year-old Alf Wight went up to Glasgow Veterinary College on Buccleuch Street to seek Dr Whitehouse’s advice. Years later he wrote:

  He listened patiently as I poured out my problems.

  ‘I love dogs,’ I told him. ‘I want to work with them. I want to be a vet. But the subjects I am taking at school are English, French and Latin. No science at all. Can I get into the college?’

  He smiled. ‘Of course you can. If you get two higher and two lowers you have the matricul
ation standard. It doesn’t matter what the subjects are. You can do Physics, Chemistry and Biology in your first year.’

  But one anxiety still gnawed away. Alf Wight was poor at Maths. Would he, he asked Dr Whitehouse, need Maths to be a vet? The old veterinarian laughed, and replied, ‘Only to add up your day’s takings.’

  * * *

  With his career goal set, Alf Wight worked harder still at school. With the tutoring and encouragement of English master ‘Johnny’ Gibb, Alf counted among his triumphs in the fourth form the winning of the prize for English. A poem, authored by Alf and ‘DMM’, appeared in the December 1932 issue of the school magazine. Entitled ‘Four o’clock’, the poem is a parody of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard from 1751:

  The buzzing bell doth screech the ended day,

  The toil-worn herd winds slowly home to tea;

  The teachers homewards wend their weary way,

  And leave the School to ‘jannies’ big and wee.

  Now fades the fog-bound landscape from the sight,

  And all the School a solemn stillness holds,

  Save where the cleaners sweep with all their might

  And clanging pail the hidden dirt enfolds.

  Save that from yonder smoothly swinging doors

  The moping ‘jan’ doth audibly complain

  To such as playing football after hours,

  Infest his all too desolate domain.

  The icy blast of cold and frosty morn,

  The ringing of alarms beside their head,

  The milk-boy’s skirl, the matutinal horn

  Will tear them, on the morrow, from their bed.

  Six months later, another poem by ‘JAW’ appeared in the Hillhead High School Magazine: this time the target of the schoolboy spoofing is Hamlet’s ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’ soliloquy, spoken by the prince when he first sees the ghost – and calls upon all things holy to protect him:

  Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

  Be thou a verb, a noun, an adjective,

  Come thou from Virgil, Livy, Cicero

  Thy object, or to help or hinder me—

  Thou comest in such a questionable shape

  That I will guess at thee: I’ll call thee Noun,

  Pronoun, Conjunction – anything! Oh! Answer me!

  Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell

  Why the examiners, fiend e’en though they be

  Do thus maltreat me; why the dictionary,

  In which thou hast been quietly inurn’d

  Hath ope’d his ponderous and gilt-edged jaws

  To cast thee up at me. What may this mean

  That thou, foul word, so tangled, and unreal,

  Revisit’st thus the examination room,

  Making day hideous; and me befooled,

  So horridly to shake my disposition

  With thoughts beyond the reaches of my soul?

  Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should I do?

  Ironically, it was Alf’s very ability at English that led him into trouble at school. For three years, his Maths master, Mr Filshie, had tolerantly shrugged his shoulders at Alf’s regrettable mathematics, the nadir being 5 per cent in a trigonometry exam. When Alf won the Intermediate prize, followed by the English prize, Filshie suddenly woke up to the fact that Alf Wight was a very bright boy. ‘Wight,’ Filshie boomed one day, ‘I have always thought you were just an amiable idiot and have treated you accordingly, but now I see that you have come out top of the class in your English paper, so I can only conclude that you have not been trying for me. Hold out your hands.’ Six of the best on Alf’s palms followed. (Unlike English schools, which used the cane for punishment, the leather strap or ‘Lochgelly tawse’ was the common means of inflicting corporal punishment north of the border.)

  By 1932, Hillhead High School had moved from its pinched confines at Sardinia Terrace (since renamed Cecil Street: the old school building now houses Hillhead Primary) to a new site three streets away on Oakfield Avenue. So popular had the school become that the governors’ constant sub-dividing of rooms was no longer a solution acceptable to the Education Department, which threatened to take away the school’s grant. Given Hillhead High School’s social aspirations, it must have pleased the governors no end that the Oakfield address lay opposite Eton Terrace, which had been designed by one of Glasgow’s greatest Victorian architects, Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson. Thomson, for his part, probably revolved in his grave as the new Hillhead High rose from the mud of the drumlin. In the reverse of the usual construction industry scenario, the school cost less than the estimate (by half, of a given figure of £183,000) and the budget for architects Messrs. Wylie, Shanks and Wylie must have been particularly skimped on. With its awkward back-to-back Y shape and its red bricks, Hillhead High School hardly boasted perfect Classical proportions. Still, when the 736 senior pupils moved in on 1 September 1931 they most likely marvelled at the echoing spaces of the two gymnasia, the hall with a stage, the art rooms, laboratories, library and refectory. However, despite the change in location and the greater space, the round of school life continued as before: there was the Armistice Day service in Belmont Church, the march past the War Memorial on the first school day after Remembrance Sunday, the Christmas holiday, ‘skating’ days off when it was really icy, the holiday on 26 May to celebrate King George V’s birthday, the annual summer garden party and half holiday in June, the end of year speech day in the Woodside Hall in July, cricket in summer, rugby in winter…

  Sport was one of the aspects of school that made it rather more than ‘OK’ for Alf. He had a medal to hang around his neck for coming second in the Inter-Scholastic sports under-16 broad jump, and in his final year his prowess with a cat-gut racket saw him in the school tennis final. He also made the rugby Second XV. Hillhead was a die-hard rugby school, and during Alf’s time there it contained a clutch of boys who would go on to play club rugby, even to represent Scotland in the sport of the oval ball. Alas, Hillhead Second XV endured a string of defeats caused by a phenomenon known to every schoolboy rugger player. On losing to Kilmarnock High, Alf entered in his diary: ‘We were beaten but not disgraced as the other team was made of huge bruisers – six footers to a man.’ Another match: ‘I’m sorry to have to say we were beaten this morning and no wonder, as the Shawlands chaps were six footers to a man.’

  When not in school, Alf’s life as a teenager was, like his life as a small boy, a round of hobbies, of making stuff and doing things. Since television was in its infancy and only available in one house in a thousand until the late 1930s, the only ‘on tap’ entertainment in the home was the radio. The first Scottish studio of the BBC opened up at 202 Bath Street in 1923, and making crystal radios to receive transmissions became a mad craze, much to the annoyance of the General Post Office (GPO) because hundreds of Glaswegians stole the earpieces from public phone boxes for their home radio sets.

  The Twenties and Thirties are thought of as the hobbies decades for good reason: the school-leaving age had been raised to 14. To help children – and the children’s parents – pass all the weekends and holidays of the school year, publishers galore issued comics and tomes with advice on rewarding hobbies. Modern Wonders for Boys, a book published by Glasgow’s The Sunshine Press in the mid-Thirties was typical of the ilk, with articles on painting on glass, simple apparatus for the amateur conjurer, photography, stamp collecting, poker work, DIY winter decorations, making a bookshelf (there were legions of boys knocking up bookshelves in the Thirties, among them J. Wight, junior), getting the best out of cricket, as well as, ambitiously, ‘How to Make a Simple Canvas Canoe’.

  But hobby books were about more than time-filling, they were regarded as tools for education, thus were peppered with general knowledge articles. Modern Wonders contained informative pieces on aeroplanes (always a winner with Thirties boys), clocks, the Seven Wonders of the World, glass-blowing in Venice, hoovers, electro-magnets, ships through the ages, signalling, submarines,
X-rays, wild ponies of Britain, spiders, newspaper presses, coal mining … To sugar the educative pill, Modern Wonders filled the intervals with breathless fictional tales of derring-do (explorer Professor Ward in ‘The Last of the Lizards’) and schoolboys having wholesome fresh air adventures tackling foreign spies.

  Save for not tackling dinosaurs and thick-accented German agents, Alf managed a full gamut of pastimes. He took Don for a walk every day, often twice a day (‘Of course Don and I took our inevitable constitutional’), he kicked the round ball around with friends in the park, went with his mother to see Rachmaninov in concert (Alf remembered that he looked like a ‘big bear’ huddled over the keyboard), tried conjuring, juggling (‘the house has resonated with the sound of falling balls tonight’), tried muscle-building with chest-expanders and hand-squeezers, joined Yoker Tennis Club, watched Rangers, watched Celtic, watched Yoker Athletic, had a notion to read the Bible (for the meaning and the beauty of the words), took up hitting the ‘wee white ball’ with a club (‘In the morning, I played golf. In the afternoon, I played golf. In the evening, I played golf’), trained in various athletics disciplines (hurdles, javelin, discus) and took up fretwork. He carried on ‘piano-walloping’, albeit informally, being inspired by the new music coming in from America.

  I’ve taken a notion to make myself a good jazz pianist as hitherto I’ve only played straight stuff. I think I’ll send to Uncle Bob [in Sunderland] and ask him for a loan of his book on jazz playing.

  Alf’s Sunderland relatives also kept him liberally supplied with the local newspapers so he could follow the fortunes of Sunderland AFC, with their exultant highs:

  28 January 1933: Oh boy, oh boy! What a day! Why weren’t these spaces made bigger. Sunderland have defeated Aston Villa, by three goals to nothing at Villa Park! Aston Villa, the greatest cup-fighting team in England, the team whose name is a household word and whose traditions are more glorious than any other club in England. And Sunderland, who had met them umpteen times before in the cup without success, licked them!