The Real James Herriot

by Jim Wight

  He and I always got on well together and there were occasions when I was grateful for his compassionate approach to his younger colleagues. In those early years of the 1970s when I was living at home, he observed on many occasions my delicate condition after an evening on the town. As the telephone was by his bedside, he took the night calls when I was on duty. I always heard the ringing in my room – an unwelcome noise it was in the early hours of the morning. He had two ways of answering these calls. His usual response was, ‘Very well, we’ll be out’ – in which case I knew it would be me crawling out of my bed. On the odd happy occasion, however, I would hear him say, ‘Right, I’ll be out.’ This meant that he had felt sympathy for his wayward son, and would soon be on his way to a cold farmyard while I buried my head deeper into the pillow. These are some of my fondest memories of a merciful father.

  I did not always get off so lightly. On one occasion, he was scanning the list of work for the day. ‘Let me see, now,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘There is a visit to Felixkirk to see a poorly calf, and what have we here? Oh yes, a trip to Ainsley of Nevison House to castrate twenty large bulls.’

  ‘Which one do you want me to do?’ I asked tentatively. Ainsley’s beasts were noted for their huge size and lightning response to any form of interference.

  ‘I’ll just get my crystal ball,’ he replied, cupping his hands around the imaginary object. ‘Yes, James, I see good old Nevison House … and, yes, there is a scene of high activity. I see flying feet, I hear bad language and … yes …’ he continued, looking directly at my face, ‘I see a bearded figure!’

  There was always plenty of humour in the practice as my father enjoyed watching his young colleagues learning the tricks of the trade. One day, one of our assistants, while visiting a group of young pigs suffering from a disease called ‘Bowel oedema’, had injected two particularly badly affected ones that had been exhibiting severe convulsions. Several days passed without his learning the result of his treatment, and this concerned him.

  ‘Don’t ask!’ advised Alf. ‘A silence means they are either better, or they are dead.’

  The young veterinary surgeon who was, naturally, itching to know what had happened, saw the owner of the pigs shortly afterwards, an elderly, bent man, walking along the street. He approached him.

  ‘Now then, Mr Braithwaite!’ he said. ‘How are those pigs of yours getting on?’

  ‘Nicely, thank yer,’ replied the old man. ‘Doin’ right well!’

  ‘Oh good,’ said the assistant, with some relief.

  Mr Braithwaite took his pipe out of his mouth and looked at the young vet. ‘Them two you injected died, but ’t rest are awright!’

  On hearing the story, my father retorted, ‘I told you not to ask him!’

  His advice to me in my early days as a veterinary surgeon was of paramount importance. While I was full of the latest theoretical knowledge, he had the advantage of years of practical experience – and there were plenty of lessons to be learned.

  On one occasion in 1970, Alex Talbot (the other assistant in the practice at the time) and I were operating on a Labrador. This big, friendly dog had the unfortunate tendency to consume large quantities of socks, shirts, old trousers – in fact, anything that was soft enough to pass down his enormous gullet.

  These unscheduled eating episodes were frequently followed by emergency operations to remove the offending substances and he soon became one of our most valued customers. On this occasion he had feasted upon a long piece of highly-coloured cloth and, having opened his abdomen, we had made several incisions into his intestinal tract but could not remove the cloth in one piece; it seemed to be firmly anchored somewhere. The operation was beginning to assume epic proportions when my father walked in.

  ‘What’s the problem, boys?’ he asked.

  I explained, through clenched teeth, that we had opened up several holes in the dog’s digestive system but that the cloth was still tightly anchored.

  He looked at the gaping wound and the perspiring faces of his two young assistants before opening the dog’s mouth.

  ‘This is interesting,’ he said quietly and began to extract, very gently, a long piece of colourful material out of the animal’s mouth. There seemed to be no end to it as he continued pulling. When he had finally finished, he tossed the entire heap nonchalantly into the waste bin.

  ‘There was some string attached to the cloth and this was wrapped around his tongue. I don’t think you will have any more trouble!’ He walked quietly out of the room to a deafening silence. It had taken him less than one minute to solve the problem.

  ‘Why hadn’t we thought of looking in the dog’s mouth?’ I thought to myself. Alex said nothing for several minutes. Suddenly, he swore savagely – twice – and continued suturing.

  These were good days in the practice. Business was improving and, with it, the profits. There was an increasing flow of dogs and cats through the old house at 23 Kirkgate, and the farm side of the work had also taken an upturn, with a new scheme to eradicate Brucellosis from the cattle population of the United Kingdom well under way. This meant that there was plenty of work for us all.

  My father was observing a great change in his profession as more modern drugs and treatments began to strengthen the veterinary surgeon’s armoury. However, in Donald Sinclair, he still had a partner on whom the passage of time seemed to have had very little effect. Just as in those far-off days of the 1940s, Donald’s fertile brain was continually thinking of ways to earn extra income. One day in the hot summer of 1975, he approached my father and myself with his latest scheme. With the farm stock thriving outside at pasture in the warm sunshine, there was very little work for us. Donald was restless.

  ‘Alfred! Jim!’ he exclaimed. ‘We should be doing something rather than hanging around! We have wages to pay but the assistants are standing around doing nothing. It won’t do! I have an idea!’

  My father’s eyes narrowed. Knowing his partner of old, he wondered what sort of wild ideas were ricocheting around in his brain.

  Donald continued with an analysis of the practice finances. ‘Alfred, I have calculated that unless we are making thirty pence a minute, we are going to the wall. We’ll go under unless we start to get busy!’

  A spasm passed across Alf’s face. He had heard this so many times before but it still managed to twist his stomach into a knot. ‘Right, Donald,’ he said, ‘what do you suggest?’

  ‘We’ll start a dog trimming parlour! Think of all those hairy dogs in Thirsk, dragging themselves around in this heat. It will give them a new lease of life.’

  There was a pause as my father took it all in. He exhaled slowly before shooting a swift glance in my direction. ‘Okay, Donald,’ he replied. Despite my father’s clear lack of enthusiasm, we all found ourselves, two days later, in the consulting-room with Mrs Warham’s hairy little Pekingese on the table and Donald clutching some huge horse clippers.

  The session began badly with Donald ramming the clippers into the ancient electric socket on the wall. This was followed by a loud explosion which delayed matters while a bemused electrician repaired the damage under Donald’s impatient stare. We were soon under way again.

  We watched in amazement as Donald hacked furiously at the hairy little creature. The old clippers made a tremendous noise as great clumps of hair flew around the room. My father occasionally tried to tender some advice but his partner was in full cry. Within minutes, the little dog was stripped bald save for his head and tail, and he presented an unusual sight. Isolated tufts stood up from his pink skin rather like cacti in a desert, while the removal of the hair from his rear end threw his hitherto concealed testicles into bold relief.

  Donald stood back to admire his work. ‘How about that, Alfred?’ he asked, a trace of uncertainty in his voice.

  My father took a while to reply. The dog appeared to be totally unconcerned but I could sense that my father felt a little differently. He stared, mesmerised, at the apparition in front of him. It no
longer bore any resemblance to the canine species.

  ‘Fine, Donald,’ he said, slowly and deliberately. ‘You will return the dog to its owner, won’t you?’

  I was, unfortunately, present when Mrs Warham came to collect her freshly-groomed pet. She gazed, open mouthed, at the little creature before her. The bald, spiky body was in stark contrast to the tufty tail with the bright red testicles bulging beneath. The eyes shone happily from the depths of the hairy face. Mrs Warham burst into floods of tears.

  Sinclair and Wight’s dog-trimming business drew to a sudden close but there was a satisfactory ending to the story. The summer of that year turned out to be an extremely hot one and Donald’s little patient, bereft of so much hair, enjoyed the best summer of his life – and went on to grow a wonderful new shining coat. Donald had been right; his first and only customer did, indeed, receive a new lease of life.

  The fact that some things altered little was quite refreshing for Alf, as he was under pressure to adapt to the ever-changing aspect of his work as a veterinary surgeon. Realising he had to move with the times, he kept well abreast of developments within the large animal side but left the more sophisticated small animal work to his younger colleagues. However, despite his assertions that he was never a ‘real small animal vet’, I was always pleased when he assisted me in performing an operation; his abundance of common sense and care for the patient, together with his deep mistrust of general anaesthesia, ensured that he never took his eyes off the patient’s respiratory rate. As a veterinary surgeon, when in the company of animals both large and small, I always found his presence a reliable and comforting one.

  Although he had a great deal to learn from his younger colleagues, we in turn had much to learn from him. We soon realised that many of our customers were far more impressed with a man of experience than one full of ‘book learnin”.

  In turn, Alf never forgot that it was his life among the farming community that had provided him with much of his material, and would continue to do so. His veterinary work throughout the 1970s took on extra meaning as, with his mind now switched onto writing, he was continually looking for new material, asking me or other members of the practice to jot down anything interesting that had occurred on the daily rounds. His first six books contained many incidents that actually happened around this time, rather than in the years either side of the war when he set the stories.

  To remember incidents, he relied simply on ‘headings’. There are notebooks full of these headings in his virtually illegible handwriting. He did not, as already mentioned, keep a regular diary; these simple headings were all he needed to remind him of the many interesting or funny incidents that he might incorporate into his books, and he referred to them continually as he wrote.

  Alf repeatedly maintained that his celebrity status meant very little to the local people of Thirsk but, when one considers the average Yorkshire person’s reluctance to display his feelings openly, it is likely that he may have been mistaken. There is no doubt that a large proportion of them – farmers included – were not only well aware of his achievements but derived pleasure themselves through his worldwide acclaim. The fact that they rarely exhibited their opinions on his success suited Alf very well. He often said how lucky he was to have spent most of his working life amongst them. During his years of literary fame, whenever he appeared under the spotlight, he never seemed fully at ease. I observed him many times on television, wearing the vague and uneasy look of someone who wished that he were elsewhere. The fact was that he was not comfortable when under the media glare; it was something he never fully enjoyed. Alf Wight was at home among the farmers of North Yorkshire and his oft-repeated expression, ‘I am ninety-nine per cent vet and one per cent author’ was one spoken from the heart.

  All of this contrasted sharply with the open admiration expressed by his adoring fans from further afield. One day, an American visitor had accompanied Alf to a farm and said to the farmer, ‘What’s it like having such a world-famous author as a vet? It must be great! Yeah?’

  The farmer displayed no emotion. ‘’E’s just one o’ the boys round ’ere!’ he replied.

  This is exactly how Alf wanted to be known. He did not seek deference from those people he had known for so long. ‘The farmers round here couldn’t care less about my book-writing activities. If one of them has a cow with its ‘calf-bed’ hanging out, he doesn’t want to see Charles Dickens rolling up!’

  This casual approach to his fame by the local people was illustrated by an incident that remained etched in his memory. In 1974, when Alf had four published books to his name, BBC Television cameras descended on Thirsk. They were there to film for the ‘Nationwide’ programme – and the object of their attention was James Herriot and his meteoric rise to fame. The film crews were there all day. Zoom lenses homed in on him as he calved cows, cameras were held inches from his face as he drove from farm to farm, and the premises at 23 Kirkgate were festooned with all the latest in modern technical equipment and what seemed like miles of cable. It was a long and tiring day.

  It was well into evening surgery when the director finally said to Alf, ‘Mr Wight, would it be possible – just to round everything off nicely – to interview one of the interesting old characters that you talk about in your books? Can you think of anyone?’

  ‘There happens to be a man in the waiting-room who would fit the bill perfectly,’ replied my father, pleased to be able to take a break from the exhausting schedule. ‘His name is Mr Hogg, an engaging chap, and a well-respected breeder of sheepdogs.’

  Not only was Mr Hogg, a farmer from nearby Kilvington indeed, something of a character, he was also a good talker. He revelled in his appearance in front of the cameras, and the director got more than his money’s worth.

  When the interview had finally ended, the farmer sidled up to the director and whispered quietly into his ear. ‘I ’eard that yer wanted ter talk to a local character. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the director.

  Mr Hogg’s voice sank to a whisper. He pointed a soiled finger towards Alf. ‘Yer should ’ave a word wi’ Mr Wight. ’E’s a very interestin’ feller!’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said the director.

  ‘Aye! In fact, Ah’ll tell tha summat!’ He put his face even closer to the director’s ear. ‘Don’t let it go no further, like, but … just between you an’ me … Ah’ve ’eard ’e’s written a couple o’ books!’

  In tandem with the literary success, there were many happy occasions in the first half of the 1970s. In September 1973, Rosie was married and twelve months later it was my turn to leave the family home. I was thirty-one years old and I think my parents were pretty relieved that I had finally taken the plunge. Having been living at home for almost seven years, they were beginning to think that I was going to be a permanent resident.

  EB01BodyTextLineSpaceOne of the happiest events occurred in May 1973 when our beloved football team, Sunderland – against all the odds – beat Leeds United in the FA Cup Final. This, the most coveted prize in the English game, had last been won by Sunderland way back in 1937.

  Alf travelled to Wembley with his old friend Guy Rob, and I well remember the smiling, swaying figure staggering back home that Saturday night. In 1990, he wrote about that memorable day in a newspaper article:

  ‘When the referee blew the final whistle at Wembley and I found myself dancing with my arms round a distinguished-looking gentleman in a camel coat who was a total stranger, I felt that from that moment on I could die happy.’

  Alf derived enormous pleasure and satisfaction from his literary achievements, but nothing would thrill him more than watching that tremendous victory for the red and whites.

  There were other less happy events. In June 1972, Joan’s brother, Joe Danbury, died in hospital following a protracted illness. This distinguished and good-natured man was liked by everyone and his death was a severe blow, especially to Joan.

  Then, on the last day of December 1973, Alf’s great friend
and colleague, Gordon Rae, died. Despite his dedication to physical fitness, Gordon had developed severe arthritis in both hips, followed by a series of heart attacks. His death was felt keenly by both Alf and Joan. Their weekly Thursday outings to Harrogate were a little darker without Gordon’s open and laughing face. He was one of the most likeable men Alf had had the privilege of knowing.

  At his funeral, Alf and Joan recalled their impecunious days of the 1960s when, unable to afford the cost of dinner out to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary, Gordon and Jean Rae had saved the day. As Alf had also just had his 50th birthday, he was asked where he would like to spend the occasion. ‘The Double Luck Chinese restaurant!’ had been his immediate response. The occasion was to be modest, but both enjoyable and delicious – and one that would, for ever, be fondly remembered by Alf and Joan.

  Joan’s mother, Laura Danbury, who had lived with us for so many years, outlived her son, Joe, but by only three years. In the final twelve months of her life she was confined to a nursing-home in Ripon. She was almost blind and my wife, Gillian, used to read her extracts from my father’s first books. The old lady would lie back in bed and listen attentively to every word that was said. She always thought the world of her son-in-law and she loved his stories as well.

  Alf, in return, had a great regard for his quiet and gentle mother-in-law who, even a day or two before her death, had the complexion of a young girl. He often said to me, ‘Before you think of marrying someone, have a good look at her mother. More often than not, she will turn out to be like her!’ Perhaps he had gazed long and hard at Laura Danbury before marrying Joan all those years ago in 1941.

  Another less than happy event occurred in 1975 when Rosie divorced her husband, Chris Page. She moved back to Thirsk with her baby daughter, Emma, and her life soon began to improve as she began work as a doctor in general practice in the town. She received enormous help from her parents in raising Emma who spent most of her childhood in the company of her grandparents. The four of them spent many holidays together, the majority of them in Alf’s, and Rosie’s, favourite surroundings – the lochs and mountains of north-west Scotland. When Emma was older, they travelled abroad on holiday, but the magic of Scotland always had a special place in their hearts.