by Nick Trout
“You know as well as I do,” said the farmer, his words slightly distorted by his brawny fingers as they slipped inside the trigger guard next to his right cheek. “I’m well within my rights to shoot. Dog off a leash, frightenin’ my cows. No questions asked.”
Maybe it was the exhaustion of the run across the field, or maybe it was fear and the absolute certainty that Jack Shepherd would pull the trigger and walk away, taking his cows off to milking without a second thought. Whatever the reason, my father crumpled at the knees, collapsing to the ground, ready to plead and beg for his dog’s life.
“I know,” said Dad, sounding as though the round had already been fired, as though Bess were already dead. “I know it’s your legal right to do it. But it was an accident. Somehow she slipped her leash. Look. There’s my other dog, tied up to a tree.”
The barrel never moved and neither did Bess, but Dad noticed how a squinting eye relaxed, looked away, followed the direction in which my father was pointing and found a golden retriever tethered in place.
Later Dad told me that in that moment, waiting to hear the blast, he thought he understood the man with his finger on the trigger. He sensed that any attempt to argue would have been a mistake.
The moment stretched, lingered, reached its silent crescendo, and came to an end, the barrel slowly lowered.
Neither man spoke, but the farmer cracked open the breech of the shotgun, pulled out the shells, and walked back to his truck. Leaving the weapon behind, Mr. Shepherd began herding the cows, compressing them into one corner of the field. This forced Bess to tighten her circles, eventually giving Dad a chance to hurl himself in her direction and grab her.
He didn’t tell her off. He didn’t curse her out. Dad held on tight to her scruff, reattached her leash and turned to Jack Shepherd, giving him the kind of resolute stare that transmits gratitude and a tacit appreciation of a stranger’s gift, a second chance he thought he might not get.
“Sometimes,” said Dad when he arrived home and relayed the story, “ ‘a still tongue makes a wise head.’ ”
I considered him with furrowed brow.
“Did you just steal a line from James Herriot?”
Dad affected outrage that gave way to a smile.
Not that it really mattered. Diplomacy may have saved the day, but this kind of incident could never happen again. This was, after all, farming country, where tolerance of and respect for livestock were mandatory. Bess’s bovine obsession would be a difficult flaw to work around. Once again my father had been made acutely aware of his failings when it came to the appropriate socialization of one of his dogs.
By now, you will have noticed that my connection with Bess and Whiskey was quite different from my connection to Patch. Please appreciate that I did cherish their place in our family, loved the notion of having dogs (plural) jostling for leashes and open doors, padding around and book-ending me on a sofa, faking toothy snarls and throaty growls, hamming it up as they acted out their pretend dogfights. Their presence reestablished the natural order of things and best of all, these two disparate creatures had slipped in effortlessly, eased our family gracefully back into the world of dogs. At that time of my life, hoping to head off to college, there was a certain solace in knowing a familiar domestic harmony would fill my absence. It was like slipping on a pair of jeans, a wallet in my left-hand pocket, a set of keys in my right, the comforting awareness of a precise personal balance. Whiskey and Bess had become this kind of combination—they felt just right.
In order to study and properly prepare for my final high school examinations I decided to become a total recluse. Though this meant abandoning my friends and our preliminary forays into underage drinking on a Saturday night, in truth I missed out on very little. For the record, in England the legal age for purchasing and/or consuming alcohol is eighteen, and back then no one carried a photo ID. In other words, one’s ability to walk into a pub and order “a pint of your best bitter, my good man” came down to whether or not you looked old enough. Rightly or wrongly (obviously wrongly when discussing the dangers of alcohol with my own kids) this “talent” set in when I was just fifteen years old. So, for some time, and long before we could drive (in Britain you cannot begin to learn to drive until you are seventeen), Nigel, myself, and two other “mates,” Simon and Phil, would stroll downtown in order to familiarize ourselves with the effects of hops- and yeast-based beverages. Simon and Phil were friends from our days together as Boy Scouts, an organization we all abandoned pretty much as soon as we discovered girls. And please, I am at pains to point out that by discovered I mean “became aware of” rather than “achieved any measure of familiarity with.” We were all horrendously inept around the opposite sex. Pimples, fashion faux pas, and a slew of dreadful one-liners guaranteed every evening concluded in much the same manner: wandering back to Nigel’s house in order to raid his mother’s refrigerator, watch old horror movies starring Christopher Lee and Vincent Price, and explain away the inadequacies of our earliest attempts at “chasing the birds.”
Now, I think you can appreciate that I wasn’t really giving up all that much to study for my final examinations—the ones that would determine whether I would be accepted to veterinary school or not; the ones that would determine whether my future and my dreams converged. In the midst of my cramming Dad came to me with a proposition.
“We were thinking of taking a short vacation, son. A family vacation, before you go away to college.”
A self-absorbed teenager, fearful of being parted from friends or missing out on some momentous social event, I viewed the offer as an invitation to vacation at a maximum-security prison, with Mum, Dad, and Fiona my chatty cell mates.
“What about the dogs?” I offered, playing to a weakness, rummaging for an excuse.
“I know,” said Dad, “we won’t all fit in our little car but Grandma says she’d be chuffed to look after them.”
“What! Marty will think it’s Christmas—devour Bess, realize he has room for seconds, polish off Whiskey. You know he will.”
“Now, son. Marty’s not the dog he used to be, and besides, you know as well as me, Whiskey and Bess are usually fine around other dogs.”
“But Marty isn’t just another dog. You might as well suggest a sleepover with a canine version of Jack the Ripper. He’ll be munching on Whiskey’s throat like it’s corn on the cob as fast as you can say ‘jugular’!”
Dad pursed his lips.
“If I didn’t know better I’d think you didn’t want to go.”
I thought about this. We never went on family vacations. If my father wanted to go somewhere requiring more than one tank of gas, if he was prepared to be separated from his dogs, this trip had to be important.
“Where are we going?”
Dad smiled his crooked smile.
“Surprise,” he said. “Just you focus on your studies.”
And I did, drowning in factoids and formulas, devouring textbooks, finally getting my chance to prove I had learned something as I embarked on a series of written examinations testing everything I had studied for the past two years in the subjects of math, chemistry, biology, and physics. And when the proctor said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please put your pens down” for the last time, I walked home and took off my uniform, and my high school career had officially come to an end. These days I have noticed that Nobel Prize and Academy Award winners have more understated celebrations than most high school graduates, and I don’t mean to sound all “bah, humbug” and crotchety, but back in England, in my day, there was no prom, no formal graduation ceremony, no yearbook, no certificate, no gown, no “Pomp and Circumstance,” no hail of mortarboards, no nothing. All that remained was time. We wouldn’t find out our examination results for two months. A full eight weeks stretched before me with little else to do but stew about my final grades. Veterinary school had offered me a place so long as I made the grades. Any combination of three A’s and one B and I was golden. Anything less and I was screwed. Not a lot o
f margin for error and room for an eternity of doubt. Suddenly a family vacation seemed like a welcome distraction from this inexorable countdown.
As soon as we began to head north up the M1 motorway, I had a pretty good idea where we were going.
“The town of Bedale,” said my mother, quoting from a tourist guidebook, “is like walking up ‘the garden path’ to the Yorkshire Dales. From there it’s a short drive to the market town of Leyburn, and now, you are at ‘the front door.’ Step beyond this threshold and Herriot Country lies ahead.”
Obviously I was tempted to challenge the pushy realtor analogies, curious to discover “the kitchen” and, more important, “the lavatory,” but I kept my mouth shut. Both my parents appeared to be captivated by the surroundings, overcome, and I sensed this journey had become the veterinary equivalent of a trip to Mecca. They had finally made it to their Holy Land, and to be fair, as our little car dropped down into the winding roads of Wensleydale, space expanded and stretched, my eyes filled with hills and valleys, all blanketed by an immense, verdant, patchwork quilt subdivided by dry stone walls, and it was hard not to be impressed. I managed stunned silence and Mum and Dad seemed pleased.
There followed several days of sightseeing and it didn’t take long before Fiona and I realized what was happening.
“Do I recognize that house?” I asked.
We were standing on a cobblestone street in the village of Askrigg, staring at what appeared to be a large three-story brick building guarded by black wrought-iron railings.
“That’s Skeldale House, son. Remember?”
“Skeldale House,” I thought. “First official residence of one James Herriot.”
Now I saw it. As I sidled into position for a photo op, I realized we were crisscrossing a trail blazed by the original production assistants from the TV series All Creatures Great and Small as they scouted the perfect locations for each scene. We moved on to the Drover’s Arms, the ford through which Herriot’s Austin 7 splashed in the opening sequence, Mrs. Pumphrey’s Manor, Bolton Castle, and many more. My parents weren’t just trying to visit Herriot country, they were trying to put me inside it, as though I might understudy James Herriot in every conceivable and memorable still from the show.
For a while I played along, unruffled by any fanatical undercurrent to our tour, genuinely enjoying the beauty of the countryside and the distraction from my exam results. Then on the Wednesday afternoon, my father asked me to join him on a trip to the nearby town of Thirsk.
“Someone I want you to meet,” he said.
This time there was no attempt at surprise—the dozen or so American tourists burdened with newly purchased books and the brass plaque on the outside of the building were too much of a giveaway. And suddenly, there he was, shaking my hand, a surprisingly small, unassuming, even shy man, scratching his name on the page of a book with an arthritic hand—James Alfred Wight. Here was the real James Herriot, a man who had brought joy to countless millions of people all over the world, and what struck me more than anything else was how uncomfortable he appeared to be as the center of attention. He seemed to be astounded, almost embarrassed, as though it were completely new to him, as though his book had only just been published, and this obvious yet restrained humility was palpable. In my eyes, this common touch, this ability to be ordinary only made him all the more extraordinary.
It must have been my proximity to greatness that did it because on the drive back to meet up with Mum and Fiona, the fear of failing to make the grade got the better of me.
“What if I don’t get in, Dad? What else am I going to do? Of course I can go and study genetics or animal husbandry but it’s not as though I really want to. And you know, every time I was waiting to go and sit another examination there’d be some smart arse reminding me, ‘Don’t worry, Nick, you only have to get another A on this one.’ ”
My tone had shifted from one of reasonable concern to panic.
Now it should be said that my father tends to be cautiously optimistic, and by this I mean any predictions for some future outcome come prefaced with the phrase “touch wood” or “God willing.” I half expected some watery platitude to tide me over.
“No matter what happens, son, I saw how hard you worked for those exams and there was nothing more to be done. That’s all any parent can ask.”
He was right. I had given it everything. There really was nothing more I could have done. Good answer, Dad, I thought.
“Besides,” he said, “things always work out for the best.”
And there it was, the trusty cliché I had anticipated.
Fortunately Dad didn’t leave things hanging any longer.
“Your mother and I have some news.”
Oh, God, I thought, after all those lectures on safe sex I was about to get a little brother or sister.
“We’ve decided to buy a house up here in the Dales. Actually it’s more of a cottage—small, two bedrooms, one bathroom—but perfect for our needs. It will be a place for us in our retirement.”
He waited a beat, took his eyes off the road, and glanced at me, trying to gauge my response.
To my left there was a field full of sheep. To my right there was a field full of cows. My mind flashed to an image of Bess and wondered where on earth this dog who had an unhealthy obsession with livestock would get some exercise. Then another thought struck me, one with far greater reach, with ramifications that could last a lifetime. What if this was all a ploy? This vacation, the sites we visited, the trip to see the real James Herriot, the purchase of a property in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales. Mum and Dad would retire in another decade or so and this would be where they would live. If I was lucky I would go to veterinary school, and in another decade or so I might be looking to settle down, to buy a practice of my own. I wondered which geographical location they might suggest. I wondered who might get to play the part of Arthur Stone, the venerated office manager, the man who made it happen, who made sure the “veterinary” fixed your animal up. In that instant I took a disjointed collection of stars and made a constellation. I had been groomed for this opportunity—inspired by James Herriot, with a chance to live the life of James Herriot. As far as my dad was concerned, the stars were beginning to align.
“That sounds great, Dad,” I said, looking back at him, keeping the uncertainty out of my smile.
6.
Trying to Learn and Learning to Try
Six years in six minutes. That’s pretty much what it felt like, thanks to time’s knack of flying when you’re having fun. One day I was a boy, rudely awakened by a man smiling into his tears, yanking me upright in my pajamas, hugging me to his chest as he whispered, “You did it, son. You did it.” The next I was a man in a long black gown clutching a piece of paper proclaiming my membership in the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons.
Whiskey and Bess had been co-conspirators on that early-morning reconnaissance mission, visiting the front doors of my high school, where the examination results had been posted. Like most teenage boys, even on this particular morning, I was unlikely to get out of bed much before noon, so, in fairness to my hyperventilating father, I have to admit that his impatience to wake his bleary-eyed son with the good news was perfectly reasonable. Besides, how angry could I possibly be?
The remaining few weeks before I headed off to college marked the end of an era for me with regard to the dogs. Whiskey and Bess were, according to my father, about to transition from mere pets to VIP patients with their own personal physician. I played along as we bought my first stethoscope, veterinary textbook, and rectal thermometer, excited by this prospect and convinced that by the end of my first term my hands would progress from performing meaningless patting to meaningful palpation through which I would divine life-saving information.
The University of Cambridge was less than a three-hour drive from where I lived, but given my upbringing, it may as well have been another planet. Ask the average English person their thoughts on Cambridge and responses will range
from an eight-hundred-year-old bastion of learning that produced such great minds as Darwin, Newton, Wordsworth, and Hugh Laurie to a retreat for overprivileged toffs spending their days punting down the River Cam drinking champagne and reciting Keats. Imagine the backdrop to an episode of Inspector Morse, only prettier (sorry, Oxford) and dotted with far fewer fatalities. Then throw in lots of clever people on bicycles wearing Batman capes. You’re taking every big fish from every high school in the country and depositing them all in the same pond—apex predators reduced to chum. It’s an adjustment, but what struck me most was the way my classmates seemed so much more worldly than me. They had passports. They had taken gap years. Boarding school educations made them appear assured, their transition to life away from home painless. They were instantly natives of college life while I was a tourist. And living in a room overlooking a pristine grassy quad and a Georgian Gothic chapel didn’t help matters. Raiding the refrigerator or taking a gamble on my mother’s haute cuisine was replaced with formal dining, too much cutlery, and grace in Latin. I had no gift for small talk, my vocabulary was too provincial. I lacked political inspiration. I was tentative and self-conscious.
After a first week of failed friendships, we started to find kindred spirits. We freshmen began to click. We no longer felt as though everyone else was having a better time than we were. We relaxed into who we were and not who we thought we should be. After a month, I could confidently say to my professors if they offered a glass of sherry during our afternoon tutorials, “Dry, or sweet, Professor?”
Dessert and fish forks started to look different. Friends came over for coffee. Those blank spaces on my calendar began to disappear and by the end of that first term I left for winter break reluctantly and already eager to return.