The Real James Herriot

by Jim Wight

  ‘But you are going past the door, Alfred. It’s pointless to send someone up there specially. It’s only a cow with a bad eye, and you’ve only to put some ointment onto it. Nothing can go wrong!’

  Donald was right. It was nothing more than a mild case of New Forest Disease. Reluctantly, Alf agreed and visited the farm where he duly applied the ointment to the cow’s eye. It had been a simple and straightforward case.

  He received a telephone call the following day. The cow was no better; in fact, she was worse, and her joints were beginning to swell. ‘What on earth have swollen joints to do with bad eyes?’ he thought, as he sped back towards the farm.

  The cow was, indeed, much worse. Not only could she barely walk, but her breathing was laboured, with a profuse discharge pouring from her nose. With grim determination, Alf tried all he knew to save her. He injected her with antibiotics; he administered steroids and fluids intravenously; he shot high doses of vitamins into her and, before leaving the farm, he personally blanketed her up to keep her as comfortable as possible. He returned home with one thought drumming in his brain: ‘What has all this to do with a sore eye?’

  Alfred Wight’s hand of doom had struck again. The following day saw a massive deterioration, with his patient recumbent and sunken-eyed. The knacker man arrived the same day to put her out of her suffering.

  With this experience having served only to strengthen Alf’s conviction that genuine ‘bogey farms’ do exist, it was a long time before he set foot on that farm again. Frank Furness never blamed Alf and, years later, when the James Herriot books began to hit the headlines, he wrote a delightful letter of congratulations to him.

  It was not only with the large animals that Alf realised a veterinary surgeon cannot win all the time. There was a lady in Sowerby who regarded him as an idiot – likeable, but nevertheless an idiot. Each time he treated her dog, something went wrong. In due course, the dog became terminally ill, suffering from renal failure, and she asked for it to be put painlessly to sleep. Realising that he was on delicate ground, he had elected to inject the barbiturate into the abdomen, rather than by the less easy – but more reliable – intravenous route of administration. To his dismay, the drug seemed to have no effect; thirty minutes later, the dog was still walking around the floor.

  The woman turned on him. ‘Mr Wight! Over the years that I have brought my dog to you, you have consistently failed to improve his condition. Now that I want you to destroy him, you can’t even do that properly!’

  As the 1950s progressed, some major small animal surgery was tentatively undertaken. Towards the end of this decade, Alf was performing cat and bitch hysterectomies, but more complicated cases were sent to a small animal specialist twenty-six miles away in Darlington. Denton Pette, an imposing, accomplished small animal surgeon, was to become one of Alf’s greatest friends – one who would, many years later, be immortalised as ‘Granville Bennett’, first appearing in the fourth Herriot book, Vet in Harness.

  The description in the book fits the real man perfectly. ‘Not over tall but of tremendous bulk … he wasn’t flabby, he didn’t stick out in any particular place, he was just a big, wide, solid, hard-looking man.’

  Above all, Denton Pette was a man of enormous presence. His wife, Eve, who is still a close friend of my mother, once said that a friend of hers asked someone how she would recognise Denton, having never before met him. ‘Just look for a square man!’ was the reply.

  As James Herriot, Alf wrote very affectionately about his friend, referring widely to Denton’s capacity to enjoy himself to the full. This incredibly generous man was the first to buy everyone a round of drinks but, with his apparently indestructible constitution having an ability to endure hours of extravagant socialising without any perceivable ill effects, one needed to be in good shape to survive an evening with Denton Pette.

  Alf and Joan enjoyed many memorable occasions in the company of Eve and Denton, with Alf frequently senseless at the end. I, too, would spend many enjoyable hours with the Pettes – like my father, almost invariably ending up glassy-eyed and incoherent. He and I were, many times, driven home by my mother after roisterous sessions with Denton and his friends. ‘What would all the James Herriot fans think of their hero if they could see him now?’ I remember my mother saying one night, as she smiled at the slumped figures in the rear seat.

  Despite Denton’s exhilarating social life, much of which I experienced during my time seeing practice with him as a student, he always appeared immaculate each morning, in beautiful suits and sparkling shirt cuffs. As I listened to his rich, soothing voice with the clients hanging on his every word, I realised that I was in the company of a highly successful man.

  His surgical expertise was amazing. He had thick, stubby fingers that seemed to caress the tissues as he worked, and he operated with lightning speed. One day, when working in Thirsk, I took a small dog to him in Darlington for an eye operation. Denton was beginning a surgical list. When he told me that he had three hysterectomies to perform, I suggested that I wander round the town for an hour or so and return later.

  ‘Not at all, laddie!’ he replied. ‘I’ll be with you in twenty minutes!’

  ‘But you have three bitch spays to do, Denton!’ I exclaimed. These operations – full ovario-hysterectomies – take the average surgeon about half an hour to perform.

  ‘Twenty minutes! We’ll have some coffee first! Care to assist me?’

  I then watched him complete the three operations in exactly seventeen minutes; if I had not seen it for myself, I would never have believed it. He was a wonderfully gifted surgeon – fast, yet gentle. As Granville Bennett, James Herriot would, very accurately, portray his friend as the talented, colourful and generous man we all knew. In the later years of the 1950s, while watching Denton at work, Alf realised he was taking a peep into the future, where the veterinary surgeon’s day would become ever more involved in the treatment of family pets. Much as he admired Denton’s work, however, his more rural existence among the farmers of North Yorkshire was the one he still preferred.

  As James Herriot, Alf Wight said many times that his life in veterinary practice was far harder in his early days than it was in the last two decades of the century. It may have been more demanding physically, but he was the first to admit that, in other respects, it was far less stressful. The modern veterinary surgeon treads a minefield, where one mistake can result in distressing legal procedures. His every move has to be carefully made lest he breaks one of an endless list of rules and regulations, while the end of the day is usually taken up with filling in never-ending forms. Paperwork sails into the modern vet’s life in mountainous waves.

  Alf’s life in the heyday of his professional career was not so bedevilled and, in addition, he did not have the pressure of long hours consulting indoors, which is the norm for the modern vet. He spent hours driving to small family farms, with his typical working day, demanding though it was, often finishing at five or six o’clock with tea in the company of his family. At this hour, for the modern veterinary surgeon in a high-powered urban practice, his day can be just getting into its stride with a full waiting-room.

  I observed the tremendous rise in small animal work in the 1970s and, even in a largely rural area like Thirsk, tea with my own family was a rare occasion indeed. This may well have been a factor in not one of my three children showing the slightest inclination to become a veterinary surgeon. When I look back on my father’s life in practice during the 1950s, my abiding memory is of a sunburned figure in an open-topped car, his dogs by his side, driving from one case to another among some of the prettiest countryside in England. There is little wonder that he wrote about those days with such feeling.

  Those days were equally enjoyed by his family for whom he always made plenty of time. My memories of the 1950s are of taking off into the hills around Thirsk, or up into the Yorkshire Dales, and walking for miles, becoming familiar with every corner of the country around our home. Visits to the seaside – Wh
itby, Scarborough and Marske – were a special treat. As we two children grew older, we would camp and stay in Youth Hostels with Alf, as well as play cricket, football and tennis. He was not just a father – he was one of us.

  Shortly after moving into our new house in 1953, Alf bought an extra plot of land behind the house on which he built a tennis court. He described the nerve-jangling experiences of its construction in his final book, Every Living Thing, but the effort was worthwhile. We played countless hours of tennis on that court.

  He and I had many marathon games. In my teenage years, I played a great deal of tennis and regarded myself as a fairly competent performer, going on to win the school tennis championship – but I could rarely beat him. Our games were closely contested encounters of rude energy versus class. He would control the game from the back of the court, firing strokes along the white lines, while I just ran and ran. At the end of the game, he would lay his hand on my sweat-soaked shirt and say, ‘Never mind, Jim, you’re improving all the time. You’ll thrash your old man easily one day!’ I never did.

  As well as tennis, golf was a game that Alf played regularly throughout the 1950s and, with the practice being quiet during the summer months, he had the time for it. Joan was also interested in the game and became a very steady player. Amongst the many people with whom they played were a couple who became extremely close friends – Douglas Campbell and his wife, Heulwen. Douglas was a chartered surveyor who was introduced to Alf by Alex Taylor, who lived next door to him at the time. Douglas, a tidily-built man who was always neatly groomed and very correct, could lead one to believe that he was a rather serious-minded and straight-laced individual, but there was much more to him than this. His clipped, precise way of describing things belied an acute sense of humour; he liked a drink and a joke, and the more Alf saw of this smiling man with the infectious chuckle, the more he liked him. He and Joan became such friends with the Campbells that, as well as enjoying countless evenings and weekends with them, our two families went on holiday together in 1956.

  It was Douglas who had provided moral support for Alf on that shattering day in the Golden Fleece when he had desperately, but unsuccessfully, bid for the house he had wanted so badly. Later in 1951, when Alf and Joan were drawing up plans for their new house, his professional expertise as a surveyor was greatly appreciated.

  The Thirsk and Northallerton Golf Club, to which Alf and Joan belonged, was a club with a difference. Because this small, nine-hole course had been purchased by the club together with existing grazing rights, it was populated for the greater part of the year by sheep. The other animals that explored the course were dogs, and two members who made full use of this rather unusual concession were Alf and Harry Addison. In the eyes of the Golf Club Committee, Alf Wight may have been a nobody, but Harry Addison was most definitely not.

  Harry Addison, our family doctor, is mentioned in the James Herriot books as ‘Dr Allinson’. He assisted at the birth of myself and Rosie, and we all looked on him as a doctor who could do no wrong. The tall, bespectacled, balding man was not only the finest player in the club but, with a strong personality that commanded respect from everyone, there were few objections to the presence of his dog on the golf course. To be able to combine dog walking with a round of golf suited Alf very well and this happy state of affairs continued for many years, but it did not last for ever. Harry Addison, having suffered a heart attack, made plans to retire to St Andrews and, at around the same time, the club committee ruled that all dog walking on the course was hitherto forbidden.

  Alf was very sorry when Harry left; he used to love watching the doctor playing the game so well, marvelling at the easy swing, followed by the little white ball sailing straight and true towards the green before fizzing to a stop close to the hole. But there was another reason to rue his friend’s departure; Alf, the lowly 18-handicap golfer, having lost his powerful ally, knew there was little chance of arguing his case for the reinstatement of dog walking over the golf course. His regular golfing days were finished; when it came to a decision between walking dogs or playing golf, his loyal companions won hands down.

  Looking back on those days, he realised that dogs on a golf course are not a good idea and he bore no resentment against the committee, but it was a shame that his playing days came to such an abupt end. He did at least have ten happy years playing a game that gave him enormous pleasure.

  It was not only tennis and golf that soaked up Alf’s spare time, nor the hours he spent with his wife and children. He never neglected his parents in Glasgow, and continued to visit them regularly as he had done since his earliest days in Thirsk. His mother also made sure that he never forgot the city of his boyhood, posting to Thirsk a long succession of savoury parcels containing Scottish food that was not obtainable in Yorkshire – mutton pies, sliced sausage, ‘tattie scones’, and black pudding with oatmeal. Alf still retained his love of the traditional Glasgow fare, and used to fall ravenously on these delicacies after a hard day’s work around the farms.

  As well as the food, his parents sent down the Sunday Post, a traditional Scottish newspaper that Alf read religiously. He enjoyed the accounts of the Scottish football matches, while the timeless cartoon antics of ‘The Broons’ or ‘Oor Wullie’ still brought many a tear of laughter to his eyes.

  The short holidays in Glasgow were of great benefit to Alf. His rural surroundings in Yorkshire seemed a million miles away as he listened to the bustle of the busy streets, the cries of the street vendors, the blaring of motor horns and the almost melodious droning of the tram cars as they swayed along Sauchiehall Street and the other great thoroughfares that he knew so well.

  The enjoyment of our family trips to Glasgow throughout the 1950s was frequently enhanced by the company of my father’s cousin Nan, who was also godmother to Rosie and me. Nan, daughter of Auntie Jinny Wilkins, was the cousin whom my father saw most throughout his life; she was only thirteen years older than Alf and was like an elder sister to him throughout his younger days. She was an unforgettable character in the true tradition of the Bells. Despite consuming prolific quantities of alcohol as well as smoking phenomenal numbers of cigarettes, she lived to her mid-eighties. She once told us that smoking was one of her great pleasures in life, and that she had no intention whatsoever of trying to break the habit. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘I’ve been rolling my own from the age of eleven so why stop now?’

  Nan’s husband was Tony Arrowsmith, a smiling benevolent man with a small pencil moustache, who spent a large proportion of his time firing off little jokes and wisecracks. Being married to Nan, he had it made: no matter the quality of the joke, Nan would laugh uproariously. Smoking had bestowed upon Nan a sharp, rasping voice with a grating laugh which we heard incessantly on those trips to Glasgow. Tony’s wisecracks and the harsh cackles of Nan were a tonic for us all.

  Apart from visits to Glasgow, Alf did not take his family on holiday until 1950 when the arrival of an assistant, together with the steady prosperity of the practice throughout the 1950s, meant that he had the time and the money to enjoy a family holiday every year.

  In 1951, we had our first-ever family holiday at Robin Hood’s Bay on the Yorkshire coast where we enjoyed the company of Alex and Lynne Taylor who were living nearby at the time. Two holidays in Llandudno in North Wales, in 1952 and 1953, were followed by a trip to the Lake District in 1954. We stayed at Skelwith Bridge near Ambleside, where it rained mightily, but this did not stop Alf falling in love with the magnificent scenery of the Lakes and he returned there regularly for the rest of his life.

  A visit in 1955 to Baronscourt in Northern Ireland, where Alex Taylor was then managing the Duke of Abercorn’s estate, was followed by holidays in Scotland every year for the next five years. Two of those, to Ullapool and Skye in 1958 and 1959, were made especially enjoyable by the company of Jean and Gordon Rae and their family.

  Gordon, who was an expert on natural history, enriched the expeditions into the hills with his tremendous knowledg
e of birds and wild flowers. My father was deeply impressed. Having had a city upbringing, and knowing little about the flora and fauna of his native land, he would listen with amazement as Gordon unfailingly identified each and every tiny flower.

  Gordon was a fitness fanatic. While in Ullapool, he woke us up early to run down to the pier and dive into the sea before breakfast. My father, although keen on keeping himself fit, had by now adopted a less rigorous approach to maintaining his health; with the old days of the ice-cold baths having long since been abandoned, he politely declined to join us.

  In those days, Alf and Joan never considered a holiday abroad; few people did in those days. In later years they did go abroad on several occasions, but they never enjoyed holidays more than those they took with their family and friends within the shores of their own country.

  Alf looked back on the 1950s as some of the happiest years of his life. The practice was doing well, he had the pleasure of spending time with his family and, in addition, he regained those youthful habits of widening his horizons. He started several hobbies, some of them seriously, others less so.

  One of the more transient crazes was that of deciding to live ‘healthily’. He bought a book by Gayelord Hauser called Diet Does It, and was convinced that, should he follow the advice within its pages, he would be supremely fit for decades to come. Gayelord Hauser described four ‘superfoods’ that were to be eaten every day – foods that in those days were virtually unknown. Yoghurt, wheatgerm, vitamin yeast and Blackstrap molasses began to appear on the kitchen shelves and Alf consumed them doggedly, not always with recognisable enjoyment.

  One day, as he was spooning black treacle into his mouth, he was reminded of an old farmer who had told him that he was fed by his employer on the cheapest food available – black treacle and dumplings. The old man went on to tell him that t’ dumplings stayed inside yer fer about a week, an’t treacle went straight through yer!’ I don’t know what effect this strange diet had on my father’s digestive system but, whatever the reason, he dispensed with it after a few months.