It was a rainy Friday night. After a long day tending to farm animals, James Alfred Wight, a 50-year-old full-time veterinary surgeon, was tapping away on a portable typewriter in the sitting room, surrounded by his family who were watching television and chattering. Writing under the pseudonym James Herriot, he chronicled his early days as a rural vet in Yorkshire, hoping “someone would publish it and a few people quite enjoy reading it”. Little did he expect that half a century later, his books are still in print, having sold more than 70 million copies worldwide. The success of these semi-autobiographical stories has spawned many film and television adaptations, the latest being All Creatures Great and Small, a popular television series remade in 2020 based on his book of the same title.
Published in 1972, All Creatures Great and Small is the first book to delve into the fascinating world of James Herriot. Told in short, anecdotal chapters, the book spans Herriot’s first two years as a new veterinary assistant at Skeldale House in Yorkshire in the late 1930s. It starts with the eager trainee stripped to the waist on the cobbled floor of an open cowshed with his aching arm deep inside a cow, struggling to deliver a breech calf in the middle of a harsh winter night. The opening scene sets the tone for Herriot’s life as a country vet: mucky, gritty, back-breaking and with unparalleled opportunities for shoving his arm into the orifices of startled-looking large animals.
Herriot settles into the busy routine of working seven days a week and being on call around the clock. Driving around the unfamiliar terrain of the fictional village of Darrowby in a dilapidated car, he treats horses with twisted bowels, cures cows with milk fever, and grapples with the idiosyncrasies of their gruff owners. Some visits are deeply moving, such as the one to a bedridden old woman who, near the end of her life, is worried that she will not be reunited with her dogs and cats in Heaven. Some are hilarious and heartening, such as his regular visits to the overfed Pekingese Tricki Woo, who, with the help of his owner, pampers “Uncle Herriot” with expensive gifts and signed photographs. And some are indeed life-changing, especially the visits to a farm standing in the loop of a river where he meets Helen Alderson, his future wife. Writing in a conversational style with verve and wit, Herriot paints a panoramic portrait of a different generation and a fading world.
Above all, the book captivates the reader with its panoply of vividly drawn characters. Siegfried Farnon, Herriot’s eccentric and mercurial boss and the most sought-after bachelor in the town, is by turns disorganised and hair-splitting, avuncular and suddenly fault-finding, a man who has a heart of gold under his irascible demeanour. He often yells at his brother Tristan, and rightfully so. Tristan is a reprobate veterinary student whose life’s ambition is to work little and play hard. Like a reed in high winds, Tristan manages to sway but does not break under his brother’s fury. And there is of course the even-tempered, occasionally awkward, nervous, self-conscious Herriot. The reader will take great delight in the chemistry of the trio.
And those are just the residents of Skeldale House. Throughout the book, Herriot introduces us to all kinds of interesting people who walk the remote, beautiful Yorkshire Dales. Meet, for example, the Major, a master payment-dodger who always charms his way out of paying anyone anything; or the slow-witted Sam Broadbent, who can scare baby cows into obedience by imitating the sound of a warble fly, the only thing he’s good at. The animals are no less present than their human owners. Who would ever forget Nugent, the luckiest pig in the world who has his own valet? Or Strawberry, the proud cow who bears her owner’s hope for the future? Breathing life into an astounding assortment of disparate characters, four-legged and otherwise, Herriot offers insight into human nature and explores the deep and intricate bonds between people and animals large and small.
In many ways, the Yorkshire landscape is just as much a character as its inhabitants. Herriot extols the gaunt beauty of the land in great detail: the verdant hills, the dry stone walls which snake for miles across the undulating pastureland, the quiet and forbidding moors, and so on. “At times”, he writes, “it seemed unfair that I should be paid for my work; for driving out in the early morning with the fields glittering under the first pale sunshine and the wisps of mist still hanging on the high tops.” In real life, the author indeed stayed in the idyllic Yorkshire countryside for the rest of his life.
Time melts away as Herriot recounts his trials and misfortunes, and we traipse with him around freezing farmhouses in the small hours or gaze with him at the glorious heather moorland in the spring sunshine. There is something soothing and comforting about this tenderly drawn slice of life, which is the best tonic for the Covid blues.
