James Herriot (60 page)

I suppose I was an entirely typical discharged serviceman. They had taken away my blue uniform and fitted me with a “demob suit,” a ghastly garment of stiff brown serge with purple stripes which made me look like an old-time gangster, but they had allowed me to retain my RAF shirt and tie and the shiny boots which were like old friends.

My few belongings, including Black’s
Veterinary Dictionary,
lay in the rack above in a small cardboard suitcase of a type very popular among the lower ranks of the services. They were all I possessed and I could have done with a coat because it was cold in the train and a long journey stretched between Eastchurch and Darrowby.

It took an age to chug and jolt as far as London then there was a lengthy wait before I boarded the train for the north. It was about midnight when we set off, and for seven hours I sat there in the freezing darkness, feet numb, teeth chattering.

The last lap was by bus and it was the same rattling little vehicle that had carried me to my first job those years ago. The driver was the same too, and the time between seemed to melt away as the fells began to rise again from the blue distance in the early light and I saw the familiar farmhouses, the walls creeping up the grassy slopes, the fringe of trees by the river’s edge.

It was mid morning when we rumbled into the market place and I read “Darrowby Co-operative Society” above the shop on the far side. The sun was high, warming the tiles of the fretted line of roofs with their swelling green background of hills. I got out and the bus went on its way, leaving me standing by my case.

And it was just the same as before. The sweet air, the silence and the cobbled square deserted except for the old men sitting around the clock tower. One of them looked up at me.

“Now then, Mr. Herriot,” he said quietly as though he had seen me only yesterday.

Before me Trengate curved away till it disappeared round the grocer’s shop on the corner. Most of the quiet street with the church at its foot was beyond my view and it was a long time since I had been down there, but with my eyes closed I could see Skeldale House with the ivy climbing over the old brick walls to the little rooms under the eaves.

That was where I would have to make another start; where I would find out how much I had forgotten, whether I was fit to be an animal doctor again. But I wouldn’t go along there yet, not just yet …

A lot had happened since that first day when I arrived in Darrowby in search of a job but it came to me suddenly that my circumstances hadn’t changed much. All I had possessed then was an old case and the suit I stood in and it was about the same now. Except for one great and wonderful thing. I had Helen and Jimmy.

That made all the difference. I had no money, not even a house to call my own, but any roof that covered my wife and son was personal and special. Sam would be with them, too, waiting for me. They were outside the town and it was a fair walk from here, but I looked down at the blunt toes of my boots sticking from the purple striped trousers. The RAF hadn’t only taught me to fly, they had taught me to march, and a few miles didn’t bother me.

I took a fresh grip on my cardboard case, turned towards the exit from the square and set off, left-right, left-right, left-right on the road for home.

James Herriot (1916–1995) was the pen name of James Alfred “Alf” Wight, an English veterinarian whose tales of veterinary practice and country life have delighted generations. Many of Herriot’s works were bestsellers and have been adapted for film and television. His stories rely on numerous autobiographical elements taken from his life in northern England’s Yorkshire County, and they depict a simple, rustic world deeply in touch with the cycles of nature.

Wight was born on October 3, 1916, in Sunderland, in the northeast corner of England. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved to Glasgow, Scotland, where his father worked as a shipbuilder and as a pianist in a local cinema. His mother was a seamstress and professional singer. At age twelve, Wight adopted his first pet, an Irish setter named Don. The bond he formed with his dog led to his interest in veterinary medicine.

Wight graduated from the Glasgow Veterinary College in 1939 at the age of twenty-three. After working briefly in Sunderland, the town where he was born, he moved to the town of Thisk in Yorkshire County, England, where he settled down. In Yorkshire, he met Joan Danbury, whom he married in 1941. The couple had two children. Son James Alexander, born 1943, would go on to become a vet and partner in his father’s practice, and daughter Rosemary, born 1947, became a family physician.

Though he’d always had literary ambitions, Wight got a late start as a professional writer. Starting a family, serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, and then establishing his own busy veterinary practice all delayed his literary debut. In 1966 at the age of fifty, he finally began writing regularly with the encouragement of his wife. After trying his hand unsuccessfully in areas such as sportswriting, Wight found modest success with the publication of
If Only They Could Talk
in 1970 and
It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet
in 1972. He adopted the pen name James Herriot because self-promotion for doctors and veterinarians was frowned upon in England at that time. In the United States, his first two books were combined by his New York publisher and released as
All Creatures Great and Small
(1972), the volume that would make the name James Herriot famous. Within a couple of years,
All Creatures Great and Small
had been adapted as a successful film starring Simon Ward and Anthony Hopkins and as a long-running BBC program.

Throughout the seventies, Wight released several writing collections in England as James Herriot. In the States, these volumes would be paired up and released under new titles as omnibuses, including
All Things Bright and Beautiful
(1974) and
All Things Wise and Wonderful
(1977). Wight declared his intentions to retire from writing life after publication of
The Lord God Made Them All
in 1981, but released a final volume,
Every Living Thing
, in 1992.

Wight passed away in 1995 at the age of seventy-eight at his home in Thirlby, near Thisk, Yorkshire.