animal stories

JAMES HERRIOT’S ANIMAL STORIES by James Herriot

With an Introduction by Jim Wight Published by: St. Martin’s Press, New York, N.y. Further reproduction Copyright 1997 by The James Herriot Partnership.

ALSO BY JAMES HERRIOT

All Creatures Great and Small All Things Bright and Beautiful All Things Wise and Wonderful The Lord God Made Them All Every Living Thing James Herriot’s Yorkshire James Herriot’s Dog Stories The Best of James Herriot James Herriot’s Cat Stories James Herriot’s Favorite Dog

Stories

FOR CHILDREN

Moses the Kitten Only One Woof The Christmas Day Kitten Bonny’s Big Day Blossom Comes Home The Market Square Dog Oscar, Cat-About-Town Smudge, the Little Lost Lamb James Herriot’s Treasury for Children

CONTENTS

Herbert, the Orphaned Lamb

A Lesson from the Horse’s Mouth

Tricki Woo Requests the Pleasure

Susie, Messenger of Love

A Real Happy Harry

Mick the Dreamer

Blossom Comes Home

There’s Nothing Wrong with Myrtle

A Spot or Two of Bother

There’s Christmas—and Christmas

Tommy Banks, one of my father’s oldest and most respected farm clients, looked down at the small boy standing confidently in his farmyard, shiny new boots in stark contrast to his own. Mr. Banks was observing a seasoned and highly experienced “veterinary assistant,” a veteran of hundreds of farm visits whose very bearing exuded pride and dedication to his job. I was that boy.

A kindly smile spread over the farmer’s face. “Are you going to be a vet like your dad?” he asked. He was unprepared for the swift, indignant reply.

“I am a vet!” I said, drawing myself up to my full height—a few inches under three feet. Having attained the heady age of four years old, I considered myself to be a fully qualified veterinary surgeon. I could not understand why Mr. Banks was laughing.

The source of my unshakable conviction that a veterinary surgeon’s life was the one for me was my father, James Alfred Wight, a man whose total dedication, love and enthusiasm for his job was transmitted down to me as a four-year-old child. I would consider nothing else for my future career and little did I realize that, so many years later, as James Herriot, my father would instill that same fascination for veterinary practice into the minds of millions of people.

The veterinary profession has never before been held in higher esteem. The modern child regards a life in veterinary medicine as a top priority when future careers are being considered, and James Herriot is largely responsible.

My father was my best friend, and since his death a day never goes by that I do not think of him, but I console myself with the knowledge that he has left us with wonderful memories of a bygone age, a vivid picture of a way of life that has disappeared but has been reborn so clearly and enjoyably through his incomparable skills as an observer of human nature and, of course, as a writer.

The stories in this book clearly illustrate James Herriot’s gift of transporting the reader into his own world. We are there with him, sharing his triumphs and disappointments, just as he did, with the many fascinating characters who were part of his life and provided him with such unique material for his books. Lesley Holmes’s beautiful illustrations brilliantly complement the stories, and help the reader to escape even deeper into James Herriot’s world.

I, of course, do not remember James Herriot simply as an author, but more importantly as a friend, a veterinary surgeon, and a father second to none. He had a demanding and time-consuming job, but would always find time to spend with his children. My sister, Rosie, and I would listen, open-mouthed, to the magical stories he read aloud to us by H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells and many other great writers. My father was a great student of history, and we relived titanic struggles on distant Scottish battlefields and sailed with bold explorers to undiscovered lands. Closer to home we would laugh at the exploits of his veterinary colleagues, Siegfried and Tristan, and a host of other funny people that my father knew. We were, in fact, listening to the origins of All Creatures Great and Small from the mouth of the master storyteller himself who, many years later, would ensure that the world could share in our enjoyment.

One of the clear memories I have of a very happy childhood is of extreme cold. Winters in Yorkshire, in the 1940’s, were a wonderful time for small children. There was plenty of snow and often in the mornings we would wake up to a white world—white outside and white inside. Number 23 Kirkgate, our first family home, later to become famous as “Skeldale House,” was not a warm house, and the beautiful “Jack Frost” patterns on the windows, the perpetually moving curtains, and the icy stone-flagged corridors all bore testimony to the house’s winter mood.

In those early years, James Herriot’s life was hard. In many chapters in his books he refers to the inevitable night work, the jangling telephone summoning him to another crisis on a faraway farm at times when it seemed everyone in the world but he was asleep. I would often accompany him, day or night, in his primitive little heaterless cars, and in response to my cries of discomfort he would say, “Wiggle your toes, Jimmy. Clap your hands!” I had to learn to survive. I was James Herriot’s first “veterinary assistant,” opening gates, carrying bottles, or catching calves, sharing in his experiences of the tough Yorkshire farming community that was to provide such a great source of material for his future years as a writer.

Those early years were rough but, in my father’s own words, “They were more fun,” and when I think back to those days I do not feel cold; I feel a warmth born of a happy childhood with the finest of fathers.

Shortly after the memorial service for my father in York Minster I was asked if I would consider writing his biography. Having accepted such a challenge I determined that my first step would be to reread all the James Herriot books, not only to pick up a few tips from the master but also to attempt an analysis of the reasons for his phenomenal success. It soon became clear to me that attempting to put his writing “under the micro-scope” was a waste of time. I simply reread the stories and enjoyed them. My father never wished that his writing should be the subject of any close scrutiny. He intended that the stories should simply be read and enjoyed, and this clearly shows in his books.

A local farmer, having read one of the Herriot books—this was received with a genuine astonishment by my dad, who never thought that the local people would read and enjoy them—said that he thought it was “very good but it was all about nowt!” I know exactly what he was trying to say. James Herriot had the rare ability to turn everyday happenings into a compelling read with the use of uncomplicated words delivered with maximum effect. His stories are very largely about that fascinating subject, Human Nature, and they were written by one of life’s keenest observers. He watched, he understood, and most importantly, he preserved in print the thoughts of a compassionate and humorous man. James Herriot’s tales are not primarily about animals, they are about people.

Animal characters do, of course, figure prominently too. In the following pages you will encounter Tricki Woo, the little Pekingese whose generosity was responsible for a regular supply of succulent food hampers to the appreciative “Uncle Wight”—or, as it appeared in the books, “Uncle Herriot.” The little dog that I remember so well was deeply hurt when his favorite uncle committed the elementary blunder of addressing a thank-you letter to “Master Tricki Woo” when, of course, the appropriate mode of address should have read “Tricki Woo, Esq.” To my father’s and the family’s dismay, the stream of delicious foods promptly dried up, but a groveling letter of apology to the affronted little animal was graciously accepted and the crisis was averted.

Tricki Woo, Blossom the cow who refused to leave home, Herbert the orphan lamb with the indomitable will to live are all examples of James Herriot’s gift of interweaving human qualities into his animal characters. It is, however, the vivid and large-as-life portrayal of the human characters themselves that is mainly responsible for James Herriot’s success. Siegfried, Tristan, Calum, Granville Bennett, and many more have become household names, and these so-unforgettable individuals are brought to life through the skillful, descriptive talents of the writer.

Years ago, as a schoolboy, I was reading an action-packed paperback and my father said to me, “Jim, have you ever read the classics? Charles Dickens? Sir Walter Scott?”

“Too much descriptive stuff. Not enough action,” was my schoolboy reply.

My father laughed. “I love descriptive bits, the way these great writers put you in the picture and carry you into their world.”

I thought about this as a boy, but reading my father’s books again has led me to realize that perhaps he learned so much from these famous authors because he himself possessed the gift of “setting the scene.” Read James Herriot’s stories and you are there with him. You will laugh with him, you may cry with him and, above all, after reading him you will feel good.

In February 1995, three days before he died, my father was reading The White Company by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Illness had taken its toll on him physically, but his mind remained as alert as ever. “What a terrific writer Conan Doyle was,” he said. “I have read this book, I don’t know how many times, but I’m enjoying it just as much this time round. The mark of a great writer.”

My father could never understand the reasons for his success, but one thing I do know: On that day in February, this modest, unassuming man, that self-proclaimed “amateur at the writing game,” had unwittingly identified himself with those literary giants he had admired so much as a boy. James Herriot’s stories have been, and will be, read over and over again. Yorkshire, 1997

JAMES HERRIOT’S ANIMAL STORIES

Herbert, the Orphaned Lamb

I realized, quite suddenly, that spring had come. It was late March and I had been examining some sheep in a hillside fold. On my way down, in the lee of a small pine wood, I leaned my back against a tree and was aware, all at once, of the warm sunshine on my closed eyelids, the clamor of the larks, the muted sea-sound of the wind in the high branches. And although the snow still lay in long runnels behind the walls, and the grass was lifeless and winter-yellowed, there was the feeling of change.

It wasn’t a warm spring but it was dry with sharp winds which fluttered the white heads of the snowdrops and bent the clumps of daffodils on the village greens. Soon the roadside banks would be bright with the fresh yellow of primroses. I pondered a moment on the months ahead of me. In April came the lambing. It came in a great tidal wave, the most vivid and interesting part of the veterinary surgeon’s year, the zenith of the annual cycle, and it came as it always does when we were busiest with our other work.

In the spring the livestock were feeling the effects of the long winter. Cows had stood for months in the same few feet of byre and were in dire need of fresh green grass and the sun on their backs, while their calves had very little resistance to disease. And just when we were wondering how we could cope with the coughs and colds and pneumonias, lambing would be upon us.

The odd thing is that for about ten months of the year, sheep hardly entered into the scheme of our lives; they were just woolly things on the hills. Then for the other two months they almost blotted out everything else. By the end of May most of the problems would have dried up and sheep became woolly things on the hills again.

But in this first year I found a fascination in the work which has remained with me. Lambing had all the thrill and interest of calving without the hard labor. It was usually uncomfortable in that it was performed in the open; either in drafty pens improvised from straw bales and gates or more often out in the fields. It didn’t seem to occur to the farmers that the ewe might prefer to produce her family in a warm place or that the vet may not enjoy kneeling for an hour in his shirtsleeves in the rain.

And the lambs. All young animals are appealing but the lamb has been given an unfair share of charm. The moments come back; of a bitterly cold evening when I had delivered twins on a wind-scoured hillside; the lambs shaking their heads convulsively and within minutes one of them struggling upright and making its way, unsteady, knock-kneed, toward the udder while the other followed resolutely on its knees.

The shepherd, his purple, weather-roughened face almost hidden by the heavy coat which muffled him to his ears, gave a slow chuckle. “How the ‘ell do they know?”

He had seen it happen thousands of times and he still wondered. So do I. And another memory of two hundred lambs in a barn on a warm afternoon. We were inoculating them and there was no conversation because of the high-pitched protests of the lambs and the unremitting deep baaing from nearly a hundred ewes milling anxiously around outside. I couldn’t conceive how these ewes could ever get their own families sorted out from that mass of almost identical little creatures. It would take hours.