The Real James Herriot (17 page)

‘By all means, Donald. You can hit me over the head with the poker and you will see that it protects me very well,' continued Scott confidently. He placed the helmet firmly onto his head.

Donald moved over to the fire, grasped the poker and swished the air with it a couple of times. Alf felt a stab of tension. He was aware of his senior partner's unusual behaviour but was unprepared for the next move. Suddenly, Donald raised the heavy poker and, with every ounce of his strength, brought it down on to Scott Ingles' head with a terrifying crash. A huge dent appeared in the helmet and the little man sank silently to the floor.

Alf stared with horror at the motionless figure. ‘My God!' he thought, ‘he's killed him!'

After an agonising few moments, Scott delicately regained his feet,
but it took more than one restorative draught to effect his complete recovery. His helmet had just passed its most severe examination.

I remember Professor Ingles, many years later in Glasgow, asking me how everyone was in Thirsk. ‘How is your father?' he asked.

‘Very well, thank you,' I replied.

‘Good! Do please give him my regards.' Professor Ingles paused for a moment before speaking again. ‘And Mr Sinclair?'

‘He's well too.'

He paused again. ‘An interesting man,' he said, a distant look in his eyes.

Alf was not alone in finding Donald Sinclair a source of amusement. Many others, farm clients included, were unable to mention his name without introducing a humorous slant into the conversation.

Many years later, my father was highly amused to hear of a visit that I had made to Sir Hugh Bell's farm at the village of Ingleby Cross. Sir Hugh appeared in the Herriot book,
Vets Might Fly,
as a character called Lord Hulton, and was a most open and likeable man. I had been to see some pigs and Sir Hugh, who was friendly with Donald, was asking after him.

‘How is Donald these days?' he said, with a mischievous grin.

‘Very well, Sir Hugh,' I replied.

‘Pleased to hear it,' he continued. His boyish face then broke into a wide smile and his sharp eyes danced before me. ‘An entertaining man,' he chuckled, ‘and only
slightly
insane!'

Alf may have had an extraordinary employer for whom he had to work very hard, but his good fortune in having a job at all was never far from his mind. Some of his friends from Glasgow Veterinary College were not so fortunate. In a letter to his parents in July 1942, he wrote:

I heard some remarkable things about some of the lads I knew. You remember McIntyre who was in my year? Well, he's still there, poor devil, sitting surgery for the umpteenth time. And Andy Flynn is still sitting pathology. Isn't it amazing! Aubrey couldn't stick it any longer at Cornwall, describing his employer as a miserable old ‘get', and is now in Sussex, while Eddie Straiton seems to be the only one who is doing well. Jimmy Steele says Eddie works from 6 am to 9 pm every day and will have a nervous breakdown if he isn't careful. The wages, I hear, are awful, too, and though I sometimes grouse at my lot, I feel I am a great deal better off in most respects. There are too many
miserable devils and slave drivers in this profession. Jimmy has to do most of his jobs on a bicycle.

I laughed till I cried at Jimmy's description of his last billet with one Benjamin P. Boyle in Staffs. He had to cut the lawn and hedges, chop wood, collect coal, but when they told him to clean the chimney, he left!

Jimmy Steele had, in fact, been receiving the princely salary of £100 per year. Although the availability of jobs in the veterinary profession was gradually improving, primitive working conditions for recently qualified assistants were still commonplace. Alf, considering himself to be a lucky man, was determined to make the most of his position in Thirsk. He had soon realised that treating farm animals, especially cows, was what interested him most. In some of the letters to his parents, he expressed his feelings for his job:

It's funny how one gets a reputation in certain branches of the work. Nowadays Donald is the horsey man and I the cow doctor. I am also firmly established as the small animal surgeon of Thirsk. All the ladies now ask for Mr Wight to see to their dogs and cats. Donald can't be bothered much with them and my Sunderland training stands me in good stead – but in my heart I am a cow man. When I started this game, I thought I'd never get to like those seemingly dull and uninteresting creatures, but I really have a great interest and affection for them now.

My dream of the future is a practice of my own in a nice country town, bigger than Thirsk, with enough to provide a decent small animal practice and, outside the town, a good dairying district with cows for ever. Of course, it seems impossible ever to save enough dough to buy a practice.

This illustrates Alf's ambitions – ones which he was to realise in the years to come. His work never failed to enthral him and, even in the wondrous years of his world-wide fame as an author, he would repeatedly maintain that he was ‘ninety-nine per cent vet and one per cent author'. This statement might be hard to believe, but there is absolutely no doubt that he was one of those who was blessed with a genuine love for his job throughout his working life.

Although James Herriot endeared himself to so many of his fans through his caring and thoughtful approach to his small animal cases, the real man – Alfred Wight – was, first and foremost, a large animal veterinary surgeon. It was not until well into the late 1960s that the
treatment of family pets would become an important contributor to the practice finances.

That is not to say that he was disinterested in the small animal work; he enjoyed it. During those early, tough years when he was tuberculin testing, castrating and dehorning, when he was spending long hours stripped to the waist, calving cows and lambing ewes, the treatment of dogs and cats made a welcome and civilised variation to his day's work. He also realised, from his earliest days as a qualified vet, that the establishment of a thriving small animal side to the practice would become ever more important as the years rolled by.

In the 1940s, however, with the large animal work dominating the veterinary surgeon's day, Alf used to gaze longingly westwards to the green dales of Frank Bingham's practice. They contrasted sharply with the prime arable land around Thirsk, with its fields of sugar beet, barley and potatoes outnumbering those full of grazing animals. He regarded the Dales as the veterinary surgeon's paradise – no ploughed fields, just grass and cows everywhere. He relished his frequent trips to do the TB tests for Frank Bingham. He loved the work but it was hard and, in the winter, it was cold.

One of the first things Alf noticed about Yorkshire was that it was much colder than Glasgow. There is very little shelter on the vast Vale of York, and howling north winds were commonplace, bringing with them heavy falls of snow. Just getting to cases could be a feat in itself. With his primitive little car adding to the discomfort, by the time he had driven the thirty or so miles up into the Dales, he was often numb with cold. On arrival, he had the near stupefying prospect of handling frozen syringes with fingers that had lost all feeling. The first item he put in his car in preparation for these comfortless journeys was a shovel. He was continually digging his car out of huge snow drifts but this, at least, had the effect of thawing him out. He considered himself to be an expert in the art of digging – the garden in summer, and the snow in winter. In a letter to his parents he wrote:

The snow has dominated everything for the last few weeks. What weather! I performed great deeds in battling round the Dales for the first two weeks of the storm and it was some experience, believe me. In the mornings, by the time I had driven to my first farm up in the hills at the top of Wensleydale, I was literally frozen stiff and had to thaw out over the farmer's fire before starting. Then away up the hillsides from barn to barn, trudging through the
snow with head down against the blizzard. And so on all day. The first week was a bit too much for me and I found I couldn't eat my dinner when I got home at night – just frozen miserable. But the second week was OK; I must have got tougher.

Last week, however, capped everything. We woke up on Tuesday morning to find snow about four feet deep even on the main roads. It took Donald and me over an hour to dig the cars out of the garages and even then we couldn't get to our local cases.

The Dales were notorious for snow in those days but the high ground of the Thirsk practice was just as bad. When it was raining in Thirsk, villages such as Cold Kirby or Old Byland on the top of the Hambleton Hills could be experiencing sweeping blizzards. Alf got to know, only too well, the high-pitched buzz of his car tyres as they spun wildly on the frozen roads, or the sight of the exquisitely shaped snow drifts sweeping across the road, beautiful but deadly as they relentlessly erased his tracks in the snow. Many times, as he struggled with tough cases on remote farms, Alf would wonder whether he would be able to return home safely over the white, snowbound roads. The less severe winters in Yorkshire today bear little resemblance to those weeks of freezing blizzards that Alfred Wight experienced so many years ago.

His introduction to the county that he would grow to love was, indeed, a cold one, but the summers in Yorkshire could be as sublime as the winters were unrelenting. During those long hot days, as Alf drove from call to call with his car windows and sunroof open, he would continually marvel at his good fortune in working in such a beautiful area of Britain.

However, summer or winter, he had to contend with one of the major difficulties facing veterinary surgeons years ago – the dearth of effective drugs with which to combat disease. Alf, Donald – and, when he was present, Brian – spent many hours concocting mixtures like colic drinks, bloat drenches and stomach powders. Some of the names of the ingredients, such as sweet spirits of nitre, sublimated iodine and flowers of sulphur, had a magical ring to them. Today's drugs do not have the same charisma but there is no doubt that they represent a tremendous advance in the treatment of disease.

When presented with a cow suffering from acute toxic mastitis, the modern vet has an armoury of drugs with which to treat the overwhelming shock to the system. In those early days, before the
discovery of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs, the vet survived on his wits. A common treatment was to cut the cow's teat clean off to allow the infected material to drain away. Large sacks were put over the animal to keep her warm and she was drenched with an exotic variety of stimulants. For cases of pneumonia, mustard plasters were slapped onto the animal's chest, while skin conditions received gruesome attention in the form of liberal application of such substances as tar and diesel oil.

A very serious condition in young cattle at pasture was parasitic bronchitis, or ‘husk' as it was commonly known. This was caused by a worm that invaded the lungs of the unfortunate animal, and often resulted in death. Nowadays, there is a vaccine to prevent this disease, and modern drugs to treat it, but the old vets had to resort to the only treatment of the day – injections of turpentine and other savage liquids directly into the windpipe in the hope of destroying the worms. Some animals dropped dead on the spot while others, with a bit of luck, survived.

It is not surprising that the farmers in those days developed a stoical approach to treatment of their ailing stock; in many cases, it was an acceptance of the inevitable. ‘Only them as 'as 'em can lose 'em!' was the final epitaph for many an animal – and one that Alf heard many times. Some of the old Yorkshiremen may have been dour, which is unsurprising considering the hard, unyielding life they faced, but a dry sense of humour was never too far away.

One of Alf's favourite stories concerned two old farmers who met one day at the cattle market. One of them, Albert, was a man of few words.

‘Now then, Albert,' said his friend, ‘Ah 'ave a beast wi' husk.'

‘Oh aye?' replied Albert.

‘Didn't thou 'ave one wi' husk a while back?'

‘Aye.'

‘Didn't thou inject it wi' turpentine inter its windpipe?'

‘Aye.'

‘I think Ah'll try summat like that.'

‘Oh aye?'

The two men met again a week later.

‘Hey, Albert,' said the farmer to his friend, ‘yer know that beast o' mine Ah told yer about last week?'

‘Aye.'

‘That one that 'ad husk?'

‘Oh aye.'

‘Well, Ah injected it wi' that turpentine, just like thou did wi' thine.'

‘Aye?'

‘Aye, Ah did – an' it died. Right on't spot!'

‘Aye? So did mine!'

What strides the profession has made in its fight against disease. Alf often stated that it was more fun in those old days, but it must also have been very frustrating. Today, it is sometimes possible to diagnose a condition without even touching the animal. Blood samples, X-rays, ultra-sound and other ancillary aids have made the job easier, but the modern vet must never lose his ability to use his basic clinical skills. Alf did not have these modern advantages in his formative years as a vet; he had only his eyes, his hands and his brain. Perhaps this fact contributed, in no small way, to his emergence as a first-rate clinician. In all the years that I worked with him, he seemed to have a natural ability to accurately diagnose and treat his cases. Those hard, early days had stood him in good stead.

To survive his physically demanding job, Alf needed to be well ‘fuelled'. In Joan, he had a wife who made sure that his energy levels were well maintained as a succession of fine meals kept heading in his direction. One of the big differences about married life was the superb variety of sandwiches he discovered each day when he was away working in the Dales. Formerly, he had survived on an interminable succession of cheese sandwiches but now it was different. To open every lunch pack was a gastronomic adventure as he bit into succulent pies, delicious cakes, and sandwiches made with homemade bread. As Alf tasted the wonderful food produced by Joan (the deprivations induced by wartime rationing seemed to have little effect upon her ingenuity as a cook), his mind would frequently stray back to his bachelor days in 23 Kirkgate when he, Donald and Brian often had to cook for themselves. On the occasions when the housekeeper, Mrs Wetherill, was away, Donald would roast huge pieces of mutton which would last the men for days. Alf, who was never keen on either lamb or mutton, experienced a dull, leaden sensation in his stomach as he remembered those endless slices of cold, grey meat, with their thick white slabs of fat.