It is the lambing season in Yorkshire, a glorious time of year when lambs with black faces and cotton-ball bodies romp in the pale new grass. An occasional snowstorm may still whiten the broad, bald tops of the highest hills, but it is James Herriot`s favorite time of year. It signals the arrival of spring.
It also signals the imminent arrival of the tourist season, which is not James Herriot`s favorite time of year. Worse, he has inadvertently brought it on himself. Strangers were rare in this remote, pastoral corner of northern England until Herriot put it on the map in 1972 with ”All Creatures Great and Small,” the first of five best sellers recounting his experiences as a country veterinarian.
Although flattered, Herriot, whose real name is James Alfred Wight, is still mildly astonished that so many would be so charmed by his tales of treating flatulent dogs, diagnosing morose ewes and grappling with the eccentricities of their taciturn Yorkshire owners.
Well over 20 million readers have bought his books and, to Herriot, it seems that most of them are hell-bent on visiting him here. Sitting at lunch in the Three Tuns Hotel, an 18th-Century inn overlooking the square of this ancient market town, Herriot is quick to laugh over the celebrity he regards with horror and amusement. Still a practicing vet at 69, he is slim and wiry with silver hair and the squinty eyes and weathered face of one who has spent most of his life outdoors.
Although he used pseudonyms for people and places in his books, his passionate fans have been quick to track him down.
”Literally thousands of them come to the surgery,” he says with disbelief. ”I see them at 2:45 on Wednesdays and Fridays and rattle my dog charity box at them,” he says, grinning. ”They`re very generous people. I make about 100 pounds a time,” he says, adding that at least his celebrity does some good in raising money for a nearby dog sanctuary. He is less amused by the intrepid fans who track him to his house.
It`s not that he is ungrateful, it`s just that Herriot doesn`t consider himself a celebrity and barely thinks of himself as an author. ”Writing has occupied such a teeny, tiny part of my life, you see,” he says in his soft, Scots burr, pointing out that he didn`t even start writing until he was 50.
”When you think of it, I wrote all of my books when I was a full-time vet. I wrote all of them in front of my TV set. I could thoroughly enjoy the telly and bash away at the typewriter,” he says pointedly, as if trying to dispel any image of himself as a tortured artist. ”There are far better books than mine sitting in drawers somewhere,” he adds, noting his own first book languished in publishers` offices for two years.
He is even more loathe to let the world`s perception of him as the Albert Einstein of veterinarians go unchallenged. ”Undoubtedly, I am the best-known vet in the world. But, as a vet, I`d say I was run-of-the-mill. I made the grade,” he says without apology.
None of this diminishes the one talent that even Herriot cannot deny: the ability to touch readers with his stories of pets and their eccentric owners and to bring them into the harshly beautiful world of the Yorkshire dales.
About five hours northwest of London, this is a region of deep river valleys tucked between high hills, or ”fells.” The land rises and falls suddenly, crazily folding in on itself to produce narrow dales or yawning wide to expose vast, moorlike stretches. The fabric of Yorkshire is defined by an endless parade of ancient dry-stone walls that march up and down the hills and across the broad pasturelands in whimsical, wavy lines. The dales have been Herriot`s enduring passion since he arrived here from Glasgow in 1937.
”I would say, it`s a feeling of wildness. That`s the thing about Yorkshire,” he says. ”Wherever you are, up in those dales, you`re on the edge of the wild. I always feel quite a thrill when I climb up on the tops, the little lonely tracts where you see the little signposts that have been there for hundreds of years.”
To hear him tell it, he was a lucky man to practice veterinary medicine when he did, and above all, where he did.
”I came in at the very beginning when things were just starting to become scientific,” he says of the days when, as a young man, he joined the sweetly eccentric Farnon brothers, Siegfried and Tristan, in the veterinary practice in Thirsk.
”Up until then, it (veterinary practice) was really steeped in witchcraft. Farmers had been using the same remedies for hundreds of years. It was a revolution when the antibiotics, sulfa drugs, steroids and all these things came in.
”I went through the high noon of veterinary practice, when vets really came into their own for, oh, 20 years, you might say. Farmers were absolutely devoted to the vet and thanked him for all he could do. But now, the pendulum has swung right back and the farmers are doing it for themselves. Today, they`ve all got their own syringes. So I`ve watched it swing right around from the beginning, when they didn`t need us, to the middle, when they were desperately happy to have us, to now, when large-animal practice is fading away.”
Herriot still practices out of the same red-brick, vine-covered surgery he wrote about. Siegfried, now in his mid-70s, still practices there as well, along with Herriot`s son, Jimmy, and four other young vets. Tristan, Herriot notes, left veterinary practice to head up a government laboratory and lives in nearby Harrogate.
Occupying an 18th-Century building on a quiet village street, Herriot`s surgery looks much as his readers might imagine. It has a spare, dignified, old-fashioned air, enhanced by lofty ceilings and long, white corridors paved in red and green tiles. There is a sunny, butter-yellow waiting room, lined with straight chairs, racks of pet health pamphlets and tall French doors opening onto a narrow, walled garden. The same garden, with its ivy-covered wall, can be seen from the windows of the small, immaculate operating and examining rooms.
”This is where we keep the patients,” says Herriot, who has shed his green Wellington boots and donned a white lab coat. He shows the way into a long room lined with cages, each lined with newspaper and a square of carpet. These days, Herriot spends less of his time with farm animals and more of it treating smaller creatures, which suits him very well, he says.
”My favorite animal is still the dog, you see. I love dogs and I like to treat them. It`s funny, because I have been, you might say, a cow doctor for 40 years, and now, I`ve a book of dog stories coming out,” he says, referring to ”James Herriot`s Dog Stories,” just out from St. Martin`s Press.
Herriot has never been without a dog. Dan, his Labrador, and Hector, his Jack Russell terrier, often accompanied him on his rounds, riding happily in the back set of the convertible cars he drove up and down the dales for 16 years. So fond of these dogs was Herriot, that he dedicated a book to one.
These days, he has a border terrier named Bodie. It may come as some comfort to owners of eccentric pets that Herriot`s dog, in his words, is ”a bit of a screwball–in a nice way.”
Not only does the independent-minded Bodie refuse to obey commands, reducing his master to plaintively calling his name, says Herriot, but the animal has his own views about the meaning of going out.
”He leaps at the door, he wants to go out, wants to go out. And then, when he gets out, he won`t go,” says Herriot, clearly delighted with Bodie`s peculiarities. ”So I have to slink down the village with him under my arm. That`s me, taking my dog for a walk,” he says, chuckling. ”It`s awful.”
At the moment, however, it looks unlikely that Bodie or other Herriot pets will have any more books dedicated to them. The doctor is still wielding his stethoscope, but, for the time being, he has put down his pen. The upcoming dog stories, like those in his charmingly illustrated children`s books, such as the recently published ”Moses the Kitten” and ”A Christmas Day Kitten” due out in October, are not new stories, but drawn from his earlier works.
”They are all true stories,” says Herriot, who is particularly fond of the tale of the Christmas kitten, which first appeared in his third book,
”All Things Wise and Wonderful.” ”It`s about a stray cat that used to come into this woman`s home for years–come in, have a bowl of milk, and then shoot off again. One Christmas, it came in with a kitten in its mouth. It laid down the kitten and then died. It had brought the kitten to the only warm place it knew.”
This tender little story might never have been told, however, had Herriot followed his original plan of a one-shot publishing career.
”I wanted to write one book and get this out of my system. Once I had written one, I just went on and on, until I got fed up. I`m fed up now.” He says this quietly, then smiles and tries to explain. ”For a year or two, now, I have had no ambition, apart from the childrens` books, to do anything else. Not at the moment.”
He shudders at the thought of another ”book tour” and avoids interviews. Indeed, he granted this interview with The Tribune only for old time`s sake, out of a lasting gratitu to Alfred Ames, a former Tribune editorial writer and book reviewer, whose glowing, November, 1972, review in Book World of ”All Creatures Great and Small,” Herriot says, is ”what started me off in the U.S.A.”
He is not being modest. Although he had published two slim books in England–with the rather limp titles, ”If Only They Could Talk,” and ”It Shouldn`t Happen to a Vet”–Herriot was far from a household name in the United Kingdom when Thomas McCormack, president of New York`s St. Martin`s Press, chanced upon his work in London in 1971. Enchanted by the world Herriot described, McCormack combined the two books in one volume, repackaged it as
”All Creatures Great and Small,” and introduced it to United States.
Hardly anyone noticed it except for Alfred Ames, who was captivated. His review led off unequivocably: ”If there is any justice, `All Creatures Great and Small` will become a classic of its kind.” McCormack promptly ran the entire review as a full-page ad in the New York Times and sales of the book, which had already blossomed in the Midwest, began to sweep the country and, eventually, the world. To date, St. Martin`s Press alone has sold over 20 million copies of Herriot`s books, not to mention millions of others sold by publishers around the world. The TV series based on his books has been seen by additional millions.
”I`m in the last lap–not to be gloomy–but when you`re in your 70th year, I feel you should start doing all the things you want. One of the things I want to do is spend more time with my grandchildren,” he says firmly.
And that`s not all. He wants to be out walking in the clear Yorkshire air, working in his garden, spending weekends in Scotland or at his little Yorkshire country cottage with his wife, Helen, and going to football (soccer) matches to root for his favorite Scottish teams. He wants to be spend time with his two children, Jimmy and Rosie, a physician, and his grandchildren, all of whom live within a mile of him in Yorkshire.
He doesn`t want to escape to the tax havens of Jersey or the Isle of Man (”Not worth it. You`d be leaving the family and the grandchildren.”). He doesn`t want a vacation villa on the Mediterranean (”Oh my God, no.”). And, he doesn`t want a Rolls-Royce (”I`m afraid if you took a Rolls-Royce to the football matches, the lads would get their knives out.”).
He wants to stay in Yorkshire. As he says and has written so often, ”I was captivated by it, completely spellbound and I still am to this day.”
