Animals and men on Yorkshire’s dales

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33941, 6 September 1975, Page 10

Animals and men on Yorkshire’s dales

All Creatures Great and Small. An Omnibus. By James Herriot. Michael Joseph. 442 pp. N.Z. price $7.35.

It is rare to find a non-fiction writer candidly describing the people among wnom he lives and works — blemishes as well as bon mots — with no attempt at anonymity, and doing so with perfect good humour, but James Herriot has done just this. A veterinary surgeon in his late fifties practising in the rugged Yorkshire Dales. Herriot has three books now topping reputable best-seller lists for paperbacks. “If Only They Gould Talk,” “It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet.” and “Let Sleeping Vets Lie.” It is these three books that comprise this delightful omnibus. James Herriot was raised in Scotland, and was fresh from Glasgow Veterinary College when, in 1937, he took a bus to the small YorKshire village of Darrowby to be interviewed for his first job. At Skeldale House, after being mobbed by “a river of dogs.” he met his future employer and partner Siegfried Farnon, M.R.C.V.S., a man a few years his senior with a flair for unpredictable and unconventional behaviour. More than 30 years later the two men are still practising together. The third vet inhabiting the shabby splendour of Skeldale House in those days was Farnon’s younger brother Tristan. Charming, lazy and wellversed in evading his brother's critical eye. Tristan’s well-meant efforts to extend Herriot’s social and amatory horizons usually ended in disaster. Some of the book's liveliest interludes concern confrontations between the brothers. When Siegfried is in bed with a sore throat, Tristan is deputed to drive his brother’s cherished Rover out on a case; inevitably he is involved in an accident — “As if operated by a powerful spring, Siegfried came bolt upright in the bed. It was startingly like a corpse coming to life and the effect was heightened by the coils of Thermogene which had burst loose and

trailed in shroud-like garlands from the haggard head. The mouth opened in a completely soundless scream. 'You bloody fool! You’re sacked!’ ” Of course Tristan takes no notice. Siegfried’s dictum is a token one, made regularly when in extremis. But if things are lively at Skeldale House, the farm visits are often orderly chaos. Administering a calcium injection to an unconscious cow in a stream, in driving rain at dawn; endeavouring to make numbers on cows’ ears tally with the indistinct figures in the farmer’s “herd record” — a miniature diary about two inches square — during a hectic day of tuberculin testing; being kicked by a stallion before he has a chance to treat him; and rocketing down a rough Dales road with his client and family in the car, hoping to reach Darrowby in time to hear a performance of “Messiah,” although the Bellerbv’s

lengthy and unconcerned meal beforehand had driven Herriot to a silent, fuming frenzy and made them all desperately late — all this and more James Herriot makes real for us. Perhaps one of the most charming characteristics of this book too, is the author’s eye for country. We sense that it is the beauty of the Dales as well the integrity of the people, that induced Herriot to stay on, marrv a Yorkshire farmer’s daughter and raise his family of two. His son has taken up his father’s profession and his daughter is a doctor. Driving home from a late case, Herriot remembers an old man who talked to his class at school about careers, “If you decide to become a veterinary surgeon you will never grow rich but you will have a life of endless interest and variety.” Herriot writes: “I laughed aloud in the darkness . . . That old chap wasn't kidding. Variety. That was it — variety.”