Every Living Thing

This was a delightful book to read. And apparently Every Living Thing was the last one that he wrote.

There are a couple chapters in this that are worth the price of admission.

One is about a vet in the next district (they all have agreed-upon boundaries apparently) whose customers keep coming to Herriot. And only after the fact do any of these customers tell Herriot that their normal vet is someone else. A few of them tell him midstream an exam. And Herriot then has to drop everything and receive permission from the other vet to proceed.

It's unclear why these people are suddenly coming to Herriot. But at the very least, it is suggested it is because this other vet has been out of town a great deal. This other vet is a cantankerous jerk and becomes incensed and accuses Herriot of trying to steal his customers. Cantankerous jerks seem to thrive in Yorkshire.

I'm not sure how much the author embellishes his stories so that they work out into something thematically complete and interesting. But in this case, this is a story that is pretty good and I won't give it away.

The second one that stands out is pretty much a condensed damnation of human nature. Herriot is called out to a home to see a black lab. When Herriot arrives, it takes at least five minutes of ringing the bell and pounding on the door before anyone lets him in. Even then, the man of the house basically takes just enough time to grunt and point to the basket where their dog is lying and suffering.

And then the man joins his wife and children (one gets the impression they are all fat) in front of the boob tube as they all mindlessly stare at it, completely ignoring the vet and their own dog.

Herriot takes a look at the dog and sees that it has been suffering for some time from mange. He is barely able to get the attention of the man again in order to give him some instructions on how to use the powders (sulfur powders, I think) to bathe the dog. He'll check back in a few days, he says, to see how the dog is doing.

And when he checks back, the packets of sulfur powder lie unopened where he had left them. And obviously the dog is no better and still suffering. And the fat family of heavy-smokers is again mindlessly all watching TV and barely can offer Herriot a grunt in response to his inquiries about the dog and the reasons for not bathing it like they should.

Herriot has seen enough and demands a tub and some hot water. He will do the first treatment himself. He goes out to the back yard of this house and proceeds to bathe the dog. There is an older couple next door who watch from over the fence and strike up a conversation with Herriot. And here's where I won't give anything more away. It's worth reading fresh. And if this family isn't at least in Purgatory, then there is no justice in this world.

Siegfried has clearly mellowed out a little since we've seen him, at least in the TV series. There's almost no conflict between him and James. It seems that Siegfried is well pleased with James and no longer motivated to be contentious.

I finished the first book in this series, "All Creatures Great and Small." It's more of the same, of course, but it is interesting reading James Herriot's experiences from the very start.

I think it's obvious that James Alfred Wight (aka "James Herriot") embellished his stories a bit. Even accounting for that, you can't help but be impressed by the Yorkshiremen and especially the Yorkshirewomen. They both worked hard. And the greatest compliment to be bestowed upon a departed wife was "She was a good worker."

Farming in a rather bleak country was hard work. Most farms had sheep and a few dairy cows. Some had pigs. There was little detail in what kinds of gardening they did, but they must have done that as well because they were pretty much self-sufficient. In many cases, people didn't leave the farm for months at a time. In one instance, I think he said this one family hadn't left the farm at all that year except when they had to send their son into town for some necessity.

I wouldn't expect Wight to write anything but good things about his wife. But Helen surely does seem like an extraordinary woman. She was beautiful, good-natured, sturdy, and hard-working. She and James were just about off on their honeymoon when a thick envelope arrived in the mail. It was a request from a government agency (for which they did contract work) to give the local cattle tuberculin tests. I'm not sure where Tristan was, but Siegried was not in a position to both run the practice and do the tests while James was away.

So James, an employee at this point, volunteered to rearrange his honeymoon a bit. They would stay at a charming little inn which they both liked and which was in the vicinity of the cows that needed testing. Rather than complaining and putting up a fuss, Helen volunteered to be James' assistant with great cheer (there is a lot of paperwork involved in these field tests). She was happy to do it and they made the best of it. Upon returning to Skeldale House (Siegfried's large home, site of the practice, and James and Helen's first living space on the third floor), they found a metal plaque alongside Siegried's which announced "James Herriot, M.R.C.V.S". He had been made a partner.

No Yorkshire farm could likely prosper without a good woman. However, it was made plain that much of the hard work a man would endure was in order to have something to hand over to his son or sons. In this modern era of divisions of labor where nearly everyone is a specialist, it's ludicrous over how today's dumbbells judge their forebears harshly for doing the same. There was indeed women's work and men's work. And both were absolute necessities for survival, if not also for a reasonably comfortable living.

And one gets the distinct impression from these books that, without some nag telling them how awful their lives were, Wight often noted how happy and at peace most of these people were, even if they were relatively poor, while the lives of the townspeople were often quite the opposite. Perhaps there's a bit of a soft-focus filter put on this. But I don't think he was lying about what he saw and experienced in the Yorkshire countryside.

Yes, wonderful memories, I'm sure. The impression I get is that the weather isn't a million miles away from where we get here on this particular part of the Left Coast, although Yorkshire is significantly further north. Yorkshire Latitude 42. Bremerton 47. Yorkshire averages about 4 to 5 degrees colder in the winter and about 7 degrees cooler in August. Where Wight practiced was in the Yorkshire Dales, in the county of Northern Yorkshire, which is in and around the Pennines, so the weather must have been even more bracing, even for Yorkshire.

And I must say, sometimes we do have those Yorkshire years here, especially in the summer. But the impression I get is it's the same relative rainy, drizzling gloom, but just a little colder (which would definitely make it worse). Yorkshire sounds like a wonderful place to visit in the summer.

James Herriot/Wight was born in Sunderland and graduated from Glasgow Veterinary College. He came from a relative big city and seemed to have adapted very quickly to rural life. He loved it. He particularly loved the scenery, slower pace, and lack of crowding.

Yes, York Minster is spectacular. And that's a nice collection of photos on that Wiki page. The one photo of the Crypt does make it look quite interesting.



Yes, that's interesting. Seattle holds the record (or near the top) for cloudy, drizzly days...but certainly not for the amount of rainfall. But it seems like more.

The rural citizenry of Yorkshire is a mixed bag. Wight describes them as some of the most hospitable people he'd ever met. But he also describes the oddest set of oddballs I've ever heard of.

For many, their general attitude toward a vet was as a necessary evil. They didn't like paying him, either out of being cheap or being unable to do so. Many thought (or rationalized) that it was their own home remedies (usually complete nonsense superstition) that did the trick.

They seemed to have dispensed quite a bit of pro bono work, and gladly so. At heart, they seemed rather to be at the beck-and-call of the animals rather than their owners. The needs of the animals were what they were and it didn't matter if a fellow hadn't paid in a year. They would be there at 3 a.m. to help with a difficult birthing if need be.

Most of the difficult ones were just overly cantankerous, not truly bad. But for every one of these that the vets ran into there were those who were absolutely thrilled to have a visit from them and it was considered an occasion. James would be fed well at their table and very often sent home with a dozen eggs, a block of cheese, or whatever, which he would often find magically in the back seat of his car...and very often from people who by all appearances did not have two pennies to rub together.

The theme all around is of hard but satisfying work. Snowflakes need not apply to Yorkshire. I wonder what it's like today.