James’s first encounter with Helen has gone well – they can talk easily to each other; she is clearly a very capable young woman and they both count themselves lucky to live and work in the Dales. Back at Skeldale House, James scans the day book regularly, in the hope he can visit the farm again, but is sorry to see the Aldersons seem to have ‘lamentably healthy stock’. Instead, he makes do with joining the Darrowby Music Society, having seen Helen going into its meetings. There, with heart thudding, he summons up the courage to ask her out. She agrees and a date is set for Saturday evening.

  James is desperate to impress Helen when they meet and he plans to take her to a dinner dance at the grand Reniston Hotel in Brawton. Dressed in a tight-fitting and hopelessly outdated dinner jacket and suit, James turns up at the Alderson farm to pick Helen up. He is shown to the kitchen by Helen’s grinning younger brother, who clearly finds the situation funny, as does Helen’s little sister, who has a fixed smirk on her face as she sits at the table doing her homework. Mr Alderson beckons James to sit with him by the fire as he reads the Farmer and Stockbreeder.

  After about a year I heard footsteps on the stairs, then Helen came into the room. She was wearing a blue dress – the kind, without shoulder straps, that seems to stay up by magic. Her dark hair shone under the single pressure lamp which lit the kitchen, shadowing the soft curves of her neck and shoulders. Over one white arm she held a camel-hair coat.

  I felt stunned. She was like a rare jewel in the rough setting of stone flags and whitewashed walls. She gave me her quiet, friendly smile and walked towards me. ‘Hello, I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long.’

  I muttered something in reply and helped her on with her coat. She went over and kissed her father, who didn’t look up but waved his hand vaguely. There was another outburst of giggling from the table. We went out.

  In the car I felt unusually tense and for the first mile or two had to depend on some inane remarks about the weather to keep a conversation going. I was beginning to relax when I drove over a little hump-backed bridge into a dip in the road. Then the car suddenly stopped. The engine coughed gently and then we were sitting silent and motionless in the darkness. And there was something else; my feet and ankles were freezing cold. ‘My God!’ I shouted. ‘We’ve run into a bit of flooded road. The water’s right into the car.’ I looked round at Helen. ‘I’m terribly sorry about this – your feet must be soaked.’

  But Helen was laughing. She had her feet tucked up on the seat, her knees under her chin. ‘Yes, I am a bit wet, but it’s no good sitting about like this. Hadn’t we better start pushing?’

  Wading out into the black icy waters was a nightmare but there was no escape. Mercifully it was a little car and between us we managed to push it beyond the flooded patch. Then by torchlight I dried the plugs and got the engine going again.

  Helen shivered as we squelched back into the car. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to go back and change my shoes and stockings. And so will you. There’s another road back through Fensley. You take the first turn on the left.’

  Back at the farm, Mr Alderson was still reading the Farmer and Stockbreeder and kept his finger on the list of pig prices while he gave me a baleful glance over his spectacles. When he learned that I had come to borrow a pair of his shoes and socks he threw the paper down in exasperation and rose, groaning, from his chair. He shuffled out of the room and I could hear him muttering to himself as he mounted the stairs.

  Helen followed him and I was left alone with the two young children. They studied my sodden trousers with undisguised delight. I had wrung most of the surplus water out of them but the final result was remarkable. Mrs Hall’s knife-edge crease reached to just below the knee, but then there was chaos. The trousers flared out at that point in a crumpled, shapeless mass and as I stood by the fire to dry them a gentle steam rose about me. The children stared at me, wide-eyed and happy. This was a big night for them.

  Mr Alderson reappeared at length and dropped some shoes and rough socks at my feet. I pulled on the socks quickly but shrank back when I saw the shoes. They were a pair of dancing slippers from the early days of the century and their cracked patent leather was topped by wide, black silk bows.

  I opened my mouth to protest but Mr Alderson had dug himself deep into his chair and had found his place again among the pig prices. I had the feeling that if I asked for another pair of shoes Mr Alderson would attack me with the poker. I put the slippers on.

  We had to take a roundabout road to avoid the floods but I kept my foot down and within half an hour we had left the steep sides of the Dale behind us and were heading out on to the rolling plain. I began to feel better. We were making good time and the little car, shuddering and creaking, was going well. I was just thinking that we wouldn’t be all that late when the steering wheel began to drag to one side.

  I had a puncture most days and recognized the symptoms immediately. I had become an expert at changing wheels and with a word of apology to Helen was out of the car like a flash. With my rapid manipulation of the rusty jack and brace the wheel was off within three minutes. The surface of the crumpled tyre was quite smooth except for the lighter, frayed parts where the canvas showed through. Working like a demon, I screwed on the spare, cringing inwardly as I saw that this tyre was in exactly the same condition as the other. I steadfastly refused to think of what I would do if its frail fibres should give up the struggle.

  By day, the Reniston dominated Brawton like a vast medieval fortress, bright flags fluttering arrogantly from its four turrets, but tonight it was like a dark cliff with a glowing cavern at street level where the Bentleys discharged their expensive cargoes. I didn’t take my vehicle to the front entrance but tucked it away quietly at the back of the car park. A magnificent commissionaire opened the door for us and we trod noiselessly over the rich carpeting of the entrance hall.

  We parted there to get rid of our coats, and in the men’s cloakroom I scrubbed frantically at my oily hands. It didn’t do much good; changing that wheel had given my fingernails a border of deep black which defied ordinary soap and water. And Helen was waiting for me.

  I looked up in the mirror at the white-jacketed attendant hovering behind me with a towel. The man, clearly fascinated by my ensemble, was staring down at the wide-bowed pierrot shoes and the rumpled trouser bottoms. As he handed over the towel he smiled broadly as if in gratitude for this little bit of extra colour in his life.

  I met Helen in the reception hall and we went over to the desk. ‘What time does the dinner dance start?’ I asked.

  The girl at the desk looked surprised. ‘I’m sorry, sir, there’s no dance tonight. We only have them once a fortnight.’

  I turned to Helen in dismay but she smiled encouragingly. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I don’t really care what we do.’

  ‘We can have dinner, anyway,’ I said. I tried to speak cheerfully but a little black cloud seemed to be forming just above my head. Was anything going to go right tonight?

  The evening limps on and there’s confusion when a waiter asks if they are staying, and James doesn’t realize he means overnight at the hotel. When they are finally led to their table, James is convinced the whole evening has been a disaster, is thoroughly miserable and is as hot as hell in his ghastly suit.

  Everything was in French and in my numbed state the words were largely meaningless, but somehow I ordered the meal and, as we ate, I tried desperately to keep a conversation going. But long deserts of silence began to stretch between us; it seemed that only Helen and I were quiet among all the surrounding laughter and chatter.

  Worst of all was the little voice which kept telling me that Helen had never really wanted to come out with me anyway. She had done it out of politeness and was getting through a boring evening as best she could.

  The journey home was a fitting climax. We stared straight ahead as the headlights picked out the winding road back into the Dales. We made stumbling remarks, then the strained silence took over again. By the time we drew up outside the farm my head had begun to ache.

  We shook hands and Helen thanked me for a lovely evening. There was a tremor in her voice and in the moonlight her face was anxious and withdrawn. I said goodnight, got into the car and drove away.

  Alf Wight’s first date with the real Helen Alderson – Joan Danbury – was similarly disastrous. They weren’t on their own, though. A cattle dealer friend of Alf and Brian Sinclair, Malcolm Johnson, knew a few ladies in Thirsk, including Joan. He asked her one day whether she and any friends would like to come along to a dance at a nearby village of Sandhutton. She had never met Alf or Brian but Malcolm assured her they were good fun and Joan agreed that she and two friends would join them. They drove in one of the practice cars, a battered little Ford with holes in the footwell, which promptly ground to a halt in a flooded road, forcing them all to return to 23 Kirkgate once they’d got the car started again. They eventually got to the dance, then returned to the practice house where they chatted further and Brian entertained them all with his usual funny stories and tomfoolery.

  Like Helen, Joan, who had dark hair and deep blue eyes, had many admirers but she wasn’t a farmer’s daughter. She was a secretary at a corn merchant’s in Thirsk and her father a government official then working in York. She had grown up in Thirsk, her family moving to the town from the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire when she was eight years old. She had had a few boyfriends before meeting Alf but she instantly took a liking to the young vet and when he asked to see her again, she agreed. While Alf had a solid profession, well revered amongst the rural community, he certainly wasn’t as wealthy as some of the richer farmers Joan had dated but she was attracted to Alf, enjoyed his company and they shared a similar sense of humour. Alf had had the odd girlfriend at school and veterinary college, and he and Brian had taken a few young women out to dances locally, but none would captivate him as much as Joan.

  In It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet Helen, thankfully, has not been put off by their disastrous first date, although a subsequent cinema trip also proves less than romantic. James is accosted by a farmer, they are ogled at by the local blacksmith’s daughter and the cinema shows an ancient Western instead of the film they came to see. Helen, however, is able to see the funny side of the situation – an important trait when spending time with James. When Gobber Newhouse, sozzled after a session in the pub, plonks himself near them and proceeds to clonk James round the back of the head accidentally, Helen breaks into laughter.

  I had never seen a girl laugh like this. It was as though it was something she had wanted to do for a long time. She abandoned herself utterly to it, lying back with her head on the back of the seat, legs stretched out in front of her, arms dangling by her side. She took her time and waited until she had got it all out of her system before she turned to me.

  She put her hand on my arm. ‘Look,’ she said faintly. ‘Next time, why don’t we just go for a walk?’

  While the date hadn’t gone exactly to plan, James is at least relieved there will be a next time and they continue to spend more time together. They walk for miles in the hills, Helen occasionally comes on evening calls with James or they go to dances in the village institutes locally. As James puts it: ‘There wasn’t anything spectacular to do in Darrowby, but there was a complete lack of strain, a feeling of being self-sufficient in a warm existence of our own that made everything meaningful and worthwhile.’

  James is clearly besotted and, on the insistence of Siegfried to throw aside his usual cautious ways, he proposes to Helen, who agrees and an early date for a wedding is set. Alf and Joan’s wedding, held on a cold winter’s morning on 5 November 1941, at St Mary Magdalene church in Thirsk was a similarly small affair. The bride and groom had little money to lavish on a bigger wedding and many couples chose to have more modest nuptials during the wartime years. In addition, neither set of parents attended: Joan’s father Horace was ill and there were some difficulties with Alf’s parents, who were concerned that Alf was marrying too early, before he was financially secure. Alf’s mother Hannah, who ran a successful wedding dress business, had also hoped for a grander wedding and perhaps a daughter-in-law from a better background. Alf, nonetheless, stood firm in his determination to marry Joan and his father was eventually won over by her, but his mother’s continuing disapproval would cause Alf uneasiness in later years. Alf had always felt a great deal of affection and respect for his mother – she was very much the driving force in the family, with great ambitions for her son – but their relationship was a complex one.

  Five people attended the wedding, including Donald Sinclair who was the best man, exclaiming ‘amen’ at regular intervals, just as Siegfried does in It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet. They were married by Canon Young, whom Alf remembers shivering with the cold, glad when it was all over and they could head outside into the frosty sunshine.

  I can’t remember much about the wedding. It was a ‘quiet do’ and my main recollection is of desiring to get it all over with as soon as possible. I have only one vivid memory; of Siegfried, just behind me in the church, booming ‘Amen’ at regular intervals throughout the ceremony – the only time I have ever heard a best man do this.

  It was an incredible relief when Helen and I were ready to drive away and when we were passing Skeldale House Helen grasped my hand.

  ‘Look!’ she cried excitedly. ‘Look over there!’

  Underneath Siegfried’s brass plate, which always hung slightly askew on the iron railings, was a brand-new one. It was of the modern Bakelite type with a black background and bold white letters which read ‘J. Herriot, MRCVS, Veterinary Surgeon’, and it was screwed very straight and level on the metal.

  The newlyweds drive out of Darrowby, James swelling with pride not only to have Helen, his wife, by his side but knowing also that the brass plate means he is now a bona fide partner at the practice alongside Siegfried. After driving and walking in the hills for a few hours, both of them in a bit of a daze, they head to the Wheatsheaf inn where they spend the first night of their honeymoon, after being fed a delicious meal of soup, stew and gooseberry pie and cream. The wedding has come at a busy time for the practice and James has agreed that he and Helen will spend a working honeymoon undertaking tuberculin testing. Helen causes surprise when she wears slacks (trousers) on the morning after their wedding, just as Joan often did, which was still very much a novelty in rural Yorkshire in the late 1930s.

  I particularly enjoyed, too, our very first morning when I took Helen to do the test at Allen’s. As I got out of the car I could see Mrs Allen peeping round the curtains in the kitchen window. She was soon out in the yard and her eyes popped when I brought my bride over to her. Helen was one of the pioneers of slacks in the Dales and she was wearing a bright purple pair this morning which would in modern parlance knock your eye out. The farmer’s wife was partly shocked, partly fascinated but she soon found that Helen was of the same stock as herself and within seconds the two women were chattering busily. I judged from Mrs Allen’s vigorous head-nodding and her ever-widening smile that Helen was putting her out of her pain by explaining all the circumstances. It took a long time and finally Mr Allen had to break into the conversation.

  ‘If we’re goin’ we’ll have to go,’ he said gruffly and we set off to start the second day of the test.

  We began on a sunny hillside where a group of young animals had been penned. Jack and Robbie plunged in among the beasts while Mr Allen took off his cap and courteously dusted the top of the wall.

  ‘Your missus can sit ’ere,’ he said.

  I paused as I was about to start measuring. My missus! It was the first time anybody had said that to me. I looked over at Helen as she sat cross-legged on the rough stones, her notebook on her knee, pencil at the ready, and as she pushed back the shining dark hair from her forehead she caught my eye and smiled; and as I smiled back at her I became aware suddenly of the vast, swelling glory of the Dales around us, and of the Dales scent of clover and warm grass, more intoxicating than any wine. And it seemed that my first two years at Darrowby had been leading up to this moment; that the first big step of my life was being completed right here with Helen smiling at me and the memory, fresh in my mind, of my new plate hanging in front of Skeldale House.

  I might have stood there indefinitely, in a sort of trance, but Mr Allen cleared his throat in a marked manner and I turned back to the job in hand.

  ‘Right,’ I said, placing my calipers against the beast’s neck. ‘Number thirty-eight, seven millimetres and circumscribed.’ I called out to Helen, ‘Number thirty-eight, seven, C.’

  ‘Thirty-eight, seven, C,’ my wife repeated as she bent over her book and started to write.

  Alf and Joan Wight also spent the first two days of their honeymoon tuberculin testing, partly to keep up with the busy workload at the practice but also because they had little spare money to spend on a holiday. They nonetheless had a wonderful time, staying at the old Wheatsheaf inn at Caperby, where, Alf remembers, they ate like royalty, the owner Mrs Kilburn and her niece Gladys producing an array of Yorkshire fare, from home-cured ham and Wensleydale cheese to roast beef and Yorkshire puddings.

  By the time of Let Sleeping Vets Lie, James has settled into life as a married man, relishing in particular the utter bliss of returning to a warm bed after a bitterly cold farm visit in the middle of the night.

  As I crawled into bed and put my arm around Helen it occurred to me, not for the first time, that there are few pleasures in this world to compare with snuggling up to a nice woman when you are half frozen.

  There weren’t any electric blankets in the thirties. Which was a pity because nobody needed the things more than country vets. It is surprising how deeply bone-marrow cold a man can get when he is dragged from his bed in the small hours and made to strip off in farm buildings when his metabolism is at a low ebb. Often the worst part was coming back to bed; I often lay exhausted for over an hour, longing for sleep but kept awake until my icy limbs and feet had thawed out.