Within a week, the new supplies from Cargill and Sons arrive in a wooden chest – including the much-anticipated Soothitt. That same day James decides to try Soothitt on a spaniel who howls like mad every time he’s in the back of a car as well as an aggressive sow who is attacking her piglets. The Soothitt has no effect on Gertrude the pig, who seems, if anything, more fierce after injections of the stuff – it’s only after she’s given two gallons of strong ale that she allows her piglets to suckle from her. Soothitt similarly proves totally ineffective with Coco the spaniel whose howls can still be heard long after his owner next drives past the practice.

  Gradually modern drugs began to make their presence felt in veterinary practice and by the early 1940s, vets like Alf could see for themselves just how effective they are in the treatment of disease. In Vet in Harness, James visits some very sickly calves belonging to Mr Clark, whose farm is covered in rusting agricultural implements, derelict cars and a converted railway wagon in which the calves are kept. They are suffering from white scour, diarrhoea caused by a lethal bacterial enteritis that once had a depressingly high mortality rate. He tries the usual age-old treatments which ‘whiskered veterinary surgeons in top hats and tail coats’ had been using a hundred years before, which include astringent powders of chalk, opium and catechu and wrapping each calf in a big sack to ensure they are warm and sheltered. James returns the next day but finds the calves lying motionless on their sides and looking so close to death that Mr Clark calls in the knacker man Mr Mallock. James, however, has some new drugs and suggests he gives them a try.

  I took the tin from my pocket and read the label. ‘It’s called M and B 693, or sulphapyridine, to give it its scientific name. Just came in the post this morning. It’s one of a completely new range of drugs – they’re called the sulphonamides and we’ve never had anything like them before. They’re supposed to actually kill certain germs, such as the organisms which cause scour.’

  Mr Clark took the tin from me and removed the lid. ‘A lot of little blue tablets, eh? Well ah’ve seen a few wonder cures for this ailment but none of ’em’s much good – this’ll be another, I’ll bet.’

  ‘Could be,’ I said. ‘But there’s been a lot of discussion about these sulphonamides in our veterinary journals. They’re not quack remedies, they’re a completely fresh field. I wish I could have tried them on your calves.’

  Almost to humour James, Mr Clark agrees to him trying the new drug, although he and Mr Mallock are convinced it won’t work. Having pounded the tablets with Mrs Clark’s potato masher in the kitchen, James measures out five doses which he and Mr Clark trickle into each of the calves’ mouths. The next morning, James is stunned to discover the calves much recovered, now with normal temperatures and standing munching hay.

  I didn’t know it at the time but I had witnessed the beginning of the revolution. It was my first glimpse of the tremendous therapeutic breakthrough which was to sweep the old remedies into oblivion. The long rows of ornate glass bottles with their carved stoppers and Latin inscriptions would not stand on the dispensary shelves much longer and their names, dearly familiar for many generations – Sweet Spirits of Nitre, Sal ammoniac, Tincture of Camphor – would be lost and vanish for ever.

  This was the beginning and just around the corner a new wonder was waiting – penicillin and the other antibiotics. At last we had something to work with, at last we could use drugs which we knew were going to do something.

  All over the country, probably all over the world at that time, vets were having these first spectacular results, going through the same experience as myself; some with cows, some with dogs and cats, others with valuable racehorses, sheep, pigs in all kinds of environments. But for me it happened in that old converted railway wagon among the jumble of rusting junk on Willie Clark’s farm.

  Of course it didn’t last – not the miraculous part of it anyway. What I had seen at Willie Clark’s was the impact of something new on an entirely unsophisticated bacterial population, but it didn’t go on like that. In time the organisms developed a certain amount of resistance and new and stronger sulphonamides and antibiotics had to be produced. And so the battle has continued. We have good results now but no miracles, and I feel I was lucky to be one of the generation which was in at the beginning when the wonderful things did happen.

  The arrival of new drugs to combat infection, first with the sulphonamides in the early 1940s, then sulpha drugs in the mid-1940s and a year or two later antibiotics, resulted in something of a golden age for veterinary practice which lasted into the early 1950s. Where once an animal might be sent to the knacker’s yard, one injection in the rump might see a complete recovery overnight, much to its owner’s delight. However, James has it drummed into him by Siegfried always to give a bleak prognosis for every case, so that if an animal dies, then they’re proved right but if a patient recovers – which they did with more frequency with effective drugs – they would be hailed heroes.

  By the time of The Lord God Made Them All, set in the years immediately after the Second World War, James is more often than not injecting animals with medication rather than pouring it down their throats.

  I had had a disturbing morning. Everywhere I had gone I was reminded that I had come back to a world of change, and I did not like change. One old farmer saying ‘It’s all t’needle now, Mr Herriot’ as I injected his cow, had made me look down almost with surprise at the syringe in my hand, realizing suddenly that this was what I was doing most of the time now.

  I knew what he meant. Only a few years ago I would have been more likely to have ‘drenched’ his cow. Grabbed it by the nose and poured a pint of medicine down its throat.

  We still carried a special drenching bottle around with us. An empty wine bottle because it had no shoulders and allowed the liquid to run more easily. Often we would mix the medicine with black treacle from the barrel which stood in the corner of most cow byres.

  All this was disappearing and the farmer’s remark about ‘all t’needle’ brought it home to me once more that things were never going to be the same again.

  A revolution had begun in agriculture and in veterinary practice. Farming had become more scientific and concepts cherished for generations were being abandoned, while in the veterinary world the first trickles of the flood of new advances were being felt.

  Previously undreamed-of surgical procedures were being carried out, the sulpha drugs were going full blast and, most exciting of all, the war, with its urgent need for better treatment of wounds, had given a tremendous impetus to the development of Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. This, the first of the antibiotics, was not yet in the hands of the profession except in the form of intra-mammary tubes for the treatment of mastitis, but it was the advance guard of the therapeutic army which was to sweep our old treatments into oblivion.

  In the pre-war period, a highly contagious disease known as brucellosis ravaged cattle herds, causing pregnant cows to abort their foetuses or give birth to very weak calves. In Vet in Harness brucellosis breaks out at Frank Metcalfe’s farm and his cows begin to abort their calves. The only drug James has at his disposal is to inject a mostly ineffective dead vaccine into the herd. A local farmer who reckons he knows better than James also advises that Frank try the quack remedy ‘Professor Driscoll’s Abortion Cure’. James wearily agrees that it probably wouldn’t do any harm, knowing that his dead vaccine is likely to be just as ineffective.

  Because this sort of thing was always happening in those days before the modern drugs appeared. Quack medicines abounded on the farms and the vets couldn’t say a lot about them because their own range of pharmaceuticals was pitifully inadequate.

  And in those diseases like abortion which had so far defeated all the efforts of the profession at control, the harvest for the quack men was particularly rich. The farming press and country newspapers were filled with confident advertisements for red drenches, black draughts, pink powders which were positively guaranteed to produce results. Professor Driscoll had plenty of competition.

  After two cows calve normally, Frank is hopeful but it isn’t long before three more cows abort their calves and then another two, and he knows there’s nothing anyone can do to save the herd.

  Driving home, I brooded on his words. Contagious Bovine Abortion has been recognized for centuries and I had read in old books of the filthy scourge which ravaged and ruined the ancient farmers just as it was doing to Frank Metcalfe today. The experts of those days said it was due to impure water, improper feeding, lack of exercise, sudden frights. They did note, however, that other cows which were allowed to sniff at the foetuses and afterbirths were likely to suffer the same fate themselves. But beyond that it was a black tunnel of ignorance.

  We modern vets, on the other hand, knew all about it. We knew it was caused by a Gram-negative bacillus called Brucella abortus whose habits and attributes we had studied till we knew its every secret; but when it came to helping a farmer in Frank’s situation we were about as much use as our colleagues of old who wrote those quaint books. True, dedicated researchers were working to find a strain of the bacillus which would form a safe and efficient vaccine to immunize cattle in calfhood and as far back as 1930 a certain strain 19 had been developed from which much was hoped. But even now it was still in the experimental stage. If Frank had had the luck to be born twenty years later the chances are that those cows he bought would have all been vaccinated and protected by that same strain 19. Nowadays we even have an efficient dead vaccine for the pregnant cows.

  That autumn, Frank calls round to tell James he’s had to sell up and move back to Middlesbrough. It’s a disastrous and utterly underserved outcome for Frank, but like many Dales farmers, he’s stoic about his misfortunes.

  ‘Oh hell, Frank,’ I said. ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am. You haven’t had a scrap of luck all the way through.’ He looked at me and smiled with no trace of self-pity.

  ‘Aye well,’ he said. ‘These things happen.’

  I almost jumped at the words. ‘These things happen!’ That’s what farmers always said after a disaster.

  By the time Alf Wight wrote the final James Herriot book in the early 1990s, brucellosis had mostly been eradicated and herds were no longer being ravaged by it as they had in the 1940s and 1950s. Veterinary surgeons, however, had practically paddled in the bacteria when treating infected cattle and some would later suffer the effects, both physically and mentally. James thinks he has escaped without being affected, until he starts to experience what his family call ‘funny turns’.

  I was always apprehensive and ill at ease when I had Mrs Featherstone’s problem dog on the table, but this time I felt relaxed and full of confidence. But then I was always like that when I was delirious.

  Delirium was only one of the countless peculiar manifestations of brucellosis. This disease, which causes contagious abortion in cattle, ruined thousands of good farmers of my generation and was also a constant menace to the veterinary surgeons who had to deliver the premature calves and remove the afterbirths.

  Thank heaven, the brucellosis scheme has now just about eradicated the disease but in the fifties such a thing hadn’t been dreamed of and I and my contemporaries wallowed almost daily in the horrible infection.

  I remember standing stripped to the waist in cow byres – parturition gowns were still uncommon and the long plastic protective gloves unknown in those days – working away inside infected cows for hours and looking with wry recognition at the leathery placenta and the light-coloured, necrotic cotyledons which told me that I was in contact with millions of the bacteria. And as I swilled myself with disinfectant afterwards, the place was filled with the distinctive acrid odour of abortion.

  The effects on many of my fellow vets were wide and varied. One big fat chap faded away to a skeleton with undulant fever and was ill for years, others developed crippling arthritis and some went down with psychiatric conditions. One man wrote in the Veterinary Record that as part of his own syndrome he came home one night and decided it would be a good idea to murder his wife. He never got round actually to doing it, but recorded the impulse as an interesting example of what Brucella abortus could do to a man.

  I used to pat myself on the back and thank God that I was immune. I had been bathing in the infection for years and had never experienced the slightest reaction and as I looked around at some of my suffering friends I was so thankful that I had been spared their ordeal. And after all this time I just knew that such a thing would never happen to me.

  That was before I started my funny turns.

  This was my family’s term for a series of mysterious attacks which came unheralded and then passed off just as quickly. At first I diagnosed them as repeated chills – I was always stripping off in open fields, often in the middle of the night – then I thought I must have a type of flu of short duration. The symptoms were always the same – a feeling of depression, then an ice-cold shiveriness which drove me to my bed, where within an hour I shot up a temperature of 105 or 106. Once I had developed this massive fever I felt great: warm and happy, laughing heartily, chattering to myself and finally breaking into song. I couldn’t help the singing – I felt so good.

  This was a source of great amusement to my children. When I was at the singing stage I could always hear them giggling outside the bedroom door, but I didn’t mind – I didn’t mind anything.

  However, I finally had to find out what was happening to me and a blood test by Dr Allinson dispelled all doubts by showing a nice positive titre to Brucella abortus. Reluctantly I had to admit that I had joined the club.

  Alf suffered similar ‘funny turns’ that would eventually subside, but it has been suggested that these repeated attacks may have contributed to the depression he suffered in later life.

  Alf was nonetheless aware, and thankful, that he had experienced rural life in Yorkshire as it once was, along with the introduction of effective modern drugs that would save the lives of the animals he treated.

  ‘I consider that I am a very fortunate man,’ Alf once said. ‘I have lived through the golden years of vet practice – without doubt, the best years.’ In The Lord God Made Them All Siegfried agrees as much although he also looks forward to great days ahead in veterinary practice.

  ‘Do you know, James,’ he said. ‘I’m convinced that the same thing applies to our job. We’re going through the best time there, too.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Sure of it. Look at all the new advances since the war. Drugs and procedures we never dreamed of. We can look after our animals in a way that would have been impossible a few years ago and the farmers realize this. You’ve seen them crowding into the surgery on market day to ask advice – they’ve gained a new respect for the profession and they know it pays to call in the vet now.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘We’re certainly busier than we’ve ever been, with the Ministry work going full blast, too.’

  ‘Yes, everything is buzzing. In fact, James, I’d like to bet that these present years are the high noon of country practice.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘You could be right. But if we are on the top now does it mean that our lives will decline later?’

  ‘No, no, of course not. They’ll be different, that’s all. I sometimes think we’ve only touched the fringe of so many other things, like small animal work.’ Siegfried brandished his gnawed piece of grass at me and his eyes shone with the enthusiasm which always uplifted me.

  ‘I tell you this, James. There are great days ahead!’

  Chapter 11

  HURTLING AROUND the HILLS

  I hardly noticed the passage of the weeks as I rattled along the moorland roads on my daily rounds; but the district was beginning to take shape, the people to emerge as separate personalities. Most days I had a puncture. The tyres were through to the canvas on all wheels; it surprised me that they took me anywhere at all.

  One of the few refinements on the car was a rusty ‘sunshine roof’. It grated dismally when I slid it back, but most of the time I kept it open and the windows too, and I drove in my shirtsleeves with the delicious air swirling about me. On wet days it didn’t help much to close the roof because the rain dripped through the joints and formed pools on my lap and the passenger seat.

  I developed great skill in zig-zagging round puddles. To drive through was a mistake as the muddy water fountained up through the gaps in the floorboards.

  On joining the Darrowby practice, James is given a tiny Austin 7 car ‘of almost forgotten vintage’ to do his rounds. Like all vets working in rural areas, James spends a great deal of time behind the wheel of a car, coaxing it up the hills of the Yorkshire Dales in all weathers. The car has seen better days: its tyres are worn and every morning it’s touch and go whether it will start, the engine only coughing into life after several turns of the starting handle or a tow from Boardman.

  These were still early days for cars – James’s Austin was probably manufactured in the 1920s – and compared to modern cars, they were uncomfortable, noisy and bitterly cold in the winter with no heating. When working in Thirsk Alf also drove a rundown Austin 7 although by then he’d had some experience driving aged cars, getting by in a tiny, old-school Ford during his time in Sunderland. In a letter to his parents in January 1940, he described the experience of driving the Ford, his words infused with the humour he would later utilize to such great effect in his books: ‘The car, using the word in its broadest sense, makes a colossal din and, in the country, the birds rise from the hedges in fright and the cows and horses in the fields look definitely startled. The vibration is terrific over thirty-five miles per hour and my liver will be in splendid condition after a month or two at it.’

  Driving the Austin 7 across the rugged landscape of Yorkshire was also something of a challenge in a car that lacked the horsepower to make it up steep inclines. Around Thirsk, the approach to the Hambleton Hills via Sutton Bank was probably the worst – even in first gear the car struggled with its one-in-four gradient and Alf had no option but to reverse up it. In good weather, Alf could slide open the car’s very primitive sunroof, but in wet weather, rain would leak through it even when closed, so that he had to put plastic sheeting on his knees.