In Every Living Thing, James calls in the local expert in the form of blacksmith Denny Boynton to help with Farmer Dickson’s big Clydesdale who has ‘gravel’, a local term for infection of the foot.

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘let’s have a look at it.’ I ran my hand down the leg and was reaching for the foot when the horse whickered with anger, turned quickly and lashed out at me, catching me a glancing blow on the thigh.

  ‘He can still kick with that bad foot, anyway,’ I murmured.

  The farmer took a firmer grip on the halter and braced his feet. ‘Aye, he’s a cheeky sod. Watch yourself. He’s given me a clout or two.’

  I tried again with the same result and, at the third attempt, after the flailing foot had narrowly missed me, the horse swung round and sent me crashing against the side of the box. As I got up and, grimly determined, had another go at reaching the foot, he reared round at me, brought a fore foot crashing on my shoulder, then tried to bite me.

  The farmer was an elderly man, slightly built and he didn’t look happy as he was dragged around by the plunging animal.

  ‘Look,’ I said, panting and rubbing my shoulder, ‘we’ve got a bit of a problem. I have to bring Denny Boynton out to another gravelled horse near here this afternoon. We’ll call in about two o’clock and treat this chap. He’s got a shoe on, anyway, and it’s a lot easier to do the job with a blacksmith.’

  Farmer Hickson looked relieved. ‘Aye, that’ll be best. I could see we were goin’ to have a bit of a rodeo!’

  As I drove away, I mused on my relationship with Denny. He and I were old friends. He was a bit younger than I and accompanied me regularly on horse visits. In the fifties, the tractor had more or less taken over on the farms but some farmers still liked to keep a carthorse and took a pride in them. Most of them were big, docile animals and I had always had a strong empathy with them as they plodded patiently through their daily tasks, but that one back there was an exception.

  Normally I would have taken the shoe off without much trouble before exploring the foot. All vets did courses in shoeing early in their education and I carried the tools with me, but I would have had some fun trying to do that with Hickson’s animal. It was a job for Denny.

  Denny Boynton is one of the few blacksmiths to have survived in the area. At one point nearly every village had a forge and a town like Darrowby would have had several. ‘But with the disappearance of the draught horse,’ as James Herriot puts it, ‘they had just melted away. The men who had spent their lives in them for generations had gone and their work places which had echoed to the clatter of horses’ feet and the clang of iron were deserted and silent.’ Alf Wight based Denny on the Thirsk blacksmith Billy Keel, who was entirely fearless when it came to horses, even fierce stallions, but was bizarrely anxious around little dogs.

  James heads to the Boynton smithy in Rolford village, where Denny is found bent over the foot of a strapping hunter, his father hammering the glowing metal on the anvil. James explains he needs help with Hickson’s horse, warning him of his wildness, although knowing that Denny had dealt with dangerous horses since childhood – ‘I had seen him again and again pushing big, explosive animals around effortlessly as though they were kittens.’ Denny is happy to help, untroubled by what James has in store for him.

  The farmer gripped the halter tightly and smiled uncertainly at Denny as he came in. ‘Watch ’im, lad. He’s a funny sod.’

  ‘Funny, is he?’ The young man, hammer dangling from his hand, grinned and stepped close to the horse, and the animal, as though determined to prove the words, laid back his ears and lashed out.

  Denny avoided the flying foot with practised ease and gave a demon king’s laugh, throwing back his head. ‘Aha! You’re like that, are ye? Right, ya bugger, we’ll see!’ Then he moved in again. I don’t know how he kept clear of the horse’s repeated attempts to injure him, but within a minute he caught the claw of his hammer in the iron shoe in full flight and pulled it towards him. ‘OK, ya big bugger, I’ve got ye now, haven’t I, eh?’

  The horse, on three legs, made a few half-hearted attempts to pull his foot away as Denny hung on and chattered at him but it was clear that he realized that this new man was an entirely different proposition. Denny, with the foot on his knee, reached for his tools, muttering threats all the time and as I watched unbelievingly, he knocked up the clenches, drew out the nails with his pincers and removed the shoe. The horse, motionless except for a quivering of the flanks, was totally subjugated.

  Denny displayed the sole for my inspection. ‘Now, where d’you want me, Mr Herriot?’ he asked.

  I tapped along the sole until I found a place which seemed tender. To make sure, I squeezed at the place with the pincers and the animal flinched.

  ‘That’s the spot, Denny,’ I said. ‘There’s a crack there.’

  The young farrier began to cut away the horn with expert sweeps of his sharp knife. This was a job I had done so often by myself, but it was a joy to see an expert doing it. In no time at all he had followed the crack down and there was a hiss then a trickle of pus as he reached the site of the infection. It was one of the most satisfactory things in veterinary practice because, if the abscess is not evacuated, it causes the most acute agony for the animal. Sometimes the pus can work up under the wall of the hoof until it bursts out at the coronet after a long period of pain, and in other cases I have seen horses having to be put down when all attempts to relieve the infection have failed and the poor animal was laid groaning with a hugely swollen foot. Such memories from the old carthorse days always haunted me.

  Nothing of that was going to happen this time and my relief was as strong as always. ‘Thanks, Denny, that’s great.’ I administered antibiotic and anti-tetanus injections and said to the farmer, ‘He’ll soon be sound now, Mr Hickson.’

  Then Denny and I set off for our next appointment. As we drove out of the yard I looked at the young blacksmith. ‘Well, you certainly dealt with that wild horse. It was amazing how you quietened him.’

  He leaned back in his seat, lit another cigarette and spoke lazily. ‘Nobbut a bit daft, ’e was. It was nowt. There’s lots like ’im – silly big bugger.’

  EPILOGUE

  The James Herriot books firmly established Alfred Wight as the world’s most famous vet. It is in many ways an incongruous epithet for such a private man, who loved his family, profession and the peace of the Yorkshire countryside but nonetheless achieved worldwide success and fame by dint of writing such wonderful stories.

  As with everything Alf Wight did in life, he put his heart and soul into every book he wrote, including the final volume in the series, Every Living Thing, which like all its predecessors shot into the bestseller lists when it was published in 1992. Sadly, there were two people central to the stories who didn’t see its publication. Brian Nettleton, the inimitable ‘vet with t’ badger’ who features so much in the final book as Calum Buchanan, was killed in a road accident in Chicago in the late seventies, twenty years after he left the Thirsk practice bound for Canada.

  Brian Sinclair, who always rejoiced in his portrayal as the exuberant Tristan, had also died, of a heart attack in 1988. He continued to work for the Ministry of Agriculture in Leeds until his retirement in 1977. Thereafter, he and Alf would meet in Harrogate every Thursday afternoon. Sitting in a tea shop by the railway station, Brian would regale Alf with his latest stock of jokes and stories, the two roaring with laughter just as they had done all those years before in the sitting room of 23 Kirkgate. An extraordinary character in life and on the page, Brian was pivotal to the James Herriot stories. Donald was similarly deeply affected by the death of his younger brother, and Alf felt keenly the death of his much-treasured friend.

  Alf and Donald remained practice partners and good friends, and Alf, Joan, Rosie and Jim were frequent guests at Donald and Audrey’s nearby estate, Southwoods Hall. In his later years, Donald showed no signs of mellowing or slowing down. He continued to come up with various schemes to generate money for the Thirsk practice, including in 1975 setting up a dog trimming parlour, which lasted a matter of days after Donald attempted to trim a Pekinese with some horse clippers – the dog was fine but the owner promptly burst into tears when she saw the results. In 1981, at the age of sixty-six, Donald suffered a bad fracture of his leg after stepping in front of a speeding motorbike in the Thirsk market place. Impatient as ever, he discharged himself from hospital – no doubt to the relief of the sister there, who considered him the worst patient she’d ever had – and he carried on working at the practice, despite wearing a plaster cast for almost a year. It was only after he suffered a stroke in 1991, at the age of eighty, that Donald finally retired.

  By the time Every Living Thing was published, Alf was also not in the best of health, having been diagnosed with prostate cancer at the end of 1991. The disease kept a low profile for two years, but from late 1993 his condition worsened, compounded by a bout of depression, which was thankfully short-lived. He bore his illness stoically and remained determinedly mobile until just before his death on 23 February 1995. Donald, already distressed by Alf’s death, lost his wife Audrey three months later and not long after he was found in a coma having taken an overdose of barbiturate. Donald had always been a proponent of voluntary euthanasia so the manner of his death, although tragic, was perhaps not entirely surprising to those who knew him well.

  Throughout Alf’s illness, and brief episode of melancholy, he nonetheless gleaned satisfaction from the success of Every Living Thing and his days were undoubtedly lightened by the piles of fan mail that arrived at the house every day. Always a modest man, he never considered himself a great writer, just an average one who had got lucky, but his fans thought differently and when he died, tributes poured in from across the world – all of which illustrated the great respect there was for his books and the huge affection there was for him. One particular tribute written by Mary Ann Grossman for The Chicago Tribune seemed to capture the magic of his writing: his empathy for animals and humans, his respect for hard-working people and love of the land, as well as ‘a glow of decency that makes people want to be better humans. I guess we’d call it spirituality these days, this proud belief of Herriot’s that humans are linked to all animals whether they be the cows he helped birth or pampered pets like Tricki Woo, a lovable but overfed Pekinese.’

  Alf’s wife Joan supported her husband through his illness, as she had throughout their married lives together. He always thought the world of her and could never have achieved such success without her love and gentle encouragement, and she of course bore the brunt of his worsening illness and eventual death. After he died, her health slowly declined and four years later on 14 July 1999 she too passed away.

  Like so many others, Joan is now immortalized in the James Herriot books, as the endearing and capable Helen, just as Donald, Brian and the array of Alf’s friends, farming clients and the animals of North Yorkshire live on for ever in his writing. The people he met, the world in which he lived and the stories he crafted are still read by millions across the world. His legacy lives on, both in his books and screen adaptations, and in the Herriot name which remains a force for good. Alf’s daughter Rosie has worked for many years with a local charity called Herriot Hospice Homecare. The James Herriot estate has also supported the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust, which looks after and preserves the Dales, including its barns, walls and hay meadows, and in Swaledale there is to be a newly planted woodland, bearing the plaque ‘James Herriot Plantation’. Both of these charities have benefited enormously from the use of the James Herriot name and will make lasting contributions to the landscape and community that he loved.

  In the days and weeks after Alf’s death, Joan and the family also received thousands of letters of condolences from close friends, clients, former assistants, and fans across the world. Decades later, the family still receive letters from Herriot enthusiasts, and there is a common thread running through all of them. Many fans are keen to express the gratitude they feel to James Herriot, emphasizing how much they have been comforted by reading his books, which have, in their words, saved their lives. The warmth and decency in the stories, the humour, the depiction of a gentler time, and the affection and respect James Herriot has for humans and animals alike, act as a kind of balm for many readers and to all of us grappling with the complexities of life.

  We welcome the change of pace his books bring and are happy to be immersed in its world. Many years ago Phoebe Adams in an Atlantic Monthly review of the omnibus edition of the first two books described the James Herriot world as ‘full of recalcitrant cows, sinister pigs, neurotic dogs, Yorkshire weather and pleasantly demented colleagues. It continues to be one of the funniest and most likeable books around’ – a review that would have undoubtedly pleased Alf Wight and could summarize all eight books in the series. While many of the small farms and cobbled byres have gone, as have the hard-working farmers and animals depicted in the books, North Yorkshire and the Dales still retain their beauty – we too can breathe in that pure air, the scent of wildflowers carried on the breeze and enjoy the landscape that so enchanted the much-loved veterinary surgeon and author James Herriot.

  Bibliography

  Herriot, James, If Only They Could Talk (1970)

  Herriot, James, It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet (1972)

  Herriot, James, Let Sleeping Vets Lie (1973)

  Herriot, James, Vet in Harness (1974)

  Herriot, James, Vets Might Fly (1976)

  Herriot, James, Vet in a Spin (1977)

  Herriot, James, The Lord God Made Them All (1981)

  Herriot, James, Every Living Thing (1992)

  Herriot, James, James Herriot’s Yorkshire (1993)

  Herriot, James, James Herriot’s Dog Stories (2020)

  Reader’s Digest Association, The, The Best of James Herriot (1982)

  Wight, Jim, The Real James Herriot: The Authorized Biography (1999)

  Acknowledgements

  Our heartfelt thanks go to Emma Marriott for her invaluable contribution to this book. Emma immersed herself in the works of James Herriot; we believe that she came to love and appreciate our father’s writings almost as much as we do.

  We would also like to thank our agent, Georgia Glover. She has overseen this project with her customary calm and efficiency, safeguarding our best interests as she has done for many years.

  Dad, aged twelve, with his first dog Don the Irish setter.

  Sixteen years old, in the Hillhead High school uniform.

  Playing for the veterinary college football team.

  Dad in his RAF uniform with a very young Jim.

  Mum, Joan, with our first dog Danny.

  Us on a sledge at Hood Grange on Sutton Bank.

  Dan the black Labrador and Hector the Jack Russell. Hector was his favourite dog. Both loved to ride in the front of the car.

  Dad with his Olivetti typewriter. He would write in the evenings with the telly on and Mum by his side.

  Jim helping Dad with a small dog at the Thirsk veterinary practice.

  This wouldn’t be the way he’d catch the pigs on the job but he was having some fun for the cameras here!

  With Arthur Dand – one of Dad’s favourite farmers and the person who thought up the title If Only They Could Talk.

  Wethercote Farm at Sutton Bank in North Yorkshire.

  Feeding a young bull at Wethercote Farm.

  Kelmire Grange in Thirlby.

  Mum and Dad with Dan and Hector at their home in Thirsk.

  Dad with Brian Sinclair.

  Donald Sinclair.

  Dad with Donald (left) and Brian (right) Sinclair. They remained good friends throughout their lives. Taken at Dad’s final home in Thirlby.

  Dad looking very happy to be introduced to the Queen at the annual Hatchards Authors of the Year reception. She was said to be a big fan of the Herriot books.

  With our Dad and Mum at the OBE ceremony, 1979.

  One of the many book signings Dad did to meet fans from all over the world and sign copies of his books.

  ‘It cleverly interweaves extracts from his novels, with an interesting commentary from his son and daughter . . . their memories and anecdotes augment the stories and make delightful reading’

  The Yorkshire Times

  ‘I grew up reading James Herriot’s books and I’m delighted that, thirty years on, they are still every bit as charming, heartwarming and laugh-out-loud funny as they were then’

  Kate Humble

  ‘Herriot’s enchanting tales of life in the Dales are deservedly classics. Full of extraordinary characters, animal and human, the books never fail to delight’

  Amanda Owen, bestselling author of The Yorkshire Shepherdess

  ‘The attraction of Herriot’s ever popular memoirs of a country vet . . . is their alternating highs and lows, humour and pathos, and gripping anecdotes about delivering lambs, grumpy farmers, hypochondriac pet-owners, stroppy cows and blunt Yorkshire characters. And, of course, there’s a powerful nostalgia element in these stories about our green and pleasant land in the day before the ravages of ribbon development’

  Daily Mail

  THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF

  JAMES

  HERRIOT

  James Herriot (1916–1995) was the pen name of James Alfred ‘Alf’ Wight, whose tales of veterinary practice and country life in the Yorkshire Dales have delighted generations. Many of Herriot’s works – including All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Things Wise and Wonderful, The Lord God Made Them All and Every Living Thing – became international bestsellers and have been adapted for film and television.