I stood for a few moments feeling again the chilling sense of isolation. I was convinced I had gone too far to the left and after a few gasping breaths, struck off to the right. It wasn’t long before I knew I had gone in the wrong direction again. I began to fall into deep holes, up to the armpits in the snow, reminding me that the ground was not really flat on these high moors but pitted by countless peat hags.

  As I struggled on I told myself that the whole thing was ridiculous. I couldn’t be far from the warm fireside at Pike House – this wasn’t the North Pole. But my mind went back to the great empty stretch of moor beyond the farm and I had to stifle a feeling of panic.

  The numbing cold seemed to erase all sense of time. Soon I had no idea of how long I had been falling into the holes and crawling out. I did know that each time it was getting harder work dragging myself out. And it was becoming more and more tempting to sit down and rest, even sleep; there was something hypnotic in the way the big, soft flakes brushed noiselessly across my skin and mounted thickly on my closed eyes.

  I was trying to shut out the conviction that if I fell down many more times I wouldn’t get up when a dark shape hovered suddenly ahead. Then my outflung arms touched something hard and rough. Unbelievingly I felt my way over the square stone blocks till I came to a corner. Beyond that was a square of light – it was the kitchen window of the farm.

  After James thumps on the door of the farm, Mr Clayton appears and takes him over to the calf house where there are four long-haired little bullocks, along with a fifth one with a purulent discharge coming from its nose – the patient. The freezing blizzard conditions are of no concern to Mr Clayton.

  As my numb fingers fumbled in a pocket for my thermometer a great gust of wind buffeted the door, setting the latch clicking softly and sending a faint powdering of snow into the dark interior.

  Mr Clayton turned and rubbed the pane of the single small window with his sleeve. Picking his teeth with his thumbnail he peered out at the howling blizzard.

  ‘Aye,’ he said, and belched pleasurably. ‘It’s a plain sort o’ day.’

  In The Lord God Made Them All James resorts to using skis to get to some of the more remote farms. The winter of 1946–7 was particularly brutal across the UK, and much of the country was swathed in a blanket of snow and ice. In the Dales, sub-zero temperatures persisted well into mid-March as James remembers.

  That was in 1947, the year of the great snow. I have never known snow like that before or since and the odd thing was that it took such a long time to get started. Nothing happened in November and we had a green Christmas, but then it began to get colder and colder. All through January a north-east wind blew, apparently straight from the Arctic, and usually after a few days of this sort of unbearable blast, snow would come and make things a bit warmer. But not in 1947.

  Each day we thought it couldn’t get any colder, but it did, and then, borne on the wind, very fine flakes began to appear over the last few days of the month. They were so small you could hardly see them but they were the forerunners of the real thing. At the beginning of February big, fat flakes started a steady relentless descent on our countryside and we knew, after all that build-up, that we were for it.

  Eventually, even in North Yorkshire, the snow recedes and normal life resumes. Throughout the year, a typical routine for Alf was to take a quick break between farm visits, stopping the car somewhere remote and picturesque to take whichever dog companions he had with him for a walk. With not a soul around, he could unwind properly and take in the scenery around him – a short respite from what are often busy days for a rural vet.

  I drove gingerly down through the wood and before starting up the track on the other side I stopped the car and got out with Sam leaping eagerly after me.

  This was a little lost valley in the hills, a green cleft cut off from the wild country above. One of the bonuses in a country vet’s life is that he sees these hidden places. Apart from old Arnold nobody ever came down here, not even the postman who left the infrequent mail in a box at the top of the track and nobody saw the blazing scarlets and golds of the autumn trees nor heard the busy clucking and murmuring of the beck among its clean-washed stones.

  I walked along the water’s edge watching the little fish darting and flitting in the cool depths. In the spring these banks were bright with primroses and in May a great sea of bluebells flowed among the trees but today, though the sky was an untroubled blue, the clean air was touched with the sweetness of the dying year.

  I climbed a little way up the hillside and sat down among the bracken now fast turning to bronze. Sam, as was his way, flopped by my side and I ran a hand over the silky hair of his ears. The far side of the valley rose steeply to where, above the gleaming ridge of limestone cliffs, I could just see the sunlit rim of the moor.

  In such hidden spots, time often feels like it stands still. When it came to rural life in Yorkshire, Alfred Wight also witnessed something of a vanishing world. When he arrived in 1940, the hills and moors around Thirsk and in the Dales were still full of small farms, some with a herd of sheep, a few cows and perhaps the odd pig or horse. Over the subsequent decades, many of these small farms struggled to makes ends meet and were sold. Isolated farms and smallholdings, many of them without even a road or track leading to them, gradually vanished, as did the presence of the draught horse. In the wake of the tractor, the great Shire or Clydesdale horses no longer pulled the ploughs or provided the heavy labour on farms, although many farmers kept them on. Nonetheless, in just a few years, Alf would see the numbers of horses in the region plummet.

  While modern life is gradually making itself felt in the Dales, there is still the odd household which has been entirely untouched by modernity. The Bramleys – made up of three brothers and a sister – who feature in It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet are a prime example of one such family. There is no road to their farmhouse, which doesn’t bother them as they rarely venture into the outside world. Miss Bramley only visits Darrowby on the odd market day and the middle brother Herbert last came into town in 1929 to have a tooth out. James is one of the few people to venture to their farm, when he calls in to treat their vast collection of much-loved cats.

  After twenty minutes of slithering in and out of the unseen puddles and opening a series of broken, string-tied gates, I reached the farmyard and crossed over to the back door. I was about to knock when I stopped with my hand poised. I found I was looking through the kitchen window and in the interior, dimly lit by an oil lamp, the Bramleys were sitting in a row.

  They weren’t grouped round the fire but were jammed tightly on a long, high-backed wooden settle which stood against the far wall. The strange thing was the almost exact similarity of their attitudes; all four had their arms folded, chins resting on their chests, feet stretched out in front of them. The men had removed their heavy boots and were stocking-footed, but Miss Bramley wore an old pair of carpet slippers.

  I stared, fascinated by the curious immobility of the group. They were not asleep, not talking or reading or listening to the radio – in fact they didn’t have one – they were just sitting.

  I had never seen people just sitting before and I stood there for some minutes to see if they would make a move or do anything at all, but nothing happened. It occurred to me that this was probably a typical evening; they worked hard all day, had their meal; then they just sat till bedtime.

  James and Siegfried also witness the last days of the small dairy farm, each typically made up of ten or so cows, all of them named and kept in a cobbled byre or sent out to graze in the fields. The bigger, more industrial dairy farms which are replacing them are more productive in terms of milk yield but, as James laments, they are far less welcoming. In the late 1930s, farmers were still hand-milking their cows, many of them the red or brown shorthorn breed which once predominated in the Yorkshire Dales before the advent of the black and white Friesians. In Let Sleeping Vets Lie, James calls in on the small dairy farmer Mr Pickersgill who just about makes a living from his smallholding and whose cows are suffering from mastitis.

  I had happened in at the little byre late one afternoon when Mr Pickersgill and his daughter Olive were milking their ten cows. I had watched the two at work as they crouched under the row of roan and red backs and one thing was immediately obvious; while Olive drew the milk by almost imperceptible movements of her fingers and with a motionless wrist, her father hauled away at the teats as though he was trying to ring in the new year.

  James deduces that Mr Pickersgill’s heavy-handed milking method is the cause of the problem and he now has the tricky task of telling the experienced farmer that he must try a more gentle technique.

  It wouldn’t be easy because Mr Pickersgill was an impressive man. I don’t suppose he had a spare penny in the world but even as he sat there in the kitchen in his tattered, collarless flannel shirt and braces he looked, as always, like an industrial tycoon. You could imagine that massive head with its fleshy cheeks, noble brow and serene eyes looking out from the financial pages of The Times. Put him in a bowler and striped trousers and you’d have the perfect chairman of the board.

  I was very chary of affronting such natural dignity and anyway, Mr Pickersgill was fundamentally a fine stocksman. His few cows, like all the animals of that fast-dying breed of small farmer, were fat and sleek and clean. You had to look after your beasts when they were your only source of income and somehow Mr Pickersgill had brought up a family by milk production eked out by selling a few pigs and the eggs from his wife’s fifty hens.

  It is Darrowby of course where James and Siegfried live and work, a fictional town that Alf Wight largely based on Thirsk, although it also contains, as Alf wrote, ‘something of Richmond, Leyburn, Middleham and a fair chunk of my imagination’. On first arriving, in If Only They Could Talk, James is immediately taken with the small market town.

  Darrowby didn’t get much space in the guide books but when it was mentioned it was described as a grey little town on the river Darrow with a cobbled market place and little of interest except its two ancient bridges. But when you looked at it, its setting was beautiful on the pebbly river where the houses clustered thickly and straggled unevenly along the lower slopes of Herne Fell. Everywhere in Darrowby, in the streets, through the windows of the houses you could see the fell rearing its calm, green bulk more than two thousand feet above the huddled roofs.

  There was a clarity in the air, a sense of space and airiness that made me feel I had shed something on the plain, twenty miles behind. The confinement of the city, the grime, the smoke – already they seemed to be falling away from me.

  Darrowby is a bustling place, with at least one weekly market, and plenty of shops, inns and various facilities for those living in the town and its environs. Dr Allison – a character based on Alf Wight’s family doctor Harry Addison – is just a few doors down from the Skeldale House practice and there’s at least one bank, a dentist, along with Howarth’s the chemist, Pickersgill’s the ironmonger and the Darrowby Plaza, the location for James and Helen’s disastrous date at the cinema. Houses vary in size and age and there are still Dickensian-like yards and tiny streets in the old part of the town, accessed through an arch and narrow passage where the likes of old Mr Dean and his Labrador Bob live.

  Like many towns across the UK, Darrowby also has an abundance of public houses and inns – Thirsk had at least nineteen when Alf worked there. Farmers would head to the pubs, especially on market day, and many villages had at least one ale house or inn, where locals could swap stories and unwind in front of a fire after a day’s hard labour. In the post-war years, pubs in Yorkshire, as opposed to the large hotel-like inns, typically had no bars, only a stone-flagged kitchen-like room where the largely male regulars would sit at oak tables or on high-back wooden benches in front of a fire burning in a range. They were often quiet places, with the landlords supplementing their usually meagre incomes with a smallholding of a few animals.

  Pubs were often judged on their fires, the food and, most importantly, their beer, and local breweries – Tetley’s of Leeds, Cameron’s of Hartlepool and Tadcaster rivals Samuel Smith and John Smith – competed for customer loyalty. Alf, Donald and Brian, like their fictional counterparts, enjoyed relaxing in a local pub, where they could enjoy a good beer, a roaring fire and pleasant company. During or after rounds, they were also useful places to escape to, where, half-starved and frozen from wrestling farm animals out in the fields, they could warm up and fill their bellies with home-cooked meals prepared on the range. During Alf’s courting days, a drink at a pub often preceded a trip to a local dance or the cinema. On returning from the RAF in 1943 he briefly lived with his wife Joan and her family in the village of Sowerby. Their house was conveniently located next door to the Crown and Anchor pub, which is still trading, and Alf shared many pints with his father-in-law and other friends there.

  Brian was a great frequenter of the local pubs, just as Tristan is in the books. Like many Yorkshiremen, Tristan considers himself something of a beer connoisseur, and he’ll often carouse long after James and Siegfried have turned in. In The Lord God Made Them All, James and Helen have just had their daughter Rosie and Tristan is keen to celebrate at a local pub. He mentally goes through all the options, including the pub they frequent most often, the Drovers’ Arms, which was based on the Golden Fleece in Thirsk. It’s clear Tristan, who has a sharp mind and bags of charm, has an encyclopedic knowledge when it comes to the pubs of Darrowby and beer drinking.

  ‘We’ve got to wet this baby’s head, Jim,’ he said seriously.

  I was ready for anything. ‘Of course, of course, when are you coming over?’

  ‘I’ll be there at seven,’ he replied crisply, and I knew he would be.

  Tristan was concerned about the venue of the celebration. There were four of us in the sitting room at Skeldale House – Siegfried, Tristan, Alex Taylor and myself. Alex was my oldest friend – we started school together in Glasgow at the age of four – and when he came out of the army after five years in the Western Desert and Italy he came to spend a few weeks with Helen and me in Darrowby. It wasn’t long before he had fallen under the spell of the country life and now he was learning farming and estate agency with a view to starting a new career. It was good that he should be with me tonight.

  Tristan’s fingers drummed on the arm of his chair as he thought aloud. His expression was fixed and grave, his eyes vacant.

  ‘We’d normally go to the Drovers’ but they’ve got that big party on tonight, so that’s no good,’ he muttered. ‘We want a bit of peace and quiet. Let’s see now, there’s the George and Dragon – Tetley’s beer, splendid stuff, but I’ve known them a bit careless with their pipes and I’ve had the odd sour mouthful. And of course we have the Cross Keys. They pull a lovely pint of Cameron’s and the draught Guinness is excellent. And we mustn’t forget the Hare and Pheasant – their bitter can rise to great heights although the mild is ordinary.’ He paused for a moment. ‘We might do worse than the Lord Nelson – very reliable ale – and of course there’s always . . .’

  ‘Just a minute, Triss,’ I broke in. ‘I went round to Nurse Brown’s this evening to see Helen, and Cliff asked if he could come with us. Don’t you think it would be rather nice to go to his pub since the baby was born in his house?’

  Tristan narrowed his eyes. ‘Which pub is that?’

  ‘The Black Horse.’

  ‘Ay yes, ye-es.’ Tristan looked at me thoughtfully and put his fingertips together. ‘Russell and Rangham’s. A good little brewery, that. I’ve had some first-rate pints in the Black Horse, though I’ve noticed a slight loss of nuttiness under very warm conditions.’ He looked anxiously out of the window. ‘It’s been hot today. Perhaps we’d . . .’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’ Siegfried leaped to his feet. ‘You sound like an analytical chemist. It’s only beer you’re talking about, after all.’

  Tristan looked at him in shocked silence but Siegfried turned to me briskly. ‘I think that’s a pleasant idea of yours, James. Let’s go with Cliff to the Black Horse. It’s a quiet little place.’

  And, indeed, as we dropped to the chairs in the bar parlour I felt we had chosen the ideal spot. The evening sunshine sent long golden shafts over the pitted oak tables and the high-backed settles where a few farm men sat with their glasses. There was nothing smart about this little inn, but the furniture, which hadn’t been changed for a hundred years, gave it an air of tranquillity. It was just right.

  The local inns provide not just beer and company but also a communal space for auctions, games, such as dominoes or darts, or meetings. In The Lord God Made Them All, one pub regular even offers haircuts at his local, the Hare and Pheasant – a character based on the Thirsk barber John Wallace. Even at his own premises, as Jim Wight remembers, he’d frequently disappear in the middle of a haircut, only to return twenty minutes later to inform you that he’d just eaten the best ham sandwich ever.

  Josh Anderson was one of the local barbers. He liked his job, but he also liked his beer. In fact he was devoted to it, even to the extent of taking his scissors and clippers to the pub with him every night. For the price of a pint he would give anybody a quick trim in the gents’ lavatory.

  Habitués of the Hare and Pheasant were never surprised to find one of the customers sitting impassively on the toilet seat with Josh snip-snipping round his head. With beer at sixpence a pint it was good value, but Josh’s clients knew they were taking a chance. If the barber’s intake had been moderate they would escape relatively unscathed because the standard of hair-styling in the Darrowby district was not very fastidious, but if he had imbibed beyond a certain point terrible things could happen.

  Josh had not as yet been known to cut off anybody’s ear, but if you strolled around the town on Sundays and Mondays you were liable to come across some very strange coiffures.