In the years that Alf lived at Skeldale House, he developed a love for gardening and planted vegetable beds full of lettuces, onions, beans and asparagus, with masses of rhubarb, tomatoes trailing up the walls and strawberries in the summer. Manure from the local farms ensured the soil was rich, and Alf turned it over with the assistance of Wardman, an odd-job man who had come through the First World War and whom Donald had employed to help out in the garden, the garage and with any animals in the yard.

  In the books, Wardman appears as Boardman, who is often lurking around the yard, tending the boiler or chortling with Tristan, who spends hours smoking his Woodbines or swapping jokes with the veteran, just as Brian Sinclair often did during his vacations. James describes the yard, Boardman’s cubby hole and his memories of Skeldale House in grander days when it belonged to a doctor.

  It was square and cobbled and the grass grew in thick tufts between the stones. Buildings took up two sides; the two garages, once coach houses, a stable and saddle room, a loose box and a pigsty. Against the free wall a rusty iron pump hung over a stone water trough.

  Above the stable was a hay loft and over one of the garages a dovecot. And there was old Boardman. He, too, seemed to have been left behind from grander days, hobbling round on his lame leg, doing nothing in particular.

  He grunted good morning from his cubby hole where he kept a few tools and garden implements. Above his head his reminder of the war looked down: a row of coloured prints of Bruce Bairnsfather cartoons. He had stuck them up when he came home in 1918 and there they were still, dusty and curled at the edges but still speaking to him of Kaiser Bill and the shell holes and muddy trenches.

  Boardman washed a car sometimes or did a little work in the garden, but he was content to earn a pound or two and get back to his yard. He spent a lot of time in the saddle room, just sitting. Sometimes he looked round the empty hooks where the harness used to hang and then he would make a rubbing movement with his fist against his palm.

  He often talked to me of the great days. ‘I can see t’owd doctor now, standing on top step waiting for his carriage to come round. Big, smart-looking feller he was. Allus wore a top hat and frock coat, and I can remember him when I was a lad, standing there, pulling on ’is gloves and giving his hat a tilt while he waited.’

  Boardman’s features seemed to soften and a light came into his eyes as though he were talking more to himself than to me. ‘The old house was different then. A housekeeper and six servants there were and everything just so. And a full-time gardener. There weren’t a blade of grass out of place in them days and the flowers all in rows and the trees pruned, tidy like.’

  Alongside Boardman and Mrs Hall, Siegfried also decides the veterinary practice needs someone to take charge of the bills. His pint-pot system, a large beer glass stuffed with banknotes and cheques, is less than satisfactory, and putting Tristan in charge of finances was only ever going to result in chaos. We learn that the new secretary, Miss Harbottle, is in her fifties and recently retired from a firm in Bradshaw where she was known for her efficiency. A big woman, her round face framed by gold-rimmed spectacles, she is introduced to James and Tristan.

  I shook hands and was astonished at the power of Miss Harbottle’s grip. We looked into each other’s eyes and had a friendly trial of strength for a few seconds, then she seemed happy to call it a draw and turned away. Tristan was entirely unprepared and a look of alarm spread over his face as his hand was engulfed; he was released only when his knees started to buckle.

  Miss Harbottle proceeds to tour the office while Siegfried hovers behind. She examines with horror the ledger and day books, which are covered in illegible scrawl. She pulls open a drawer in a desk, out of which fall old seed packets, a few peas and some French beans. Crammed in another drawer are soiled calving ropes which somebody has forgotten to wash, while empty pale ale bottles clink in another drawer. When she asks to see the cashbox, Siegfried shows her the pint pot on the mantelpiece, with some of its contents spilled onto the hearth below.

  Miss Harbottle clearly has her work set out for her and Siegfried is keen for her to start. The relationship, however, soon turns sour as Miss Harbottle grows increasingly frustrated with Siegfried’s chaotic way of doing things.

  Siegfried looked down at the square figure behind the desk. ‘Good morning, Miss Harbottle, can I do anything for you?’ The grey eyes glinted behind the gold-rimmed spectacles. ‘You can, indeed, Mr Farnon. You can explain why you have once more emptied my petty cash box.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I had to rush through to Brawton last night and I found myself a bit short. There was really nowhere else to turn to.’

  ‘But Mr Farnon, in the two months I have been here, we must have been over this a dozen times. What is the good of my trying to keep an accurate record of the money in the practice if you keep stealing it and spending it?’

  ‘Well, I suppose I got into the habit in the old pint-pot days. It wasn’t a bad system, really.’

  ‘It wasn’t a system at all. It was anarchy. You cannot run a business that way. But I’ve told you this so many times and each time you have promised to alter your ways. I feel almost at my wits’ end.’

  Miss Harbottle was based very loosely on Harold Wilson, a retired railway clerk whom Donald and Alf employed in 1949 to help with the practice paperwork and to balance the books. He, like Miss Harbottle, had a difficult relationship with Donald who found the presence of Harold increasingly irritating. Harold, however, valiantly persevered, bringing some order to the haphazard organization of the practice, and stayed on as a valued employee for ten years.

  After a few months, the battle between Siegfried and Miss Harbottle intensifies as each combatant attempts to assert their authority in a variety of crafty ways, with Siegfried more often than not on the losing side.

  Watching him go, I thought wonderingly of how things had built up since the secretary’s arrival. It was naked war now and it gave life an added interest to observe the tactics of the two sides.

  At the beginning it seemed that Siegfried must run out an easy winner. He was the employer; he held the reins and it appeared that Miss Harbottle would be helpless in the face of his obstructive strategy. But Miss Harbottle was a fighter and a resourceful one and it was impossible not to admire the way she made use of the weapons at her command.

  In fact, over the past week the tide had been running in her favour. She had been playing Siegfried like an expert fisherman with a salmon; bringing him repeatedly back to her desk to answer footling questions. Her throat clearing had developed into an angry bark which could penetrate the full extent of the house. And she had a new weapon; she had taken to writing Siegfried’s clerical idiocies on slips of paper; misspellings, errors in addition, wrong entries – they were all faithfully copied down.

  Miss Harbottle used these slips as ammunition. She never brought one out when things were slack and her employer was hanging about the surgery. She saved them until he was under pressure, then she would push a slip under his nose and say ‘How about this?’

  She always kept an expressionless face at these times and it was impossible to say how much pleasure it gave her to see him cower back like a whipped animal. But the end was unvarying mumbled explanations and apologies from Siegfried and Miss Harbottle, radiating self-righteousness, correcting the entry.

  As Siegfried went into the room I watched through the partly open door. I knew my morning round was waiting but I was impelled by morbid curiosity. Miss Harbottle, looking brisk and businesslike, was tapping an entry in the book with her pen while Siegfried shuffled his feet and muttered replies. He made several vain attempts to escape and, as the time passed, I could see he was nearing breaking point. His teeth were clenched and his eyes had started to bulge.

  In the immediate post-war years Siegfried goes on to get married and lives with his wife a few miles outside Darrowby while James, Helen and their son Jim are still living in the practice headquarters. In reality, Donald had married in June 1943 while Alf was in the RAF and he and his new bride Audrey Adamson initially lived at 23 Kirkgate. (Donald had been briefly married before while he was a student at the Edinburgh Veterinary College but he lost his young wife to tuberculosis in the early 1930s.) Donald and Audrey would remain married for over fifty years and it was said that her calm temperament acted as the perfect foil to Donald’s more impulsive nature.

  When the James Herriot books were published many assumed that Alf had exaggerated the unruly tendencies of Donald to create the character of Siegfried. Donald himself was unhappy with his portrayal, declaring quite memorably after reading the first book: ‘Alfred, this book is a test of our friendship!’ In fact, many of those who knew Donald felt that Alf had underplayed his eccentricities – his behaviour was extraordinary and erratic in a myriad of ways, as reflected in the books. But he was at heart an immensely likeable and funny man, and, while he could be challenging, ‘his many good qualities’, as Alf’s son Jim put it, ‘far outweighed his less appealing ones’. Keen not to upset Donald, Alf deliberately played down his personality quirks in the remaining six books, although he still remains a key character right through to Every Living Thing.

  By the time of Every Living Thing, set in the early 1950s, James, Helen and their two children decide to move out of Skeldale House into a more modern property, as they did in reality in 1953. Much as they love the place, it’s a big house to look after and its high ceilings and draughty corridors make it impossible to heat.

  We loved the old place but it had vast disadvantages for a young couple of moderate means. It was charming, graceful and undoubtedly a happy house in its atmosphere, but it was far too big and a veritable ice box in cold weather.

  I looked up over the ivy-covered frontage at the big bedroom windows, then further to the next storey where there was a suite of rooms where, in the early days, we had had our bed-sitter. There was another storey if you counted the tiny rooms under the tiles; here there was a big bell mounted on the end of a spring which used to summon a little housemaid down to the ground floor in the early days of the century.

  The old doctor who lived in Skeldale House before we took over had had six servants including a full-time housekeeper, but Helen looked after the whole place with the aid of a series of transient maids, most of whom soon grew tired of the hard work and the impossible inconvenience of the house.

  On the day of the move, James finds that Skeldale House echoes with the life it once contained – the antics of three young bachelor vets, the squabbles between Siegfried and Tristan, the ever-present pack of dogs yelping at the door, children running down the corridors – a house that was noisy, chaotic but always happy. The lives of Siegfried and James are moving on, they are married men now and their domestic lives are no longer intertangled as they once were.

  Leaving Skeldale had been a far greater wrench than I had ever imagined. After the van had taken the last of our things away I roamed through the empty rooms which had echoed to my children’s laughter. The big sitting room where I had read the bedtime stories and where, before all that, Siegfried, Tristan and I had sprawled in bachelor contentment, seemed to reproach me with its ageless charm and grace. The handsome fireplace with its glass cupboard above, and the old pewter tankard which used to hold our cash still resting there, the French window opening onto the long, high-walled garden with its lawns, fruit trees, asparagus and strawberry beds – these things were part of a great surging ocean of memories.

  Upstairs, I stood in the large alcoved room where Helen and I had slept and to where we had brought our children as babies to sleep in the cot which once stood in that corner. I clumped over the bare boards to the dressing room which Jimmy and Rosie had shared, almost hearing their giggles and teasings which were the beginning of each new day.

  I climbed another flight to the little rooms under the eaves where Helen and I had started our married life, where a bench against the wall and a gas ring once served as our only cooking arrangements; then I walked to the window and looked over the tumbled roofs of the little town to the green fells and swallowed a huge lump in my throat. Dear old Skeldale. I was so glad it was going to be kept on as the practice house and I would walk through its doors every day, but my family was leaving and I wondered if we could ever be as happy again as we had been here.

  While both Alf and Donald continued to work at the Thirsk practice, Donald moved out with his wife Audrey in 1945. As Audrey came from a wealthy shipbuilding family, they were able to move into an elegant country estate, Southwoods Hall, in Thirlby near Thirsk, where Donald could indulge in the gentlemanly pursuits of hunting, shooting and fishing. Donald continued to work at 23 Kirkgate, although reduced his weekly hours, while Alf worked full-time with the help of assistants and eventually his son Jim.

  Donald Sinclair was an extraordinary character, in life and on the page as Siegfried Farnon. Siegfried was always an essential part of the practice and of the world that existed inside Skeldale House. His presence in the James Herriot books adds vigour and humour to many of the stories, much of which reflect just how funny Donald was, often unconsciously so. Such is the case in Every Living Thing when Siegfried, who is still much admired by local farmers, treats Mr Hawley’s calf.

  The farmer, white hair straggling from under a tattered cap, watched anxiously as Siegfried bent over the prostrate calf in a pen in the corner of the cow house.

  ‘What do ye make of it, Mr Farnon?’ he asked. ‘I’ve never seen owt like it.’

  The appeal in his eyes was mingled with a deep faith. Siegfried was his hero, a wonder worker, the man who had brought off miracle cures for years, even before I had come to Darrowby. William Hawley was one of a breed of simple, unsophisticated farmers who still survived in the fifties but who have long since melted away under the glare of science and education.

  Siegfried spoke gravely. ‘Very strange indeed. No scour, no pneumonia, yet the little thing’s flat out like this.’

  Carefully and methodically he went over the little body with his stethoscope, auscultating heart, lungs and abdomen. He took the temperature, opened the mouth and peered at the tongue and throat, examined the eyes and ran his hand over the roan hairs of the coat. Then slowly he straightened up. His face was expressionless as he looked down at the motionless form.

  Suddenly he turned to the old man. ‘William,’ he said, ‘would you be so kind as to fetch me a piece of string.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘A piece of string, please.’

  ‘String?’

  ‘Yes, about this length.’ Siegfried spread his arms wide. ‘And quickly, please.’

  ‘Right, right . . . I’ll get ye some. Now where can I lay me hands on a bit that length?’ Flustered, he turned to me. ‘Can ye come and give me a hand, Mr Herriot?’

  ‘Certainly.’ I followed him as he hurried from the cow house and outside he clutched at my arm. It was clear he had only asked me to come with him to enlighten him.

  ‘What does ’e want a piece of string for?’ he asked in bewilderment.

  I shrugged. ‘I really have no idea, Mr Hawley.’

  He nodded gleefully as though that was only what he expected. An ordinary vet couldn’t possibly know what was in the mind of Mr Farnon, a man of legendary skill who was known to employ many strange things in the practice of his art – puffs of purple smoke to cure lame horses, making holes in jugular veins and drawing off buckets of blood to cure laminitis. Old William had heard all the stories and he was in no doubt that if anybody could restore his animal to health by means of a piece of string, it would be Mr Farnon.

  But the maddening thing was that as we trotted round the buildings he couldn’t find such a thing.

  ‘Dang it,’ he said. ‘There’s allus a coil of binder twine hangin’ there, but it isn’t there now! And I’m allus trippin’ over bits o’ string all over t’place, but not today. What’ll he think of a farmer wi’ no string?’

  In a growing panic he rushed around and he was almost in tears when he saw a piece lying across a heap of sacks.

  ‘How about this, Mr Herriot? Is it t’right length?’

  ‘Just about right, I’d say.’

  He grabbed it and ran as fast as his elderly limbs would carry him back to Siegfried.

  ‘Here y’are, Mr Farnon,’ he panted. ‘Ah’m not too late, am I? He’s still alive?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes.’ Siegfried took the string and held it dangling for a moment as he measured the length with his eye. Then, as we watched, wide-eyed, he quickly tied it round his waist. ‘Thank you so much, William,’ he murmured, ‘that’s much better. I couldn’t work with that damned coat flapping open as I bent over. I lost a couple of buttons yesterday. Cow got her horn underneath them and tore them off – it’s always happening to me.’

  ‘But . . . but . . . the string . . .’ The old man’s face was a picture of woe. ‘Ye can’t do anything for my calf, then?’

  ‘Of course I can. Whatever makes you think I can’t?’

  ‘Well . . . do ye know what ails him?’

  ‘Yes, I do. He’s got CCN.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Cerebrocortical necrosis. It’s a brain disease.’

  ‘It’s a terrible big name. And his brain? It’ll be a hopeless case?’

  ‘Not a bit. I’m going to inject vitamin B into his vein. It usually works like a charm. Just hold his head for a moment. You see how it’s bent over his back? That’s called opisthotonos – typical of this condition.’

  Siegfried quickly carried out the injection and got to his feet. ‘One of us will be passing your door tomorrow, so we’ll look in. I’d like to bet he’ll be a lot better.’

  It was I who called next day and indeed the calf was up and eating. William Hawley was pleased.