James Herriot's Dog Stories Read online

  As I have said, much of the tuition at the old College was a joke and, indeed, the whole curriculum was steeped in the Dark Ages, but there was a bright side. We saw a lot of practice. We had no clinic, so we had to go out and observe animal treatment in the real world. In fact, in our final year we had only one lecture in the morning and then we were out with one of the local practitioners for the rest of the day. The real world contained very few horses and a lot of dogs.

  I was lucky. I was a student with Donald Campbell of Rutherglen, a fine man and an outstanding veterinarian but, being dog-orientated, my biggest break was being able to work at the surgery of the great Weipers in the heart of the city. Bill Weipers, now Sir William Weipers and in later life Dean of the new Veterinary School of Glasgow University, was a man ahead of his time by many years. He set up a purely small animal practice and established it on a standard which was undreamed of at that time. He was a brilliant, immensely likeable man of boundless energy and his students worshipped at his shrine. As for me, I was spellbound. It was just dogs and cats all day long and when I saw the fine operating theatre, the top class surgical procedures, the X-ray machine and the laboratory where blood, bacterial and other examinations were carried out, one thought hammered away in my head. This was what I would do some day.

  This practical experience was a Godsend, and there was another advantage about those old days. There was no Veterinary Surgeons Act then and it was quite legal for students to work on their own. Some of us helped out the local vets at weekends and I actually did a complete fortnight’s locum at the age of nineteen. The vet went off on holiday and left me, wet behind the ears as I was, to run his practice. That fortnight seemed to last a year, but it did me a world of good.

  It was deeply satisfying to be able to apply our scientific knowledge to practical things, because we did glean some vital information from the college tuition. For instance we really did learn pathology. The redoubtable Professor Emslie insisted on it. He was no broken-down old practitioner, he was a dynamic intellectual in the prime of life with a passion for his subject and an awesome personality. Burly, black-browed, smouldering-eyed, he could cower every one of us with a single look. The bunch of hell-raisers with the poor old men were frightened little mice with Emslie. And he taught us pathology. With a savage wit and terrifying outbursts of rage, he rammed it into us.

  I was as scared as the rest but grateful to him, too, because pathology lies at the heart of all animal treatment and in those early days when I was seeing animals with pneumonia, renal and cardiac conditions and struggling to understand what was behind them, it was like the lifting of a veil.

  When I qualified and walked out of the door of the College for the last time I felt an acute sense of loss, an awareness of something good gone forever. Some of my happiest years were spent in that seedy old building and though my veterinary course was out of date and inefficient in many ways, there was a carefree, easy-going charm about that whole time which has held it in my mind in a golden glow.

  When, many years later, I saw my son, Jimmy, on to the train in York to begin his new life as a veterinary student, I said only one thing to him – ‘Have a good time.’

  I know he did, but nobody had a better time than me.

  With MRCVS after my name, I was now out in the big world, but it soon turned out to be cold and hard. I must have been blinkered during my years of training because my boyhood vision had remained unchanged. I was still in my white coat or in an operating gown under the brilliant lights with the nurses around me. I could see no impediment to my ambition. I would take an assistantship in a small animal practice, then after I had gained experience and earned some money I would look for a partnership or possibly put up my plate in Glasgow. The future seemed rosy. There were dogs everywhere, just waiting for me.

  But when I qualified I came up against harsh reality. The depression of the thirties was still lying over our profession like a dark blanket and jobs were desperately scarce. For every vacant appointment advertised in the Veterinary Record, there were eighty applicants and for those who did manage to find a post, the remuneration was often pitiful. Qualified veterinary surgeons were working for thirty shillings a week plus bed and board and it was terrible to read in the ‘appointments required’ column the dread phrase ‘Will work for keep’. These words cropped up again and again, a heart cry from many who, like me, would do anything to get off their parents’ hands.

  I saw my colleagues taking jobs in shops or in the Clyde-side shipyards and I was just beginning to despair when I was offered an interview for a post in the Yorkshire Dales. I could hardly believe my luck when I was taken on. It was a lifeline, but even in my euphoria a sad little thought intruded. This was a large animal practice, dealing almost entirely with farm horses, cows, sheep and pigs. Where was my dream now?

  But I had no time to worry about such things and the vision of the immaculate young vet in his sterile surroundings soon melted away. I spent my time in shirt sleeves and wellingtons, trudging through mud and muck, wrestling with huge beasts, being kicked, knocked down and trodden on. As a city boy, thrown headlong into the kind of remote rural community I had only read about in books, I was like a poor swimmer trying to keep afloat in the deep end. I was acutely aware that I had no agricultural background and that I had to establish myself among farmers who had spent a lifetime with livestock and often had a jaundiced attitude to what they called ‘book-learnin’ ’. Life was very full.

  And yet, among the hurly-burly, there was a magical element. I was working outside all the time, in the sunshine and clean air, and around me was a countryside which was all the more enchanting for being unexpected. I was amazed that nobody had ever told me about Yorkshire. The majestic grassy fells soaring high above the pebbly rivers and the grey villages, the airy distances of the moors with their billowing sea of purple heather. I had stumbled on a wonderland which appeared to be undiscovered because often I was quite alone in those wide landscapes. There was a sense of solitude here, a nearness of the wild which was exciting and I realised that if fate had decreed that I was going to be a farm physician instead of a dog doctor, the compensations were enormous.

  As the months passed this feeling deepened into a conviction. This was the life for me. I would never go back to a city again.

  It was a pity I would never realise my ambition. It had been with me for a long time, but I pushed it to the back of my mind. Then it began to come through to me that, even here, there was dog work all around – a whole charming little world of it among the scattered villages of the Dales. People had pets there, just as in the cities. Not in such large numbers but enough to make a refreshing sideline to my large animal duties. And to my surprise I found that these people were ready and eager for my services. The main reason was that among the tough, hard­bitten horse- and farm-doctors of that period, it was considered slightly cissy to attend to the needs of dogs and cats. I remember one old practitioner looking down his nose at me when I described a small animal case. ‘That’s not veterinary surgery,’ he grunted.

  But it was to me. Very much so. And I found that I had a pretty free rein in my practice, because my boss, later to be my partner, was a dedicated horseman who seized on every equine problem, leaving the dogs and cats to me. So it happened that after a year or so I had what amounted to my own small animal practice, with clients coming from far around to our little town to seek the services of a vet who actually wanted to treat their pets.

  This part of my work was like a bright thread running through the stern fabric of my daily round. Country practice is hard, but it was a lot harder half a century ago, before the modern drugs, the metal crushes and tranquillisers which make the handling of the big, struggling beasts so much easier. I was a young, fit man and I gladly accepted the rough life, but it was still a magical relief to step out of the dirt, the cold, and the bruising routine to treat the ailments of gentle little animals in drawing-rooms.

  It wasn’t the kind of dog practice I h