Krishna
shire Dale, a quiet corner of England, you should as you would be in for a treat.
. His keen sense of observation bring what would be an everyday humdrum anecdotes in any other hand vibrantly to life with great humour and wonderful empathy and love for the profession. This is the first omnibus edition of his works. He has written numerous slim books that have been compiled into four big editions. This is the first one, and if you put all of them together, they make the first four lines of Cecil Alexander’s Hymns for the Children poem.
He talks about starting off in his practice, this being the first of his omnibus collections, and the book is funny from the first page, where he is trying to pull a calf out of a pregnant cow in a rural Yorkshire village. He talks about going to meet Siegfried Farnon for an interview. It is amazing how he can find fun in a rural everyday setting and what’s more, manage to communicate his infectious enthusiasm to you and even more amazing how, long after the book was published, and even longer after the timeframe when the events happened (1937 onwards) the writing and the imagery is still as fresh as it happened yesterday. This is an extraordinary achievement from the pen of an accomplished writer and thinker and a fundamentally nice human being.
There are just vignettes all through the book, each an individual case that can be read separately. Yet, they all hang together with the key personalities (himself, Siegfried and a few others), the locale and the mores of the times. This is a timeless classic.
What remains is to recount a few of the episodes in the book that tickle your funny bone or make you get a small lump in your throat – sometimes both together.
His initial interview with Siegfried is told as well as the others. His finding himself on a limb when he realizes that Siegfried was away and that the housekeeper had not even been told of his arrival, his imagining Siegfried to be a plumb German with an impossibly thick accent, only to find the real man, when he arrived, a thin young man with a pure British accent is all well told. Even his encounter with the dozen or so dogs and how he ‘handled’ them is told with great warmth and wit.
He then goes for his first trip with Farnon and attends to a horse’s hoof that was infected and gets knocked over by a well aimed kick from a cow, with Farnon watching with suppressed amusement. The drinking session on the way back gave opportunity to meet a colourful old countryman who gave a ‘miracle remedy’ as a favour to Herriot.
He talks about his first solo mission where he had to take a decision to put down a horse that ‘just had a bit of colic’ according to Mr Soames, the cantankerous villager who threatened to sue Herriot for the horrible judgement.
Next comes Tristan, Siegried’s happy-go-lucky brother. (Their father was obsessed with Wagner, so the classical sounding German names for the kids). The tension between the two widely different nature of the brothers; Siegfried’s asking for a sharp steel knife from a farmer wife and after sharpening it asking the terrified wife for her husband through a mistake in the address – he was trying to do a post mortem on a dead sheep but had forgotten his surgical knife at home – are hilarious.
Tristan and Herriots playful pranks, you get the idea. It is on the whole lightweight innocent fun to read. Not deep, not philosophical but just a vet enjoying his work and company and seeing humour in everyday things.
There is the story of revenge taken by an older vet who takes offence at the smallest slights and makes Herriot wear an outlandish suit just to pass an implement to the growing mirth of witnessing farmers.
One where Siegfied gets showered with the cow’s stomach contents as he is trying to retrieve a wire that got into the stomach.
I must admit though, that after all these years, it does not read as fresh and as riotously hilarious as it sounded about thirty years ago when I read it first. Still, it is a very good book which elicits a chuckle or a mild sadness as the case may be.
To carry on, there is the health inspection for cows that goes wrong in every place; the suspicious but wealthy farmers who try home remedies before calling a vet.
His romance with Miss Anderson goes in a parallel stream.
All in all a fun read and very enjoyable if you are reading it the first time, if a little old fashioned in its views. But the second time, not so much.
7/10
= = Krishna