In those difficult days for young veterinary surgeons, the acquisition of some job security was, for most of them, little more than a dream. Alf was, astonishingly, offered a salaried partnership before he had even accepted the job. Rather than receiving a salary while Donald was away in the Royal Air Force, Alf would receive five-eighths of the profits of the practice – helping himself to any cash that he could generate in the course of his work. After Donald’s return, Alf was promised a salary of four guineas per week in addition to a share in the profits made while doing extra work for the Ministry of Agriculture.

Alf knew he would have a busy time ahead if he accepted. As well as doing the work of two men while Donald was away, he would also be balancing the books and running the Kirkgate premises, but it all added up to a tempting financial carrot for a penniless young man.

Money, however, was not everything. Alf knew he wanted to work in an environment that he could enjoy, and his first glimpse of Yorkshire had been an eye-opener. Instead of a drab, industrial landscape, he had seen rich, green fields and attractive little villages nestling at the foot of the Hambleton Hills. The thought of working in such pleasant surroundings appealed to him. Thirsk, with its collection of uneven buildings clustered around the cobbled market place, had an atmosphere of friendliness and charm. It was in marked contrast to the grey, windswept streets of Sunderland.

The unusual character of his prospective employer did not mar these positive thoughts. Donald Sinclair may have been a little eccentric in his behaviour but Alf had instinctively liked him from the moment they had first shaken hands. He had an honest and open face, together with a sharp sense of humour and an appealing personality.

The dearth of available jobs in 1940 decreed that Alf needed to make his mind up quickly, and he did. He informed McDowall of Donald’s offer and then wrote immediately to Donald advising him that he would accept the job.

Mac was sorry to lose his young colleague, but he knew that Alf would not have stayed in Sunderland for long. He understood why the ambitious young man had been looking for a permanent post, with better prospects than he could ever offer him.

Alf travelled down to Yorkshire with his meagre belongings, arriving in Thirsk on 18 July 1940, and took up residence in one of the upstairs rooms of 23 Kirkgate. After spending a few days travelling round the practice with Donald and Eric Parker to acquaint himself with the area, he signed his contract as a salaried partner on 24 July, and began work two days later. As he set off on his rounds on that July day, little did he know that, many years later, he would turn Donald Sinclair’s business at 23 Kirkgate into the most famous veterinary practice in the world.

CHAPTER EIGHT

In the early years of his literary success as James Herriot, Alf Wight wrapped a cloak of secrecy around the true location of Darrowby, revealing to no one the identity of the people on whom his characters were based. His portrayal of Darrowby was deliberately altered and is described in the books as being in the High Dales country, surrounded by wild fells and green valleys, with drystone walls snaking down towards the little town. His efforts to insulate himself, his friends and this area of Yorkshire from the explosion of publicity in the early 1970s were not very successful. It was not long before the media publicity had revealed that he lived in Thirsk, and it was his experiences in this Yorkshire market town that provided the greater part of the material for his books.

The vast majority of the incidents recounted within the stories happened in and around Thirsk, not in the Yorkshire Dales over twenty miles away. Thirsk was Darrowby and Alfred Wight, despite his enormous love for that area, could never be described as a Dales veterinary surgeon.

A postcard from Thirsk, sent by Alf to his parents on the day he arrived there in July 1940, shows that the town has not really changed a great deal in appearance over the years. There is a refreshing absence of motor vehicles in the old picture, but the unevenly roofed buildings surrounding the cobbled market place are very familiar. It was in this rural environment, far removed from his city upbringing, that he was to lay the foundations of a successful career as a veterinary surgeon. 23 Kirkgate, that he would years later make famous as ‘Skeldale House’, would be his home for the next twelve years, and his practice premises for the whole of his professional life.

Alf’s feelings for the house and garden are clearly expressed in chapter 2 of his book If Only They Could Talk, where he describes seeing it for the very first time:

I liked the look of the old house. It was Georgian with a fine, white-painted doorway.… The paint was flaking and the mortar looked crumbly between the bricks, but there was a changeless elegance about the place.…

I was shown into a sunlit room. It had been built in the grand manner, high-ceilinged and airy with a massive fireplace flanked by arched alcoves. One end was taken up by a french window which gave on a long, high-walled garden. I could see unkempt lawns, a rockery and many fruit trees. A great bank of peonies blazed in the hot sunshine and at the far end, rooks cawed in the branches of a group of tall elms.…

Sunshine beat back from the high old walls, bees droned among the bright masses of flowers. A gentle breeze stirred the withered blooms of a magnificent wistaria which almost covered the back of the house. There was peace here.

Although there may have been peace at 23 Kirkgate, he had little time to sample it. During those first months in Thirsk, Alf discovered that the life of a country veterinary surgeon was fascinating, challenging and extremely hard. The ‘free’ salaried partnership into which he had entered with Donald Sinclair was a two-edged sword. Although he did not have to find the money to buy his partnership, he repaid Donald’s gesture with something he had in abundance – a willingness to work hard – and his repayments got off to a flying start during that summer of 1940.

Donald left to join the Royal Air Force within days of Alf’s arrival and Eric Parker departed four weeks later. Alf was left to run a strange practice entirely single-handed in an area with which he was almost totally unfamiliar. Having had most of his experience with small animals, he now had to transform himself into a large animal vet – and pretty quickly, too. The days were long and tiring but he managed to enjoy them as well as learning an enormous amount.

It is interesting to study the old practice ledgers which reveal how different the nature of the work was from the present day. Much of Alf’s time was spent visiting individual animals on small family farms and, of course, his patients received very different treatment in those days before the arrival of modern drugs. He was continually drenching bovines with strange concoctions such as ‘Stimulant Stomach Powders’ or ‘Universal Cattle Medicine’. He washed out cows’ stomachs with these quaint mixtures, and irrigated their genital tracts and their udders with Acriflavine to combat infertility or mastitis. Acriflavine, an antiseptic, was a great standby for the veterinary surgeon; it was syringed up just about every available orifice that needed cleaning. In those days, the veterinary surgeons spent many long hours mixing medicines to their own ‘recipes’. These seem so outdated now but many of them were actually quite effective. The more dramatic side of the work was never far away – the calvings, foalings, castrations and various stitching jobs that have always punctuated the veterinary surgeon’s day.