A lot of nonsense has been talked about the exploitation of Alf Wight throughout his years as a veterinary surgeon, describing his earnings as paltry and his attitude to his senior partner as one of a mixture of fear and servility. His earnings in 1945 of around £9 per week were certainly not those of a poor man, while to receive well over £20 per week in 1946, placed him in the bracket of a high earner. In 1946, at the time when Alf was earning £20, a fully qualified chartered accountant, for example, was earning less than half that amount.
On 2 May 1949, Alf Wight’s roots in Thirsk were finally anchored when he received a full partnership from Donald. He did not have to pay a single penny for this but he had to earn his share of the partnership in other ways, as one part of the agreement reveals: ‘Para. 11. The said James Alfred Wight shall devote his whole time and employ himself diligently in the business of the partnership and use his utmost endeavours to promote the interests thereof and the said Donald Vaughan Sinclair shall give such time as he may desire to the partnership affairs.’
Donald, quite obviously, had no intention of working his fingers to the bone, but the next paragraph reveals that the partnership was not quite so one-sided after all: ‘Para. 12. The said Donald Vaughan Sinclair shall be entitled to two-thirds of the fees paid to him or the partnership in respect of professional services rendered by him in connection with the said practice or one-third of the net profits of the said practice whichever shall be the lesser amount and the said James Alfred Wight shall be entitled to receive the balance of the net profits of the partnership.’
This meant that Alfred Wight was to earn more than Donald Sinclair – and so it would turn out to be for the rest of their professional lives. Alf would always work harder in the practice than Donald but, in return, he would earn more. He had displayed patience and determination in achieving his goal of a partnership – two qualities that were to resurface more than twenty years later in his pursuit of success in a very different field.
The arrangement must have been broadly agreeable to both parties as they remained friends and partners for another forty years.
Alf always considered himself fortunate to have known such a fascinating man as Donald Sinclair but Donald, in return, was blessed throughout his professional career with an honest and hard-working colleague. Alf was to be a selfless and loyal partner for Donald and later, as James Herriot, he would be equally generous in his portrayal of Donald as the unforgettable Siegfried Farnon.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When Donald and Audrey Sinclair moved out of 23 Kirkgate in the summer of 1945 to live in Southwoods Hall, Alf and his family moved from Blakey View in Sowerby to live, once again, in the old house in Thirsk, staying for the next eight years. Alf’s mother-in-law, Laura Danbury, accompanied them. His father-in-law, Horace Danbury, had died in January of that year and Laura did not want to continue living alone at Blakey View. ‘Lal’, as she was always known, was to live with us for the next thirty years.
Lal was not the typical ‘music hall’ mother-in-law. She was a quiet, sweet-natured lady with whom we never had a cross word. She was no trouble – in fact, she was a great asset since she was always a willing baby-sitter when Alf and Joan wanted to go out. She was also of great assistance to Joan in the big house, helping her daughter with both the housework and the cooking.
Despite Lal’s help, Joan found the burden of keeping 23 Kirkgate clean an exhausting one. Alf worried constantly as he saw his wife slaving day and night in the big rambling house. Through her obsession with housework, she fought stubbornly to keep everything sparkling and geometrically neat and tidy. ‘For God’s sake, Joan! Stop scrubbing these stone floors, will you?!’ was a cry that we heard almost every day. Aware that his pleas were falling on deaf ears, he realised that the only way to stop his wife destroying herself with work was to find another home and leave 23 Kirkgate. My mother’s ‘domestomania’ would be a major factor in our eventual departure from the old house in 1953.
All three storeys of the house were available to the family. The top storey, which had been Alf and Joan’s first home, was little used. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom on the middle floor, while downstairs were the sitting-room, dining-room, kitchen and scullery.
In those days, with very little dog and cat work, the waiting-rooms and consulting-rooms were virtually non-existent. People just marched in to have their animals attended to on a little wooden table – either in the drug store or just in the old passageway – very often by the veterinary surgeon in Wellington boots.
The extensive and well-stocked surgeries shown in the television series and films of the Herriot books were greatly exaggerated. The real ‘Skeldale House’ never looked so impressive, with the family rooms doubling up as rudimentary consulting-rooms and waiting areas. The house certainly had plenty of charm with its long winding corridors and the fine walled garden, but it was really quite basic. It was also extremely cold.
The modern large animal veterinary surgeons still have a demanding life, and have to wrestle with difficult cases in cold conditions, but at least they usually return to warm, centrally-heated premises. This luxury was not available to the young Alf Wight. He returned to 23 Kirkgate. We spent many happy years there, but the old house certainly did not wrap us in comfort. The winter winds probed its every corner, with draughts blasting up and down the long stone-flagged corridor. As I spent my youth attired in short trousers, I frequently complained of the cold, whereupon my father used to say, ‘Run, Jimmy, run!’, and I would hurtle up and down the length of the house to keep warm.
The winters in Yorkshire nowadays are positively tropical in comparison to the iron-hard days we endured when I was a boy. Snow fell regularly throughout the winter months, while huge icicles hung from the gutters for weeks. With the windows often white with frost, my most vivid memories of 23 Kirkgate are of the beautiful wintry patterns on the glass – something we rarely see today in our warm, centrally-heated homes. The only sources of heat in the entire house were two coal fires downstairs and an infuriatingly temperamental anthracite stove in the office.
Most things were done at high speed; to linger resulted in severe hypothermia. On winter mornings, my father, having leapt out of bed into the freezing air of the bedroom, would run downstairs and along the passageway into the kitchen to light the fire. He could never even loosely be described as a handyman and was virtually useless at performing household tasks. His attempts at putting a picture up on the wall would invariably result in its crashing to the floor within minutes; to ask him to change an electric plug was followed by what seemed hours of intense concentration, followed by sparks and the house invariably being plunged into darkness. The job of lighting fires came no easier to him and there was little comfort to his family when they came into the kitchen in their search for warmth each morning. My overriding memories of his tiny fires are of black, smoking mounds from the depths of which occasionally appeared a small, white flame that quivered and spluttered for a few seconds before disappearing as suddenly as it had arrived.
My mother’s fires in the living-room were a different proposition. She could have a roaring inferno going within minutes and we sat round this oasis of warmth in high-backed chairs and sofas, the perpetually moving curtains bearing testimony to the draughts coursing around the room.