Donald always got away with it. He would apologise profusely, invite the young man for tea, and be totally forgiven every time. His natural charm was his saving grace.
‘You know,’ Alf said once, expounding on his partner, ‘everyone is born with some quality that helps them along life’s road. With Donald, it is his natural charm. No matter what he has done, you just cannot be annoyed with him for long. For as long as I have known him, he has possessed the ability to have people running around working for him. I wish that I could say the same of myself!’
One of Donald’s genuinely endearing qualities, however, was his attitude to children. This phenomenally impatient man displayed a total reversal of character whenever a small child was involved. He gave plenty of time to his own two children, Alan and Janet – with whom Rosie and I played for many hours around the huge, magical Southwoods Hall – and he showed no less patience with those of others.
I remember him talking one day to a client in our office, when he was abruptly interrupted by a little girl. She had just completed a drawing of a frog and was longing to show it to someone. She chose the right man in Donald Sinclair.
He turned away from the client, stooped down towards the child and said, ‘How very interesting! Let me see.’ He examined the drawing carefully while the little girl jumped up and down with delight. ‘And what do you call this little frog?’ he asked gently.
‘Francis!’ cried the child, jumping higher and higher.
‘Francis Frog! What a nice name!’ Donald said.
There followed an excited account about her frog while Donald listened intently. He then took the little girl by the hand and led her out into the garden to show her some flowers – having totally forgotten about his paying customer in the office. What an extraordinary man! He had little patience with his fellow men but he had all the time in the world for a small child.
My father had two other ‘assistants’ – my sister and myself, and we accompanied him frequently on his rounds throughout the 1950s. One way we were of genuine assistance was through our dedication to opening and closing gates. The modern farm has far fewer gates, most of which have been replaced by cattle grids, but in those days a considerable slice of the veterinary surgeon’s time was spent leaping out of the car to deal with the gates. When visiting the Ainsley brothers of Nevison House, Alf had to climb in and out of his car fourteen times to open and shut the gates, every one of them held together with old string. It turned a visit to this farm into a marathon session, so much so that he wrote about the place with its ancient gates and deeply rutted track in the opening to The Lord God Made Them All.
Rosie took her task very seriously. When the time came for her to attend school in 1952, at the age of five, she was racked with worry lest her father could not cope on his rounds without her.
During my years at secondary school, when I had already decided to become a vet, and had begun a more serious appraisal of my chosen profession, I had the opportunity to study him at work. I noticed his conscientious and caring approach, and particularly enjoyed watching him calving and lambing, procedures he performed with extreme gentleness. He said many times that lambing ewes was easily his favourite job, one he could perform quickly as well as gently when the need arose. One afternoon, he was confronted with sixteen visits to lambing ewes; three hours later, he had completed them all.
Another animal he treated very skilfully was the pig. I had little doubt, as a teenager, that I had chosen the right profession, but the visits to pigs with my father tested my resolve to its limits. I was terrified of pigs.
In those days, with home-cured bacon still figuring prominently in the Yorkshire country person’s diet, there were many local smallholders with ramshackle sheds at the bottom of their gardens that housed huge, fat sows. These formidable animals did not appreciate needles being driven into their bodies and were especially aggressive when their piglets required treatment. Large sows possess a fine set of teeth but my father, who seemed to have no fear of them, would enter their domain, armed simply with a board or an old broom and skilfully inject them, despite their savage barks of protest.
When the piglets needed attention, the sow would be tempted outside with some food and the door locked, enabling the vet to carry on with his work in safety. The pig has been described as a difficult animal to treat, one that ‘responds vociferously to the mildest of restraint’. This is certainly true and piglets are endowed with stupendous vocal chords from the moment they are born. I spent many an hour in my youth, helping my father inject squealing piglets, while outside, the enraged mother sow, driven on by the deafening noise of her offspring, furiously attacked our shaky refuge. My sole aim throughout these ear-splitting sessions was to establish an escape route should the colossal sow blast her way into the building.
I remember my father once asking me to inject a sow when I was about fifteen years old. Quivering with terror, I shot the needle into her leg. The vast pig erupted from the straw with a roar and I vaulted back out of the pen, my needle still protruding from her thigh. I received a severe dressing down.
‘Damn it, Jim!’ he shouted. ‘You’ll never make a vet if you run away from your patient!’
‘I don’t want to lose a leg!’ I replied. ‘Have you seen the size of those teeth?’
‘You have got to get in and out quickly!’ he shouted. ‘It’s no good being frightened of the bloody things!’
Although a sympathetic man, he was quick to chastise me if he thought I was not ‘framing’ properly, and would grunt with frustration should I fail to catch a young bovine by the nose first time, or receive a sharp kick from a cow through faulty milking technique.
‘Don’t stand back off her!’ he would yell. ‘Get in close! You’ll get your head knocked off if you stand back!’
He repeatedly drummed into me that I would look an utter fool on a farm if I could not handle the animals properly. His instruction certainly stood me in good stead in later years. In 1975, in the Daily Express, I was amused to see a photograph of James Herriot chasing a small pig. This was, quite obviously, purely for the benefit of the article. Alf would have been the first to say that there is no future in chasing pigs; they can run at amazing speeds and possess superb body swerves. The only way to catch them is by the deployment of cunning tactics.
My father and I often had to inject dozens of lively pigs at one time.
When confronted by a pink, squealing wave hurtling around a yard, he would corner them with a large gate. Once trapped in a tight corner, the pigs would scream loudly and he would say, ‘Wait, they’ll calm down in a minute.’ He was always right. All at once the noise would stop and the pigs would freeze. He would then inject them all, using a multidose syringe, and hardly a pig would move. Simple.
Although mainly a farm-animal vet, Alf Wight had to turn his hand occasionally to horse work. He had had plenty of experience in his first years in Thirsk, docking the tails of foals and castrating wild colts, while the foalings on the huge heavy draught mares were especially taxing. Donald, who had a fine reputation as an equine veterinarian – and was the Thirsk Racecourse Veterinary Surgeon for over forty years – did most of the horse work, but Alf was no novice when called upon to treat horses.
Alf was never to become regularly involved with equine work, but when it came to treating family pets, it was a different story. As the 1950s progressed, with the amount of small animal work gradually increasing, I had the opportunity to observe him perform in this vastly different arena. Here, not only did he display his all-round expertise as a sound and competent veterinarian but, as with his life out in the farmyards and fields of Yorkshire, he came across some fascinating characters whom, years later, he would masterfully and humorously commemorate to print.