The woman turned on him. ‘Mr Wight! Over the years that I have brought my dog to you, you have consistently failed to improve his condition. Now that I want you to destroy him, you can’t even do that properly!’
As the 1950s progressed, some major small animal surgery was tentatively undertaken. Towards the end of this decade, Alf was performing cat and bitch hysterectomies, but more complicated cases were sent to a small animal specialist twenty-six miles away in Darlington. Denton Pette, an imposing, accomplished small animal surgeon, was to become one of Alf’s greatest friends – one who would, many years later, be immortalised as ‘Granville Bennett’, first appearing in the fourth Herriot book, Vet in Harness.
The description in the book fits the real man perfectly. ‘Not over tall but of tremendous bulk … he wasn’t flabby, he didn’t stick out in any particular place, he was just a big, wide, solid, hard-looking man.’
Above all, Denton Pette was a man of enormous presence. His wife, Eve, who is still a close friend of my mother, once said that a friend of hers asked someone how she would recognise Denton, having never before met him. ‘Just look for a square man!’ was the reply.
As James Herriot, Alf wrote very affectionately about his friend, referring widely to Denton’s capacity to enjoy himself to the full. This incredibly generous man was the first to buy everyone a round of drinks but, with his apparently indestructible constitution having an ability to endure hours of extravagant socialising without any perceivable ill effects, one needed to be in good shape to survive an evening with Denton Pette.
Alf and Joan enjoyed many memorable occasions in the company of Eve and Denton, with Alf frequently senseless at the end. I, too, would spend many enjoyable hours with the Pettes – like my father, almost invariably ending up glassy-eyed and incoherent. He and I were, many times, driven home by my mother after roisterous sessions with Denton and his friends. ‘What would all the James Herriot fans think of their hero if they could see him now?’ I remember my mother saying one night, as she smiled at the slumped figures in the rear seat.
Despite Denton’s exhilarating social life, much of which I experienced during my time seeing practice with him as a student, he always appeared immaculate each morning, in beautiful suits and sparkling shirt cuffs. As I listened to his rich, soothing voice with the clients hanging on his every word, I realised that I was in the company of a highly successful man.
His surgical expertise was amazing. He had thick, stubby fingers that seemed to caress the tissues as he worked, and he operated with lightning speed. One day, when working in Thirsk, I took a small dog to him in Darlington for an eye operation. Denton was beginning a surgical list. When he told me that he had three hysterectomies to perform, I suggested that I wander round the town for an hour or so and return later.
‘Not at all, laddie!’ he replied. ‘I’ll be with you in twenty minutes!’
‘But you have three bitch spays to do, Denton!’ I exclaimed. These operations – full ovario-hysterectomies – take the average surgeon about half an hour to perform.
‘Twenty minutes! We’ll have some coffee first! Care to assist me?’
I then watched him complete the three operations in exactly seventeen minutes; if I had not seen it for myself, I would never have believed it. He was a wonderfully gifted surgeon – fast, yet gentle. As Granville Bennett, James Herriot would, very accurately, portray his friend as the talented, colourful and generous man we all knew. In the later years of the 1950s, while watching Denton at work, Alf realised he was taking a peep into the future, where the veterinary surgeon’s day would become ever more involved in the treatment of family pets. Much as he admired Denton’s work, however, his more rural existence among the farmers of North Yorkshire was the one he still preferred.
As James Herriot, Alf Wight said many times that his life in veterinary practice was far harder in his early days than it was in the last two decades of the century. It may have been more demanding physically, but he was the first to admit that, in other respects, it was far less stressful. The modern veterinary surgeon treads a minefield, where one mistake can result in distressing legal procedures. His every move has to be carefully made lest he breaks one of an endless list of rules and regulations, while the end of the day is usually taken up with filling in never-ending forms. Paperwork sails into the modern vet’s life in mountainous waves.
Alf’s life in the heyday of his professional career was not so bedevilled and, in addition, he did not have the pressure of long hours consulting indoors, which is the norm for the modern vet. He spent hours driving to small family farms, with his typical working day, demanding though it was, often finishing at five or six o’clock with tea in the company of his family. At this hour, for the modern veterinary surgeon in a high-powered urban practice, his day can be just getting into its stride with a full waiting-room.
I observed the tremendous rise in small animal work in the 1970s and, even in a largely rural area like Thirsk, tea with my own family was a rare occasion indeed. This may well have been a factor in not one of my three children showing the slightest inclination to become a veterinary surgeon. When I look back on my father’s life in practice during the 1950s, my abiding memory is of a sunburned figure in an open-topped car, his dogs by his side, driving from one case to another among some of the prettiest countryside in England. There is little wonder that he wrote about those days with such feeling.
Those days were equally enjoyed by his family for whom he always made plenty of time. My memories of the 1950s are of taking off into the hills around Thirsk, or up into the Yorkshire Dales, and walking for miles, becoming familiar with every corner of the country around our home. Visits to the seaside – Whitby, Scarborough and Marske – were a special treat. As we two children grew older, we would camp and stay in Youth Hostels with Alf, as well as play cricket, football and tennis. He was not just a father – he was one of us.
Shortly after moving into our new house in 1953, Alf bought an extra plot of land behind the house on which he built a tennis court. He described the nerve-jangling experiences of its construction in his final book, Every Living Thing, but the effort was worthwhile. We played countless hours of tennis on that court.
He and I had many marathon games. In my teenage years, I played a great deal of tennis and regarded myself as a fairly competent performer, going on to win the school tennis championship – but I could rarely beat him. Our games were closely contested encounters of rude energy versus class. He would control the game from the back of the court, firing strokes along the white lines, while I just ran and ran. At the end of the game, he would lay his hand on my sweat-soaked shirt and say, ‘Never mind, Jim, you’re improving all the time. You’ll thrash your old man easily one day!’ I never did.
As well as tennis, golf was a game that Alf played regularly throughout the 1950s and, with the practice being quiet during the summer months, he had the time for it. Joan was also interested in the game and became a very steady player. Amongst the many people with whom they played were a couple who became extremely close friends – Douglas Campbell and his wife, Heulwen. Douglas was a chartered surveyor who was introduced to Alf by Alex Taylor, who lived next door to him at the time. Douglas, a tidily-built man who was always neatly groomed and very correct, could lead one to believe that he was a rather serious-minded and straight-laced individual, but there was much more to him than this. His clipped, precise way of describing things belied an acute sense of humour; he liked a drink and a joke, and the more Alf saw of this smiling man with the infectious chuckle, the more he liked him. He and Joan became such friends with the Campbells that, as well as enjoying countless evenings and weekends with them, our two families went on holiday together in 1956.