In some respects, Alf was ideal ‘nervous breakdown material’. Following his recovery, people used to say to me, ‘I’m surprised that your dad had a breakdown. He always seemed so calm and never seemed to let anything worry him.’ This explains a great deal. He did seem to be in control of a situation but he was a man who hid his emotions – someone who would bottle things up rather than openly discuss his feelings with others.
He was a worrier, a private man who rarely allowed his deeper thoughts to surface. He worried about Joan and her slavish attitude to housework. He worried about Rosie and me, and whether he had done enough for us. He fretted about his parents; with Pop’s job in the office not always secure, would they manage to cope if he was out of work? As he observed the slow but steady disappearance of grazing land around Thirsk, he began to feel concerns not only for the future of the practice, but for that of the veterinary profession in general. In years to come, would people still be getting up at ungodly hours to milk cows or would some clever person produce artificial milk more easily and cheaply? With no capital behind him, he depended entirely on the financial success of his business. Towards the end of the 1950s, when there were some rumblings of discontent among the assistants, he took on the responsibility of dealing with them with little help from anyone else. He did not discuss any of these problems with his family; his selfless nature decreed that he shared his secret hopes and fears with no one.
One thing that haunted him throughout the latter part of the 1950s was his children’s education. My sister and I were attending the local school, despite my father’s fervent wish that we should receive private education. His own parents had made sacrifices to send him to a fee-paying school and, deep down, he blamed himself for failing to give us a similar opportunity.
Having privately educated us throughout our primary years at Ivy Dene school, my father had been prepared to carry on paying tuition fees throughout our higher school years, but my mother had had other ideas. She was adamant that we were to be educated in Thirsk and her argument was strengthened by the fact that he would have been hard-pressed to find the money to pay private school fees. He could have afforded it by stretching his finances to the limit, and not to do so only compounded his feelings of guilt.
All this should never have concerned him. Thirsk Grammar Modern School, superbly run by the headmaster, my father’s friend Steve King, achieved remarkable academic results for such a small school. The high standard of teaching, allied to tight discipline, ensured that Rosie and I received a wonderful education but, despite our success there, my father still had that nagging doubt; had he done all he could for us?
His veterinary colleagues, Donald Sinclair and Gordon Rae, sent their children to fee-paying schools, as did many people of means in the Thirsk area. It seemed to him that he was one of the few men of professional status who used the local school. What if we failed to achieve? Would he ever forgive himself?
He watched our education very closely and when I fell behind in my second year I remember receiving a severe lecture from him. I think that, had I not pulled myself together and improved dramatically the following year, he would have bartered his soul to send me away to school.
Our education was not the only cause of his concern for our well-being. In those days, the possession of a dialect was regarded as a stigma; it could be a hindrance to progress in one’s chosen profession. As a Yorkshire boy who spent his time with other Yorkshire lads, I developed an accent – one that worried my father so much that he sent Rosie and me to elocution classes in the nearby town of Ripon. My father was convinced that it was doing me good but I hated every minute; I made no progress, and he eventually conceded defeat. Things have now changed, with the possession of a dialect, quite rightly, no longer frowned upon but, in those days, he was convinced that my Yorkshire accent would hold me back. It was just another example of his determination to do everything within his power to ensure that he gave us a good start in life.
His concerns for the welfare of others did not stop with his immediate family. Since the day he qualified from Glasgow Veterinary College in 1939, Alfred Wight had carried the burden of the belief that he owed his parents a debt he would never be able to repay. From his very first poverty-stricken days as a young veterinary surgeon, he had not only regularly sent money to his parents, but had written to them conscientiously every week as well as visiting them, without fail, several times every year. His devotion to his parents was admirable, but it had its price.
In the years following his recovery from depression, Alf would realise just how much those feelings of having to repay his parents had affected him. I well remember the day of my graduation from the University of Glasgow Veterinary School in 1966. My mother and father, who had come up for the occasion, were staying with us in my grandmother’s home in Anniesland Road. We were enjoying a celebratory drink when my grandmother said to me, ‘Jim, never forget that you owe your father a great deal. He has made sacrifices for you. You owe him everything!’
I shall never forget the expression on my father’s face, nor his comments to me immediately afterwards. He led me into another room.
‘You owe me nothing! Do you understand? Absolutely nothing!’ He spoke with an intensity that I found a little unnerving. Having known him so long as such a reserved and mild-mannered man, it was a new experience to hear him speak to me so directly. I did, indeed, consider that I owed him a great deal and said as much to him.
He paused for a second, without taking his eyes from mine. ‘You owe me – and your mother – nothing!’ He said no more.
As his illness worsened throughout 1960, I noticed my father begin to exhibit subtle changes in his behaviour as he imagined his darkest fears beginning to assume threatening proportions. One of the worst was his concern that my mother was interested in other men.
I remember my mother at the time as an attractive and – when in the mood – flirtatious lady who was, without doubt, popular among my father’s many friends and acquaintances. He had, from their very first meeting in 1941, been totally besotted by her, and his imagining that she could possibly forsake him for another, was, I feel sure, a factor in contributing towards his illness. I remember him being distinctly unfriendly towards a man he thought was paying too much attention to her. This was not like the man I knew.
This period, when I was in the sixth form at school, was the only time that I felt distanced from him. He was continually pressurising me to comb my hair, shave regularly, speak properly and generally behave in a manner he thought appropriate. I felt that my father was needlessly dogging my every move and I resented it. My busy days at school helped in taking my mind off the problem and he, too, was working hard in the practice, with the result that we never openly fell out, but there was, for the first time in our lives, a gulf between us. I did not fully realise it at the time but I was observing a man who was treading on the brink of a total nervous collapse, carrying the worries of the world on his shoulders.
In the early summer of 1960, when his illness appeared to be worsening by the day, Joan, on advice from the doctor, took him to York for psychiatric treatment. It was a very hard time for her. She had to cope with a husband who was undergoing a gradual personality change, but she stood by him – despite some unreasonable behaviour that was totally unlike the man that she had married. He seemed to become hypercritical of her – just as he was of me – but she bore it all with fortitude. I remember feeling great admiration for her. I was old enough to know that there was something seriously wrong with my father as I tried to imagine the strain that she was under.