By Lisa Boonstoppel-Pot

When James Alf Wight was 50, he was sharing a funny story about a farm client with his wife, Joan, and said he’d write it in a book someday. Joan laughed. “People don’t suddenly start to write a book at the age of 50,” she said. This bothered him. “It nettled me,” is how the real life Alf Wight described that pivotal moment. His words rang out from a grainy screen in the World of James Herriot museum and surgery in Thirsk, England where I recently travelled. Alf Wight is the man who transformed into James Herriot, author of eight books about his life as a veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales. So internationally famous did the books become that Northern Yorkshire around the village of Thirsk has become known as “Herriott Country”. I first read All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriott when I was a kid on the family farm. I was instantly transported to the picturesque Yorkshire Dales and their contained collection of quirky characters identified by an intense work ethic, folk wisdom and sometimes absurd superstitions. Herriot celebrated their individuality and hard scrabble life on the moors with engaging humour. His animal patients were characters too, from the greedy Tricki Woo to the loyal Blossom who escapes the drover and returns home, udder swaying, to her stall in the byre. Herriot wrote about the cold nights birthing lambs and miserable hours with his aching arm up the arse of a cow while lying on manure-coated cobblestone. He did not mean to romanticize it yet his stories felt profoundly purposeful; idyllic even. He had a gift for detail, a captivating style and because he loved his job, his family and his place, the stories resonated. The Yorkshire Dales were his castle; those green arching hills bordered by stone fences cleared hundreds of years earlier. Herriot would write that after needling wild bullocks, he would park his car and sit on a hill, feeling the wind and taking in the view of the valley with all its old stone barns and winding lanes. There he would find his peace, his contentment and very likely, there he would begin developing a fictional version of the eccentric farmer or animal he had just left. It was those stolen moments amidst the consuming demands of being a rural veterinarian that have been a constant lure for me, an ardent fan of all his books. I reread his books every few years to immerse myself in the Yorkshire Dales. I wanted to sit in those same hills to feel, see and love the Dales as he (did. It felt like an elusive dream, for what would ever bring me there? Turns out turning 50 was the impetus for my own launch. A two-week vacation that included Scotland, a six-day hike along Hadrian’s Wall and completed with a stay in the Yorkshire Dales was planned while I was still 49. But would seeing it match the ideal James Herriot had painted with words so many decades before? Leaving Bowness on Solway following our hike, blisters healing in sandals and backpacks thrown into the trunk of a rental, we headed towards Gunnerside in the thick of the Yorkshire Dales. Our host might well have been a James Herriot character – her wild, grey, good-witch hair and obsession with previous guest’s use of sugar was offset by a genuine welcome. Later, driving though Wensleydale and Swaledale, Hawes and Bedale, Herriot’s books came to life. In this hilly country, dotted with farms and small towns, connected by a curving gateway of narrow roads lined by flower-filled stone fences, it was stunningly real. If today’s cars did not fly by (not fearing death around the next bend as we were on one-lane roads narrower than our laneways) you would never know this was 2019 versus the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s in which Herriot’s earlier books were set. We parked the car. We sat on the hills and felt that breeze. Saw those sheep. Breathed deep of the fresh air and ingested every adjective Herriott ever wrote about the Yorkshire Dales. It was everything. Climbing higher, we reached the moors, those high hills of heather, moss and grass where sheep share ground with the circling curlews, the fighter-pilot lapwings, wing-beating skylarks and camouflaged grouse. Walking in the moors is like walking on a sponge. At first it seems porous. Vacuous. Then you catch the first “cur-lee” call of the curlew. You watch the lapwings joining forces and fly in formation to defend their nests. Then, if you are ever so lucky, you startle a grouse hen and she’ll run away, her chicks stumbling behind her. It is achingly beautiful up close and even more so when you stand to view the never-ending succession of sweeping hills. I would love this place without James Herriot’s literary blessing upon it but I might never have known about it if his wife had not “nettled” him into writing a book. And so one lightly-spoken challenge in Skeldale House, village of Thirsk, North Yorkshire, brings people from around the the world to these parts. His books also launched the dream of many to become veterinarians themselves. Reading them, you will, at the very least, develop an empathy for animal suffering while receiving a medical education. As a working vet, he did not shy away from clinical details and reading his books, you’ll learn more about prolapsed uteruses than perhaps you ever wanted to know. When you read more about the author James Herriot/Alf Wight, you learn he was eventually overwhelmed by his fame. He identified as a veterinarian first, author second yet his literary fame encroached on his work as a veterinarian. He could not keep up with the letters, visitors and appeals for speaking engagements. These days, it’s Alf Wight’s son, Jim (also a veterinarian) and daughter, Rosie (a retired doctor), who shoulder the responsibility since their dad died in 1995 at the age of 78. While Alf Wight still lived, his books were adapted for film and television as well. I like to imagine one day I might pen something that makes people “see” what I have seen. Wight proves it’s never too late and that turning 50 can lead to great things! ◊