James Herriot
James Herriot
James Alfred "Alf" Wight, OBE, FRCVS, known by the pen name James Herriot, was a British veterinary surgeon and writer, who used his many years of experiences as a veterinary surgeon to write a series of books each consisting of stories about animals and their owners. He is best known for these semi-autobiographical works, beginning with All Creatures Great and Small in 1972. The British television series adapted from the books is also titled All Creatures Great and Small...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 October 1916
I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.
They can't find my house now because I keep it very quiet where I live.
I will write another book if I feel like it.
I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much – in just standing and staring.
If a farmer calls me to a sick animal, he couldn't care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.
There was no last animal I treated. When young farm lads started to help me over the gate into a field or a pigpen, to make sure the old fellow wouldn't fall, I started to consider retiring.
I was helped by having a verbatim memory of what happened years ago, even if I can't remember what happened a couple of days ago.
I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.
If I had been a little dog I'd have gone leaping and gambolling around the room wagging my tail furiously.
It was Sunday morning (one a.m.), a not unusual time for some farmers, after a late Saturday night, to have a look round their stock and decide to send for the vet.
For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents.
And the peace which I always found in the silence and emptiness of the moors filled me utterly
Over the years I knew her she always looked at me like that - as though I was a quite pleasant but amusing object - and it always did the same thing to me. It's difficult to put into words but perhaps I can best describe it by saying that if I had been a little dog I'd have gone leaping and gambolling around the room wagging my tail furiously.
And there was that letter from the Bramleys—that really made me feel good. You don’t find people like the Bramleys now; radio, television and the motorcar have carried the outside world into the most isolated places so that the simple people you used to meet on the lonely farms are rapidly becoming like people anywhere else. There are still a few left, of course—old folk who cling to the ways of their fathers and when I come across any of them I like to make some excuse to sit down and talk with them and listen to the old Yorkshire words and expressions which have almost disappeared.