Every Living Thing (46 page)

It was one morning several months later while Ginny and I were in this posture—she on the wall, touching noses with me, gazing into my eyes, drinking me in as though she thought I was rather wonderful and couldn’t quite get enough of me—when I heard a sound from behind me.

“I was just watching the veterinary surgeon at work,” Helen said softly.

“Happy work, too,” I said, not moving from my position, looking deeply into the green eyes, alight with friendship, fixed on mine from a few inches away. “I’ll have you know that this is one of my greatest triumphs.”

James Herriot (1916–1995) was the pen name of James Alfred “Alf” Wight, an English veterinarian whose tales of veterinary practice and country life have delighted generations. Many of Herriot’s works were bestsellers and have been adapted for film and television. His stories rely on numerous autobiographical elements taken from his life in northern England’s Yorkshire County, and they depict a simple, rustic world deeply in touch with the cycles of nature.

Wight was born on October 3, 1916, in Sunderland, in the northeast corner of England. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved to Glasgow, Scotland, where his father worked as a shipbuilder and as a pianist in a local cinema. His mother was a seamstress and professional singer. At age twelve, Wight adopted his first pet, an Irish setter named Don. The bond he formed with his dog led to his interest in veterinary medicine.

Wight graduated from the Glasgow Veterinary College in 1939 at the age of twenty-three. After working briefly in Sunderland, the town where he was born, he moved to the town of Thisk in Yorkshire County, England, where he settled down. In Yorkshire, he met Joan Danbury, whom he married in 1941. The couple had two children. Son James Alexander, born 1943, would go on to become a vet and partner in his father’s practice, and daughter Rosemary, born 1947, became a family physician.

Though he’d always had literary ambitions, Wight got a late start as a professional writer. Starting a family, serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, and then establishing his own busy veterinary practice all delayed his literary debut. In 1966 at the age of fifty, he finally began writing regularly with the encouragement of his wife. After trying his hand unsuccessfully in areas such as sportswriting, Wight found modest success with the publication of
If Only They Could Talk
in 1970 and
It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet
in 1972. He adopted the pen name James Herriot because self-promotion for doctors and veterinarians was frowned upon in England at that time. In the United States, his first two books were combined by his New York publisher and released as
All Creatures Great and Small
(1972), the volume that would make the name James Herriot famous. Within a couple of years,
All Creatures Great and Small
had been adapted as a successful film starring Simon Ward and Anthony Hopkins and as a long-running BBC program.

Throughout the seventies, Wight released several writing collections in England as James Herriot. In the States, these volumes would be paired up and released under new titles as omnibuses, including
All Things Bright and Beautiful
(1974) and
All Things Wise and Wonderful
(1977). Wight declared his intentions to retire from writing life after publication of
The Lord God Made Them All
in 1981, but released a final volume,
Every Living Thing
, in 1992.

Wight passed away in 1995 at the age of seventy-eight at his home in Thirlby, near Thisk, Yorkshire.