BooksOfTheMoon

This final volume of James Herriot’s fictionalised memoirs follow the same pattern as the others, with Herriot telling amusing and touching anecdotes of the people and animals he’s worked with over the years. The book is just as charming and gentle as the others, and we also get rough line drawings to illustrate each chapter, which I wasn’t sure about at first, but which grew on me as the book went on.

Tristan is missing from this volume entirely, other than a couple of passing mentions, but in his place we get the wonderful Calum Buchanan, soon known to all as the “vet wi’ t’ badger”. He’s got a great personality and his growing menagerie of animals causes consternation in the practice.

I still twinge every time someone has a drink and gets into a car, or at the amount of antibiotics being prescribed, but it’s very much a product of its time, and Herriot’s adventures are still a delight to read.

This book, like the others in the series, is just very pleasant to read. The war is over, Jim is back in Darrowby and back into his old life. This volume sees the birth of his second child, Rosie, and, although he’s mostly covering the post-war years here, we get a couple of jumps forward in time to the early ’60s as he travels with first a boatload of sheep to Russia and then a plane-load of cows to Istanbul. Both of these provide entertainment and excitement, albeit in different ways.

As always, Herriot captures the essences of the characters that he works with in a charming way, especially the Danish sailors he travels to Russia with. Speaking of eccentric characters, once again there’s no appearance from Grenville, and both Tristan and Siegfried don’t have much in the way of screen presence, and both show up in workman like roles, rather than for the eccentric stories we’ve come to expect. In fact, both have got married and had children off-screen, as it were, which is a bit disappointing, given that Tristan used to pretty much chase anything in a skirt, and Siegfried never had to chase at all, but was beating the ladies off with a stick, but never seemed that interested in actually capturing any of them. But in the end, it’s Herriot’s book, not that of the Farnon brothers, so he looks mostly at his own life and family.

It is the post-war era by this point, and antibiotics are starting to become available. This means that from my 21st century point of view, I twinge a bit in alarm at the casual way that Herriot prescribes penicillin and its successors. But of course, the dangers of that was hardly something that could have been aware about in the 1950s. The other thing that makes me cringe every time I read it is when he or one of his friends hops into a car after an evening at the pub. The don’t drink and drive message that has been drummed into everyone of my generation from an early age was still decades in the future at this point.

But despite these relatively minor issues, these books are gentle, wonderfully descriptive of the Yorkshire countryside, and a pleasure to read.

Volume six of James Herriot’s fictionalised memoirs have him completing basic training in the RAF and going to learn how to actually fly a plane. He completes this but ends up being invalided out the service before he ever sees action – I guess the military want people to be fully healthy before they send them off to be killed!

But as with the last volume, we spend very little time in the RAF, with most of the book being taken up with Jim’s musings on his previous life in the Yorkshire Dales. We meet more of the wonderful farmers and villagers that make up his life and there are some touching stories about how their lives touch that of Jim.

We don’t see much of the supporting cast this time round, although we do get to see an unexpectedly tender side to Tristan, which leads into a beautifully bittersweet story. Jim’s business partner Siegfried barely turns up at all, and we don’t get any appearance from the always delightful Granville.

But as with the others, it’s a pleasure to read, and Jim always has empathy for his charges, whether that’s a farm animal or a beloved pet. His writing is soothing and the glimpse into another time is fascinating. Even for a confirmed urbanite like me, it’s a wonderful read.

I was wondering what this fifth volume of James Herriot’s (fictionalised) memoirs would be like, given that the last had him leaving his wife and practice to join the RAF during WW2. As it turns out, although we do get a little bit of life as a trainee airman, he mostly uses incidents in the military as jumping off points to talk about other events in his veterinary career (although I did enjoy his playing truant in order to go and see his pregnant wife, and how he played the corporal who spotted him). Mostly, these books are gentle and very easy to read, and this is no exception. Apart from the chapter where someone in the town is poisoning dogs with strychnine, and six out of the seven creatures that Herriot treats die. I was not prepared for that!

Apart from that, we have mostly enjoyable anecdotes of veterinary life in the 1930s. It was hard, and a way of life that has pretty much entirely died out with the changes that have come in the latter half of the 20th and now the 21st centuries, and this provides a fascinating snapshot into a period of history, and a way of life that I mostly don’t know much about.

I’ve come to really like the other characters that Herriot deals with regularly – his partner Siegfried and the perpetual student Tristan, but my favourite character has to be Grenville Bennett, the expert in dogs and general bon vivant, in whose company Jim invariably ends up completely plastered, and showing himself up. It’s utterly cringeworthy (and normally I hate that) but so much fun, just to see how the utterly oblivious Grenville (who is really most jovial and friendly, and doesn’t have a mean bone in his body) spoils Jim’s day this time.

Speaking of drinking, the one thing that always jars in these books, and brings home just how much societal attitudes have changed, is the way that many characters, Herriot included, go the pub, have a few drinks and then just hop in their car and drive off. From a modern perspective, this his horrifying, but it was completely normal at the time.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoy this series. It’s not something I would have picked up for myself, but I’m glad that my friend bought them for me. I look forward to reading more of Jim’s veterinary and air force adventures soon.

I enjoyed this fourth volume of James Herriot’s veterinary memoirs even more than the preceding volumes. This volume spends less time on farms with Jim elbow-deep in a cow’s vagina, and more time with some of the smaller animals that a vet sometimes has to deal with, particularly dogs. There’s also a slightly melancholy air to it, as although it’s hardly mentioned, the War is looming. And indeed, this volume ends with Jim being called up to serve, along with his partner Siegfried and the newly qualified Tristan (Siegfried’s brother), leaving the practice in the care of strangers.

Speaking of those two characters, another change to previous volumes is that they barely show up. There’s an amusing story of Siegfried judging a Christmas cake and Tristan pranking a drunk who mistakes their surgery for the GP practice next door, but other than that, it’s very much just Jim trudging through the Yorkshire hills and the characters he meets in his practice.

To make up for it to some degree, we’re introduced to a new regular – the specialist small animal surgeon Granville Bennett, a larger than life character with whom Jim inexplicably tries to match drink for drink every time they meet up, and ends up consistently making a fool of himself, in an endearing way.

Like the other Herriot memoirs, this is a very gentle and readable book, where Herriot’s love of the Yorkshire countryside is often to the fore. I look forward to the next one soon.

I’m not sure I can write anything about this third volume of James Herriot’s (fictionalised) memoirs that is really that different from the first two. Herriot continues to be in love with the Yorkshire Dales, and with the beautiful Helen, although he seems incapable of wooing her in any sensible way. Somehow though, she sees past all that and decides that she likes him anyway.

Siegfried and Tristan both continue to be true to their established characters, although now that I’m ready for them, they become funny traits that I look forward to seeing. Herriot obviously puts a lot of love into the characterisation of the various folk that he comes into contact with over the course of his practice, both the loveable ones and the not-so-loveable.

This is mostly just very pleasant, light reading with nostalgic fondness for a hard time, long gone. Although in saying that, there are a couple of tear-jerking stories, and I tense up every time that Herriot has to go and visit a dog in the fear that something bad might happen to it.

I’m not really an animal person, and not a country person, but I do find myself enjoying these memoirs a lot.

The second volume of James Herriot’s veterinary memoirs follow much in the same vein as his first. He talks about specific cases and characters from his time practising in the Yorkshire Dales, as as well as the eccentricities of his boss Siegfried and his boss’s brother Tristan, who also helps out, when he’s not studying. This volume also introduces us to Helen Alderson, whom our intrepid vet starts to woo. (The dates that he takes her on are toe-curlingly disastrous, but she keeps coming back, so I guess there must be something to the young man).

Herriot paints a lovely picture of a time that’s now long gone. I wonder what he would have made of modern industrial farming, without the space for the eccentrics and smallholders that populated the dales in the first half of the 20th century and who Herriot describes so lovingly. While I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to live in that period (or, indeed, any period without modern medicine and a decent Wi-Fi connection), I can be slightly sad that we’ve lost something as we’ve modernised.

These books are a charming, low stress look into the past and I look forward to reading more of them.

Prior to reading this, my knowledge of this series by James Herriot didn’t go any further than knowing that the Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison, starred in a BBC adaptation of it in the ’70s and ’80s. In fact, I thought it was a fictional account of a country vet, rather than a fictionalised memoir. In any event, it’s not a book that I would ever have picked up for myself, but a friend bought me the entire box set for my birthday and I’m now glad that she did.

It’s a very gentle, low-pressure account of the practice of veterinary medicine around the middle of the 20th century in the countryside of the north of England. A time when you could drive to the pub, drink several pints and then hop back into the car to go home (this made me shudder every time). Herriot quietly teases out the eccentric personalities of both his fellow vets (he’s the assistant here to the very strange Siegfried Farnon, whose younger brother Tristan also hangs around, when he’s not at university, allegedly studying to be a vet himself) and the good people of the Yorkshire dales where he works. You get a real feeling for both the place and the people.

I’ll definitely read more in the series, but it doesn’t make being a vet sound enticing at all (not that it did before – I am not an animal person), but being up all hours to be feeling around in the rear end of a cow, or having to put down a dog is not my idea of a good way to spend my working life.