Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 12, 1995 TAG: 9503100055
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELIZABETH STROTHER EDITORIAL WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
I must have read his first book, "All Creatures Great and Small," when I was in college. This memoir of his early experiences as a country veterinarian became a best seller, but I had stumbled onto it before it hit the list. He later told interviewers that he wanted to record that extraordinary time just before World War II when leaps in science gave vets the tools to perform wondrous cures before the eyes of the hard-to-impress farmers of England's Yorkshire Dales. It was a kick.
Here was a man who loved his work, and could make the most ignorant city slicker, such as myself, admire the nobility of a profession that seemed to require him to spend good portions of his days and nights with his arm up to the shoulder inside pregnant cows, turning calves and straightening their legs to ease difficult deliveries.
What gave the book its charm, though, was his unerring eye for the maddening and endearing quirks of his clients, both human and animal, and the warmth with which he told their stories. I enjoyed each successive book I read, but none quite so much as that first one about that early time.
Still, it probably would be just one of many entertaining books I've read over the years had it not been for the nightmares.
I am a vivid dreamer, waking up some mornings blissfully rested from dreams of indescribably beautiful lands of sparkling ice mountains where it is sunny and warm. The down side of this is that my bad dreams have, at times, been so horrifying that I yelled out in my sleep or awakened so frightened that I hardly dared breathe.
When I was a little girl, I had my good ol' older sister, Barb, right there, and when I got scared, I just woke her up. She was a good sport about this, I thought, never getting really angry - she wouldn't wake up enough for that. I'd tell her my tale of horror, and she'd irritably mutter something like "Oh, go back to sleep," and drop off again like a stone.
That was OK. That was enough. She was pretty brave, and I knew she'd protect me if there were truly any danger. The fact that whatever fearfulness I'd whipped up in my mind never scared her at all took the fright right out of it.
I remember one brief period when I had a recurring nightmare that not only scared the dickens out of me, it replayed every time I drifted off. I didn't wake Barb because I was afraid even to speak of it and, after several days of this, came to dread bedtime and tried to fight off sleep as long as possible.
One night, when I could stand it no more, I woke her and told her I was too scared to go to sleep, and she must stay awake and talk. This was considerably more dramatic than my usual histrionics, and she insisted I tell her my dream or she was going back to sleep. She would not stay awake all night.
So, slowly at first, I recounted every horrifying detail, then went over it and over it until, at last, it bored even me. Then I lay down, slept soundly, awoke feeling great, and have never recalled a single thing about that dream.
This system worked well for me, and Barb didn't seem to mind much. At least she never held it against me the next morning.
Then we grew up.
There's a certain balancing out in life and, luckily, by the time your sister grows up and moves away, you don't need her so often to calm your fears. Nightmares are seldom as horrible as some of the things in the real world that you've learned to accept. And when a bad dream does wake you, it loses its fearful grip almost immediately. If it doesn't, you danged sure aren't going to wake anyone up and admit it.
A few years after I discovered Herriot's books, though, I suffered some difficult losses. Again, my sleep was visited by terrifying dreams to match my childhood nightmares, and I would wake gasping for breath, unable to shake an irrational sense of fear.
It was then I picked up "All Creatures Great and Small" again, and reread those funny, poignant stories from the lives of real people who lived in a world totally unlike mine, but whose foibles and humor and loves and losses were so recognizable; people who could make me laugh out loud. I read until the fear lifted.
I kept the book at my bedside for a long time. After a while, I didn't need it in the middle of the night, and eventually I reshelved it or lent it out. I'm not sure I can put my hands on it anymore. I will always feel deep affection for James Herriot, though. I always meant to join the thousands of fans who wrote to tell him as much. I just never got around to it.
One fan letter more or less could hardly have made much difference to him, though. Far more important was the fact that Herriot - real name, James Alfred Wight - continued leading the life that he loved, doing the work that he loved, despite the fame his books brought to him and his veterinary practice in the town of Thirsk.
When he died last month at age 78, I was sorry to see that he had lost a three-year fight with prostate cancer. But I smiled with satisfaction to read that he had continued to make house calls in the middle of the night till he was 72. The man was "too fond of animals" to give it up. That was the man his readers loved, and felt they knew. Only the pen name was inauthentic.
by CNB