Book review of a British country veterinarian's memoir from the 1930s, of all things
<p class="">I recently entered a book review contest and didn’t win (womp womp) but I had a ton of fun writing it. This book is a personal favorite that I come back to time and again, so I thought I’d share it here. The book is <em>All Things Wise and
I recently entered a book review contest and didn’t win (womp womp) but I had a ton of fun writing it. This book is a personal favorite that I come back to time and again, so I thought I’d share it here.
Years ago, I was wandering through the bargain aisles of a Barnes & Noble when a thick, two-volume hardback caught my eye. The dust jacket was a serious, classic-looking number, but the portrait on the cover was of a big slobbering dog. The incongruity was amusing, but what made me buy the book was the author’s name, vaguely though pleasantly familiar: James Herriot.
Once I began to read, I realized what Herriot’s name meant to me. Nanny had mentioned it in passing in a story she told me about my grandfather. Something about an old British TV show he loved, which was based Herriot’s memoirs of his practice as a Yorkshire country veterinarian.
I have lots of tidbits like that floating around in my mind because when I was 5 years old, my widowed Irish grandmother got on a plane and flew over 3,000 miles from Northern Ireland to Los Angeles to help with childcare. She ended up staying for 30 years, the remainder of her life. Nanny was there every day while I grew up, in the bedroom next to mine, taking us on walks to the beach, making dinner or folding laundry, and invariably knitting.
Nanny was born in 1925 in Belfast. She volunteered with the Air Raid Precautions during the Belfast Blitz and lost her fiancé when his plane was shot down. She worked in a textile factory. She delivered four children, three of whom lived, in a time before women gave birth in hospitals. She raised a family during the infamous Troubles. I knew all this because of her stories, which were enveloping and rich with details. She never tired of telling them, and I never tired of listening.
I felt the same way when I read All Things Wise and Wonderful.
The book, set in 1939, was published over 30 years later, in 1973. The gap between the present of the events and the present of the book’s writing gives Herriot’s stories the same multidimensional quality as my grandmother’s, and an unforced profundity that can only be earned through decades of contemplation.
More than in his other books, in ATWW Herriot plays with the associative nature of memory. In one early chapter, you can simultaneously hear the voices of the retired veterinarian, the airman trainee, and the young man just starting out. This layered but seamless style produces an engaging and eloquent result: a life story reconstructed with order, if not in order.
The opening chapter drops us alongside Herriot and his fellow airmen during a hellish course of physical training on the streets of London.
At the time of his conscription, Herriot had only been a veterinarian for a couple of years and his new wife Helen was pregnant. Immediately we’re told that the most painful discipline was being without his wife. “My few months of married life with Helen had been so much lotus eating,” he writes before the first page is out. “Three days ago I was in Darrowby and half of me was still back there, back with Helen. …It was a dull, empty ache which never really went away.”
Another early chapter has Herriot marching in a squadron through the pea-soup London fog, his mind inevitably drifting to the superior Yorkshire fog and the magic of the “jewelled world above it” atop the hills. A place so enchanted that there above the mist a silver-tongued yet bumbling marquis would dress in rags and muck out stalls, and a nearly impossible case of a pig with a prolapsed uterus would end not with slaughterhouse but with a pastoral scene of beauty and contentment.
“She was a fine pedigree pig,” he writes, “and instead of lying on the butcher’s slab today she would be starting to bring up her family. As though reading my thoughts she gave a series of contented grunts and the old feeling began to bubble in me, the deep sense of fulfillment and satisfaction that comes from even the smallest triumph and makes our lives worth while (sic).”
That last sentence would seem the thesis for the entire book. For Herriot’s whole worldview, really. Though tinged with the romantic, his is an unflinchingly realistic perspective—hard not to be, when one’s arm was frequently shoulder deep in a cow’s rectum. Still, Herriot is intensely humane, not just toward the animals of agriculture, but also toward the then-vanishing uncomplicated country life and the people who lived it.
Yet even the most sentimental stories are never saccharine. Inescapably, ATWW has a wartime setting, written by a man who served. The through line comes from frequent short chapters that take place entirely in the present of Herriot’s RAF training. As it was for James himself during the timeline of ATWW, the specter of war is ever-present and jarring. The tales of veterinary practice are a respite.
Even so, the veterinary work was dirty, backbreaking, and frequently thankless. Herriot’s practice began in a time before antibiotics. That fact alone is grim. But it was also a time before CAFOs, before widespread industrial agriculture. Scenes of warm cow byres, humble farming families, and cozy village pubs are come by honestly. And of course, each chapter features stories about animals—mostly farm animals but some pets, too. Though many chapters are lighthearted and funny, in others life and death, sometimes even financial ruin, hang in the balance. Almost all revel in the peculiar absurdity of the entwined lives of man and beast.
Herriot’s comedic timing is effortless, and he was a keen observational humorist. Take, for instance, a tense argument over lunch about bovine injection sites with his veterinary partner Siegfried. James places injections in the neck, and Siegfried disagrees.
‘If I may say so, it’s rather a daft place. I always use the rump.’
‘Is that so?’ I helped myself to mashed potatoes. ‘And what’s wrong with the neck?’
‘Well you’ve illustrated it yourself, haven’t you? It’s too damn near the horns for a start.’ …
‘All right.’ I spooned some green beans from the tureen. ‘But your way you stand an excellent chance of receiving a faceful of cow shit.’
‘Oh rubbish, James, you’re just making excuses!’ He hacked violently at his mutton.
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It’s what I believe. And anyway, you haven’t made out a case against the neck.’
‘Made out a case? I haven’t started yet. I could go on indefinitely. The neck is more painful. … The neck is often thinly muscled,’ snapped Siegfried. ‘You haven’t got a nice pad there to stick your needle into.’
‘No, and you haven’t got a tail either,’ I growled.
‘Tail? What the hell are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about the bloody tail! It’s all right if you have somebody holding it but otherwise it’s a menace, lashing about.’
Siegfried gave a few rapid chews and swallowed quickly. ‘Lashing about? What in God’s name has that got to do with it?’
‘Quite a lot,’ I replied. ‘I don’t like a whack across the face from a shitty tail, even if you do.’
There was a heavy-breathing lull then my colleague spoke in an ominously quiet voice. ‘Anything else about the tail?’
After a bit more badinage, Siegfried concludes: “James, I don’t like to speak to you in these terms, but I am bound to tell you that you are talking the most unmitigated balls, bullshit and poppycock.”
This little scene is exquisitely era- and location-specific. The specificity, though, is what makes the familiarity so striking. Who hasn’t found themselves in a heated argument with a friend over something essentially meaningless? The question was important to them, and virtually nobody else. But I’m drawn in. Recognizing myself in an otherwise ludicrously foreign setting reminds me that the patterns of human nature—that absurdity I mentioned before—are universal. It also leads me to ask, what unimportant arguments am I clinging to that someone else, someplace else, might find ridiculous?
As so many great storytellers do, Herriot embroiders his anecdotes with well-placed details. For instance, he expertly transitions from erudite narration into the dialects of Yorkshire (“Ye daft awd divil! Listen to what ah’m sayin’”), Scotland (“Whit part o’ Glesca are ye frae?”), and the toffee-nosed gentry (“Oh, I say! That’s rather a bore”) with as much precision and believability as Mark Twain’s use of Southern dialect. Such minutiae charmed British readers in the 70s and 80s who saw themselves, or their parents or grandparents, in Herriot’s books.
But why would anyone read All Things Wise and Wonderful now?
Aside from enjoying Herriot’s talents as a writer, I suggest that his books—and ATWW in particular—offer a cultural inheritance we sorely need today. Not a Eurocentric culture, mind you, nor one based on dogma (Herriot was not religious or overly patriotic—as a Scotsman in England, how could he be?). Instead, Herriot presents a deep investment in the small yet significant collection of moments that make up a life.
During more than a decade as a stay-at-home parent, I’ve come to relish the smallness of my existence. This wasn’t always the case. Early on, I grappled with the implications of leaving a career: does this mean I lack ambition? What is my value if my contributions are so insignificant, so personal? But over time I learned how to borrow the hard-earned perspective shared by Herriot and my grandmother. Because their engrossing storytelling style made identifying with them so very easy, I could imagine a future version of myself reflecting on my life now. A flash of anger at a fussy child passes quicker when I remember my future-self missing this since-grown child. That’s some Arrival-level shit. (Interestingly, the film Arrival was adapted from a Ted Chiang short story called “Stories of Your Life;” both explore the significance and interplay of language and memory making.) Some people call this mindfulness, or simply gratitude, but it’s richer than that. Whatever you call it, this perspective is a practice, not a personality. It is accessible to all.
Today, the whole of humanity rests uneasily on a fulcrum as it did in the late 30s and early 40s. Now as then, people are dying. “I used to sit up and shake myself,” Herriot admitted, “wondering at how my thoughts had been mixed up by the war.” The analogy can only go so far, of course, since world war has profoundly different qualities than world pandemic, but the most salient and universal similarity is the sudden suspension of the rituals of life.
When you can’t go out in public en masse, when you can’t participate in the events that mark the secular and sacred calendars, when the ways in which you engage with coworkers and friends are abbreviated or severed, when you are more tightly bound to your living space, what once passed for meaning disappears.
ATWW, though clearly an exercise in retrospective meaning-making, is different than a reliving of the glory days so many people do who fail to launch, or underachieve, or suffer great disappointment. By the time Herriot wrote ATWW, he had grasped many brass rings: he maintained a fruitful veterinary practice with his partner for more than 35 years, he had a loving wife and two successful children, and a celebrated late-in-life writing career. No, Herriot had no deficiencies to mend with revisionism. Accordingly, Herriot’s books reveal the failures and losses as much as the happy outcomes. In one particularly hopeless case, Herriot wrestles with the temptation to give up. But then “a soft, uncomplaining grunt” from the suffering animal he was treating “reminded me that I wasn’t the only one involved.” He carried the realization from that day onward: none of us is in this alone.
No, neither syrupy pablum nor cold-eyed pragmatism limit All Things Wise and Wonderful. Instead, Herriot makes an accounting of his life with an aesthetic appreciation for both the triumphs and the losses. Showing us that noticing and valuing the small, commonplace moments makes sacred all our ordinary days.