If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.
It's in the autumn that I miss my dogs, too. All of the dogs I've known. They loved to ramble, as well, this time of year. While they were of varied breeds and even more varied personalities, they all had rambling in common. I never felt more British, even in places like Mississippi or the Virgin Islands, than when on a ramble with a dog.
It is also in the autumn that I pull from the shelves a volume or two of James Herriot's. Not the greatest of writers, as least not in the classic British tradition, a bit too derivative of P.G. Wodehouse, sometimes, but a writer of one, particular talent: He could make the mundane and routine worthy of celebration. That ability, alone, puts him in the top tier of writers.
That, and he loved dogs, too. Not just dogs, but all of the creatures, great and small, that filled his world.
James Alfred Wight, better known by his pen name of James Herriot, was born in northern England but moved with his parents to Glasgow, Scotland while still an infant. In a marvelous coincidence, his father worked with my grandfather in the ship construction industry in nearby Clydebank. Here, the working class formed a strong community with mutual care, plain values, and amusement at life's follies serving as its chief features. This background would come in handy.
Herriot graduated from Glasgow Veterinary College in the spring of 1939, scant weeks before the outbreak of World War II. In the summer of the next year, at the beginning of the Battle of Britain, Herriot accepted a position at a humble veterinary practice in Yorkshire, England. It was here that he would build his life as a veterinarian, husband, father, business partner, and, eventually, celebrated author.
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| The original practice, now the Herriot museum. |
Much of Christianity is taken with the intention of incorporating common life with common faith. Hence our shared document of faith and practice, The Book of Common Prayer, a volume that contains a multitude of prayers and collects that elevate the common experiences of everyday life. While our celebrity-aware culture often highlights those of transient glamour, and even more transient "talent", and can frustrate the faithless as they pursue that which can never be caught, and feel an absence of real purpose with thwarted fulfillment,
If one suffers from such, there is liberation in finding small moments worthy of celebration in even the most minor of circumstance. That which is humble to some often leads to a deeper faith, sense of purpose, and balanced happiness for many more. Finding joy in one's work and family in those common moments has provided for more spiritual awareness than any collection of over-wrought books on "happiness" or the bilious homilies of clergy.
Upon his return, James Herriot's days were filled with the routine work of a country vet. He answered calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on farms made remote by the geography. He polled cattle, castrated pigs, delivered breech-born calves, and euthanized house pets. He dealt with "playsome" hogs and remarkably feral barn cats. During lambing season, it was not uncommon for him to work for days on end with very, very little sleep. So fatigued could he be that on one occasion, while answering a middle-of-the-night emergency call, he attempted to give a gynecological examination to a bull.
Some personalities would find this nothing less than Sisyphean drudgery. Herriot, instead, found it the source of life, filled with birth, death, disease, healing, and occasions for the demonstration of what Dylan Thomas called, "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower". For all of the human ills forced upon the world through the latter half of the 20th century, Herriot discoverd the secret of a life well-lived in the sheer power of creation.
[Former and current philosophy students may remember Heidegger's notion of "handiness". Some things, like a hammer, can be described in their intention and usefulness, but its utility is not realized until it is actually taken in hand and employed to drive a nail through wood. We can speak of the merger of the eternal and the temporal in our lives, but unless we actually take to hand the routine of our lives, we cannot discover the holy that resides within it.]
A frustrated writer in his youth, Herriot began to keep a journal of his days. When it was discovered, and admired, by his wife, she encouraged him to seek out a publisher for them. Publishing in the United Kingdom was once a rather open affair, with all sorts of volumes being produced for the consumption of a highly literate public. Herriot's early journal, If Only They Could Talk, was published in 1969. It sold modestly, but fulfilled a sense of expression for Herriot and he returned, satisfied in his art, to his work at the practice.
However, a publisher from the United States, traveling through the English countryside, picked up a stray copy at a train station bookstore and, intrigued with the volume's rhythm and subject matter, offered to publish the book in the U.S.A., along with any other journals that Herriot wished to adapt. In 1972, All Creatures Great and Small was released, making its way quickly to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It would be followed by subsequent volumes, their titles also taken from verses of the familiar hymn, Royal Oak [Hymn #405 in the Episcopal Church's Hymnal 1982].
Herriot became a bit of an institution, with even a long-running television show based on his books in Britain, Canada, and the United States. [ I actually saw an episode on late night TV in Australia last year.] The former location of his veterinary practice is now a museum dedicated to the world he created in his books about his ordinary, yet revelatory, days in Yorkshire.
Through all the fame and fuss, as is typical for even a transplanted Glaswegian, Herriot did not allow his life to be interrupted or altered. He continued to be the local vet, even as his practice changed with the times, with more house pets than large farm animals as his patients. If reading the books for the charming animal stories, one also notices his piquant observations about country life and the characters who inhabited the Dales. As with the poetry of Robert Burns, while what is on the surface is a record of country life, deeper truths about human nature are also revealed.
Herriot's books are still in print and still popular enough that one may find volumes on sale even in the rather desiccated bookstores of the 21st century. There is even a James Herriot calendar that is produced annually. If one travels to the town of Thirsk in North York, the real location of the Herriot's fictionalized version, one may see that his stories are responsible for the area's most viable industry. Namely, that which is generated from tourists eager to see the farms, fields, and livestock that Herriot brought to life. As mentioned, his practice is now a museum, the tools of Herriot's veterinary trade are on display at yet another museum, and for a time the local pub changed its name from what it was originally to what it is called in the books.
During a physical examination necessitated after being injured on the job, he was rammed by a ram, it was discovered that Herriot had cancer. He suffered quietly from the disease, under the care of his physician daughter and giving over the more difficult aspects of the job to his veterinarian son until his death in 1995 at the age of 78.
Since then, the local train station has been named in his honor with a statue to him unveiled by the actor who portrayed him in the television adaptation of his books. The veterinary practice, now in the hands of Herriot's son, is still active and still addressing the needs of a variety of patients, from Yorkshire beasts to herding dogs to house cats to a merchant seaman's chimpanzee.
Of his life, as measured through his kind and gentle stories, Herriot once noted that which powers our relations with our animals and one another,
I went back to my conversation with Siegfried that morning; we had just about decided that the man with a lot of animals couldn't be expected to feel affection for individuals among them. But those buildings back there were full of John Skipton's animals - he must have hundreds. Yet what made him trail down that hillside every day in all weathers? Why had he filled the last years of those two old horses with peace and beauty? Why had he given them a final ease and comfort which he had withheld from himself? It could only be love.