His first few stories on other subjects such as football were rejected, but then he turned to what he knew best: being a vet in a rural country practice, and his first book, If Only They Could Talk, was published in 1970, followed by It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet in 1972. He had always wanted to write books, but in the early years his busy practice did not allow any time for writing, but thankfully he listened to his wife and began to put pen to paper. The books were semi-autobiographical in nature, and he began writing them in 1966 when he was 50 years old, at the urging of his wife. James Herriot is the pseudonym of James Alfred “Alf” Wight (1916-1995), a Scottish veterinarian who practiced in and around the Yorkshire Dales during the 1940s to the 1970s. But it’s not complete – I’m missing The Lord God Made Them All (1981) and Every Living Thing (1992). My slightly battered James Herriot collection, bought in 1984. And luckily Herriot was still writing new books during those years, and so I got the joy of reading his new releases as I got older. I discovered these charming tales about a 1930s Yorkshire vet when I was somewhere around ten or eleven, I think, as books I brought home from the school library. So as I thought about what to include in my reading list this year, I just couldn’t go without including a James Herriot book.
But the animal stories have always risen to the top of my faves.
Yes, I loved Peter Pan, and The Swiss Family Robinson, Huckleberry Finn, and other non-animal classics. But it is also true that although I read a lot of books as a child, the ones with animals were invariably my favourites. It is true that many children books are about animals, so it is no wonder that many of my favourites contain four-legged characters. The Wind in the Willows, The Yearling, Winnie the Pooh, and Watership Down all are about animals in one form or another. You may have noticed by now that animals feature large in this series of blog posts in which I am returning to books that were important to me in childhood.
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