All Creatures Great and Small

“I lay face down on the cobbled floor in a pool of nameless muck, my arm deep inside the straining cow, my feet scrabbling for a toe hold between the stones. I was stripped to the waist and the snow mingled with the dirt and the dried blood on my body.”

Herriot uses vivid, visceral imagery to set up the reality of a vet’s life. He contrasts this with the vision of being a vet that he once—and his readers likely still—had. In this vision, it is clean, tidy, and simple. In reality, it is not an easy job, especially when working with farm animals. The patients are large and strong and decidedly uncooperative. Making it clear right at the beginning how much struggle goes into the life of a vet makes James’s triumphs more wonderful and shows how defeat is always at the door.

“The two of us stood gazing at the gleaming rows without any idea that it was nearly all useless and that the days of the old medicines were nearly over. Soon they would be hustled into oblivion by the headlong rush of the new discoveries and they would never return.”

Herriot juxtaposes nostalgia and progress as he does often in this book. He speaks admiringly of the old medicines and how impressive the dispensary was in those days but, though he thinks of the medicines as old friends, he knows they were mostly useless. Though the new packaging is less aesthetic, the new remedies are exciting and effective, making him feel like a magician around the farmers used to the ineffectual old drugs.

“It’s a funny profession, ours, you know. It offers unparalleled opportunities for making a chump of yourself.”

Although Herriot tells stories of many veterinary successes, he finds it essential to stay humble. Instead of showing how brilliant each success is by balancing it out with failure—which would be a depressing read—he instead uses warnings and occasional failures or comical mistakes to add contrast to his great successes. Siegfried, always willing to make expansive pronouncements, gives this warning. In this case, for once, he is correct.

“With the passage of time, an appreciation of the Dales people had grown in me; a sense of the value of their carefully given friendship. The higher up the country, the more I liked them. At the bottom of the valley, where it widened into the plain, the farmers were like farmers everywhere, but the people grew more interesting as the land heightened, and in the scattered hamlets and isolated farms near the bleak tops I found their characteristics most marked; their simplicity and dignity, their rugged independence and their hospitality.”

Although Herriot is an outsider, he makes it clear how much he loves and values the people amongst whom he works. Few narratives choose their story arc as the development of mutual respect, but Herriot—a young, educated city boy—never portrays himself as better than the farmers whose animals he treats. Instead, it is often the reverse, where he admires their generosity, hard work, and kindness to their animals. Because of this, although he is the narrator and always a witness to the stories he tells, he can easily cede the role of protagonist to the various people he meets and tell stories about their strengths, successes, and kindnesses as well as his own.

“I could look back now on six months of hard practical experience. I had treated cows, horses, pigs, dogs and cats seven days a week; in the morning, afternoon, evening and through the hours when the world was asleep. I had calved cows and farrowed sows till my arms ached and the skin peeled off. I had been knocked down, trampled on and sprayed liberally with every kind of muck. I had seen a fair cross-section of the diseases of animals. And yet a little voice had begun to niggle at the back of my mind; it said I knew nothing, nothing at all.”

The real-life misadventures of a vet are not those of a hero. In a heroic story, all of the work and suffering that Herriot describes should lead inexorably to triumph, but Herriot takes pains to remind the reader that this is a story about real people and events, not one that is shaped by narrative expectations. Here he points out how it is easy to see oneself as a hero and think that after struggle you deserve success. In reality, there are too many unpredictable elements and too much to learn to ever guarantee the ability to save the day.

“It’s a bit quicker than the old bicycle pump.”

Herriot is known for his humor, and here the humor derives from the way veterinary medicine is a pragmatic and down-to-earth discipline. For all the medical advancements, scientific seeming formulations, and technical equipment, one of the only ways they had of treating milk fever before the development of intravenous calcium was to inflate the cow’s udder, often using equipment no more complex than a bicycle pump. In contrast, intravenous calcium is both wizardly and mysteriously scientific.

“The shepherd, his purpled, weather-roughened face almost hidden by the heavy coat which muffled him to his ears, gave a slow chuckle. ‘How the ‘ell do they know?’ He had seen it happen thousands of times and he still wondered. So do I.”

The sense of awe associated with new life appears frequently in Herriot’s books. One source of it is how the newborn creatures find their way unerringly to the mother’s teat. It is a mystery that never loses its wonder even to those who have seen it happen over and over again.

“He had built up a weird pathology of his own and backed it up by black magic remedies gleaned from his contacts with the more primitive members of the farming community. His four stock diseases were Stagnation of t’lungs, Black Rot, Gastric Ulsters and Golf Stones. It was a quartet which made the vets tremble for miles around.”

Jeff Mallock, the knackerman, is a fixture of life in the Yorkshire area, and Herriot describes him with gentle humor. Even though his diagnoses are an irritation and occasionally a problem, there is no harm in him. Herriot teases him by quoting the four invented diseases with the most humorous titles. Gastric ‘Ulsters,’ not ulcers, and ‘Golf’ Stones, instead of gallstones, are both close to real medical issues but miss the mark just slightly. They show how Mallock is endeavoring to sound knowledgeable and educated even while he is talking nonsense.

“I was really worried about Tricki this time. […] He had become hugely fat, like a bloated sausage with a leg at each corner. His eyes, bloodshot and rheumy, stared straight ahead and his tongue lolled from his jaws.”

Another strategy Herriot uses for humor is exaggeration and simile. Although he wants to express the seriousness of Tricki’s condition, this is not a dark or sad story. Thus a dramatic comparison to a sausage both gets across how bad Tricki’s current health is and also indicates the humorous tone of the story to follow.

“‘I said me cow’s up. Found her walking about byre this morning, fit as a fiddle. You’d think there’d never been owt the matter with her.’ He paused for a few moments then spoke with deliberation like a disapproving schoolmaster. ‘And you stood there and looked at me and said she’d never get up n’more.’”

Self-deprecation is a key way for Herriot to keep James sympathetic. Whether it is being made fun of for wearing his pajamas on a call, getting kicked repeatedly by a cow until he has to flee the barn through a hole in the wall, or misdiagnosing a stubborn cow with a broken pelvis, James is never so talented a vet or superhuman a person that he cannot make mistakes. Relating tales of his own foolishness allows the reader to laugh both at and with James.

“I could see only one future for myself; I was going to be a small animal surgeon. [...] a kind of vision of treating people’s pets in my own animal hospital where everything would be not just modern but revolutionary. The fully equipped operating theatre, laboratory and X-ray room; they had all stayed crystal clear in my mind until I had graduated M.R.C.V.S. How on earth, then, did I come to be sitting on a high Yorkshire moor in shirt sleeves and Wellingtons, smelling vaguely of cows?”

One of Herriot’s great sources of humor is juxtaposing the noble and romantic with the prosaic and unromantic. Here James is thinking of his student dreams to be a small animal vet, in a city where everything is tidy and modern, while his reality is cow dung and the great outdoors. But although it would be easy for this to be the juxtaposition of expectations with reality, Herriot uses it to illustrate James’s self-discovery. Sometimes what we think we want is not what we really want. James realizes that he does not have what he wanted as a student, and yet he is even happier than he imagined he could be.

“‘Mind you, don’t think I’m blaming you, James. It’s probably your Scottish upbringing. And don’t misunderstand me, this same upbringing has inculcated in you so many of the qualities I admire—integrity, industry, loyalty. But I’m sure you will be the first to admit,’ and here he stopped and wagged a finger at me, ‘that you Scots sometimes overdo the thrift.’ He gave a light laugh. ‘So remember, James, don’t be too—er—canny when you are operating.’ I measured him up. If I dropped the tray quickly I felt sure I could fell him with a right hook.”

Irony is a key literary device for Herriot. The quotation above comes from one of the many stories of Siegfried first saying one thing and then immediately contradicting himself. After the reader becomes wary of Siegfried’s tendencies, the tales also take on an element of dramatic irony, where we wonder if this is the time when James will not take Siegfried at his word only to be scolded for doing so later. But because James admires Siegfried and wants to impress him, he falls for it every time.

“‘That’s Heskit Fell—nearly two and a half thousand feet. And that’s Eddleton just beyond, and Wedder Fell on the other side and Colver and Sennor.’ The names with their wild, Nordic ring fell easily from her tongue; she spoke of them like old friends and I could sense the affection in her voice.”

James’s romance with Helen in this book may be more accurately described as an extension of his romance with the Dales. Here we see the moment where they first make a connection. Helen’s love of the place where she lives is a key reason he is drawn to her.

“At times there was the strange excitement of peering down the microscope at a clump of bright red, iridescent T. B. bacilli. When that happened the cow was immediately slaughtered and there was always the thought that I might have lifted the death sentence from some child—the meningitis, the spinal and lung infections which were so common in those days.”

In an era—not so long ago—where pasteurization was not usual or mandatory, tuberculosis from cow’s milk was a huge danger, and regular testing made veterinarians one of the few barriers between severe and often fatal diseases. Herriot, a dutiful vet, takes pride in the times when by identifying tuberculosis in a cow, he has protected people in his community. Though usually laboratory procedures are not particularly visually interesting, Herriot uses the bright color of the bacteria to make this procedure vivid and memorable.

“And, sitting there, drinking my tea, with the dogs in a row by the bedside and the cats making themselves comfortable on the bed itself, I felt as I had often felt before—a bit afraid of the responsibility I had. The one thing which brought some light into the life of the brave old woman was the transparent devotion of this shaggy bunch whose eyes were never far from her face. And the snag was that they were all elderly.”

Though the tales are often humorous and show the amusing side of the people of Yorkshire, here Herriot is telling a serious story. The language he uses is as simple and straightforward as always, but the woman is “brave,” the dogs are “devoted,” and James himself is aware of the seriousness of his profession. Veterinary medicine can be serious because of the value of the animals and the livelihoods of his clients but, in this case, it is serious because he is trusted to take care of the health of beloved creatures.

“‘They say animals have no souls.’ ‘Who says?’ ‘Oh, I’ve read it, and I know a lot of religious people believe it.’ ‘Well I don’t believe it.’ I patted the hand which still grasped mine. ‘If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans. You’ve nothing to worry about there.’”

Herriot is aware of the value people put on religion, and how it gives them hope and the strength to face suffering in life. But he has no patience for unfeeling dogma and rules that contradict the world he sees with his own eyes. James struggles to find the right words to comfort this woman, but he does not doubt what he’s seen—that animals love and care in ways unmistakably like the best qualities of humanity.

“He seized my hand in his own and sobbed at me ‘I can’t bear it, Mr. Herriot. He was like a Christian was that pig, just like a Christian.’”

Although the scene is humorous: a huge, powerful truck driver is weeping over his pig being killed for its meat, and it is also humorous to picture a pig as a Christian, perhaps attending church and being baptized, there is a deeper meaning to it. It appears only two chapters after the scene with Miss Stubbs, and the humor does not verge into ridicule. Loving an animal is natural, and Kit Bilton’s love for his pigs may be slightly over-demonstrative, but there is no shame in it.

“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.”

One of Herriot’s themes is that how someone appears on the outside does not show you all of who they are. Mr. Skipton seems crotchety and rude, but his care for his elderly horses reveals that he too can love. The question structure allows Herriot to frame just how lovely Mr. Skipton’s actions are, even though Skipton would never say so himself.

“Mr. Sidlow was a just and humane man. After maybe five or six days of dedicated nursing during which he would perhaps push half a-pound of lard and raisins down the cow’s throat three times a day, rub its udder vigorously with turpentine or maybe cut a bit off the end of the tail to let the bad out, he always in the end called the vet. […] When the vet arrived he invariably found a sunken-eyed, dying creature and the despairing treatment he gave was like a figurative administration of the last rites. The animal always died so the Sidlows were repeatedly confirmed in their opinion—vets were useless.”

Here Herriot uses a paragraph structure where he begins with a lie and uses the evidence that follows to reveal the truth. Mr. Sidlow is not a just and humane man. But instead of saying so, Herriot shows it through his actions until the first sentence reads as bitterly ironic. No one, in Herriot’s estimation, counts as just and humane unless they care for their animals, and Sidlow shows no such care.

“Mr. Sidlow, describing the treatment to date, announced that he had been pushing raw onions up the horse’s rectum; he couldn’t understand why it was so uneasy on its legs. Siegfried had pointed out that if he were to insert a raw onion in Mr. Sidlow’s rectum, he, Mr. Sidlow, would undoubtedly be uneasy on his legs.”

Here Herriot describes a moment of Siegfried’s arch sarcasm that reveals his own thoughts about Mr. Sidlow. Siegfried is a witty character, and so it is his job to skewer Mr. Sidlow so deftly. Mr. Sidlow may not change his behavior, but his stubborn foolishness has been made apparent.

“No doubt I considered there was something just a bit dashing and gallant in the picture of the dedicated young vet with his magic potions on his back battling against the odds to succour a helpless animal.”

Herriot often sets up James’s romantic notions only to have them punctured. It is indeed gallant and dashing to trudge through the snow and nearly lose yourself in the Dales on your way to see a sick animal. But, in the end, looking gallant and being admired for being dashing means nothing in comparison to being able to help an animal.

“I knew just where the abscess was but it was a long way in and en route there were such horrific things as the carotid artery and the jugular vein. I tried hard to keep them out of my mind but they haunted my dreams; huge, throbbing, pulsating things with their precious contents threatening to burst at any moment through their fragile walls.”

Here Herriot is describing a straightforward if risky surgery. To make it clear to the reader how risky it is, and how much the fear is paralyzing him, he uses James’s dreams to show the risks in an exaggerated way and how any slip of the scalpel could result in disaster. Though he succeeds when he makes the attempt, the true impact of the success is made clearer by these nightmares of failure.

“It puzzled me that I hadn’t realized until now that Connie was one of the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. Back there in the street outside the hospital she had seemed very attractive, but obviously the light had been bad and I had failed to notice the perfection of her skin, the mysterious greenish depths of her eyes and the wonderful hair catching lights of gold and the deep red-bronze from the flickering fire. And the laughing mouth, shining, even teeth and little pink tongue—she hardly ever stopped laughing except to drink her beer. Everything I said was witty, brilliantly funny in fact, and she looked at me all the time, peeping over the top of her glass in open admiration. It was profoundly reassuring.”

Herriot never portrays himself as faultless and, in this quotation, James has combined his faults of self-doubt and excessive drinking. The hyperbole he uses to describe her and his wittiness make it clear to the reader that what he perceives as truth may in fact not be true to an outside observer. He now directs against himself the same ironic and cutting tone he used concerning the Sidlows.