Never too late

Who are some underrated people in history?

The doors wooshed shut and the train pulled away from the station. I was left alone with a sense of awe, the blue skies, and the sweet air of northern Yorkshire.

I couldn’t believe it.

I’d finally made it.

One of my favorite authors as a kid was the English veterinarian James Herriot, whose All Creatures Great and Small series became a worldwide sensation. He lived and practiced in rural Yorkshire from the 1930s until the late 1970s.

His stories are timeless, weaving a tight sense of community, the simple farm life of his clients, the town church, the village pub, and veterinary medicine. I was already a nut about animals, but something about his writings awoke in me a great love of all things English.

I read and re-read his books so many times they became tattered and dog eared. I could recite long passages from memory and the vet at the Boca Humane Society was startled that I knew so much about veterinary medicine.

I was determined that someday, I’d get to Yorkshire and see where it all happened. It was a dream deferred for almost 50 years.

Similarly, Dr Herriot always had vague ambitions of writing. He loved books and during his rounds of the farms and dealing with clients in his house/surgery, he internalized countless interactions…some poignant, some hilarious, some tragic. He always intended to commit them to paper.

One day he came home after a long day and put his medical bag down. He was in his fifties by now and had never written anything. He looked at his wife. “I’ve got another story for my book,” he said.

“Book?” she answered. “What book? When are you going to stop talking and start writing?”

Something inside him snapped. That night, as she watched the BBC, he got out a ream of paper and an old typewriter and started. Night after night, the stories flowed unceasingly. Thirty years of pent-up content appeared with the staccato clack clack of his typewriter.

After our anniversary cruise last week, I decided it was finally time to visit the place I had dreamed about for so long. Instead of flying home, I flew from Barcelona to London and bought two tickets on the train to Yorkshire.

I had only been to England once before, three summers ago, but the people were as polite and kind as I remembered.

The barmaid at the pub near our hotel insisted on buying us a round after learning it was our anniversary. “Look at you two,” she smiled. She had a London accent and pronounced it yew teww. “That’s fantastic.”

A stranger gave us a double take as we were studying the tube map. He paused, then came over. “Can I help?” he asked politely.

On the train, the ticket lady came around and asked for my pass. Her device chimed and she smiled. “Lovely,” she said as she handed it back. She asked where we were from and we chatted for a few minutes.

The pastoral English countryside rolled by as I sipped my coffee. In a very short time, I was standing on the platform as the train pulled away.

It was less than a mile from the train station to the town of “Darrowby” (actually, Thirsk, a name from the Viking era). Halfway to town, we passed the Thirsk horse race track, now named after Herriot.

We found our way to The World of James Herriot visitor center. I was surprised at the number of people there; the hostess said they receive tens of thousands of visitors each year.

Herriot initially produced a series of short stories and articles which he hopefully mailed to publishers and the BBC. It was a frustrating experience as one after another rejected his work. Apparently, no one was willing to gamble on a collection of vignettes and short stories from an obscure Yorkshire veterinarian.

“There’s a special noise that a rejected manuscript makes when it comes through the letter-box and hits the doormat,” he wrote. “It’s more recognizable than that of a ewe in labour or a cow with a prolapsed uterus. I would call it a sickening thud and it was a noise I learned to hate.”

But when the breakthrough did arrive it came in an avalanche of sales, and it came not in Britain but in the United States.

Henceforth all of the James Herriot stories would be runaway best sellers, not only in Britain and the US, but throughout the world.

The Herriot stories have been translated into at least eighteen different languages. Over sixty million copies have been sold worldwide.

His house and surgery were exactly as portrayed on the TV series, as they had been filmed there.

But seeing his house… the smells, the surgery, the kitchen and living room, the restored car… blew me away. It was like I was there in the 1930s.

Afterwards, standing in the nearby 900-year old marketplace, seeing his favorite pub, seeing how it was all those years ago…left me deeply satisfied. I’d finally scratched the itch.

After all that, I thought that the English and civilized thing to do would be to hit the pub with Sue for a few pints of and discuss the day.

So as we sat in The Grapes… one of London’s oldest pubs, now owned by Sir Ian McKellen (“Gandalf” in the Lord of the Rings series)…I pondered the oddity of a writer who made his living doctoring animals.

Of a man who, although fabulously wealthy, still chose to kneel in snowy, windswept fields to deliver animals. Who sat down with farmers for breakfast after a difficult calving. Who viewed the world with a gentle humor and self-deprecating style.

Who chose to live out his life out in a humble farming village, wanting nothing more than to share the goodness of humanity as he saw it with the world.

The world could use more James Herriots. 😎

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Images by author and the World of James Herriot, Ltd.