All Things Wise and Wonderful

James Herriot's memoir followed the Yorkshire veterinary surgeon through his Royal Air Force service during World War II, weaving his experiences as a raw airman with vivid memories of veterinary life in Darrowby, a fictional town in the Yorkshire Dales. Each RAF episode triggered flashbacks to the animals and people Herriot left behind.

The book opened with Herriot's arrival in London for training, where grueling runs through the streets exposed how soft he had become after months of marriage to Helen, his wife and an excellent cook. The misery triggered a dream about old Mr Dakin, a gaunt smallholder whose aged cow Blossom was destined for the fatstock market, where animals are sold for slaughter, because her udder kept getting trampled. When the drover led Blossom away, she escaped along an alternate path and returned to her own stall. Moved by her devotion, Dakin chained her back up and resolved to keep her. Gasping through another circuit, Herriot understood why he had dreamed of Blossom: Like her, he wanted to go home.

Herriot's memories cascaded throughout training. A London fog recalled a morning in brilliant Yorkshire sunshine when he drove to the estate of Lord Hulton, an eccentric aristocrat who worked as hard as any laborer, for a tuberculin test, a routine cattle check for bovine tuberculosis. A predawn call to the same estate for a sow with a prolapsed uterus became an exhausting ordeal as Herriot struggled on cold concrete to push the massive organ back into place. A dental examination proved equally grueling: Despite clean prewar records, Herriot needed five fillings and an extraction, and the officer in "Room Four," nicknamed "The Butcher," broke the tooth during extraction and resorted to a chisel and mallet while a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) cradled Herriot's head.

The book featured a rich gallery of veterinary cases. Cedric, an enormous Boxer belonging to a fastidious local client, Mrs Rumney, devastated her social gatherings with chronic flatulence. Every remedy failed until Herriot rehomed the dog with Con Fenton, a retired farm worker whose adenoid surgery had left him with no sense of smell. In another case, neglected ten-year-old Wesley Binks, a local boy, brought his mongrel puppy Duke to Herriot with canine distemper. Wes transformed into a model of industry to pay for treatment, but Duke developed fatal chorea, a progressive twitching condition, and had to be euthanized. After the dog's death, Wes reverted to delinquency and disappeared from the district.

Several chapters showcased Herriot's partnership with Siegfried Farnon, his employer, and Siegfried's student brother Tristan. When their housekeeper left for a week, Tristan produced nothing but sausage and mash, culminating in an explosion when he lit the kitchen fire with ether-soaked cotton wool. Meanwhile, Herriot and Siegfried solved a baffling case of dying calves at a local farm: Scabs from horn buds treated with a chemical disbudding paste, a substance used to prevent horn growth, had been falling into the calves' milk buckets, leaching the poison antimony into the feed. Siegfried, upon tasting Tristan's charred potatoes, declared he knew exactly how the poisoned calves felt.

At Scarborough, months of physical conditioning transformed Herriot into a lean athlete. As Helen's due date approached, he resolved to sneak away despite the risk of severe punishment. He escaped by tagging onto a passing marching column and spent one precious hour with Helen, nourished more by the sight of her than by the food. On a second trip, he arrived to find Helen had already given birth to their son Jimmy, a healthy nine-pound boy who initially struck his father as oddly unprepossessing until Herriot compared him to the equally funny-looking baby next door and felt reassured. To spend his compassionate leave with Helen at home rather than at the moment of the birth, he arranged a delayed telegram announcing the arrival; the plan succeeded, but when Flight Sergeant Blackett, the unit's tall and imposing NCO responsible for squadron administration, personally delivered the congratulations with such genuine warmth and fatherly pride, Herriot's triumph was shadowed by guilt. The leave itself proved joyful, with long walks and pram-pushing and the simple pleasure of being home.

The memoir closed with Herriot's medical discharge from the RAF, the result of a surgical condition that had grounded him permanently. After a brief convalescence at a comfortable country house, he endured a long, freezing train journey north and arrived at last in the Darrowby market place. Recognizing the familiar cobblestones and the old men by the clock tower, he picked up his cardboard suitcase and set off on foot toward Skeldale House, where Helen, Jimmy, and Sam, his beagle, were waiting.