Although there may have been peace at 23 Kirkgate, he had little time to sample it. During those first months in Thirsk, Alf discovered that the life of a country veterinary surgeon was fascinating, challenging and extremely hard. The ‘free’ salaried partnership into which he had entered with Donald Sinclair was a two-edged sword. Although he did not have to find the money to buy his partnership, he repaid Donald’s gesture with something he had in abundance – a willingness to work hard – and his repayments got off to a flying start during that summer of 1940.
Donald left to join the Royal Air Force within days of Alf’s arrival and Eric Parker departed four weeks later. Alf was left to run a strange practice entirely single-handed in an area with which he was almost totally unfamiliar. Having had most of his experience with small animals, he now had to transform himself into a large animal vet – and pretty quickly, too. The days were long and tiring but he managed to enjoy them as well as learning an enormous amount.
It is interesting to study the old practice ledgers which reveal how different the nature of the work was from the present day. Much of Alf’s time was spent visiting individual animals on small family farms and, of course, his patients received very different treatment in those days before the arrival of modern drugs. He was continually drenching bovines with strange concoctions such as ‘Stimulant Stomach Powders’ or ‘Universal Cattle Medicine’. He washed out cows’ stomachs with these quaint mixtures, and irrigated their genital tracts and their udders with Acriflavine to combat infertility or mastitis. Acriflavine, an antiseptic, was a great standby for the veterinary surgeon; it was syringed up just about every available orifice that needed cleaning. In those days, the veterinary surgeons spent many long hours mixing medicines to their own ‘recipes’. These seem so outdated now but many of them were actually quite effective. The more dramatic side of the work was never far away – the calvings, foalings, castrations and various stitching jobs that have always punctuated the veterinary surgeon’s day.
The enjoyment of tackling his new job was heightened by the surroundings in which he found himself. Thirsk is situated in the Vale of York on some very fertile, flat arable land, but a few miles to the east is the western boundary of the North York Moors. At the foot of this great escarpment are numerous picturesque villages and Alf derived great pleasure from driving around this beautiful area, revelling in his visits to Boltby, Thirlby, Kilburn, Coxwold and other charming places. He was equally entranced when he coaxed his little car up to the top of the Hambleton Hills, where he would spend a large part of his working life in the years to come. This area of the practice, 800 feet above the flat land around Thirsk, was the domain of the hill farmer and the sparse landscape was dotted with grey, stone farmsteads, standing defiantly in the face of the howling north-east winds that whipped across the plateau in winter.
In the colder months, he experienced a harsh and forbidding place with no protection from the elements, but in the summer he saw a land of sunlit heaths and moorland, bisected by deep wooded valleys, the silence broken only by the bleating of sheep and the plaintive cries of curlew and golden plover. It was a wild and unspoilt area, the type of country that Alf always loved, and he felt at home in those airy surroundings.
The access to this high land is via a steep hill, Sutton Bank, from the top of which there is a fine panorama across the Vale of York to the distant Pennines. Alf, who always called this view ‘the finest in England’, never tired of stopping at the top for a moment or two to drink in the scene laid out before him. A mile or two further east, he could look across thirty or forty miles of unbroken moorland towards the Yorkshire coast and the towns of Whitby and Scarborough.
He had not been many days in Thirsk before he knew that he would be happy here, and he was to develop a lasting love for the surrounding countryside in which he was to spend his entire working life. Many times, he and Donald would remark that they considered themselves to be lucky men, driving around such a lovely area – and getting paid for it, too.
Alf was not only sampling a new sort of work. He was getting to know a different community of people, a way of life far removed from his urban upbringing. He was beginning to mingle with the Yorkshire country folk about whom, one day, he would write with an authority born of half a century in their company. At first, he was very unsure of them. The average inhabitant of rural Yorkshire could be difficult to get to know, and he had to work hard before he was finally accepted into the community. He was an incomer, a ‘furriner’, one to be regarded with suspicion until he had proved himself. It would be years before he felt he was completely accepted in the local area, as an extract from a letter to a friend illustrates: ‘For some reason, the local farming community regards Wight with some asperity. I cannot understand the reason for this as I have a most charming method of approach!’
He found their attitude towards him very different from that in Glasgow. In the big city, everyone aired their opinions openly, while in Yorkshire, people kept their feelings to themselves. He did not know whether they liked him or thought him a complete idiot. They remained inscrutable. Another great difference between city and country life was that, in the country, everyone seemed to know all about him. Stripped of the comparative anonymity that he had enjoyed in Glasgow and Sunderland, he had the feeling that he was under the microscope. He felt that he was being watched.
Another obstacle was the learning of a new ‘language’. Words like ‘felon’, ‘garget’, ‘marra’ and ‘wick’ bombarded his brain as he attempted to unravel the mysteries of the Yorkshire dialect. This old way of speaking is less common today but it was a problem for anyone new to the area in those days. He used to tell a story about a visit to a farm at which he had to attend a young heifer with a growth on her teat. The farmer was worried that the growth, if not treated, would cause severe inflammation of the udder, probably leading to mastitis. The farmer was not one to speak in hushed tones; a life among bellowing cattle and squealing pigs meant that a loud voice was often a necessary aid to communication on a Yorkshire farm.
‘Na then, Mr Wight!’ he bawled, his red face about six inches from Alf’s.
‘Good morning, Mr Musgrove,’ he replied, his ears ringing.
‘Ah ’ave a beast wi’ a waart i’ ya pap!’ shouted the farmer.
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Aye! Thow’d better gitten tiv’er afower she’s segged i’ yower! Ah doubt she’ll a’ cripple felon afower long!’
Alf had shown a gift for learning foreign languages but it was severely put to the test in his early years in Yorkshire.
Alf particularly liked the Yorkshire country people’s honesty and fairness. They were hard-working, lived a tough, exacting life, and while some of them could be dour and unsmiling, they were just in their attitude to anyone who did their best for them. This Alf did, and he soon made many good friends among the farming folk. His accounts of that country community are affectionately written, and with good reason. He was fascinated by the ways and traditions of the people, uncovering warmth, humour and other qualities that belied the impenetrable front they often displayed to the outside world. The country folk around Thirsk may have been studying the young Alf Wight but he, in turn, was studying them – and he was going one better. He was filing it all away at the back of his mind until, years later, he would reproduce it in print for thousands the world over to share.
Donald Sinclair had bought the practice from an elderly veterinary surgeon, Mr Wood, and although he had greatly improved the profitability, it was still not a very lucrative one at the time of Alf’s arrival. The farmers were very reluctant to call the vet; money was in short supply, and extracting it from them required a mixture of firmness and diplomacy. Some of the entries in the old practice ledgers seem to indicate that working as a veterinary surgeon was not a formula for becoming a rich man. A typical entry is as follows: