It was not long before the telephone rang in Alf’s house. He could almost sense the tension as he lifted the receiver.
‘Alfred?’ there was a desperate quality in his partner’s voice.
‘Yes, Donald?’ he replied.
‘Come down – now!’
‘Why, Donald? Is it busy down there?’ The sound of shouting and barking dogs could clearly be heard.
‘ Busy?!The place is going mad!’
‘Are you alone? Is there no one to help you?’
The voice rose to a shriek, ‘Not a bloody soul!’
These were days of reflection for Alf. He was observing the gradual disappearance of veterinary practice as he used to know it. The small family farms were steadily going out of business, to be incorporated into larger estates, and the old stone houses bought up by wealthy people to be converted into fine, modernised homes. The old Yorkshire that he knew – the way of life he had preserved in print – was on the way to becoming history.
One of Donald Sinclair’s stock phrases was ‘I do not like change’, but there was little that Alf and he could do about the march of progress within both the veterinary profession and the farming industry. They were especially sad to see the steady replacement of the old cow byres with modern milking parlours; more efficient perhaps, but cold and austere. Both men remembered with affection the delicious sensation of warmth on walking into a cow byre on a cold winter’s day, with the rows of contented cows, the gentle chink of the chains around their necks, and the sweet, delectable smell of hay. But Alf knew this was a nostalgic picture that was fast becoming a thing of the past.
There were some timeless relics in the surgery that were soon to be destined for replacement. One day, while in the office at 23 Kirkgate, my wife Gill pointed towards the window. ‘Those curtains!’ she exclaimed in a loud voice.
She was referring to the old ‘red’ velvet curtains that had hung beside the office window for almost forty years. They were tattered and frayed, with part of the fabric so thin that it was possible to see straight through them out onto the street beyond.
My father was seated at the desk. ‘Curtains?’ he replied slowly.
‘Yes! They are utterly appalling!’
‘Oh?’ He gazed affectionately at them for a moment. He had spent so many years in their company that it seemed unthinkable to replace them. Her comments, however, had struck home and they were soon heading for the bonfire.
He told me about this shortly afterwards. ‘Gill’s absolutely right, of course,’ he said. ‘They were pretty awful, but they were old friends to me. They were here when I first came to Thirsk all those years ago!’
He paused a moment before pointing to our telephone exchange box on the shelf next to the desk. ‘It’s that thing over there that worries me far more than the old curtains!’
‘Why’s that?’
‘It’s about three inches from my ear when I sit at the desk and I don’t trust it.’
‘Why?’
‘It hums … and it’s hot!’
The days of the telephone box, too, were numbered. The practice of Sinclair and Wight had begun to enter the modern age.
His life in practice was changing by the day, but it was the passing of many of his old farming clients – men, women and their families, that he had come to know so well – that was especially saddening. As the years rolled by, it was easy to forget that he, too, was getting older.
One day, he was standing outside the surgery with a farmer as a funeral procession passed by on its way to St Mary’s at the end of Kirkgate. ‘There goes poor old Tom! I’m sorry to see him go,’ he said quietly.
‘Aye,’ replied the farmer. He then turned gloomily towards my father and said, ‘They’re pickin’ ’em out of our pen now, Alf!’ Alf had always looked very young for his years, and had a youthful outlook upon life, but this chastening expression gave him food for thought.
A less sombre reminder of the advancing years hit him shortly afterwards. One afternoon in 1982, a woman flagged him down as he was driving home through his village. He opened the car window. ‘Mr Wight,’ she said, ‘it’s about the old folks party in the village hall.’
‘Why, yes, of course,’ Alf responded, reaching into his pocket for some money. He had always supported this occasion. ‘Just hang on a minute and I’ll give you something towards it.’
The woman produced two tickets. ‘Nay, I don’t want no money! These are for you. Enjoy the party!’
Alf Wight had, for as long as I can remember, always referred to his parents and other elderly people as ‘the old folks’. Now, he was one of them.
In general, Alf had enjoyed good health throughout his working life but, with the passing of time inevitably starting to assert itself, he began, when he was about sixty-two years old, to experience angina attacks. As several of his relatives had died of heart attacks, these symptoms were a source of considerable concern but, as it turned out, none of us need have worried; the angina was not to prove the threat we had imagined.
A few years later, in the summer of 1981, he experienced the agony of renal colic. These attacks, initiated by the presence of large kidney stones, were the most excruciating experiences he had ever endured and, for a long time, a bottle of painkilling tablets was his constant companion. He suffered pain intermittently for about a year before the problem was eventually resolved.
He spent a week in hospital at the time of his worst attacks, but he was always convinced that he cured it himself by flushing the stones from his system one evening in the Three Tuns Hotel in Thirsk – assisted by the intake of large volumes of McEwans Export ale.
It was not only Alf’s health that was under siege in 1981. Both Donald and Brian were experiencing serious problems of their own and Donald’s was of his own doing; he stepped in front of a speeding motor cycle in Thirsk market place and suffered a severe fracture of the lower leg.
He was admitted to the Friarage Hospital in Northallerton where the sister in charge of the ward soon informed Alf that his partner was, without doubt, the worst patient she had ever had. Considering the chaos he engendered in the practice over the years, I can well believe that was true.
I visited him one day in hospital. I had been beside his bed for no more than a minute before he said, ‘Thanks for coming, Jim. You can go home now! Goodbye!’
True to his impatient nature, Donald discharged himself from the hospital very quickly. He purchased an automatic car, and stomped around the practice carrying an enormous plaster cast on his leg for almost a year. A simple thing like a broken leg was not going to prevent ‘Siegfried’ from enriching the atmosphere of 23 Kirkgate.
If Donald’s experience had been inconvenient, Brian’s was far more serious. He began to lose weight in 1980 before eventually being admitted to hospital for tests, but he continued to deteriorate steadily throughout 1981. I visited him early in 1982 in St James’s Hospital in Leeds, and was appalled to see his condition. Gone were the chubby cheeks and the twinkling eyes; instead, I saw a gaunt, sunken-eyed skeleton – someone I barely recognised. As I drove home that day, I wondered whether I would ever see Uncle Brian again. The outlook was bleak; no one had been able to diagnose his condition and all treatment had failed. These were desperate times for his family; Brian’s wife, Sheila – like Brian, a very close friend of Alf and Joan – could only watch helplessly as her husband continued to waste away before her eyes.
Donald, horrified, watching his brother visibly fading, was convinced that he was going to die. One morning, he strode purposefully into the surgery.