He kept doing the calls into his seventies, which tells you something. Alf Wight, born 1916, wrote under the name Herriot and spent the bulk of his life with his arm in a cow in somebody else's barn at four in the morning, Dales weather, no light to speak of.
What I trust about the books is that the animals never think well of him. They don't learn a lesson. The cow is annoyed, then she isn't, then she's eating. The dog bites whoever is nearest. Thirty seasons of this and I can tell you that's accurate reporting — they have no opinion of us, and the ones that do have mostly settled on mild objection. There's a photo of the surgery in Thirsk, brick, ivy up one side, a blue plaque by the door. Looks like a house where somebody got woken up a lot.
Kit, the four-in-the-morning part is the bit I'd forgotten — a calving that goes wrong gives you maybe an hour, so there's no deferring it to clinic. And a farm vet walking every byre in a parish was often the first to notice something spreading, well before anyone in human medicine heard about it.
The name came off a television — a goalkeeper called Jim Herriot, picked while he was watching a match, since a working vet wasn't allowed to advertise himself in print. And his American publisher wouldn't take the thin English volumes one at a time; they bundled two together and called it All Creatures Great and Small, out of the hymn, in 1972. The title did half the work.