I loved James Herriot's books ever since I've read them (the four taking place before the war) for the first time as an adolescent - in fact, in my late teens I thought that if I could take just one book to a desert island, it would be one of these. Like in real life there was humour and there was sadness; but most of all there was kindness, and it all happened in a landscape I loved without having ever seen it.
In time, other books inevitably replaced them as my favourites, but I kept liking them a lot. Over the years I've read all the eight books, most of them more than once, the first four several times. Eventually I concluded that I liked best the very first one, describing the young vet's first year in Darrowby. So I was completely annoyed when the Kindle edition I bought turned out to miss the last chapter or postscript, making the book feel like a printed one from which some barbarian has torn off the last few pages.
But before discovering this I was enjoying once more the rest of it. Including the following quote I'd meanwhile forgotten, concerning one of the remoter farming families: "They seemed to me to be survivors from another age and their world had a timeless quality. They were never in a hurry; they rose when it was light, went to bed when they were tired, ate when they were hungry and seldom looked at a clock."
I realise this must be a bit idealised (what if there was some emergency? did they all get hungry at the same time? and so on), but that's just the nitpicker in me talking. I believe that families and communities like this did, hopefully still do, exist, and all I can do is envy them, regretting that the only times when I can temporarily live like this are those rare ones when I can safely ignore everything and everybody.
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