Holidays with Pay

Oneal Peters

Colorado State University

Experiences

A seven hour plane ride is easy to sleep through after the first year of veterinary school. Without realizing it, I had been consistently short on sleep for the entire thirty weeks that make up freshman year and I was more than happy to take a seven hour snooze while the less exhausted people around me fidgeted in their seats, anxious to arrive in London. In all honesty, I was incredibly excited, despite being able to become comatose for the entire flight. All I could hear in my head was Joey Tribbiani from FRIENDS exclaiming “London Baby,” and I couldn’t agree more. This would mark my fifth trip to the United Kingdom and I was ecstatic. In front of Skedale House

It’s a funny thing to be at Heathrow airport without a phone in search of the other four members of your family who flew in earlier and are waiting to rendezvous with you. All the Londoners buzz by, speaking on their mobiles in that lovable accent most people covet, and there we were, no phone, hoping that the meeting up plan would work. Just when you start to lose hope, you see you mother walk by, most likely on her way to buy her eighteenth cup of tea for the day (and it’s only eleven in the morning! ) For her, this was once home, and she eases back into British life seamlessly, although her accent now has a subtle flavoring of America. My mother, or mum as she is known in Great Britain, has lived in the United States since 1978, but besides her address, the rest of her is authentic Brit. She is hopelessly addicted to tea, as mentioned earlier, watches the BBC’s Masterpiece Theatre every Sunday night, knows all about marmite, Turkish Delight, chocolate flakes and Yorkshire pudding and if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have gone to veterinary school.

I know that must seem a strange leap from having a British mother to wanting to be a vet, but there is a key middle component of the matter. His name was Alf Wight, and he is one of the most famous veterinarians, not only in his native UK but in the States as well. Most know him by his pen name, James Herriot, and while it may seem that this story is dripping with cliché, it’s the truth, and the real reason I am where I am today, and one of the reasons I was spending a fortnight traveling in the UK with my family.

When I was seven, my parents bought me the James Herriot Treasury for Children hard back. Today the book sits in my bookcase on a shelf entirely devoted to and filled with all of James Herriot’s books. The cover is worn, but my dad’s slanted writing inside the front cover is in perfect condition, words that had an incredible influence on me. They read, “This man, named James Herriot, is a very good person who cares mostly about animals. He is like you about that. Read these stories (we can read them to you) and you will learn all about animals, farm animals and house animals. You will also learn about a place in England above the place mommy grew up called Yorkshire. It is a wild windy place and it snows there. It is supposed to be a very beautiful place also. Someday we will go there together. Love, Mom and Dad.”

And there we were, all together, walking through the streets of a small village called Thirsk, looking for Skeldale House, the setting where James Herriot’s veterinary career began, a career that would later include being the author of the All Creatures Great and Small series. Skeldale House, preserved in time is now the official James Herriot museum and one of our key destinations during our holiday. Upon arrival, we all stopped outside the house, admiring the place that had become famous to so many. Alf Wight’s shiny brass sign still adorns the doorway, and as I looked at the tidy etched lettering, I could see my own reflection gazing back, as if to affirm that this choice of profession was the right one.

The tour of the museum is truly akin to stepping into the past. The rooms are set up as they were when James, Siegfried and Tristan used the expansive household as their small animal surgery. The house also doubled as a residence for each partner in the practice at one time or another. The floors creak as the feet of the modern day fans explore the house, and for a moment you can imagine how the same floorboards must have creaked as James dashed out of bed on so many nights to answer the three a.m. call from a desperate farmer.

It is easy to get lost in the romance of James Herriot’s stories and forget that he worked tirelessly just as the modern vet does. But despite the long hours, three a.m. wake up calls and impossible clients, Alf still had enough adoration for veterinary practice to write countless stories about his life as a vet.

That realization has indeed shaped my path through veterinary school. Veterinary school is quite challenging, and life after veterinary school will not be any easier, but I continue down this path because I am in love with veterinary medicine, just as so many others are. We all have the choice of whether to become vets in order to have a job, or to become vets because we cannot see ourselves doing anything else. For me, as it was for Alf, I have chosen the latter course.

When my parents gave me my first James Herriot book that Christmas, they unknowingly shaped the course of my life. Such a small thing can have a large impact on someone. That book, my mother’s British influence, and my dad’s note to me all shaped me to become who I am today and make the choices I have made. We all did visit Yorkshire together, as my dad promised me almost twenty years ago, and that trip helped reaffirm that I was exactly where I wanted to be, and I will carry that with me always. James wrote “I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man. It was like ‘holidays with pay’ to me. I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.” As I sit here today, my tattered copy of James’ Treasury for Children next to me, I have no doubt in my mind that I will feel exactly the same.