It shouldn’t happen to a vet’s wife!
He took her to an abattoir on a first date, nursed cows as she went into labour and has filled their home with a mad menagerie. No wonder the wife of TV’s Yorkshire Vet says ...
YORKSHIRE vet’s wife Lin Wright is famously long-suffering. Take one of their early dates when she and Peter were courting, 35 years ago, for example.
‘He drove an old Ford Escort that stank of animals,’ Lin remembers. ‘He kept his wellies and waterproofs in the back and an animal drug that smelt awful, which he tried to mask with aftershave. Then he drove me to an abattoir because he wanted to watch a post-mortem on a cow.’
Hardly the most romantic of beginnings. But then Lin knew what she was getting into from the off. Peter, 62, began his career as apprentice to vet Alf Wight, best known by his pen name, James Herriot.
Alf drew on his experience as a vet in the Yorkshire town of Thirsk to write a series of books, beginning in 1970 with If Only They Could Talk. The books spawned films and the hugely popular TV series All Creatures Great And Small starring Christopher Timothy as Herriot and Robert Hardy as his partner, Siegfried Farnon (Donald Sinclair in real life).
Today, Peter is a senior partner at the practice. He also features in the TV series The Yorkshire Vet, and has just published his autobiography. And he owes it all, he says, to Lin.
Throughout their marriage, she has played second fiddle to a long line of ailing cows, horses, cats, dogs, chickens — with the odd pet snake and chinchilla thrown in. It isn’t always an easy relationship, even for an animal lover like her.
Today, dressed in smart plaid skirt, red jersey and patent leather loafers, she is picking her way through a field of cow pats towards a drove of bullocks, to pose for photographs with her ‘celebrity’ husband, beaming at her side.
A couple of bullocks venture so close she could feel the rasp of their wet tongues on her skirt. Peter, chatting amiably, is oblivious to his wife’s discomfort.
Suddenly, as one of the bullocks nudges her, Lin’s had enough. ‘I’m off!’ she cries, squelching through the mire at a trot.
Poor Lin. Seconds later she’s yelping in pain, having accidentally grasped an electric fence in her scramble to get out the field.
‘You silly girl,’ retorts Peter amiably. They look at each other fondly and laugh. After 32 years of marriage, Lin accepts her life will be a rich mix of farce and mishap; of hilarity, misadventure and occasional tragedy.
She’s given a loving home to the legions of pets he’s rescued, and she provides an out-of-hours answering service to his clients, and manages to be polite, most of the time: ‘If someone rings up in tears late at night because their beloved pet has taken a fit, I’ll sympathise. But one man rang me up, drunk, to tell me his dog had fleas at 1am on a Sunday morning. I did lose my cool a bit!’
She’s got used to the fact, too, that Peter’s devotion to duty has meant absences from every family Christmas for three decades.
Allowances were not even made when Lin was due to give birth to Emily, the first of their two children, in 1987. While the real ‘James Herriot’, Alf, famously tested a cow herd for TB on his honeymoon, Peter went one further. Lin remembers: ‘Emily was in breech position so I’d been booked in for a Caesarean. On the day, a long-standing client — Howard Bosomworth — called the vets’ surgery to say a couple of his cows had problems, so Peter insisted on dropping by on his way to the hospital with me.
‘When we pulled into Howard’s farmyard, he laughed until his shoulders shook. I had to see the funny side, too.
‘Peter still remembers the two cases today: one cow had mastitis and the other a cystic ovary.’
Emily was safely delivered the following day. Ironically, Peter couldn’t bear to watch. It’s one thing inspecting the insides of a poorly animal on the operating table, but quite another when it was his beloved wife.
‘Then, when our son, Andrew, was born two years later — it was a natural birth this time — Peter was there, even though a couple of hours earlier he was inspecting a turkey factory. Although he’s used to delivering animals he was horrified to see me in pain. He said: “I’d never have put a cow through that.”
‘But we get on so well. We’re a team. We’re always teasing each other, and when Peter started this TV malarkey I told him: “It’s not you, dear, folk want to see, it’s the animals.” I was a bit harsh. People do like him.’
THEY certainly do. With his warm, easy charm, and that of his colleague Julian Norton, Yorkshire Vet is in its sixth series and regularly pulls in 1.6 million viewers. It’s also been credited with reviving the tourist industry of Thirsk, and helping Yorkshire as a whole.
Lin and Peter have the easy affinity of a couple long accustomed to each other’s ways; they’re constantly joshing and teasing.
Lin remembers when they met in December 1984: both were going out with other people. Peter had a long-term girlfriend from university; Lin, who was practice manager at the nearby dental surgery, was seeing ‘a chap in the rag trade who drove a BMW and came from a wealthy family in Leeds’.
Donald (alias Siegfried) had given Peter permission to hold a Christmas party in the flat above the operating theatre at the surgery.
‘But the ceiling had bellied and it was in danger of collapsing,’ Lin recalls, ‘So my boss said we could have the party in the dentists’ waiting room instead. Blooming good of him, wasn’t it?
‘Peter and I were co-ordinating the party. We met at a pub to discuss the drinks and sound system, and got on very well.
‘Then, during the party, we ran low on alcohol. In those days there were no late-night supermarkets, so Peter and I went to my house and raided my wine rack.’
‘And you were flirting with me,’ puts in Peter, who has just arrived with a tray of tea. ‘Did we kiss?’ asks Lin. ‘Put it this way,’ smiles Peter. ‘I felt encouraged.’
So it was that Lin swapped her glamorous boyfriend for a ‘raggyarsed vet’ as Peter puts it. And within six weeks, on Valentine’s Day 1985, he had proposed.
‘He gave me the choice of a ring or washing machine. I chose the washing machine because I knew he’d come home covered in animal poo, blood, mucus and iodine.’ They were married in September 1986 and Alf made them a present
of £1,000 and gave them a carved wine table, which still stands in the large sitting room of their stone farmhouse today.
Peter was made a partner at the surgery in 1990, then five years later Alf died of cancer and within four months Donald had taken his own life following the death of his beloved wife, Audrey.
Peter continued to preside over an old-fashioned practice, attending to both domestic pets and farm animals, and relying on Lin to field out-of-hours phone calls when he was on call.
‘Peter has always worked Christmas Day for as long as I’ve known him,’ says Lin, ‘and that meant I did, too, because I’d take the calls. There would be cats with Christmas tree needles in their paws, and dogs that had devoured whole boxes of chocolates or swallowed turkey bones that splintered in their throats.
‘On Boxing Day three years ago, Peter delivered a calf in a farmyard when the rain was coming down in stair rods. I do worry about him; he gets very tired, he goes out on icy roads in the winter and I fret about him being kicked or bitten.’
Their children Emily, 31, a criminologist who has a son Archie, ten, and Andrew, 29, an electrician, got used to their dad’s frequent absences. They are also accustomed to welcoming the various waifs and strays that have turned up at the house over the years.
‘He brought a rabbit home when the children were little. There wasn’t anything wrong with it — but it kept attacking other rabbits. It attacked me, too. Can you see the scars?’ She rolls up a sleeve to reveal scratch marks.
‘And that flaming rabbit — Spot, the children called him — lived for 12 years!
‘Then we had a blind cat, and a poor female duck that had been raped by amorous drakes. I put a big vegetable cloche over the pond to protect her from foxes and dug worms for her supper, and she lived happily there for years.
‘Then there’s our cat, Toddy, rescued last year from a skip, a tiny kitten, and now a fully grown whirlwind of mischief.
‘He would have been crushed to death if he hadn’t been found. I saw him and that was it.’
Resilience and imperturbable good humour characterise her: even when she had breast cancer in 2010 she remained stoic and upbeat.
‘Peter didn’t take it very well. After the diagnosis he said: “You’re going to die, aren’t you?” He was just devastated. And at that point I knew I’d have to be strong for both of us.
‘I had a mastectomy on my left breast on my 51st birthday.
‘People were saying “How awful to have it removed on your birthday”, but I thought: “On my birthday I’ll be cancer free.” And it hadn’t spread.
‘I was completely positive. And I’m stubborn. If I’d allowed myself to feel low, Peter would have dropped even lower.
‘I decided I wanted a reconstruction and it was a huge operation. Peter was so worried,’ she smiles. ‘But it went well, and five years on I’m fit and strong.’
Their marriage, too, remains in robust good health. ‘We’re a partnership in everything we do,’ says Lin. Like Peter, she’s a popular figure in Thirsk, where folk greet her cheerily. ‘They’ll say “Ay oop, Mrs ’Erriot”, or “Ow do Mrs Vitnery.”’
Lin is an object lesson in loyalty and cheeriness — even if she does baulk at standing in a field full of frisky bullocks.