All Creatures Great and Small

James finally comes to Heston Grange to take Helen on a date. He has grand plans for a dinner dance at the fanciest hotel north of London, but one disaster strikes after another, leaving James looking and feeling like a buffoon. After a misunderstanding about whether or not he’s staying at the hotel, all his confidence crumbles, and he goes through the motions for the rest of the date, but his heart is not in it anymore.

When the brakes on the Austin fail, James has a series of narrow escapes from disaster. Siegfried keeps forgetting to get the car repaired—that is, until he drives it, nearly ends up in a serious collision, and scolds James for not telling him how bad the brake situation was.

James has another narrow escape when visiting the house of a pleasant man mostly interested in talking to him about football. He is left alone with his Great Dane and her pups. The Great Dane reacts poorly to a stranger in her territory, and James must fend her off with an old chair. Even with his lion-tamer act, he gets a nasty bite on his left thigh. Siegfried remarks on how close he was to losing some very important anatomy.

After an adventure getting lost in the snow on the way to a farm, James arrives, feeling like an intrepid explorer, only to have the farmer remark about the “plain” weather.

Dick Rudd is a poor farmer with a small herd of cows. Finally, he buys a perfect little Dairy Shorthorn. When she develops an inoperable abscess, James doesn’t know what to do. Unable to simply let her die, he tries a risky surgery, which is a success. Although in retrospect he knows that he left it too long and that there were other ways to help the cow, at the time he was simply relieved that it worked, and he is grateful to be invited to the Rudd’s silver wedding anniversary party.

One of Siegfried’s struggles with the practice is getting farmers to pay their bills. He plots to get Dennis Pratt to pay by calling him on market day when everyone else is paying, hoping it will encourage him to pay. Not only does it fail to work, but he also gives Dennis free medicine and the promise of a complex and expensive treatment.

Another non-payer is the local butcher, who summons James in the middle of the night to deliver two large twin calves. When James gets them out, both alive, he remarks on how much they are worth. The butcher, faced with the clear value of veterinary assistance, offers him some sausages. But when James, unable to not push him just a little farther, asks how much they’ll be, the butcher can’t help but charge for them.

James is very upset after the failed date with Helen, and to cheer him up Tristan invites him to go out to a dance with two pretty nurses. They get far too drunk. Tristan hits his head on a table. James and his date fall down a hill. And then, worst of all, Helen shows up with a date and sees James drunk and dirty from his fall.

Herriot then relates a collection of short anecdotes—the tale of Tip the dog, who chose to sleep outside even in the snow, a farm rivalry, and a family who love their farm cats so much that James acquires an experimental vaccine to save the kittens from feline enteritis.

A pony with acute laminitis is suffering, and James asks Siegfried to assist. Siegfried tries something very old-fashioned: bleeding the pony. It recovers, and James is mystified. There is no scientific foundation for bleeding, and yet it seemed to give the pony instant relief.

Helen shows up at the infirmary with a dog with a dislocated hip. She asks to help and together they get the dog’s hip back into place. In the surgery, James’s courage doesn’t fail him, and he manages to ask her for another date.

James visits two families, one rich and one poor. In the rich family, the father is treated as an object of contempt. In the poor one, the daughter sees how hard her father works and bicycles four miles to bring him a small treat. James concludes he would prefer to have the poor but loving family.

James’s next date with Helen also feels like a complete disaster. With nosy villagers and dissatisfied clients interrupting, a large drunken man joining them in their row, and the wrong film being shown, he is about to despair again, when Helen suggests that next time they just go for a walk. The words “next time” relieve his anxiety.

Siegfried is up for a position as a vet at a racetrack. He makes a brilliant first impression on the two military men and their wives who are judging him. But when he runs into an old friend at the course, he goes off with him for a drink. They drink and catch up for two hours, and when they return the military men are very upset. Siegfried, who is very drunk, manages to top this off by losing his car key. He does not get the job, but he accepts the result philosophically, certain that he would have been unhappy in the position.

Although James has only been seeing Helen for a short time, Siegfried tells him it’s high time he got married. Although he had planned on courting her for a year or more, this encouragement motivates him to ask her and she agrees. But then she reminds him that he has to tell her father.

Soon, James is called to a calving at the Alderson’s and they roll the cow to undo a torsion of the uterus. When the calf is delivered, James tells Mr. Alderson that he wants to marry Helen. Mr. Alderson, not entirely thrilled by an impecunious vet as a son-in-law, nevertheless invites him in for a drink. He begins telling stories about Helen’s mother and James realizes that this is his blessing.

Just as James and Helen are about to get married, a large number of tuberculin testing assignments get sent to the practice. Unwilling to leave Siegfried to do all the work, James and Helen change their plans for their honeymoon. They stay up at the top of the Dales for a week, spending their first week of marriage tuberculin testing. As a wedding present, Siegfried makes James a partner in the practice.