September days

The day before yesterday, 22 September, was the fictional birthday of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings. Yesterday was the feast day of St Padre Pio. Two of my favourite personalities, Tolkien and Padre Pio, are brought to mind at the same season. They shared a similar very strong Christian faith. Tolkien, of course, could never stop writing, and when illness prevented him from holding a pen he said he felt like a hen without a beak. St Pio, by contrast, wrote little, apart from letters. In a homily about him yesterday, the preacher said that he asked a friar who had known St Pio if it was true that the latter never preached at the Eucharist. Slightly affronted, the friar replied: ‘his whole life was a sermon’. How wonderful if that could be said of us, especially those of us who attempt to write on Christian subjects. It is probably little known that Tolkien wrote on spiritual subjects, but only in his private letters, unlike his friend C. S. Lewis, whose religious works Tolkien did not greatly like. Some of what Tolkien wrote is available in his Collected Letters: it is worth looking at.

22 September also marked the showing on Channel 5 of Episode Four of the new series of dramatizations of James Herriot’s vet stories, All Creatures Great and Small. We loved the original TV series of forty years ago, and the books even more. Naturally we wondered how the new version would compare. So far we’ve only seen Episode One, which we thought extremely impressive, as regards both acting and setting. A bonus for us was that in the forty years between the two series we have got to know several of the places in the Yorkshire Dales where the stories are set — thanks to staying at Scargill House for ACW and other events. Much filming of the old series took place around Leyburn, a lovely town which we have often visited. But it intrigues me that, while Alf Wight (Herriot’s real name) set his stories in the Dales, his real-life veterinary practice was situated in Thirsk, the other side of the A1 and closer to the North Yorks Moors. It’s almost as if he had an eye to the scenic requirements of a future film version.

Which leads me on to another thought about verisimilitude. Having seen that first episode, I was impelled to go back to book one of the series, If Only They Could Talk, to see how it had been adapted. Not surprisingly, James’s desperate dash through pouring rain to his interview for the job at Skeldale House, for which he is late, is a dramatic invention of the scriptwriters with no basis in the book. More interestingly, Siegfried Farnon, James’s employer, is portrayed as treating James rudely and almost sadistically, throwing him at the deep end so that he is kicked into the mud by a powerful horse and generally makes a fool of himself, ending up drunk after a curt offer of the job from Siegfried. Nothing could be further from the book, where Siegfried is the soul of affability from the start, showing off his dispensary to James, hardly letting him take on any jobs for days, thanking him for opening farm gates for the car, and easing him into the work gradually. Instead, the whole of Siegfried’s irascibility is directed at his hapless brother Tristan.

Does it matter? After all, James Herriot had already fictionalized the experiences of Alf Wight working for Donald Sinclair in Thirsk, and there are so many stories that much of what he wrote must be invention, even if based on real events. So fiction is re-fictionalized. One thing is certain. Herriot mastered the art of the humorous short story. Not many such books cause one to laugh out loud. I think they could serve as a model of light fiction, as Tolkien does for the serious kind. And St Pio as an inspiration, if not a model, for living.