What they had

Siblings Rosie Page and Jim Wight reveal what their parents' wedding day was truly like, describe the real men behind Siegfried and Tristan Farnon, and divulge ...

And he could say to one of us, “Just, can you fetch me the penicillin and a syringe?” And we knew which one to bring and were genuinely helpful. In fact, Jim thought he was a stuffed dog, and he was very much not stuffed. And they ask him a lot of veterinary stuff. Hall was bringing him in again and again on a velvet cushion to the back of the church. I don’t want to be recognized.” And don’t you know a man came up to me in Thirsk marketplace and said, “I’ve just read a book by a vet called James Herriot.” I said, “Oh, yes?” I’d have a face like the sphinx. Emma Marriott pulled it together and consulted with us at length to give the origins of the characters and the incidents that our father describes. He was a modest and very retiring man, really, didn’t want the limelight. Despite all the rejections he got, he believed his book was good enough and was determined to get it published, which he did. And yet in the same sentence, I would say, whenever fans of the books came to our surgery back in the seventies, it was Donald who’d take them on conducted tours ‘round the place! And the real man, Donald Sinclair, as my father very astutely put it, “is a true character because he doesn’t think he is!” Donald was explosive, unpredictable, massively impatient, and almost impossible to work with, but an honest and decent man. That was the reality at the Thirsk Church, there were five people at the wedding—including mom and dad. When we lived in that house, as we did until I was six, that bit at the top was never seen as anything but the attic.