Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

My low spirits following my father’s last days were not improved by the death, shortly afterwards, of Donald Sinclair. Donald had had an emotionally turbulent few months. The death of my father had hit him so hard that he could not summon up the courage to speak to me until a full week later. When he did, it was in typical fashion. The telephone rang in my house and when I lifted the receiver, a voice said, simply, ‘Jim?’

‘Yes, Donald?’ I replied.

There was a long pause, which was unusual for such an impatient man. When he spoke, his voice was unsteady. ‘I’m fed up about your dad.’

Comment

Comment

Donald’s brother Brian (“Tristan”) had died seven years previously. Having read Jim Wight’s excellent book, I’m still not clear as to why his dad chose Wagnerian pseudonyms for the pair.

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Original

My low spirits following my father’s last days were not improved by the death, shortly afterwards, of Donald Sinclair. Donald had had an emotionally turbulent few months. The death of my father had hit him so hard that he could not summon up the courage to speak to me until a full week later. When he did, it was in typical fashion. The telephone rang in my house and when I lifted the receiver, a voice said, simply, ‘Jim?’

‘Yes, Donald?’ I replied.

There was a long pause, which was unusual for such an impatient man. When he spoke, his voice was unsteady. ‘I’m fed up about your dad.’

I had no chance to respond. The telephone went dead. It had been the briefest of conversations but I knew how he felt – and what he had tried to say.

Worse was to come Donald’s way. His wife, Audrey, who had been failing for some time, died that June, three and a half months after my father. Donald had been totally devoted to her throughout their fifty-two years together and, following this devastating blow, he seemed like a lost person, drained of all his humour and vitality.

One day not long after Audrey’s death, he walked into the surgery in Kirkgate and stood beside me as I operated on a dog. He had always been a startlingly thin man but, on that day, he seemed to have shrunk to almost nothing. That gloriously volatile aura of eccentricity was absent as he stood quietly, observing me at work. The wonderful character I had known for so many years bore little resemblance to the old man at my side, and I felt a pang of sympathy as I glanced at his face – one that betrayed an air of loneliness and hopelessness.

Suddenly, he broke his silence. ‘Jim, do you mind if I come and live here?’ he asked quietly.

‘These premises belong to you,’ I said, ‘so you can do what you like.’

‘I have always wanted to live in that top flat. Looking over Thirsk to the hills – the one where your mother and father had their first home,’ he continued.

‘Yes, there is something very nice about the flat,’ I replied. Although I knew that Donald had become depressed living alone in Southwoods Hall, I hardly expected him to move house at such an advanced age.

‘I’ll move in tomorrow,’ he said, and disappeared as suddenly as he had arrived. It was the last time that I saw Donald Sinclair alive.

The following morning he was found, at Southwoods Hall, in a coma. He had taken an overdose of barbiturate, leaving a scribbly note indicating his desire not to be resuscitated. His children, Alan and Janet, were soon by his side and, after five days of heartache and uncertainty, he finally passed peacefully away.

502 words.

Tags

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• Barbiturate (1) ·
• Donald Sinclair (veterinary surgeon) (1) ·
• Herriot, James (2), pseudonym of James Alfred Wight (1916-1995), Sunderland-born veterinary surgeon and author ·
• Medication (2) ·
• North Riding of Yorkshire (51) ·
• North Yorkshire (10) ·
• Suicide (9) ·
• Thirsk (14) ·
• Veterinarian (2) ·
• Voluntary euthanasia (1) ·

All tags.

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