This is the volume that begins "When the gate fell on top of me, I knew I was really home." Too many people don't seem to read these books with attention to detail. Many people, for example, recognizing that Herriot was a Scot, suppose that he was working in Scotland, rather than Yorkshire, the largest and most varied county in England.

This volume is a good example of this sort of misconstruction. This book doesn't begin at the end of WWII. The war is still going on. Herriot has been invalided home, though he is actually better from what he was operated on for. Because vets were a 'reserved occupation' (after all, you need to keep the farm animals healthy to feed a population that can't get food, cloth, etc from overseas), he was discharged and sent home probably about 1943 (Herriot's always a little vague on dating).

Falling gates notwithstanding, Herriot is very glad to be home. He'd made it very clear in the previous volume that he resented very strongly being deprived of his son's infancy. Though he did travel some later (he describes the trips in this volume), Herriot never let himself be kept away from home, family, friends, dogs, etc for any prolonged period afterward.

Many people skip over the dedications of books, and especially in this series this is a mistake. This volume is dedicated to Herriot's granddaughter. Some people are born to be family members (parents, especially, but also attached to extended family). Herriot is one of these. One gap that struck me most seriously--Siegfried and Tristan marry and father children in this period, yet there's no real account of their courtships, and little about their parenting experiences.

Influenced by the familiar quatrain, many people think this is the last volume in Herriot's reminiscences. I'll get to the fifth book next. But this volume contains many elements that are valedictory. I THINK this is the volume that discusses the death of Sam--but I'm not sure that it's not in the next. I'll keep an eye out for this.