When you contact the British National Party you cross over to the political dark side, a shadowy world over which neither Gordon Brown nor David Cameron hold dominion. There is paranoia behind the voice telling me that I, as a member of the press, will be allowed to attend the launch of the BNP’s European election manifesto, but that I will not be told where or when it is, not until a few hours beforehand. I will also have the chance to interview Nick Griffin, the BNP leader but, again, the timing of this will remain vague for fear of “sabotage”.

So it is that I find myself at a “redirection point”, the Aldi carpark in Grays, Essex, from where I will be taken on to the secret venue. A “Truth Truck” is being unveiled, its billboard showing a white family, all smiles, and a slogan: “People like you voting BNP”. The none-too-subtle subtext is that the BNP is not for “people like them”: black people, people from ethnic minorities, immigrants. Almost immediately, the police arrive. There has been a complaint from the manager of Aldi. The Truth Truck is covered up and moved on.

The venue turns out to be a theatre in the town, a 10-minute walk away. Men and women with red, white and blue BNP rosettes are milling around outside, quite openly. One wears a smart tie and blazer with the insignia of the Merchant Navy. It reminds you that when details of the 10,000 or so members of the BNP were leaked last year, some turned out to be retired policemen, ex-servicemen, solicitors, teachers, even a ballerina – as well as all the white van men and nightclub bouncers you might expect.

There are no protesters today, thanks presumably to the secrecy. Councillor Robert Bailey, an ex-Royal Marine, is the BNP candidate for London. “Most of us are ex-Labour,” he tells me. “The Labour Party used to stand for what we believe in. Now, no way. It’s not just immigration that has changed; it’s our way of life. We’re becoming a Third World country in Europe with no influence, no power and the people not knowing anything about their own history.”

When I talk to other members, they don’t want me to use their names. Is this because they are ashamed? “No, it’s because of the intimidation and threats. Because we might lose our jobs.” A retired man in a trilby tells me that, according to YouGov, many of the people who are intending to vote BNP on June 4 won’t say they are for that same reason, but in the anonymity of the polling booth the true scale of BNP support will be revealed.

Worryingly, he may be right. It is predicted that the BNP may win not only its first seat in the European Parliament but, because of the proportional representation system of voting, as many as seven. To win in the North-West it needs just 8 per cent of the vote, barely 1.5 per cent more than it got in 2004. Griffin is calling it a “perfect storm”. He believes that the combined effects of the credit crunch, the perceived lack of control over immigration and, most significantly, the perception that all of the mainstream parties are corrupt – thanks to the MPs’ expenses scandal – will mean a big turn-out for the BNP. “Journalists are going to say it was a protest vote: well, that is fine with us,” he tells me later in the day. “The British public have a lot to protest about.”

The Conservative Party is so concerned about the BNP benefiting from the expenses scandal that it won’t even discuss the party by name for fear of giving it publicity; in one of his few comments on the subject David Cameron has dismissed the BNP as an “evil party”. Lord Tebbit’s intervention last week was not helpful: he argued that people should punish the main parties in the European elections, though he was at pains to add that he did not mean vote BNP (he meant Ukip, presumably).

Labour, meanwhile, has gone on the attack, mobilising at local level wherever there is a sign of heavy BNP activity. National funding has been provided for “Stop the BNP” leafleting. Cabinet ministers have been warning disillusioned Labour supporters not to vote BNP. They would rather they voted Tory.

That is the peculiar thing about the BNP: it seems to be an amalgam of extreme Left and Right. Its policies include taking Britain out of the EU, deporting all illegal immigrants (and offering legal immigrants money to return home), and bringing back not only hanging and the birch but also National Service and imperial measurements.

Yet it is also, fundamentally, Old Labour. It would take the railways back into public ownership. It rejects globalisation. It believes in strong trade unions and that as much of industry as possible should be owned by those who work in it. In these respects it reminds you that Oswald Mosley left the Labour Party in 1931 to form the party that ultimately became the British Union of Fascists because Labour had rejected his plan to defeat mass unemployment with a programme of public investment. It is no coincidence that campaign leaflets in white working-class areas describe the BNP as “the Labour Party your grandfathers voted for”.

Before she will talk to me, one BNP rosette-wearing woman from Epping Forest, who works for the NHS, wants to know who I will vote for. When I decline to tell her, other than to say it is certainly not the BNP, she takes this in good part and tells me the reason she votes BNP. She is worried that if Turkey is allowed to join the EU, Muslims will be in a majority here within 20 years. “They are going to take us like an army. It’s the way they breed.” They. Them. Always the language of otherness, of fear.

Inside the theatre, Vera Lynn is playing over the sound system. I’m asked not to mention this because she has complained about being used by the BNP in the past. There are speakers and film clips which reveal that the BNP is proud of its new call centre and the row of computers it calls its data processing unit. A suited man who sounds like Charles Kennedy explains the finances of the party and claims that it now has funds of £2million and that “this will send a shiver up the spine of the main parties”. It will be contesting every region in this upcoming election. Simon Darby, the deputy leader, refers to “the greedy, lying, treacherous bunch of swine in Troughminster”.

But the theatre is only half full, with about 100 people, and there is an amateurish feel to the presentation, with slides not coming up and sound systems not working. There is also a propaganda stunt worthy of Maoist China. Three “politicians”, wearing suits, pig masks and rosettes of the main parties, come on the stage and guzzle money out of troughs, before being chased off the stage by construction workers waving banners saying “British jobs for British workers”. This is the slogan the BNP is fighting on –one they had first, as they are delighted to remind me. Gordon Brown, they claim, nicked it from the BNP.

By now the leader is running half an hour late. This, I discover later, is because he has been interviewed by Andrew Neil on The Daily Politics in London. “First time I’ve been allowed into a BBC studio,” he is to tell me. “When I was interviewed by Paxman I had to be filmed somewhere other than in the building.”

When Griffin arrives and makes his stump speech it is in front of a poster of a Spitfire. He is greeted with a standing ovation. “We are not going to Brussels to get our noses in the trough but to become whistle blowers about the corruption there,” he says. “We are going to throw some rusty spanners in the works.”

Although it wants to leave the EU ultimately, for now, he says, the BNP will oppose the entry of Turkey into the EU – because otherwise this country will be flooded with “low-wage Muslims”. Someone behind me shouts “Never!” and is rebuked by the Charles Kennedy sound-alike in front of me who turns and silences him with a finger to his lips. Clearly they have been told to tone down the thuggish image for this conference.

Grotesquely, given the British were fighting the Nazis in the war, Griffin compares June 4 to D-Day, a chance for the BNP to get a bridgehead into Europe. And he ends his speech by giving a Churchillian two-finger salute.

It is time to meet. The Labour leader has something other than a slogan in common with the leader of the BNP. They both have a glass eye. I think Julie Burchill’s description of Griffin takes some beating. “To look at, he’s like a plain man who is halfway through eating a handsome one; to listen to, sometimes he sounds sensible, sometimes completely mad. I’ve never seen a face so asymmetrical as Mr Griffin’s. You can actually see his Mr Nice/Mr Nasty sides jostling each other for dominance.”

He is 50 this year, married to a nurse, and the father of four. They live in a remote part of rural Wales with guard dogs and security cameras. His father, a farmer and Tory councillor, met his mother while heckling a Communist Party meeting in north London in 1948. When everyone else has gone, apart from his bodyguards, we wander into the town to find a café. When he offers me a coffee, he says: “With milk? Not white coffee. Can’t say that.” He is wearing a tiny metal poppy in his lapel – the British Legion sign – and cufflinks that have a griffin on them, the crest of Downing College, Cambridge, where he read law.

I tell him that most of the activists I have talked to seemed more concerned with race than the BNP’s official slogan. “The British jobs for British workers slogan has become a way to openly and legitimately express concern about the multicultural transformation of Britain,” he says. “And that is the core of our vote, the reason we are here.”

When Griffin became leader in 1999 he began to change the BNP’s stance on racial issues. He claims to have repudiated racism now, instead espousing what he calls “ethno-nationalism”. But the fact remains that in 1998 he was convicted for incitement to racial hatred for denying the Holocaust. More recently he was acquitted on two charges of incitement to racial hatred against Muslims, after describing Islam as “vicious” and “wicked”.

When he refers to “low-paid Muslims entering Britain from Turkey”, he is presumably, I suggest, blowing a dog whistle to potential supporters who are racist. “No, we’re talking about Turkey because there is a serious plan afoot by our liberal elite to give 80 million Turks the right to come here. Their culture is very different to ours; we find some of their culture thoroughly unpleasant. Giving them the right to come and settle in Britain is a huge issue. I think if British people really understood that was one of the consequences of our membership of the EU, then I think you would find that 95 per cent of the population of this country would want us to leave the EU. It wouldn’t just be the native Brits; it would be the Sikhs, the Hindus, the Christian West Indians, even the moderate Muslims not wanting to be part of an Islamic state.”

So he accepts there is such a thing as a moderate Muslim? “There is, and he is effectively a bad Muslim because Islam is fundamentally intolerant of all other religions. Someone who really follows the Koran is obliged to be a bad neighbour; that is what the Koran tells them.”

The BNP’s “People like you” whites-only billboard, I ask: does it mean that if you are black you are meant to think you are one of “them” and therefore you don’t belong in this country? “I’d never thought of that billboard in a racial sense. What that is portraying is ordinary, happy, family people and not strange people on the fringes of society. Now there may well be people from ethnic minorities who would like to feature on our poster because they don’t want to see any more immigration either, but we think it would send out a confusing and mixed message if we had black faces on that poster – because people would think even the BNP is politically correct these days.”

He claims his is not a racist party, yet he won’t have black or ethnic members: isn’t that as good a definition of racism as any? “It could change but at present, because the BNP is defined ethnically, any discrimination against the BNP is indirect racial discrimination, so members who feel their job is threatened because of the membership can say to their employers if you sack me I will go to a tribunal for racial discrimination.”

Under a European law? “Yes, funnily enough. The other thing is that every other ethnic group in this country has a large number of groups representing their interests – the Black Police Officers Association, Muslim Lawyers Association, Bangladeshi Women’s Association – there are hundreds of them. You try and form an English Lawyers Association and you would be thrown off the Bar Council, or a White Policeman’s Association: you would be up for racism. So the only group that the white, indigenous population of this country has to speak up for them is us.”

If he doesn’t think he is racist, I say, I’d like to know what his definition of racism is. “It’s a term invented by Trotsky to demonise political opponents and, if it means anything, it is about exercising power to disadvantage or hurt other people just because they are from a different racial or national or cultural group, and I think it is wrong. I think there is racism in this country and most of it is directed at the indigenous population. On the streets of Birmingham and Bradford there is an epidemic of racist violence against young white males.”

There are probably a lot of racist people in this country, so might there not be some votes in admitting it is a racist party? “I don’t think so. We almost put on our poster ‘BNP. I’m not racist but …’ because that is what everyone says. They don’t want to be perceived as racist, they don’t feel they are racist but they know there is deep unfairness going on, directed against the native Brits. There are racists out there. The National Front is still out there and that is a rival organisation; it’s very much unreconstructed, hardcore racist and no one supports it. But even if there were votes to be had in racism I would not want those votes because we are not a racist party.”

Is that why he left the National Front? “I realised it was unreconstructable. Tainted goods. I walked away.”

Griffin has become a skilful interviewee. He has learnt to sound reasonable, arguing that any racist or anti-Semitic quotes from the past have been “taken out of context”. (He now accepts that millions of Jews were killed, but claims that some historians still question whether it was deliberate genocide.)

I gather that over the next three weeks the party will be running ad campaigns in newspapers – something it has not been able to do much of in the past. “Last time we did this was two years ago; half the papers said yes, half said no. There are more this time saying yes because newspapers need the money.”

So does he feel he is now coming in from the cold? “We patently aren’t more mainstream. There are politicians queueing up to denounce us. You can usually cut the atmosphere with a knife when our councillors arrive on the first day [they have 56] but after a year or so, when other councillors see that we are just trying to help things improve, they relax a bit. I wouldn’t want to be too normalised, though, because I think that is what has happened to Ukip’s vote. It’s seen to be sleazy as well. When they are treated well by the BBC, that goes against them, because we are both competing for the same anti-establishment vote. When I get on the BBC, they want to rough me up and we have a good old ding-dong and voters realise we are not the same as the others. Very beneficial for us. But we do want to do some of the things the other parties do, like hold a meeting in a public venue and advertise it, like go on The Daily Politics without having a gang of Labour goons waiting for me outside.”

Sounds like he enjoys the ding-dongs. “Yes, I boxed at university and I still enjoy a good scrap.”

A bodyguard tells us we need to move: we’re attracting unwanted attention. A final question, then. What about the argument that Griffin is a liability to his party because of his Holocaust-denying past? “Because of my talent for horrifically vicious sound bites that come back to bite me, you mean? That’s as maybe. I can probably take the party to an 18 per cent threshold but the final step to power will have to be taken by someone else. Before long things that nationalists said when they were young may become like John Reid saying he was a member of the Communist Party when he was young.”

I doubt it. Griffin doesn’t seem to appreciate quite how beyond the pale he is and his views are. The British are a tolerant people. The cloven hoof of fascism does not suit our national temperament. I’ve been trying to work out how the BNP is different from the National Front of the Seventies and the British Union of Fascists in the Thirties and the answer is that it is now playing the victim. The white working class it represents felt superior before. Now they feel inferior and victimised.

The final word should go to the black man who was working on reception at the theatre. I asked him what he made of all these rosette-wearing supporters strutting around his theatre. He shrugged and said: “Seems a shame.”

A shame is exactly what it seems.

The hours are hellish, the travel gruelling, the emotional toll immeasurable: is it any wonder nobody wants to be a traditional country vet any more… Nigel Farndale visits ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ country and finds James Herriot is long gone

Roll the words ‘country vet’ over your tongue. Only three syllables and three vowels, but all the resonance of a tuning fork. Twenty years ago, these words would have evoked James Herriot, the Dales vet turned best-selling author. All Creatures Great and Small, the long-running television series based on his semi-autobiographical novels, was as familiar and comforting as a log fire or a pot of tea.

Farmers wore flat caps and spoke in broad accents, they were amusingly contrary and dour, and they always seemed one step ahead of the earnest, gentlemanly vets.

But even when it first appeared in the late 1970s, All Creatures Great and Small was nostalgic; set in a folksy 1940s England that was rapidly disappearing. Intensive farming was on the way; thundering tractors had long since replaced draught horses and veterinary medicine was becoming more sophisticated. As Herriot himself put it: ‘Years ago, farmers were uneducated and eccentric and said funny things, and we ourselves were comparatively uneducated. We had no antibiotics, few drugs. A lot of time was spent pouring things down cows’ throats. The whole thing added up to a lot of laughs. There’s more science now, but not so many laughs.’

Nowadays, the words ‘country vet’ evoke…… what… Images of mass culls, probably. The stench of pyres. All those diseases that chill at their mere mention: avian flu, BSE, bovine TB, bluetongue, and most notoriously, foot and mouth.

For a time, the vet seemed to be a harbinger of doom or, worse, an agent of an unfeeling government. Just as priests in the Middle Ages were blamed for the spread of the Black Death – superstitious villagers jeered at them – so vets found themselves held in suspicion by some farmers. It is no coincidence that the first vets were referred to as ‘the priests of nature’.

Does the real country vet lie somewhere between these two stereotypes… To find out, I spent a day with one in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire, in part because this was where much of All Creatures Great and Small was filmed, but also because this was where I grew up, on a farm.

A visit from the vet was always worth a stare. To a child, he seemed an exotic creature, always smelling of disinfectant, always using long Latin words when making a diagnosis. One of ours would manage to smoke a pipe as he felt around inside a cow, another always wore a bowtie and had mutton-chop whiskers. He would ask me to fetch him a bucket of hot water, a task that made me feel important. His name was Jack Watkinson and he has since retired. His son, John, aged 48, runs the practice, Hollin Rigg, on the outskirts of Leyburn.

The view from his surgery is one of the most captivating in England: hay meadows framed by dry-stone walls and thick hedgerows that lead the eye up the Ure valley towards the sleeping giant that is Penhill. It is the reason that the television series was filmed here rather than in the more prosaic landscape around Thirsk, which was where Alf …Wight had his practice. That was Herriot’s real name, by the way. He was obliged to take a pen name because British law forbade veterinary surgeons from advertising. The profession has always been blighted by red tape.

The foot and mouth epidemic of 2001 came to within a mile of this idyllic place. It was a stressful time to be a vet. The contiguous cull was a panic measure introduced when state vets realised that the disease was spreading out of control. Farmers who resisted were subjected to dawn raids by government officials accompanied by police in riot gear. Up to 10 million animals were slaughtered – a million of them unnecessarily as they were subsequently shown not to have the disease – and the countryside was turned into a horror show. Plumes of black smoke. The smell of death. An animal holocaust that left witnesses traumatised. Neighbour feared neighbour. Visitors were turned away. The general election was postponed for a month. Researchers at Lancaster University have shown that vets suffered almost as much as farmers, with reports of distress, flashbacks and nightmares – the suicide rate among them increased to four times the national average, and the method was always the same: the same lethal injection that they used to put animals down.

Watkinson is not the depressive type, but he did find the foot and mouth crisis frustrating. ‘It was chaos,’ he says. ‘We felt we were banging our heads against a wall with Defra [the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs]. The licensing and the movement restrictions kept us busy, and I was constantly sending Defra letters on behalf of clients pleading to move their stock from fields with no grass.

‘We would promise to lay down plastic sheeting on the road and burn the plastic afterwards, but there was complete intransigence. From the welfare point of view, it was nuts. The lunatics were running the asylum. All local vets were marginalised. Defra officials would come and say it was their show.’

In two specific ways, Watkinson is a traditional country vet. The first is that he has a Y chromosome. In the past decade, 80 per cent of graduates from veterinary college have been women, drawn to the profession by its caring image as well as television docu-soaps and dramas such as Animal Hospital and Vets’ School. This feminisation of the profession has meant a rapid decline in the number of vets willing to do farm work: only one in 10, compared to 50 per cent 20 years ago. That’s the other way in which Watkinson is a traditionalist. He specialises in farm animals and, as such, belongs to a dying breed. The government was warned of an ‘impending shortage’ of large farm animal vets by a parliamentary committee five years ago, and though it pledged an ‘urgent action plan’, no action has been taken, urgent or otherwise. It is predicted that one in five remaining farm vets will quit within 10 years.

Women vets tend to prefer ‘small-animal’ work in cities, dealing with pets mostly, cats and dogs. And why wouldn’t they… Farm work has notoriously unsocial hours, with emergency night calls a regular occurrence. Small-animal work involves hardly any travel, and the increase in pet insurance means that it pays better, covering as it does more expensive operations and longer treatments.

Watkinson is a Yorkshireman born and bred – friendly and wry, but blunt. When his teenage children – he has three, two boys and a girl – opened an email account for him they called him johnmadvet@… The farmers nickname him ‘Rhino Vet’. ‘Because I’m thick-skinned and I know how to charge.’ And when his assistant sees me arrive with a photographer, he says, ‘I see they’ve sent two of you in case John turns violent.’ The old Herriot humour is still here, then.

Which reminds me of the other reason Watkinson is a good starting point. His father, Jack, he of the mutton chops and bow tie, was the chief veterinary adviser for All Creatures Great and Small – mention this, though, and John Watkinson groans. ‘In veterinary circles, Herriot is long gone,’ he says. ‘Ancient history. And I don’t think as a stereotype it was especially helpful.’

Meaning… ‘Since Herriot, there has been an assumption that veterinary work is romantic and you are not supposed to be business-oriented, but why should vets be different… We have a living to make. This business of ……”We love animals and will work for nothing” is just soft. Get real.’

It is 8.30am, the official start of his long working day, though Watkinson has been on call all night. ‘It is very hard to find an assistant these days because no one wants to do the unsocial hours,’ he says. ‘I advertised for 13 months, a one-in-two-evenings-and-weekend rota, without any takers. Only after we formed a partnership with a neighbouring practice and were able to offer a one-in-four rota did we get a response. A lot of adverts these days specify “no on-call”. But that isn’t what we’re about. Yes it costs you 150 quid to take your dog to the vet at midnight, but it bloody well ought to. That’s the free market. It’s your choice.’

His round begins with his weekly visit to Washfold Farm, a state-of-the-art, computerised dairy unit, where the Metcalfe brothers milk 550 pedigree Holstein cows. ‘The veterinary profession follows farming,’ Watkinson says, ‘and the dairy industry has had a 10 per cent attrition rate every year since the 1960s. So there are fewer farms. Metcalfe’s have gone from 100 cows to 550 in the past 20 years, so from our point of view that allows for those dairy farmers in this area who have retired, like your father.’

He always rings five minutes before he arrives on a farm, to make sure that they are ready for him – because, from the moment he gets out of his vehicle, he charges £60 an hour. They are ready: a row of 50 cows, their heads tethered, their computerised records printed out. In the Herriot films, the vet would strip to his waist, but not any more. This vet has his rubber leggings over his wellies already; now he also puts on his baseball cap, rubber apron and a rubber stopper device over his upper arm (his own invention, made from, I think, an old tyre). It is messy working at the business end of a cow. On comes the arm-length surgical glove. In goes the arm. The cow’s eyes bulge.

Today he is doing fertility checks. He flicks their stomachs with his finger, listening for fluid in the uterus. He presses his stethoscope to their wombs. He studies an ultrasound machine, which is pulled on a trolley beside him as he moves down the line. ‘We all use scanners now,’ he says over his shoulder. ‘Though I was trained to palpate the uterus, teaching your hand how to feel. It’s a dying skill that takes a year to learn properly.’

As he works, he issues instructions to Tom, the herdsman who, strangely enough, has an intolerance to milk – to drinking it, that is. ‘Give this girl one percentile,’ Watkinson says.

‘This girl is having twins.’

‘This girl’s geld [barren]. She might make £600 as beef [as opposed to £2,000 at her milking peak].’

The cows are tagged with electronic censors, so that their steps can be measured every day and their fitness monitored. ‘If a cow gives 10 per cent less milk a computer beeps,’ he says. ‘Better feed, better genetics, this is farming as science. The problem is, fertility suffers. With this one, I’m putting in a progesterone implant.’ He does a double shunt to get his arm farther in. Those widening bovine eyes again.

‘I would say the welfare standards of an intensive unit like this are 10 times better than traditional muck and straw. Mind your back, Tom.’ …The cow coughs and the herdsman is splattered.

The stethoscope comes on for a girl with suspected pneumonia. ‘She’s blowing a bit. I’m always listening to them for coughing and bealing [anxious mooing]. Always looking at the condition of their coats and the consistency of the faeces. Always checking their cudding. They get good value for money from their vet because I see 50 in one morning, rather than on a small farm where I might see one. It’s cost effective for them and regular business for me.’

He sets off again in his red 4×4 – number plate J7 VET, loaded with medicines, smelling of disinfectant – and drives quickly along winding country lanes until he reaches the Wilsons’ farm, about 20 minutes away. He has come to look at some scoured Hereford calves. These are kept outside on verdant, bosomy pastureland and will be bought by Waitrose when they are ready, which means that they are ‘farm-assured’. ‘This one’s badly,’ Watkinson says, taking a blood sample. ‘This water bubbling out of his mouth could be cocci [coccidiosis]. But I think it’s just the transition to barley that’s causing the scour. Try putting more fibre in his diet.’

The clock is still running so there is little time for banter. Watkinson is friendly with the farmers, but conscious of their being nervous about him hanging around at the end of a visit. ‘They joke with me that they like to get me off the farm as soon as possible. You’re always doing a bit of this social chatting and having a whinge together, though. It does both of us a lot of good. People like to belly ache. I don’t charge for 10 minutes’ chatting time. I’d soon hear about it if I did. I always record the times on my tape-recorder. If you are not straight, you are soon out of work because you have to face people next day. Everyone knows everyone else. You are scared of your own reputation.’

Do vets have to harden their hearts… ‘Farmers are more sentimental than you would imagine. You have to be tactful and polite. I put my own dog down five years ago and couldn’t believe how upset I was. I must have done hundreds. I suppose livestock are different: putting them down is an economic decision. Since I put my own dog down, I have been more sympathetic. I have seen plenty of hard-bitten farmers start sobbing when I’ve put their favourite sheepdog down. The sheepdogs are their companions and work mates – in the tractor, in the fields.’

Canvas the views of vets around the country and you soon discover that it’s not just the job that has changed, the diseases seem to be constantly adapting and evolving, too. Bluetongue, caused by a virus spread by midges, is a relatively new import, for example, one that will not be eradicated in the foreseeable future. There is also the excitable media to contend with. Claire Knott is a vet in Norfolk who was involved in massive culls of poultry during the outbreak of avian flu there in 2006. ‘One of the biggest additional stresses of the job these days is dealing with the hysteria caused by the media,’ she tells me. ‘There were some farms we could barely get down because the lanes were blocked by TV crews. They were being impossible in my opinion, feeding the frenzy. We had to spend 48 hours just manning the phones, trying to reassure members of the public that their pet chickens were safe.

‘We had one nursery school that wanted to close down because it was near a poultry farm. We had to reassure them it was safe, which it was. There had been outbreaks of avian flu as far back as 1990, but the media paid no attention to them. Only when it was reported that it might possibly carry to humans was there media interest. Reporting a notifiable disease is a nightmare because you are telling a farmer he may be about to lose his livelihood – and that is very distressing for him.’

Meanwhile, back in Wensleydale, Watkinson explains that he is always on the look-out for symptoms of foot and mouth. ‘You have to know what orf is to know it’s not foot and mouth,’ he says. ‘It is passed down the vets’ folk memory how to spot that.’

One of his bugbears is that because so few young vets want to do farming practice these days, the old skills are being forgotten. And the next time there is an outbreak of foot and mouth, or swine fever, or anthrax, it could prove fatal. Another beef of his, if the pun will be excused, is the legal obligation that vets have to give first-aid emergency treatment free.

‘No other countries have this,’ he says. ‘We do charitable work out of our own pockets all the time. We had someone bring in an injured seagull the other day. And we often get tourists bringing in rabbits they’ve run over. Or rabbits with myxie [myxomatosis]. We have a sick-rabbit box at the surgery entrance for Sundays, with a message saying, “When we get back, we’ll put it down.” Some tourists won’t agree to that, so they will knock on every vet’s door all the way home until it is treated.’

Over lunch – sandwiches provided by his wife, Nicky, back at the surgery – we talk about the unsocial hours. ‘A lot of the difficult vetting occurs out of hours in the farming world. It is a major issue as to who is going to do it in the future. There’s a lot of political chat at the moment about the working time directive. Personally, I think we will have to go onto a subscription service for out-of-hours, like the AA. You may not get home calls from GPs any more – they totally abdicate their responsibility after 6pm – yet we all [as taxpayers] pay a subscription for them. They are only half-doctors. Part-timers. They should be ashamed of themselves. Vets get no taxpayers’ money. We are 100 per cent private.’

Another beef is about what he calls ‘lady vets’. He describes himself as ‘quite cynical’ on the subject. ‘It’s rough, physical work being a farm vet. And a lot of women are dropping out because they can’t cope with the hours. What’s it called these days… The work-life balance…’ Claire Knott, incidentally, has three children, but didn’t take a career break, just 12 weeks off for each. Though, tellingly, her eldest daughter is training to be a vet at Bristol.

Nicky Paull, the new president of the British Veterinary Association, also has an interesting perspective on this. She has a large practice in Cornwall, where the controversial issue at the moment is badger-culling to stop the spread of bovine TB. It has divided the countryside, with farmers and vets pitted against animal-lovers (she is all for culling, but Defra has ruled it out for the moment). Hers is, in other words, a physically demanding farming practice.

‘I encountered sexism when I started here in 1979,’ she says. ‘When I appeared on farms, I would be met with a look of horror. It was like they were seeing a female vicar for the first time. It’s worst with cows because I’m quite slight and short as well – 5ft 2in – so I need to stand on something. I sometimes wish I could get my arm in farther, but you develop techniques to compensate for the lack of brute force.’

She reckons there is no farm work that she cannot do as well as a man, however, and some pastoral work she might do better. ‘Being a vet can sometimes be like being a counsellor,’ she says. ‘During foot and mouth, farmers were very isolated – not being allowed visitors on the farm – so when the vet visited they wanted to talk. I remember there was one farmer who I was quite worried about. He was so depressed. I just sat in his kitchen and we talked and talked until his mood lifted and I felt it was safe to leave him on his own.’

The original set of the interior of the surgery used in All Creatures Great and Small is now located at the Richmondshire Museum, in Richmond, about a 12-mile drive from Watkinson’s practice. He considers this a short run compared to some of his journeys, a 40-minute drive not being unusual. ‘And they are slow miles,’ he says. ‘Not fast miles on a motorway.’ …The rising fuel costs are a problem for him, not least because he does not begin his clock until he gets onto the farm.

He has come to inspect a small flock of Wensleydale sheep. Many farmers don’t consider it viable to call out a vet for a sheep, because the visit costs more than the sheep is worth. The owner of these sheep, though, believes it is her ethical duty to pay for treatment – she even believes in ethical castration with painkillers, which is not something more traditional farmers go in for. Foot rot is the problem today.

As he works in a pen in the corner of the field, Watkinson gives me an anatomy lesson, showing me an ulcer in the joint of the foot. ‘Farmers call it scald. You can’t pare that away. It’s jiggered. I’m going to have to amputate it.’ As he is holding the ewe on her back, he asks me to fetch him a bucket of water. He freezes the claw, then uses cheese wire attached to two metal rods to saw it off, another improvised device. It was given to him by his father when he qualified. Folk memory again.

‘Actually, these cutters go back to Bingham’s day,’ he says. Bingham was a local legend, the vet in this area before Jack Watkinson. He had fought in the First World War, been a Mountie and used to work with Alf …Wight; indeed he features in the Herriot books and was such a hard drinker that customers would come to the pub rather than the surgery to find him. My father recalls seeing a swaying Bingham having to steady himself against the car when he turned up at the farm one day on a call.

‘He was quite a character,’ …Watkinson says. ‘There was another vet round here, MacDonald, who would never itemise a bill, just write, “For services rendered.” Everyone would pay up because they trusted him.’

On the subject of folk memory, I remind Watkinson of the time he came to visit a sick cow on our farm, one that he suspected had eaten some electric fence wire and got it tangled in its gut. He opened up the cow but couldn’t find the wire and, days later, the cow made a full recovery. He said at the time he must have let the evil spirits out.

‘What I meant was that I’d made the wrong diagnosis,’ he says now, with a grin. ‘Luckily for us, nature has a way of curing itself sometimes.’

Albert DeSalvo was always friendly to Ellen Junger, except for one ‘incident’. She tells Nigel Farndale, in Belmont, about her terrifying encounter with the serial killer – and the murder mystery that has fascinated her family for decades

Forty-one years after his capture, the Boston Strangler still has a unique hold on the American psyche. Other serial killers may have been responsible for more deaths, but none haunts the collective imagination quite like Albert DeSalvo, the carpenter who confessed to raping and murdering 13 women in their own homes between June 1962 and January 1964.

It was partly to do with his efficiency. He worked quickly, on one occasion managing two murders on the same day – and he never left any sign of a break in. It was also to do with his calling card: his victims were strangled with their own clothes, usually their stockings, which he would leave tied with a bow under their chins. Supernatural powers were attributed to him. He was the inspiration for a Rolling Stones song, “Midnight Rambler”. For two terrible years, no woman in Boston felt safe.

Ellen Junger, a 77-year-old artist, has more reason than most to feel haunted by DeSalvo. For six months of his killing spree, she employed him as her carpenter, building a studio extension to her house in the sleepy Boston suburb of Belmont. Ellen was often alone with Al, as she called him – her husband, Miguel, a Harvard-educated physicist, being at work. The couple still live in the area, in a large, yellow-painted clapboard house. When I meet them there on an overcast April morning, I am struck by the almost fond tones in which they speak of DeSalvo. “He was quite likeable,” Ellen says. “He had an easy smile and a gentle manner and was… he was quite passive about starting conversations. I would go out and see how he was getting on every day. He was so strong, he could carry huge piles of lumber. When the weather was nice, we would have a sandwich and a chat with him out on the patio.”

Miguel leans forward and says: “There was one time, I was ill in bed with flu. Al came back after work with his children, to introduce them to me. He was so solicitous and kind, you know, asking: ‘Can I get you a glass of water, Mr Junger?’ He was so sweet. I was touched. I guess he must have had a split personality.”

Ellen is a handsome woman with erect posture, high cheekbones and steady green-blue eyes. She levels them at me now and says: “Yes, he was always friendly, except for one incident.”

Up to that point, the Boston Strangler had murdered six women, all elderly. The police assumed their suspect must be a mother-hater. That theory was to collapse a few weeks later when the Strangler murdered the first of his younger victims, a 22-year-old. But, at the time, Ellen, 33, did not fit his victim profile and so had no especial reason to feel afraid. The “incident” occurred in October 1962. It was the second day that DeSalvo had turned up for work and he had called up to Ellen from the basement, saying something was wrong with her washing machine.

“It was early,” she says. “Miguel had just left for work and I was still in my nightgown and bathrobe. I think he had been waiting to see Miguel leave. I went to the basement door and looked down at him and he was looking up at me with this frightening expression in his eyes, kind of intense and burning. It wasn’t anger it was more as if he was trying to mesmerise me, to compel me to come downstairs. It was like he was seeing right though me. I’ve never had anybody look at me like that. I was terrified.”

In 1965, DeSalvo described to a psychiatrist how, on the morning of a murder, he would wake up in a trance-like state, feeling hungry, yet he did not want to eat. It was more as if he had ‘little fires’ inside him. I ask Ellen if she could relate to that description. “Yes, it was as if he was possessed that morning. Bold. I got a strong sense of that. I guess not many women who witnessed that look of his survived to describe what it was like. Only at the last moment would his victims have seen it. I thought I cannot go down there into the basement because I’ll be harmed. I was completely frightened. I was shaking.”

For years, Ellen convinced herself that DeSalvo would not have been so stupid as to rape and murder the woman he was working for, thereby making himself the chief suspect. However, she later discovered that Al was not supposed to be at work that day. “He had a perfect alibi,” she says. “He and his workmates weren’t due back until the following day. Maybe the worst scenario would have been that he raped me, but he was smart enough to know you can’t leave witnesses.”

“Ellen never told me about that incident at the time,” Miguel interjects.

“That’s true, I didn’t,” Ellen says. “I thought about it. I did think: ‘I can’t have this man working here for six months.’ But then, the next day, Al turned up with his workmates and he was all “Good morning, Mrs Junger. How are you today?” – all cheerful and busy, and I thought, ‘Maybe I was overreacting. I don’t want to get a man fired because of the look in his eyes. I’ll just watch him today, keep an eye on him.’ ” She laughs and shakes her head. “And I was anxious to get the studio done. I knew that if I told Miguel, he would sack him and the studio would never get done on time!”

How did she react when she heard the news that DeSalvo had confessed to being the Boston Strangler? “I heard from Al’s old boss, Russ Blomerth. I collapsed. We had this white, rotary desk phone and, in front of that, a stool, and I just felt my knees go and found myself on this stool. I was speechless. Just speechless. It’s very hard for any man to understand what women went through in that period. We all felt so vulnerable. There was mass hysteria. Then to find out that the Strangler had been on my property all that time. It was unbelievable.”

She asks if I would like to see her old house, on Cedar Road. It’s only five minutes away. As she drives she talks about the peculiar fact that DeSalvo was never actually charged with murder. In 1967, he was sent to prison for life on unrelated rape charges, having confessed to being the Boston Strangler in exchange for immunity from prosecution and transfer to a psychiatric hospital. In fact, of all the murder cases attributed to the Strangler only one was officially “closed”, that of Bessie Goldberg. “Her murder especially frightened us,” Ellen says, “because she lived on our doorstep. We’re coming up to her house right now.” We pull up in front of a brick and wood-slatted house.

On March 11, 1963, the day Bessie Goldberg was raped and strangled, a man named Roy Smith happened to be doing a cleaning shift here. Being the only black man in an all-white neighbourhood, Smith was easily spotted, by several witnesses, walking away from the house at 3pm. Bessie Goldberg’s body was discovered by her husband at 4pm. Though there was no evidence linking Smith to the murder, he became the sole suspect, and within months had been tried and found guilty by an all-white jury. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Ellen’s son, Sebastian, the bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, grew up listening to his mother’s story, and has written a new book on the Boston Strangler. “Sebastian’s book has brought it all back to me,” Ellen says. “I think about it all the time now. I hadn’t talked about it for years.” In A Death in Belmont, published on Tuesday, Sebastian Junger raises the possibility that DeSalvo could have committed the Goldberg murder.

“[Roy Smith] was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Ellen says, as she leads the way to the back of the house. “It was pure racism that got him convicted. What the jury had not been told was that a man fitting Al’s description and wearing work overalls had been round the back here, that day, asking a neighbour if he wanted some painting done.”

In his confessions about the Boston stranglings, Al revealed that he had always gained admission to his victims’ premises under the guise of being an official checking for leaks, that or a decorator. “Here, let me show you something,” Ellen says. We get back in the car and drive towards some traffic lights. “See those? Al always used to complain about those lights. This was his route to our house, you see. The two houses are only a mile apart.”

We soon arrive at Ellen’s old house, a grey-painted wooden structure with the roof extending to the ground. It is surrounded by leafless trees and colonial-style houses, some with stars and stripes flapping lazily from their facades. “The jury in Roy Smith’s trial did not know that Al was working here unsupervised on the day of the murder,” Ellen says. “We were the only ones who knew that and we had no reason to suspect him at the time.”

Though DeSalvo never confessed to murdering Bessie Goldberg, Smith always professed his innocence and twice refused parole in exchange for a confession of guilt. In 1973, days after the 10th anniversary of Smith’s conviction for the killing, DeSalvo was stabbed to death in prison. Smith was finally offered unconditional parole in 1976, but died of cancer a few days before his release.

Ellen is now convinced that DeSalvo murdered Bessie Goldberg. “I think Al knew the Goldbergs because he lived right across the street from their business in Chelsea. They had a movie house, and he almost certainly recognised them. Bessie was strangled in the same way as the other Boston Strangler victims. Al would only have had an hour, but he killed very quickly. He may have been waiting for Roy to leave the house.”

Ellen shows me the studio that Al helped “The afternoon of Bessie’s murder, I came back here at about 4.30 or five and Al was back painting here, up a ladder. I had a phone call from our babysitter saying “Lock your door – there has been a murder on Scott Road”. So I hung up and locked the door, then went out to the studio to tell Al. I said this terrible thing has happened. There has been a murder in Belmont, and he said: ‘Yeah? That is terrible.'”

Ellen shakes her head and says, “I remember the last time I ever saw Al. It was right here, the day after the Goldberg murder. They had finished the studio and had come to collect their tools. We thought we would commemorate their last day with a photograph. Me with Sebastian, and old man Wiggins, and Al in the middle with his big hand across his chest. It turned out to be quite a poignant photograph.”