Young Country Doctor

When he arrives in Bilbury, a small village on the edge of Exmoor, the young doctor doesn't realize how much he has to learn. But he soon finds the extent of his ignorance when he meets his patients. There is Anne Thwaites, who gives birth in the middle of a field and local rogue Thumper Robinson, who knows a good many tricks that aren't in any textbooks. And there is Mike Trickle, a TV show host, who causes great excitement when he buys a house in the village. The young doctor's employer is elderly Dr. Brownlow, who lives in a castle-like house and drives an old Rolls Royce.

Bilbury Grange is the second in Vernon Coleman's series of Young Country Doctor books. The place is the English county of Devon. The time is the 1970s. A young doctor, just married and in a new home (a vast and rambling country house in desperate need of repairs and renovation), has taken over a small village practice when suddenly the authorities decide that the village isn't big enough to have its own doctor. The villagers decide otherwise. Bilbury is the village everyone dreams of living in. It's the village where people speak to strangers and where doors are left unlocked.

Disaster strikes during a long, relentless storm which batters the village and blankets the whole area in a thick covering of snow. The doctor nearly loses his life, and the village schoolteacher loses her cottage roof. The excitement really starts when the villagers join together to raise money to repair the devastated cottage. Vernon Coleman describes an old fashioned music hall evening (during which just about everything that can go wrong goes wrong), and one of the funniest cricket matches ever described is reported in Chapters 16 and 17.