Chewing the Cud (9 page)

I had never been able to bring myself to run Ben out with the cows. Woodlands Farm was a very different matter from Tytherington, and it had a public footpath going right across it. Moreover, however quiet he seemed, bulls will be bulls, and I worried on the children's behalf.

So customarily he lived quite happily out in the orchard on a length of running chain and was brought into the yard for service (though we didn't pull any curtains).

On this occasion he had been for some reason tied up in the cowshed, with that same heavy metal that had once held Mobbs's bull. But, unlike Mobbs's bull, Ben had no horns, and when the cows had been milked and turned out, he had decided to go walkabout. He had slipped his thick neck out and, though all the doors of the cowshed had been left wide open, had decided for some good reason of his own upon a different means of exit. He set his brow against the wooden wall and pushed.

I know that this is what happened because at that precise moment I chanced to come out into the yard to see his head emerging through the cowshed wall, just as a circus dog jumps through a paper hoop. With a splintering crash his body followed while pieces of stout timber and planking flew in all directions. He lumbered off into the nearest field, called the Railway Ground, which had a heavy green-fodder crop of oats and vetches, and stood there belly-deep in the stuff, a few yards inside the gate.

Before I could move, Gladwyn arrived back from his breakfast, cycling into the yard. Catching sight of Ben staring owlishly at him, he did not dismount but with wild cries of Welsh anger rode straight into the field as if
to ram the great black barrel of a bull and fell off.

Alarmed by the sudden and noisy appearance of this human torpedo, Ben started off up the hill at a ponderous gallop, smashing his way through the tangle of oats and vetches, while Gladwyn, cursing horribly, struggled through them in a vain attempt to cut him off.

I was laughing so much that I couldn't do anything but managed to dash the tears from my eyes in time to witness a wonderful scene. I have only to shut them to summon it up now.

Ben had reached the public footpath, and he turned to gallop along it, directly across my field of vision. And because the path ran along the crown of the farm, making a near horizon, the picture was in stark silhouette against the morning sky.

Fit and furious and free now of the entangling crop, Gladwyn closed rapidly on the fat and flagging Ben. Halfway across he was near enough to grasp the tail of the bull and throw his weight against it, like the anchorman in a tug-of-war team. And by the time that a hedge cut them off from my sight, Ben was down to a trot.

Pulling myself together, I found the bull pole and began to run across the paddock to find them, only to see, now walking towards me, the heaving, blowing figure of a breathless Ben meekly following a panting Gladwyn.

“D'you want me to put him on the pole?”

“Darw, boyo, the silly old bugger don't need no pole, see. He's run out of puff, silly old sod. Look here.” And I could see that Gladwyn had just one finger, the little one, hooked through Ben's nose ring.

Ben's story has a happy ending. When I decided to dispense with him, I felt strongly that I would like him to go to a really good home. And suddenly I thought, Of course! Tytherington! That'd be the life for him.

So I wrote to my old master there, and he was perfectly agreeable, either for old times' sake or, more probably, because I was asking too modest a price.

And for many years afterwards, I like to think, for he was only a youngster, the gleaming satiny black shape of Ben-the-bull roamed the rolling downlands with his many-colored heifers and passed on to hundreds of sons and daughters his quiet and amiable ways.

A
s well as cow keeping, we began pig keeping. The poor old pig, linked always with gluttony, obesity, and squalor. As greedy as… as fat as… as dirty as… In fact, pigs are very like us. Their digestive systems are almost identical to ours, they are omnivorous as we are, and they very much enjoy their food as we do. They are also intelligent, strong-willed, and of an independent nature, all gifts we admire in ourselves. We can hardly blame them for fatness and greed, since we have bred and
fed them for just such qualities, licking our lips with an anticipation that is almost cannibal as we lean upon the wall of a sty and look down upon these creatures that so nearly resemble us.

As for being dirty (by which we mean not just muddy but incontinent), given half a chance there is no cleaner animal on the farm. Humans, once out of diapers, pride themselves on confining their excretions to a particular spot, as opposed to the random discharge of cattle or sheep or poultry; and they instruct the dogs and cats that share their houses to respect that privilege. But without any training the pig from an early age will use a lavatory only if he is given one.

As for intelligence, when next you get a chance, look closely into a pig's eye. The expression in the eye of a dog is trusting, of a cat supercilious, of a cow ruminative, of a sheep vacuous. But the look in the eye of a pig is, quite simply, knowing. Other beasts think, This human is looking at me. The pig thinks, I am looking at this human. There is all the difference in the world.

My pig keeping could best be described as amateurish with flashes of professionalism. The pigs suffered more than the other livestock from my love of trying to do things on the cheap. For example, I fed my store pigs large amounts of
swill, cooked swill that arrived weekly in great steaming drums, filled with waste food of every imaginable kind, including on two occasions whole boiled cats. These had presumably fallen into the vats from some overhead mousing walkway and been cooked. The pigs chomped them up with gusto. They seemed to love swill. But they fattened rather slowly.

At Woodlands Farm we converted the old barn into a modest piggery, dividing the floor space with walls into a narrow feeding passage at the front, four roomy sties through the middle, and at the back a dung passage running the whole length and divided by a system of doors so that each sty had its own latrine. Mucking out was a simple matter of shoveling, brushing, and hosing down the dung passage, which forty pigs had meticulously used. The sties themselves would be spotless.

The conversion of the barn was a sensible enough idea: a good investment and well designed. The same could not be said of the housing that I provided for the sows to farrow outside. Most people would have invested in good, strong, weatherproof huts built for the purpose, with stout floors and farrowing rails, and skids and proper linkage for easy moving. Not I, I bought a job lot of old fowl houses. I removed the perches but left the nest boxes on as an escape area for piglets at risk of being overlaid. I also took
the wheels off and thus lowered the ancient structures to the ground, having just enough wit to realize that otherwise a 350-pound sow would go straight through the floor.

When we came to move the first of them to fresh ground, in a field aptly named the Wilderness, we hooked a chain onto it and pulled merrily away with the tractor. Whereupon the whole thing fell to pieces like a pack of cards. Later movings were nervous occasions, each hen-house tied up with rope like a giant parcel. Gladwyn and I would proceed with the utmost caution, one driving the Ferguson at snail's pace, the other monitoring progress with anxious shouts of “Hold it! She's twisting!” or “Steady! The floor's going!”

There was, however, one successful economy, the fencing of the Wood. This three-acre block of humps and hollows covered with a tangle of trees and undergrowth was useless for any other purpose. It would be ideal, I thought, to run pigs in. For shelter there were two good brick-built Nissen huts, in which the Home Guard had once stored their ammunition. There were many oak trees, whose acorns in due season would be gratefully received. And there would be no need to ring the pigs, for they could root away to their hearts' content. True, there was no drinking water laid on, but that was easily solved — an old bath at the nearest point to the tap and a length of
hose. Why spend money on a proper field tank and piping? No need even for feeding troughs. Take a bag of pignuts and throw them on the ground.

The only problem was one of containment. The perimeter of the Wood was perhaps 600 yards, of which 100 were walled. So I should need 500 yards of pig wire, a formidable outlay. And in practical terms, though the pigs would be unable to get through or over it, how could I be certain that they wouldn't squeeze under it? Somewhere, especially on such rough and steep ground, someone would find or force a way beneath the bottom strand, and the thought of three or four dozen pigs making their way to Bristol or Chipping Sodbury was nightmarish. Any fence must be pigproof or I should never sleep easy.

I went to the sawmills. “

Coffin boards,” said the sawyer. “It's coffin boards you want.”

“Coffin boards?”

“Like these.” And he showed me a stack of them, long slices of elm an inch or so thick and six feet in length. “Not good enough for the undertaker, these ones. Got a split or a shake or a knothole in them. Ideal for your job.”

“But they're only two foot high. Any pig'd get over them.”

“Ah, for the base to your fence, I do mean, young man.
Set them well down flush to the ground with a stake driven against them either end, and then all you do want is a bit of wire on top of 'em.”

And that way it wouldn't need to be so high, I thought, so I bought not 500 but 250 yards of pig wire and Gladwyn and I solemnly cut it all in half longwise.

And then round the Wood we went with our stakes and our coffin boards and our foreshortened wire. And over the years hundreds of pigs lived there happily, and not one ever escaped.

This kind of success story was not the general rule. Take my dealings with dealers. Later, in the heyday of the Woodlands pigs when I was running ten sows with my own boar and producing at least 150 weaners a year, there were plenty to fill the sties and a surplus to sell. But in the first days, when the only pig on the place was a large white gilt called Molly that I had bought from the farm attached to a local lunatic asylum, I had to buy “slips”' eight-to ten-week-old youngsters, just off the sow. I knew the sort of
pig I wanted to buy and I knew the sort of price I wanted to pay, and even now it amazes me how seldom the two coincided.

What a joy I must have been to Mr. Hamper.

Mr. Hamper was distinguishable from his larger pigs by virtue of wearing clothes and standing on his hind legs. Even then his face was so porcine that it was almost a surprise to see hands rather than trotters protruding from the sleeves of his ancient dust coat. Above his several chins, thick lips that half hid yellowish tusks were topped by a squashed nose whose nostrils pointed forward like the mouth of an aimed shotgun. His cheeks hung pendulous, his little eyes glinted, and he always wore, perhaps to conceal huge hairy ears, a woolen hat like a giant's tea cozy.

Behind Mr. Hamper's house was a yard flanked by a range of a dozen brick-built pigsties, in the nearest of which my trading with him always began, since he used the inner part of it as an office. Or perhaps he lived there, for whenever I knocked on the door of his house and it was opened to me by Mrs. Hamper (a gaunt, ratty woman), the exchange would be the same…

“Oh, good morning. Is Mr. '”1

“Round the back.”

And round the back I would go, across the yard, into the first sty, and duck low beneath the doorway to find
Mr. Hamper inside, in a sitting position. Somewhere underneath him, that is to say, there was a long-suffering chair, but his bulk overflowed and concealed it. The only other furniture in this sparsest of business premises was a rickety table upon which stood two thick pint glasses and a fat black bottle. Here the conversation was also standard, regardless of the time of day.

“You'll take a drink, young man?”