Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (19 page)

The new one-way system was authorised by the council following the decision to build the supermarket. It will divert traffic
around the town and away from Silver Street, where all the independent shops are located: Bryan's garden shop, Mr Bonner's
butcher's shop, the greengrocer's, the chemist, the cheese shop, the bookstore, all the shops that give Ilminster its character
and vitality. A further blow to the town traders is the council decision to allow the supermarket to build on the site of
the existing car park which means moving the car park out eastwards into an area which, at the moment, is a field. 'To get
to Mr Bonner's,' says Mike, 'you're going to have to walk over half a mile.' The new road system, which the road department
are insisting on for reasons of safety, will turn a journey that at the moment is about two hundred yards, into one of over
a mile. For Bryan and Elizabeth, Aaron Driver, Mr B, John and Mary Rendell and others along Silver Street, it's like having
a heart by-pass.

'Of course, there's another alternative road scheme,' says Bryan. 'We've proposed it and this is what we need David Laws to
help us with.'

'Three thousand people in Ilminster have signed a petition objecting to the traffic scheme,' added Mike, who knows that Ilminster's
market town diversity is so attractive to his guests. 'This is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.'

Bryan has another worry. While building works are going on, spaces in the existing car park will be reduced from 160 to sixty.
He's been checking the car park every few hours, counting the actual number of cars parked there at any time. It's rarely
under ninety. In their memo to David Laws, Mike and Bryan write that 'there can be no doubt that the road plans and proposed
car park layout are designed exclusively for the benefit of the superstore and to the detriment of the rest of the town. A
look at the plans and time spent "walking the job" will demonstrate this. We see no malice here, only lack of detailed thought:
no consultation; incompetence and an "it's not important" attitude.'

'We know the superstore is coming: we just want a level playing field to fight it from,' Brian says, adding that he's recently
heard from a retailer in Tiverton who has told him that, since major traffic deployment schemes following the opening of a
Tesco superstore, his turnover has declined to the point that the outlet is no longer profitable and remains open only because
it can - for the moment - be bailed out by his other outlets. If you have only one outlet, like Bryan and Elizabeth, this
option is not available.

Bryan and Elizabeth used to have another shop in Wellington, which Bryan looked after while Elizabeth took care of the Silver
Street store. But a couple of years ago they had to close it down and consolidate their resources in the one shop. The development
of the superstore might bring more people into the town, but they will be dedicated supermarket shoppers who, after spending
one and a half hours filling up their trolleys with frozen meals and chilled food and then pushing their groceries back to
their cars to unload, won't then set off back past the store and into town. Bryan's right: the way the scheme is planned,
it will mean only loss of business for the existing shops.

Fat-Boy's constant quest for food often goes badly wrong. We left a bag of rice out on the table in the kitchen overnight.
It was half full and I'd rolled down the cellophane and secured the bag with an elastic band. Fattie nicked it off the kitchen
counter, his teeth puncturing the thin transparent bag. When I come down in the morning there's a trail of rice leading out
of the kitchen, along the corridor and into the sitting-room, where he's abandoned what's left of the bag beside the fireplace.
He's really been after the leftover pheasant bones, which had been boiling on the stove the previous evening, but the saucepan,
with the lid firmly on, had been placed well out of his reach so he's settled for stealing the rice. It's the end of the shooting
season and Mr B is selling a brace of pheasants for as little as £2.50. There are so many round here that I realise I take
their exotic gorgeousness for granted. Their lives, though, are tragic. Deliberately introduced here from a faraway habitat,
they're mostly raised in captivity then released into the wild, knowing nothing about how to survive, only to be shot or squashed
under car wheels after wandering unwittingly on to the road. Pheasants were first brought to Britain by the Romans, but these
early birds were kept in pens and never went native. A thousand years later, the Normans brought in a new strain, with the
white neck ring. These adaptable birds naturalised well in the woods and grasslands of Britain. At my cousins' farm, many
of hedges were planted as 'doubles' in Victorian times: two hedges separated by a gap of some fifteen feet, where trees and
brambles were allowed to grow wild. Doubles were designed with pheasants in mind, providing safe corridors for them to live
and nest in. Victorian gamekeepers would be under instruction to shoot anything that might eat pheasant eggs, young chicks
or the birds themselves: badgers, foxes, weasels, stoats. But in the 1920's, when the Depression began, money ran out and the
pheasant population, quite unable to fend for themselves, was decimated. Wartime followed and, after the war, estates were
too expensive to keep up, which further reduced pheasant numbers. It wasn't until the financial boom of the 1980s that estates
began intensive breeding programmes again, rearing the birds in coops and releasing them on demand into the line of the guns.
In the name of sport, twenty million pheasants are bred every year across the English countryside. As Ander says, it's a heartless
business. They don't like to fly and they often get winged by city gents who don't shoot straight; then they're left as prey
for the foxes and badgers.

My father used to shoot, primarily, he always said, because he liked the walking and the company. But after he turned seventy-five
he stopped, saying that he no longer wanted to kill anything. As he aged he grew more vociferous about his love of the countryside,
and his view of what human beings were doing to it became increasingly savage. His main anxiety was population growth, and
as Alzheimer's slowly ate into his brain this turned into an obsession. When I became the editor of the
Daily Express,
Dad's first suggestion was that I should publish a whole page every day showing on a graph how much the world's population
had grown in the previous twenty-four hours. When I pointed out that this would be an extravagant use of limited space, he'd
jab his finger at a page of advertisements for cheap TVs or low-cost flights and instruct me to 'dump this silly rubbish'.
As his inhibitions faded along with his memory, he would work himself up into explosive fury about the fate that would soon
befall the planet, all because people spent too much time fucking! It was bizarre and uncomfortable to hear such an obscenity
from my father, a previously fastidious and impeccably mannered man who would have recoiled with horror from anyone swearing
like that.

My sister and I would endure his outbursts as best we could and it was only after he died, in the autumn of 2003 at the age
of eighty-seven, that I was able to see the truth of what he feared. Until some populations started reducing in size, the
world was on a terrifying trajectory. In AD I, when Christ was born, there were between 100 million and 300 million on the
earth. By 1500 there were 500 million. By 1825, one billion. By 1927, two billion. By 1960, three billion, by 1975, four billion.
By Millennium Eve - which my father spent with Charlie and me, Daisy, my sister and her family and cousin Ander, watching
fireworks from the offices of the
Daily Express
overlooking the Thames at Blackfriars - the world's population had reached six billion. Unchecked, that rate of population
expansion would have meant sixteen billion people on the earth by the middle of this century, a completely unsustainable number.
But, in fact, due to falling birth rates across the world, population experts now estimate that the world's numbers will level
off between nine and eleven billion by 2050.

Charlie's family is a good example of falling birth rates. His maternal grandmother gave birth to twenty-two children, born
between 1893 and 1916. There were two sets of triplets who all died, three sets of twins, one of whom survived, and seven
others who grew to adulthood, his mother, Naida, being the youngest. His grandmother was called Rose Guest and when she'd
come to the end of her years of breeding she set about planning her exit from her marriage. As the Depression deepened in
the twenties, her husband Henry, a West Country cattle drover, transferred a sizeable amount of his company assets into his
wife's name, in order to safeguard himself in the possible event of bankruptcy. Rose took the money and moved into the Clarence
Hotel in Weston-super-Mare, from where she oversaw the building of a four-bedroom Regency villa, equipped with two bathrooms
and all mod cons. Charlie has only eight cousins, a case of dwindling returns on Rose and Henry's original investment in procreation.

My father would not have been persuaded by their example. Nine billion people are still far too many for our planet to sustain
comfortably. Most of the money I have invested in the farm came from the legacy I inherited from my father and I like to think
that he would have been pleased with what we are doing, delighted by the pigs and the plants and our small attempt to put
something back into the natural order of the world.

8

The Swallows Return

The last Saturday in March, a week before the official first day of spring on 1 April, turns into one of the worst days we've
yet had on the farm. It isn't just because of what actually happens, although things do happen; it is also because the things
that do happen bring me face to face with a whole slew of problems which I've been shoving under the carpet and refusing to
acknowledge.

Mildred doesn't survive her fall into the duck pond: she shivers through one night and the following day she dies in the hen
house. George is now a lonesome turkey and all that remains of poor little Mildred is a collection of five eggs which are
awaiting their turn in the incubator. The new pigs have all settled in: Earl and the Empress are living in the caravan wood
with Boris and his three brothers. This week the vet said there is every likelihood that Boris's fertility has been affected
by his illness and by the antibiotics he's had to take, so we're going to have to bite the bullet and send Boris up the hill
when he's fat enough. One of his brothers will be kept as the Gloucester boar. I want to call him Napoleon, as he's attained
his status through another's demise, but the boars need short names which they can remember and Nappy seems very undistinguished
for a breeding pig.

Poor Boris, getting the chop after all the misery of those injections, the tea-tree oil and iodine baths, the endless scabby
skin and itchiness. Still, maybe he'll taste good, I think, as I go into Mr Bonner's expecting to see our name up on his blackboard,
advertising our pork. Nothing. And no sign of Mr B. I find his dad, Mr B senior, in the back of the shop, standing beside
the long chopping boards, expertly wielding a knife through a huge joint of beef.

'How's our pork?' I ask.

He frowns. 'Well, not very good, actually.'

'What do you mean?'

'Your pigs are too thin, there's not enough fat, and Clinton cut off a chop to cook and it was tough. And they're boars and
they're not as good. We only sell gilts . . .'

He takes down a piece of meat that is hanging off a metal hook above his head. 'Clinton kept this for you to see.' He bends
the piece of meat in his fingers: it's part lean flesh, part skin with a small layer of fat. It rolls together and, to my
ignorant eyes, looks like a nice, though not large, chunk of pork. 'See how small it is,' Mr B senior continues. 'And look
at this one.' He goes out to the main shop and returns carrying a huge rolled loin of pork in one hand and a smaller loin
in the other. The first one has a thick layer of chunky white fat running right round it; the smaller one is almost wholly
lean, the skin attaching directly to the meat. This is ours. 'We can't sell this kind of meat in a shop like ours.' He says
this in a whisper, so that the people in the queue in the main shop won't hear. I could be in the clap clinic waiting for
a test result. 'You could sell it in a supermarket, or somewhere that wasn't so particular, but it would bring us into disrepute.
We've made the rest of the pigs into sausages.'

I feel sick: it is like having an article rejected or getting the sack. Does this mean Bonners won't sell our pork any more?
I don't want to ask. Mr B senior is saying that we need to get some advice on how to rear our pigs and that we should ask
David's uncle, Mr Sainsbury, who knows all about how to fatten pigs. He suggests that I call his son when he gets back from
a short holiday in three days' time.

After apologising profusely for our substandard pork, I leave the shop and bump into Charlie, who is walking along Silver
Street towards the butcher's. I tell him what has happened and we go off to get coffee in the Meeting House at the other end
of the town. Apart from Mr Bonner, a pig is also going to Rowley Leigh, chef of Kensington Place restaurant in London, and
heaven knows what he will think of it. Clearly, we aren't going to get much money for the pigs and, even though the walled
garden is now full of seeds, at least another two or three months are going to pass when we'll still be far below the break-even
mark. For the last five months our polytunnels, which could have been producing salads, have stood largely empty, and ground
where winter vegetables such as leeks and Brussels sprouts and sorrel could have been growing has been fallow. The pork disaster
acts like a catalyst to open the floodgates of doubt. Is this all completely crazy? If David had been borrowing the money
from a real bank, rather than from a couple of ignorant townies, would he have done things differently? If Charlie and I were
borrowing the money from the bank and we'd promised the manager an injection of cash once the pigs were sold, we'd be sweating
with anxiety. It is only six days ago that we sat down in the kitchen with David, assessing our financial prospects for the
coming weeks. It looked promising: Dillington House owed us £1,100, Row­ley owed us £180, and the pigs would bring in at least
£500. That would mean almost £1,800 into the account by the end of March, and on 1 April it's the farmers' market at Mon­tacute
where we'll be running the herb stall. They expect a thousand people and, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, if they
spent 40P each we'd be doing just fine. Now, I'm revising my estimate: to make up for the pig loss we'll need to come home
with £600. I have absolutely no idea whether this is realistic or a complete pipedream. More importantly, is our eagerness
to have a farm, and to watch the pigs and chickens breed and grow, to have the sort of romantic country idyll you see in picture
books, actually preventing us from building a sustainable business?

As we set off to the bird market in Taunton, to see if we can find a female Kagyua duck and a replacement for Mildred, I am
fearing just that.

'I'm out of my depth,' Charlie says, as we drive out of Ilminster and the rain starts pattering down on the windscreen. 'I
know what makes a good vegetable, but I don't have a clue about what makes a good pig.'

The bird auction is being held in the Taunton cattle market. Trucks and trailers containing sheep, lambs, cows, sows and boars
are loading and unloading their cargo. The air is thick with the sounds of the animals, the squealing of brakes and the shouts
of the buyers and sellers. The rain is falling steadily by now, and the ground is running with the muddy yellow stains of
animal muck. The rare-breed birds are being sold in one half of the pig barns: inside it is heaving with farmers, breeders
and families with young kids out to buy a couple of fancy chickens to keep in their back gardens. Steam from wet clothes drifts
into the air. It is smelly. The auctioneers, two young guys wearing green overalls, keep up a running mumble of inaudible
words as they parade along the top of the pig pens, above the crates containing the individual chickens.

David and Josh are already there. There is no mate for our splendid blue-black Kagyua duck, only another drake, who is being
sold as 'great breeding material'. There are no turkeys at all, male or female. Standing squashed up against a cage containing
two blue buff Orpingtons, I find myself next to Darren Riggs and his two children. I ask him how much his dead pigs had weighed.
He looks pleased. 'Eighty-four and eighty-seven kilos dead weight.' Ours had weighed fifty-six, fifty-eight, sixty and sixty-four.
'It's all been sold to friends in the village and our deep freeze is bulging with the rest of it.'

'What did you feed them on?'

'Grass, organic pig nuts and old vegetable scraps from the kitchen.' No substantial difference there, but Darren's fat porkers
must have had a lot more of something than ours. I wonder if his were older, but in fact his two had gone to Snells at seven
months, slightly younger than our four. There had been a good, inch-thick layer of fat on both his pigs.

'What sex were they?' I ask.

'One of each,' he replies, raising his hand to bid for a pair of Brahmas, which a second later go for £5 more than he is willing
to pay.

'Don't boars taste different?'

'That's just an old-fashioned myth. If you eat them before they're sexually active, there's no difference. I don't know why
people still believe that.'

God, how depressing. How come Darren can rear two good pigs in his small field, and we can't? I am angry that David hasn't
seemed very perturbed about the Bonners' verdict on our meat. Charlie is angry that our polytunnels are only now being fully
planted. We are both cross that our ignorance has been exposed. It had been humiliating standing in the butcher's shop, with
old Mr B whispering so that the other customers wouldn't overhear. We walk back through the rain to where we've parked our
car, in one of the car parks of Taunton Cricket Ground, to find the gate is locked and there's no one around. It takes us
almost an hour to rescue the car and set off home.

Later that evening, I discover that we've run out of eggs. The rissoles I am making from a leftover piece of beef will fall
to pieces without an egg to bind them, so I set off with the dogs and a torch to collect some from the hen house. The farm
gate is closed and padlocked, so I climb over, leaving the dogs whining on the far side. The gate to the chicken run is padlocked
also. I stand there cursing as the light dies in the sky, the walls of the garden black above me, the geese standing out in
the darkness like large snowballs, their shapes indeterminate in the gloom. All the rescue hens and the rare breeds have gone
inside their houses; only the geese and a handful of hens are still outside, displaying a complete disregard for the foxes
and perhaps too much reliance on the powers of the electric fence. I can see the dogs silhouetted against the gate, and, as
I walk back towards them, two of the new baby saddlebacks venture out of their house to see what is going on. I turn the torchlight
on their curious little faces, their wrinkly noses twitching with interest and life. I make a silent vow that when it is their
time to go up the hill, they will be as fat as barrels. I wish we'd just killed one pig and then fed the other three till
they were fit to burst. Killing them when they weren't as good as they could be makes their death feel wasteful.

When I get home, I dig out an old copy of
Charlotte's Web,
the wonderful American children's story that I'd loved reading as a child. The porcine hero, Wilbur, was a ferocious eater,
never more so than after he became a star, thanks to the cunning of Charlotte the spider, who saves Wilbur from the knife
by writing words in her webs which Wilbur's owners believe have originated from the pig. Wilbur's meals are brought to him
in a pail and then poured into his trough. 'The slops ran creamily down around the pig's eyes and ears. Wilbur grunted. He
gulped and sucked and gulped, making swishing and swooshing noises, anxious to get everything at once. It was a delicious
meal - skim milk, wheat middlings, leftover pancakes, half a doughnut, the rind of a summer squash, two pieces of stale toast,
a third of a gingersnap, a fish tail, one orange peel, several noodles from a noodle soup, the scum off a cup of cocoa, an
ancient jelly roll, a strip of paper from the lining of the garbage pail and a spoonful of raspberry jello.' I'm cheered,
as always, by the story and decide to christen the new saddleback herd the Wilburys.

Over the weekend David talks to his uncle, who tells him that we need to double the amount the pigs are being fed. Those over
three to four months will now be getting four pounds of nuts a day and the smaller ones, two pounds. Each pig will eat about
£40 to £45 of pig nuts in its life. Then you need to add the £20 cost of 'going up the hill' and about £10 for straw and worming
tablets. So if we rear the pigs ourselves, each one will cost £70 to get to market. We can reduce that cost, and improve the
quality of the meat, by feeding them rejected vegetables and leaves, by turning them out to grass and by growing fodder beet
for the winter. Fodder beets are out of fashion now: they're too much trouble to grow in bulk, so most pigs are fed on nuts
all their lives. At my cousins' farm in Great Tew, I remember how delighted I'd
been to carve Halloween lantern faces out of the oddly shaped mangel­wurzels that Giogia and Ben grew to feed their animals.
In the days before smooth-skinned pumpkins were easily available, they were all we had.