Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (34 page)

Sophie lives in Norfolk and she's cooked for Charlie and me at every occasion in our married life when we have reckoned we
can't cope. Our wedding, our birthday parties, our big parties which are just for the hell of it. The dogs are devoted to
her and greet her when she arrives like a long-lost relative. My stepson-in-Iaw, Charlie, husband of Miranda who is David
Leitch's eldest child, has arrived to take photographs of the pigs and the garden and the preparations. Miranda and her two
children, Fen and Jessie, are due to arrive tomorrow, when Daisy is also coming in on the morning train.

As the sun sets into a vivid red and pink work of art beyond the vegetable garden, I feel a rare sense of comfort and ease.
We've been at the Dairy House for just under four years and the coming weekend feels like a celebration of all that Charlie
and I have made together here. I walk round the garden, conscious of its loveliness in the fading light, the scent of roses
heavy in the hot night air. In the wood, a lone green woodpecker is still hammering away in a branch above my head. The old
oak by the pond is silhouetted against the coming night, the five-foot bamboo wind-chimes that hang from one of its branches
still and quiet. Somewhere an owl hoots and another answers back. I sit down on the bench by the oak, leaning back against
its gnarled trunk, and watch the still water of the pond grow steadily blacker as the light leaches from the sky. In the undergrowth
beside me I can hear the rustling of some small creatures of the night, and out in the fields a cow is lowing. I look out
across the pond towards the park, where the oaks are slowly being swallowed up in the darkness, their shapes becoming increasingly
indistinct until they are just a blacker part of the blackness. It would have looked the same to someone sitting under this
oak tree for the last few hundred years, the continuity of nature which feeds and nourishes the soul. The owls start hooting
again, several of them this time, calling and answering each other, their eerie cries carrying through the stillness. I imagine
them swooping down through the darkness to find mice or frogs or other small creatures who haven't managed to get home in
time. In East Anglia an old chimney stack was recently opened for the first time since it had been capped in 1913. Barn owl
droppings revealed an exotic and varied diet: bats, water shrews, dormice and weasels, bits of frogs, swallows, yellowhammers
and a great many different insects. Then the darkness is broken by the lights of Charlie's Land Rover travelling through the
park and within minutes the dogs are racing noisily through the garden, barking wildly as they charge through the flower-beds.

Fat-Boy wakes us up at five o'clock, leaping on to our bed and lying down above the pillows, more or less on top of our heads.
It's a position he favours, since, once
in situ,
he is impossible to ignore. I heave him off but he keeps padding around the bedroom, sticking his nose into my face, until
I have to get up, kick him out of the bedroom and shut the door. The reason for his early morning energy is apparent as soon
as we get up. The previous afternoon, Mr Bonner delivered eight chickens, two small truckles of Cheddar and a whole Somerset
Brie for our lunch party. They have all been stored in the spare fridge outside in the shed, but dear Mr B also included a
whole Cheddar, 56 lbs of it, a magnificent circular wedge covered in cheesecloth, yellowed and stained from the fat which
seeps from the cheese. He sent it along as a loan which he thinks we might like to display on the table. The unexpected gift
has been placed on the floor of the back kitchen, well sealed in a brown cardboard box. It was too heavy to move on to a shelf,
so I left it there when I went to bed. But I forgot about Fat-Boy. Overnight, he's bitten his way into the box, ripped a hole
through the tough cheesecloth and eaten a large circular chunk out of the cheese. Charlie is less than amused and he sets
off to town to tell Mr B of the disaster that has befallen his cheese, which, we reckon, would have cost over £400. Fat-Boy
goes too, sitting in the back, looking terribly pleased with life. I set off to Montacute with Dennis, the back of the van
full to the roof with herbs and flowering plants, brown bags of beans, peas and beetroot, bunches of freshly picked carrots
with long green feathery stalks, herb biscuits in small clear bags, and recipe leaflets jammed in wherever there is a spare
inch.

The incident with the cheese has made us late, and by the time we arrive at the market it is already full of stallholders
setting up their wares under green-and-white-striped umbrellas. The sun is beating down on the old stable yard as Dennis,
who's recently had a hip replacement, and I, with my limp, start carting trays of herbs and plants across the cobbles towards
our stand. Our second disaster of the morning: we've forgotten to load the trestle and have to borrow a small table from the
National Trust. We can't fit much on it, just half a dozen herbs, four boxes of eggs, a small pile of recipe booklets, a selection
of sweet herb biscuits and a dish of herb dip with some cracked biscuits. We arrange the trays of flowering white daisies
and purple osteospermums, chives, parsley, rosemary, basil, sage, oregano, thyme, coriander and chervil on the ground around
us. When we've finished, I walk back to the archway to inspect our efforts. The stall looks good and inviting, a leafy contrast
to the tables bearing rows of jams and honey, cheeses, pies and tarts and cakes, or the mobile ice­trays full of pork or lamb
or water buffalo, or the table groaning with handmade chocolates which is next to the one selling fish from Bridport. The
edible samples smell delicious: scallop shells full of prawns, slivers of squid in oil and smoked trout pate, chunks of black,
bitter chocolate, little wedges of ewes' milk cheese, squares of stoneground brown bread spread with local organic butter,
slices of hot sausage flavoured with apple, leek and herbs, crispy bacon which you can skewer on a toothpick, broken water
biscuits to dip in jars of strawberry and raspberry jams.

As we wait for the market to open I walk round the stalls, saying hello to the stallholders I've come to know over the summer:
Sue and Keith Warrington, Andrew Moore and his wife Lavinia, and Tanya with her wonderful display of fresh bread and croissants,
as well as the organiser, Elaine Spencer­White. At the water buffalo stand, the whiskered butcher tells me that they expect
to take over £1,000 by lunchtime. Then it is ten o'clock and a sudden rush of people surge through the archway into the stable
yard, falling on the food stalls with the sort of voracity normally reserved for the first day of the post­Christmas sales.
Supermarkets might dominate our retail world, but for the first hour of that Saturday morning I reckon any retailer would
have been pleased to be there, as money briskly changes hands and food is eagerly stashed away in shopping bags. By providing
people with trolleys, supermarkets ensure that people usually buy more than they actually need and I reckon that if there'd
been trolleys at Montacute the stalls would have sold out of food within the hour.

Business on our stall is intermittent. Despite my certainty that snacks would boost our income, our piles of biscuits are
only rarely sampled and hardly ever seem to translate into a purchase. Dennis and I shelter from the heat and bright light
under our stripy umbrella and drink tepid water out of plastic bottles. I ask him if he and Anne are worried that David is
overworking and he laughs and shakes his head. 'He's tired, but he's always wanted to do something like this.' David is their
eldest child, born in 1968, eighteen years after Dennis and Anne married. They met as teenagers, when Anne lived in Dinnington
and Dennis in the nearby village of Kington. Anne and her sisters would bicycle to Dinnington to catch the bus to Taunton
on a Saturday afternoon to go shopping. Dennis and his mates would whistle at the three long-legged blondes as they cycled
by. Their first date was a walk around the village. They married when she was nineteen and Dennis was twenty. Dennis's job
as a cowman, and Anne's looking after the calves, meant six-and-a-half days' work a week, including weekends, bank holidays,
Christmas Day and Boxing Day. His first job in the early 1960s paid £12 per week; his second, towards the end of the decade,
paid £22. The days would start with bringing seventy cows in from the field, milking them, turning them out again, trimming
feet, performing artificial insemination, cleaning and washing the milking parlour, hauling the churns out on to the roadside
stand for the delivery lorries. They lived on the farms where they worked so they'd go home for breakfast and home again for
lunch. Then in the afternoon the process would be repeated. 'You worked until the work was done,' he says ruefully. By eleven-thirty,
I'm feeling exhausted. Dennis, by contrast, is chipper and engaged.

A couple dragging two thirteen-week-old Labrador puppies on leads stop to buy three rosemary plants and a white daisy. The
dogs are soft and cuddly, their coats hanging loose on their bodies, just waiting to be grown into, and it reminds me that
before Fat-Boy became an advanced eating machine he cost us hundreds of pounds in ruined shoes, chewed table legs and all
the knobs on the lower drawers of a small chest of drawers which we keep cutlery in. The puppies, collapsed on the cobbles
and panting from the heat, look incapable of any crime.

Dennis and I make £136.50 in four hours, far less than Sue Warrington with her jams and tarts and cakes and far less than
Sue Tutton and her Gloucester Old Spot sausages and burgers. But, on our modest financial scale, it isn't a bad result. Back
at home, the village fete is, if not exactly in full swing, at least jostling along merrily. I am pleased to see that myoId
black coat with the mink collar has been sold for a tenner. The coat was left behind in the vast cold store beneath Harrods
where customers used to pay to store their furs through the summer months to stop the fur from moulting. The fur fridge was
in operation for over a hundred years, until one day seven years ago Mohammed Al Fayed decided to stop selling fur in the
store and to close down the store room beneath. Coat owners were contacted to come and retrieve their wares but, several months
later, Al Fayed was left with about thirty furs in various stages of decrepitude and he handed them out to anyone who came
by to visit. I went for lunch with him and he thrust three coats into my arms as I was leaving. They were strangely cut and
looked awful. Two were long gone, consigned to the charity store in Westbourne Grove, but the third, which I had worn occasionally,
hung on in my wardrobe for years, gathering dust and gradually moulting. I didn't see who had bought it but I wonder if I'll
see it around town in the coming winter.

Charlie is doing a brisk trade in raffle tickets and Sophie is serving cream teas with scones and strawberry jam. The bric-a-brac
stall, manned by Barbara and Steve and our friend Gillie, is overloaded with the unwanted contents of drawers and cupboards
and shelves. There are a pair of green chintz curtains patterned with pink roses, three rolls of white embossed wallpaper,
a pair of brass oak-leaf candle-holders, a cream and white wedding hat, a set of Henna Body Art, a thousand-piece jigsaw of
the Houses of Parliament still in its plastic wrapper, a watercolour of St Margaret's Bay, Kent, painted by Linnie Watt in
1879, a wine rack, a relaxation bath pillow, a pair of bedside lamps with white shades covered in yellow roses, and two electric
hand-mixers with a pictures of Antony Worrall Thompson on the side. The contents of the tables have the same unexpected intimacy
that comes from seeing the faded wallpaper of a stranger's bedroom suddenly exposed after a building has been ripped apart
by bomb blast.

Daisy has arrived from London while I've been at Montacute and she and her friend Rowland have organised a game of cricket
with Miranda's two children, Fen and Jessie (Daisy's niece and nephew), and some other children whose parents have dragged
them along to the fete. David has corralled two pigs, a young saddleback and an older Gloucester, behind a wooden gate in
our garage and Joss is busy selling tickets to the 'guess the weight of the pig' competition.

I'd wanted to bring the Empress over to the garage so, like her namesake, she could star in a fat pigs event, but she is now
too
fat to be moved in the small trailer, so smaller pigs were called up for duty. Four people ask Sophie if we're not leaving
it a bit late in the day to kill the Gloucester ready for the evening's hog roast, which, as she says, just goes to show that
even in the heart of the country, people know astonishingly little about how food gets to their plates.

It isn't the hottest day of June, but out in the full glare of the sun the temperature is in the mid-eighties and our wood garden
becomes a welcome retreat from the glare. In
the three years since we first hacked out the brambles, cut down the trees that were crowding too close and built the paths
and the pond, nature has reasserted herself and the dense greenness of it all is like a plunge into cool water, the foliage
muffling and muting any noise. The willow house looks slightly crazy, with the springy leaves clustering towards the light
on the top of the house, leaving bare branches down below, but the plants round the pond, the gunneras, the twisted willow,
the marsh marigolds, the wild irises, with their soft blue petals marbled with delicate black veins, and the smaller marsh
primulas all look like they have been growing there for years. There are ferns, which unfold their curled-up tips every spring,
there is an Indian bean tree whose autumn flowers smell like lily-of-the-valley, there are some spiky dark-green hollies,
red-stalked brambles, day lilies in huge clumps and hostas in their myriad shades of green. The sunlight filters through the
trees, casting shadows and reflecting off the pond. It is amazing how the plants are growing to fill the spaces between the
trees, forming their own complicated patchwork on the ground. In a few years, the shrubs and small trees will reach upward
to fill in the air beneath the overhead canopy. Here there are no straight lines: the paths bend and weave, the outline of the
pond is the sort of wobbly circle a child might draw and the great big chairs made out of tree trunks are rough and misshapen.
But it is lovely and it's our creation, something we've watched grow and change, seeing how the light plays along the edges
of the trees, never the same at any hour of the day. Standing in the wood, looking out at the park, where some twenty people
are eating cream teas sitting at trestle tables, it feels like being underwater, the bright intense light mercifully out of
reach.