Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (25 page)

We find two seats about six rows from the front. To the left of the altar, a six-foot-high cross has been painstakingly covered
with spring flowers: daffodils, tulips, primroses, camellias, hyacinths, primulas and scillas, its fragile beauty bursting
with colour. For over a thousand years Wells Cathedral has been a great centre of Christianity, but its importance has always
been overshadowed by Glastonbury. No mythical king ever strode through its doorways and it lacks the legends that have sustained
and taken Glastonbury into the realm of the spiritual, divorced from its Christian beginnings. Yet Wells is without doubt
one of the finest cathedrals in England. It is small and set at the far end of a green which is surrounded by pretty houses.
On a clear blue day, its eastern facade stands against the sky, the gargoyles and sculpted scenes as elaborate as anything
you would find in an Italian city where tour buses would deposit their cargo all summer long. But Wells, sitting on the edge
of its small market town, with only a few hundred yards separating the great front door and the open fields and the start
of the footpath to Glastonbury, just seven miles away across the Levels, is spared the crowds. Charlie and I once spent a
night here in winter and after dinner we walked around the cathedral green in the moonlight, the only people there to appreciate
its powerful beauty.

I think I am like many people, perplexed by belief but disturbed that so many dismiss faith with secular cynicism: the towering
edifice of Wells has been for centuries the recipient of the prayers, hopes, sadnesses and joy of countless people, and it
is hard to feel wholly cynical in the presence of such permanence. Now faith is being abused by fanatics of all persuasions
who argue that their faith is guiding them towards war, punishment and repression. Sitting in the magnificent knave, the curved
arches reaching above me, I find myself remembering a man I met in the early 1990's called Steve. Steve was in his sixties,
with two gold teeth which twinkled in his wrinkly, smiling face. It was shortly after MandeIa's release from prison and Steve
had defected to the ANC from the South African police force. He had been in charge of a little-known unit and his job was
to eliminate ANC dissidents and troublemakers who the authorities wanted out of the way. His team of three, himself and two
black special constables, would kidnap and murder on demand, driving their victims into the hinterlands to the north of Johannesburg
and burning their bodies to destroy the evidence. He told me that they had special songs which they sang as they watched the
bodies burn, drinking themselves into a stupor as the flames went to work. I felt transfixed with horror that this man should
be sitting at my dining-room table. Steve touched my hand: 'I did this because I believed this was right. That God had told
me so. No one ever went to war believing they were on the side of evil.' I know my father went to war and killed German soldiers,
confident of his belief, but when belief is used to justify cruelty, it is no wonder that we become so cynical of religions'
deepest goals.

It is easy to dismiss the church and say that it no longer matters, but I believe that it does.
In
Wells this morning, on the long pew beside us, is a family with young children, the youngsters turning the pages of picture
books. Behind us and in front of us are old people, middle-aged people, teenagers in jeans. The message is simple. It is for
peace, for love of one's neighbour, for a moment of calm within the relentless stream of modern life. There is nothing here
for anyone to quarrel with. Like it or not, the Christian story is the one that I and so many have grown up with. Christmas
and Easter might nowadays represent nothing much more than a few days off work and a chance to shop even more extravagantly
than usual, but the Christian year is embedded in all our lives. It is estimated that this year we spent £10.5 billion over
the four­day Easter break, a record burst of consumerism, but I know that I certainly have a hankering for something over
and above spending and acquiring, and that I am increasingly drawn towards the mysterious and the unknown, towards something
that will forge a reconnection with a narrative that links my life into the great human quest for social justice, fairness
and equality. If we reduce the world to just the bare bones of stuff, of rationality and of materialism, we deny that part
of ourselves that is capable of rising a little higher, of yearning to be at one with something that money can't buy, and
if we forget that, or say that it doesn't matter, then any chance of forging a better world is gone. We do not need to believe
in God to care about the human condition or to believe that there is something in this world which transcends materialism
or to believe that our lives are a journey in which we can strive to make moral progress. I do not know if we evolved a need
for religion, or if there is a religious gene, as some scientists attest, but faith is stubborn and our need for it so primeval
that no amount of shopping malls will ever replace it.

The service opens with the hymn 'Jesus Lives', followed by a sung psalm and then the first reading from the Old Testament,
from the book of Genesis, which tells the biblical version of creation. Creationists tell us that this, indeed, is how the
world was formed and they are rubbished in turn by devotees of Darwinism, who say that we all evolved in a random fashion,
with the fittest being the long-term survivors. Clearly the world was not made in seven days, as the creationists believe,
but I have never understood why a belief in some kind of god, a god of one's own understanding, is incompatible with evolution.
Creationists like to challenge evolutionists about missing links, attesting that as we do not fully know how worms evolved
to be human beings, this therefore implies the presence of a creator. I'm with the scientists here: in time and with diligence,
we will discover all those missing links and our progress from single-celled life to fully evolved human being will be understood
in all its minutiae. But what evolution doesn't answer is what started it all off in the first place, what kicked off the
big bang which led to life on earth. Evolution doesn't, and I think cannot, explain that, and neither can it explain our need
for beauty, for love, for human emotions. The fact that God can't be explained in any way that makes satisfactory scientific
sense doesn't mean he doesn't exist.

But religion has a lot to answer for, not least in an environmental respect. The reading from Genesis tells us that God said,
'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the
livestock, over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground.' In Christian theology, humans were given
carte blanche
to rule the planet; indeed, it was stated that it was God's will that we should bring nature under control. But as our population
has increased and our technological skills have advanced we have become a rogue species, dominating all others, convinced
by our own righteousness. Until recently, humanity had evolved happily within living communities, all profoundly interdependent
on one another. The natural world was our kin; maybe this is why we find it so restorative today. We need to rediscover this
interdependence, and this involves learning to live lightly. The founders of Alcoholics Anonymous stressed the importance
of this. Anyone struggling to recover from addiction knows that one of the secrets of recovery is learning to take life seriously,
but not so seriously that we lose our sense of humour, wonder and fun. Living lightly means living with respect for others
around you, it means losing the crippling self-absorption that is the trademark of an addict's life and it means becoming
aware. As a species, we need to rediscover how to live lightly once again.

On Easter Monday, the piglets discover that they are small enough to squeeze under the gate, Peter Rabbit-style, which leads
out of their pen and on to the path along the side of the walled garden, where we're growing rhubarb and cut flowers. They
trot along, noses in the air, looking this way and that, full of curiosity and then, for no reason that I can ever detect,
they stop, stiffen, their ears prick up and they squeak loudly, turn round and dash back to the safety of their mother as
fast as they can, their little pink legs moving in sequence as they race along the grass. They seem to behave exactly like
Piglet, who was always in a state of alarm and agitation at real and imagined fears. When Winnie the Pooh decided that he
was going to track a Woozle, he enlisted Piglet's help. The two animals paced round and round in circles, unaware that the
tracks they kept encountering were their own. 'Suddenly Winnie the Pooh stopped, and pointed excitedly in front of him. "Look!"

'''What?'' said Piglet, with a jump. And then, to show he hadn't been frightened, he jumped up and down once or twice more
in an exercising sort of a way.'

Out in the big field, pheasants have eaten all the small new leaves of the cabbages and the broccoli. We had planted fifty
metres of each and now the plants look like shredded lace made by a bunch of drunken elves. They've left the red cabbages,
possibly considering them too bitter. There aren't many solutions to the pheasant problem: we have tried bird­control devices
which fire off blanks every few minutes but the birds seem to know instinctively that this is just a ruse. CDs or bits of
silver paper strung on lengths of string are similarly useless. Charlie's father used to have a Labrador that was so well
trained that he would sit by the growing vegetables for hours on end, provided his dad left his shooting jacket on the ground
beside him. As an anti-pheasant tactic, it is not much use for us: Fat-Boy can't sit still for a minute, let alone be entrusted
to keep watch over the cabbages. So I write a cheque for two 250 x 8-metre lengths of gauze which will cover the new plants
until they're big enough to withstand the onslaught of the pheasants. Another £334.96 to add to the bottom line, but, as David
points out, we can use it over and over again.

'This is our town and we love it. Mark my words, it is going to change.' On the Tuesday after Easter, Bryan Ferris is standing
in front of a crowd of almost one hundred in the Ilminster Parish Hall, making his last-ditch attempt to garner enough support
to force the council to reconsider the planned one-way system. He, Mike Fry-Foley and Mr B have set up stands around the room
which show in detail what the proposed routing will do to the town, in particular to the shopkeepers of Silver Street. 'If
we don't have a commercial heart to the town, we have nothing,' he says. Mandi and Graham Bulgin, owners and proprietors of'Allo
'Allo taxis, look gloomily at the maps. 'From May 1st the Somerset County Council is making it compulsory for all taxis to
have meters,' Graham says. 'This route change is going to add £3.50 to a fare for someone coming from the south who wants
to get to the north or east side of Ilminster. There won't be any point in us having a taxi rank in the square, so we'll just
be available by phone.'

The Parish Hall stands at the top of North Street: it's a large stone building with scuffed wooden floors and a stage at its
southern end. It's the biggest meeting place in Ilminster. Three town councillors are present and, once everyone has studied
the road plans, Bryan asks them if they want to speak. 'We'll keep our powder dry and listen,' says Mike Henley, who had been
so dismissive of Bryan at the meeting the week before. Bryan and Mike then invite the townsfolk to come up to the microphone
and share their views of the one-way system.

'I'm a member of the Ilminster First Response Unit,' says Steve Mayor, owner of the Dolls' House shop in East Street, 'and
we pick up 999 calls and go to help. We often arrive well before the ambulance. But the local ambulance is usually parked
in Chard and the one-way system will add eight minutes to the journey. That could be a matter of life and death.'

Deirdre Cargen, proprietor of Bishop's Funeral Services in Chard, says that she hopes to open an office in Ilminster and she
wants to warn the town about the effect Tesco might have. 'I've watched Chard go downhill: it's a beaten place now. Even though
Tesco agreed not to sell various things, they do. Take pot plants. When they won the contract to open in Chard, they agreed
never to sell them. But on the day before Mother's Day the store was full of pot plants. The same happens at Christmas. They
take them away before anyone has a chance to complain. Ilminister is a lovely little town. I don't want it to go the same
way.'