Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (26 page)

The councillors are getting annoyed. 'This was meant to be a meeting about the road system,' shouts Mike Henley. I am sitting
next to Steve Mitchell from the picture framer's and we agree that he sounds like an arrogant windbag. 'Now you're all talking
about the supermarket. There's no debate about that. Tesco
is
coming.'

His words are greeted with loud jeers, but the next group of speakers stick to the question of the road system, raising issues
to do with parking, whether Tesco, who own the car park, will charge people who just want to use it but not shop at the store,
how the signposts will work, where the buses will stop, what will happen while the store is being built on the site of the
existing car park. It soon becomes clear that the issues have not been thought through at all.

'The one-way system didn't just happen. There's been full consultation,' interjects Mike Henley, to more raucous boos and
jeers.

'I'd like to contradict that.' The calm-voiced speaker is at the back of the hall. 'It was a split vote at the original meeting
last year and it was only pushed to a vote because the councillors wanted to get off to dinner. It was never fully discussed.
It wasn't democratic. I was there.' I look round to see if Mr Henley plans to answer, but he's gone, slipping away through
the crowd to the side exit. The atmosphere is now highly charged and excited. There is a goal towards which everyone is working
and, it seems to me, there is now a villain in the person of Councillor Henley. I get a lift home with my neighbour, Henry
Best, who used to be the regional representative for the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Henry is six-foot-six tall and
he folds himself into the driving seat of his small Ford Mondeo like a collapsible walking stick. 'It's not going to work,
they're not going to listen.' I don't want to believe him, but Henry is a wily old bird who has, over the years, worked tirelessly
to support the rural communities around the town. He's seen the closure of countless village shops, and watched what happens
in towns when supermarkets move in and, one by one the shops close down, or move away. While I concede that the supermarket
battle is lost, winning the fight over the one-way system still seems not only possible but an important victory to strive
for. It will make a difference to the shopkeepers, but it will also be a unifier for the town, making us all aware of what
we stand to lose.

The week after Easter we set up an honesty table in the front porch of Dillington House. Several hundred people go in and
out every week, taking courses, attending conferences or local council training days. Dennis has built a table to fit precisely
into one side of the porch without disturbing the passing traffic: six feet long and eighteen inches wide. In
Freako­nomics,
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's unconventional take on what makes life tick, there's a story about the economics of honesty
boxes. In Washington in the 1960s, a man named Paul Feldman was employed to analyse weapons expenditure for the US Navy. He
was a good boss and every Friday he brought in bagels and cream cheese for his staff. Employees from other departments heard
about the bagels and wanted some too.
In
time, he was bringing in fifteen dozen a week and to recoup his costs he put out a cash box and a sign with the suggested
price. His collection rate was 95 percent: he attributed the underpayment to oversight, not fraud.

In 1984, his research institute was taken over. His kids had finished college and his mortgage was paid off so he quit and
decided to sell bagels. The plan was simple. In the early morning he would drive round all the companies who had signed up
to his scheme and deliver bagels and a cash tin: at lunch he'd pick up the money and the leftovers. Within a few years he
was delivering 8,400 bagels a week to 140 companies and he was making as much money as he ever made working for the Navy.
He was also, quite unwittingly, carrying out the field research for an economic experiment into white-collar crime.

He expected to continue receiving the same 95 percent payment rate. What he didn't bargain for was that his presence in the
research unit deterred cheating and that in the real world, he had to settle for less. A company that paid above 90 percent
he considered 'honest'. Anything between 80 and 90 percent was 'annoying but tolerable' and less than 80 percent would elicit
a snappy note of complaint ending with 'I don't imagine that you would teach your children to cheat, so why do it yourself?'
He noticed several curious trends. Cheating went down immediately after
9/11.
It is more pronounced in big offices than small ones. Warm weather makes people more honest, while unseasonably cold days
make people cheat prolifically. The week before Christmas is shocking, as is Valentine's day and Thanksgiving. However, around
the Fourth of July, Labor Day and Columbus Day, people are more likely to pay up. The reason? The high-cheating holidays are
fraught with miscellaneous anxieties and the high expectations of loved ones. Feldman also concluded that people who were
happy in their work were less likely to cheat.

Wayne is optimistic: he's had experience of honesty boxes and tells me confidently that we will probably end up getting more,
not less, money. 'People always round up - not down,' he says. 'Otherwise they think they're being dishonest.' I bought a
new notebook to keep a list of what is on sale: eggs, soap, herb recipe books, herbs, hostas, irises, daisies, grasses, flowering
currants and larger pots stuffed with four or five different herbs. On the first day of the experiment, Dillington House is
hosting a West Country education conference for 146 people. Over the weekend, there are courses taking place in digital photography,
'Women in Ancient Egypt' and 'Plant Hunters', as well as a course on the importance of hand evaluation in bridge; some 150 people
are expected to attend. Byteatime on the first day we have made £58, on the second £46 and on the third £38 - as much as we
made in Montacute after deducting the rental price of the stall. Suddenly, the farm's financial future looks quite different.
If we can sell £200 of produce on the honesty table every week, we'll earn £10,000 a year and that, in our parlous financial
set-up, is a fortune.

Charlie is chuffed: throughout that first weekend he goes to check the table every few hours, making sure that anything that
has been sold is replaced and that the pots are tidy and earth isn't being spilt on the flagstone floor of the hallway. Unlike
Members of Parliament, visitors to Dillington are clearly an honest lot. The honesty box in the Strangers' Canteen in the
Commons, which had been introduced to allow MPs and staff to pay for cups of tea without having to queue for the checkout,
has just this week been removed after too many 'forgot' to pay. I get out the old cash flow charts and revise them with this
new, unexpected addition. It looks good. The chickens are now laying two hundred eggs a day, we have six more pigs, and we
are shortly going to be able to sell the first of our home-bred rare-breed chickens.

Eggs - 1,400 a week: £160 a week

Pigs - by the autumn selling six a month: £900 a month Vegetables - by midsummer selling to DH: £1,600 a month

Honesty table: £800 a month

Plants to the South Petherton Flower Shop: as yet unknown

Herb markets: £200 each time, five more markets to go

That adds up to £4,140 a month, not counting the flower shop, the sale of rare-breed chickens and the proceeds from any other
markets at which we can rent a stall. It also doesn't count selling vegetables to other outlets with which we may strike up
deals over the summer when the produce is full grown and ready to eat. Are we finally turning a corner? David has pinned up
a plastic notice on the door between the office and the potting shed. Illustrated by drawings of cartoon pigs with stubby
little wings, it reads:

Another Month Ends

All targets met

All systems working

All customers satisfied

All staff eager and enthusiastic

All Pigs Fed and Ready To Fly.

10

A Market Stall at Langport

The strings of toad spawn hatch into tadpoles just before the end of April, when the weather warms up and spring arrives like
a tidal wave, unstoppable, changing every day, the trees seeming to explode into a million shades of green. There are hundreds
and hundreds of tadpoles clustering round the edges of the garden pond, clinging to the muddy black lining, next to the water
snails which the warm weather has lured out from under the weed in great quantities. Early one morning I watch a group of
tadpoles eating the pale grey innards of a snail which hangs limply out of its shell. The first time I look I can still see
the eyes on the tips of its two front tentacles, but quite soon afterwards the eyes have been gnawed away and by the following
day the whole nibbled body has parted company with the shell. Like a shoal of piranhas, the tadpoles are feasting on the stringy
flesh which floats slowly through the water like a life raft.

Bluebell's piglets need tagging, and when they are three weeks old David and I decide to brave their indignant screams. Using
a device that looks like a stapler, we clip their ears with a metal tag which has been engraved with our licence number. No
pig can be moved around the country and thus to slaughter without such identification, and it is easier and less painful to
do it to the piglets when they're tiny and their ears are still soft and pliant. We bribe Bluebell to leave the run with pig
nuts and half a dozen parsnips, then, with the gate firmly shut between us, David grabs the first piglet and passes it to
me. For something so small, piglets make an incredible amount of noise. They squeal, bark, kick, wriggle, whistle, grunt and
honk, keeping up the same level of outrage right through the process, without any change of emphasis or volume at the moment
David punches the metal tag through one ear. But once back on the ground, all noises instantly cease and they trot off to
join the rest of their siblings, wholly unaffected by the experience. Any maternal instinct that Bluebell might still be harbouring
is clearly insufficiently strong to displace her interest in the parsnips: she chomps and chews throughout her offspring's
ordeal without even bothering to look up. All the same, David and I are glad of the gate: sows are unpredictable and Bluebell
now weighs about 200 lbs.

As I watch the punching machine pierce the piglets' ears, I remember having my own ears pierced. It was 1974. I was twenty-three
and living in a first-floor hotel room in a dusty little street in the Kathmandu bazaar, known locally as Freak Street. It
was so called because it was where the countless hippies and exiles from the sixties congregated to explore Hinduism and Buddhism
and, above everything, to take drugs. With my boyfriend, John Steinbeck, I'd arrived in Kathmandu on a green Royal Enfield
350 cc motorbike, a machine developed by the British Army and the workhorse of the Indian police. We'd come to India three
months earlier, accompanying an old friend of John's to Bangalore to visit the guru Sai Baba. Steve had cancer and Sai Baba
had a reputation for performing miracles. As we discovered when we arrived, most of these miracles involved producing quantities
of holy ash from his fingertips and the occasional Rolex watch, which would emerge from the folds of his long saffron robes.
Despite liberal applications of holy ash, or
vibutti,
after two months, Steve died. We cremated his body, flew north to Delhi and bought the Enfield. From the bazaars we acquired
mattresses, sheets, a mosquito net, cooking pots and pans, a gas-canister cooker and plastic containers for food. We loaded
it all on the back of the bike and set off north, travelling up the Ganges to Rishikesh and then east to enter Nepal.

Within minutes of checking into the hotel, there was a knock on the door and a young Nepalese, carrying a square leather briefcase,
was offering us the contents of his mobile pharmacy. John had been a soldier in Vietnam and after his tour of duty he'd returned
to the country as a journalist. He'd broken a lot of stories, lived as a monk on an island in the Mekong and become briefly
addicted to heroin. He'd made the experience sound exciting and I wanted a part of it. Inside the bag there were slabs of
rich brown hashish, lots of multicoloured pills and little white vials of clear liquid with the words 'Welcome Drug Company,
Bombay' etched on the glass. I persuaded John to buy the morphine, plus a couple of syringes. Then I lay back and let him
inject the liquid into the vein in the crook of my left elbow and floated away on a tide of opium dreams. A few days later,
he bought me a pair of circular gold earrings, forgetting that I didn't have pierced ears. Undeterred, we sterilised a needle
in a candle flame and he pushed the point through my ear lobe and into a cork. The holes that resulted were out of balance
and messy: one is lower down than the other, which makes many styles of earring look ridiculous. They bled on and off for
days. But I put the earrings on and carried on drifting through the opium haze.

In the days that followed, we would spend hours lying on our twin beds, the windows open, the noises of bells and drums and
chanting drifting up from the street outside, and reading aloud to each other, working our way through as many of his father's
books as we could buy from the local bookstore:
East of Eden, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath, The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men
and, one of John's favourites, St. Katy the Virgin', a short story about a wicked pig who undergoes a religious conversion
after chasing two monks up a tree. Fearing for their lives, the monks try to exorcise the evil out of Katy. They lower a crucifix
suspended on a girdle down to the sow's eye level.

'The face of Katy was a tiger's face. Just as she reached the cross, the sharp shadow of it fell on her face, and the cross
itself was reflected in her yellow eyes. Katy stopped - paralysed. The air, the tree, the earth shuddered in an expectant
silence, while goodness fought with sin. Then slowly, two great tears squeezed out of the eyes of Katy, and before you could
think, she was stretched prostrate on the ground, making the sign of the cross with her right hoof.'

John Steinbeck's motto had been 'To the stars on the wings of a pig,' a sentiment he felt was both 'earth bound but aspiring'.
Steinbeck had always liked escutcheons; he liked the way that people with a profession had symbols of their trade: cobblers
had shoes, pawn merchants had their three gold balls, aristocrats had seals which told of their armies and castles and worldly
possessions. He claimed to be proud of his common stock and thought that a flying pig aptly represented the aspirations of
a hard-working, ambitious though lowly man. The image, which he called Pigasus, was turned into a gold and steel seal by a
craftsman in Florence, with the words 'Ad astra per alia porci' stamped around the flying pig. He took delight in punching
the seal into hot red wax to close his letters.

The idea of flying pigs dates back to a 1586 Scottish proverb which curiously states that 'pigs fly in the air with their
tails forward', but Steinbeck, according to his eldest son, Thorn, pinched the idea from Lewis Carroll, a writer he much admired.
It appears in the poem 'The Walrus and the Carpenter', which Tweedledum recites to Alice shortly after she has met him and
his brother, Tweedledee, in a wood.

'The time has come,' the Walrus said,

'To talk of many things;

Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -

Of cabbages - and kings -

And why the sea is boiling hot -

And whether pigs have wings.'

Steinbeck taught his sons to memorise 'The Walrus and the Carpenter' when they were old enough to read, along with all seven
verses of 'The Jabberwocky', which they would have to recite before their father would consider granting a favour, like staying
up late or going fishing on a weekday. He never owned a pig himself because, he told his sons, a pig wouldn't take to life
in New York City, but when his famous black poodle Charley died, shortly after their marathon trip together round America
which formed for the basis for
Travels with Charley,
he bought a white bull terrier, which he named Angel, after a pig that had been owned by his best friend at junior school
in the Salinas Valley. One Halloween, he cut out a pair of wings and taped them to Angel's sloping shoulders and walked her
round Sag Harbour, his two sons following behind, doubled over with laughter.

By mid-May, every inch of the walled garden is planted and the seeds are growing well. Outside the walls in the five-acre
field, 1,000 cabbages and 1,000 cauliflowers are safely sheltered under a long length of white fleece, which looks as though
someone has chucked a giant blanket across the earth. Another length of the white material covers early carrots, and 1,000
sprouts, 2,500 parsnips, 1,000 French beans, 1,000 spring onions, 500 Swiss chard and 3,000 leek seeds are beginning their
magical underground journey, which will, in a few short weeks, transform the small dry seeds into lush, energy-rich plants,
full of taste, nutrition and vitamins. If Alice in Wonderland had been asked to choose which of the following two scenarios
was most likely to happen, that pigs would learn how to fly or that a tiny seed could become an eight-foot-high leafy plant,
producing well over one hundred red flowers and well over one hundred pounds of green beans, which taste delicious and which,
moreover, if you eat them yourself will make you grow tall and strong - and it will do all this in about eight weeks - I think
she would have plumped for flying pigs as being by far the most plausible.

I am beginning to understand how lucky we are to have the walled garden. Correctly positioned and designed, the temperature
inside the walls is estimated to be 7°C higher than outside, which means that inside the garden we're effectively in Bordeaux.
Melons, pineapples, peaches and grapes were all grown here in the eighteenth century, when Dillington House, under the ownership
of Lord North, had a reputation for its excellent kitchen. Thomas Beedall, a parson from Langport, recorded in his diary in
1769 that he had occasion to call upon his Lordship.

'Read the newspapers until his Lordship came back when I was hard into his Lordship's room and he talks with me and gave me
five guineas . . . at five o'clock I went for dinner with the head servants and had for Dinner a Dish of fish, a sirloin of
Beef roasted, a Loyn of Veal with colly flowers, carrots etc. for the first course, and for the second a Roast Turkey, a Hare,
Pidgeon pye, fried Oysters, Chicken Tarts, Lavor etc. Drank water at dinner, after Dinner drank 4 glasses of Port Wine.'

A huge variety of vegetables were cultivated and, though there are no records of exactly which were grown in Dilling­ton,
records from the nearby Selborne estate in 1749 show that the head gardener was planting forty different varieties, including
endive, mustard and cress, white broccoli, skirret and scorzonera, marrowfat peas, leeks, squashes, cucumbers, three types
of artichoke, asparagus, all manner of lettuces and onions for pickling. His hot bed for growing melons was forty­five-feet
long and used thirty cart-loads of dung a year. Our range of vegetables is modest in comparison.

Walled gardens are of ancient and almost universal origin. There is detailed evidence of Egyptian gardens dating from the
fourteenth century b.c with huge walls, towering gateways and oblong outlines, echoed by a garden within, which would always
be laid out in the same, symmetrical lines. Instinctively, when we first looked at the garden in early winter of 2004, we
wanted to carve it up into straight lines, pathways, perfect circles, above all into symmetrical shapes which would complement
and perhaps soften its innate austerity. The Egyptian love of gardening was echoed and enhanced by the Persians, who had several
ideal forms of garden: small ones, built close to the house, protected by mud walls and containing pools, watercourses, trees
and flowers, and much larger, free-flowing parks. In Sardis, Cyrus the Younger created a famous palace garden when he walled
in an area of park land and referred to it as a
pairidaeza,
from
pairi
(around) and
daeza
(wall). The original meaning of the word 'paradise' thus describes an enclosed garden in the Persian style.