Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (8 page)

Ten days before Christmas David kills eight of the geese. I'd
asked him to leave two to kill until I arrived, so that I could see for myself what it was like to kill an animal that you'd
reared. He was reluctant. Despite his confident words that morning in the kitchen, killing the geese has made him feel 'tight'
and he's upset that the geese now regard him as an enemy, not a friend. When I go over to the farm on the last Saturday morning
before the holidays, the remaining eleven birds are clustered at the far end of the chicken run, completely silent, an unheard-of
state for a gaggle of geese. Even when we walk in to feed the chickens, they still hang back. 'They know,' David says, as
he flings handfuls of corn towards them. Their egg-laying has improved a little and is now back to about thirty a day. As
there is no chance of the rare breeds getting pregnant in the deep winter, they are all out of their pens: magnificent Brah­mas,
speckled Sussexes, bantams with wildly feathery legs, all clustering round the pond, choosing to drink there rather than from
the relative safety of their water trough.

Killing a goose isn't that easy, certainly not as easy as killing a chicken. Holding each head in his left hand, David fired
his 2.2 air rifle into the back of each downy white skull, then quickly made an incision through the neck to allow the blood
to pump out. Plucking takes almost two hours per bird: first the outer, big feathers, then the downy layer beneath, and finally
an all-over singe with a blowtorch to remove the last feathery bits. The huge naked birds are then hung up by their feet,
their heads enclosed in plastic bags which collect the last of the blood. That morning David and I are in the shed, looking
at the ungainly, naked birds hanging from the ceiling. We take them down one by one. David chops off their heads then severs
the neck close to the body, keeping the bony tube as part of the giblets. He makes a further cut to remove the rear end, through
which he pulls out the gut, gizzard, heart, kidneys and liver. I take each bird outside and clean it inside and out with a
high-pressure hose, washing away any remaining bits of blood, singed feathers and loose fat. They are heavy, between twelve
and twenty pounds, and their breasts are plump with flesh and thick, yellow fat. I tie the feet together and, with the same
bit of string, pull the wings close into the body. Then I stuff the finished birds into plastic bags which we've been given
by Mr Bonner. They look good: eight fat geese lined up on the shelf in the shed, ready for Christmas tables.

Financially, they are useless. Each bird has cost £4.50 as a day-old gosling. Even if we charge the plucking costs at the
minimum wage, each goose costs over £1 0 to prepare. Add into that each bird's share of fencing, food, man-hours for feeding,
watering, checks by the vet and I think you must add about a tenner. Then there is the price of driving the birds to Kensington
Place restaurant in London. That's roughly £20 in petrol, or £2 per bird, plus the cost of labour, which comes to another
£2 per bird. Total cost per bird: £28.50. Sale price to Rowley: £35.

David has cut down a big old spruce that had been threatening to fall on to the fence along the north side of the girls' wood.
After the geese are safely in their bags, we light another bonfire to clear away more wood, ivy and undergrowth so that there's
clear space to plant some cooking apple trees. The pigs cluster excitedly round the fire as it leaps into life, but then stand
still, their eyes caught by the flickering lights. David sits on Bramble and I perch on Bluebell, who has returned from her
stay among the boys, hopefully pregnant. Both pigs move close to the fire, their noses just inches from the flames. They stand
still and solid and I feel touched that a semi-wild animal lets me sit peacefully on her back. David has news about the pig
rustlers. According to local gossip, on the basis of no evidence, a gypsy family has been on a mad stealing spree. The most
astonishing theft concerned a Range Rover which was discovered by Rodney, Ewen's gamekeeper, hidden in a nearby field of maize.
But the gypsies themselves have been in serious trouble. The weekend before, one of them had been hit on the head in a pub
fight in Broadway. He'd recently had a heart attack and was on prescribed blood-thinning drugs and the blow had killed him.
Now a local man was being held on a manslaughter charge.

If there were truffles growing under the ground in Somerset, then it would be understandable why someone might want to steal
a pig. One of nature's more extraordinary symbiotic meetings connects a pig's snout to certain fungi. Truffles live underground,
below broad-leafed trees which lack phosphorus. The trees need the fungi to supply them with this vital trace element, so
the parasitic fungus lives on their roots well below the surface. The best known of these is the
Tuber melanosporum,
which unites with the hair-like rootlets of the European oaks and develops tiny organs called mycorrhizae. These allow the
fungus to access carbohydrates, produced up above in the leafy canopy, and they return the favour by spreading out in webs
throughout the soil, collecting moisture and minerals which they share with the tree.

Root-bound and down in the dark, the fungus had a problem. The oak tree could reproduce via its acorns, but how was the fungus
going to spread its spore? The famous black truffles of Perigord hit on an ingenious solution: the nose of the wild pig. The
fungus somehow synthesised a perfect chemical copy of y-alpha-antrostol, the active testosterone normally found in the salivary
glands of boars in the mating season. So, in the dead of winter, the truffle emits a smell strong enough to attract the nostrils
of passing female pigs, who dig down in glee, hopeful of finding a randy boar under the soil.

It's an extraordinary, though mostly one-sided, bargain. The fungus gets to spread but the sow is left disappointed. For humans,
though, it's something of a bonanza. They follow the pig and push her away before she can reduce the truffle to a cloud of
dust, selling the prized fungi for up to £700 a pound. I pat Bluebell on her bristly rump. I'm sure that, given half a chance,
she'd be a great and determined truffle pig, rootling her way through the undergrowth in search of the buried treasure. Even
so, she will more than earn her keep: over her breeding lifetime she will give us at least forty piglets.

We decide that next year we're going to rear at least fifty geese and fifty turkeys and we're going to either rent a machine
that will pluck them or take them somewhere that will do it for us. Mr Bonner has sold ninety geese this year, forty up from
Christmas 2004, so hopefully we can make a deal with him early on in the year. Of our twelve remaining geese two are ganders.
Assuming the ten females lay ten eggs each and successfully hatch half of them, we'll have fifty of our own goslings. As ever,
these things look good on paper but go awry somewhere in the actual process of growing and selling. We're still subsidising
the farm to the tune of some £1,500 a month, and even though we're selling all we grow there's a vast gap between outgoings
and income. In
January we're taking on another four acres, specifically to grow vegetables. That will cost £1,000 a year, plus fencing, plus
the extra labour that will be needed to keep rows of organic vegetables weed-free. It's no wonder that organic vegetables
cost more. Before he began working full-time on the farm, David helped set up an organic vineyard for a Londoner who wanted
to go into wine production. The vineyard consisted of some five miles of vines, all of which had to be weeded by hand. David
reckoned the wine would have to cost £30 a bottle.

5

A Christmas Market

The Empress died on Christmas Eve, 2005. When David went to feed the pigs early in the morning, the usual stampede was light
one animal. The little black pig was lying on her side in the shed, partially covered by straw. There were no marks on her
body. The vet said that she had died of suffocation, probably after being slept on by the bigger pigs. It seems sad and pointless.
Although I'm not at all sure that I would have done anything different myself, I am somehow aggrieved that David hasn't eaten
her: she might have tasted delicious and my sense of waste would have been partially mitigated. But he says that while he
did think of it, the fact that she hadn't been correctly slaughtered stopped him and he buried her three feet down, under
a laurel tree. But I think he's too much of a softie to butcher her himself and I wonder how the two of us are going to cope
when we set off to Snells the abattoir in the middle of March with the first two boys.

The Empress's demise hastens the planned relocation of the pigs. When they're born, the first piglet, generally the biggest,
latches on to the best teat nearest the sow's head and, unless forcibly moved, stays there throughout. Pigs have a very acute
sense of smell. Get a pig to select a playing card from a washable pack, wash the pack and then ask it to find its original
choice, and it will do so unerringly. It is bizarre to imagine some hapless researcher attempting this experiment, but it
explains how they always know which teat - among twenty - is theirs. The same rigid pecking order carries on into young adulthood,
with the biggest pigs getting bigger and the small ones lagging behind. They need to be kept in similar sized groups, something
that might well have saved the Empress's life. We divide the girl and the boy groups, leaving Babe, Bluebell, Bramble and
Guinness to roam around their large wood, with the bigger boys in the other heavily wooded region. The unnamed boys-to-be-eaten
are all now in a smaller run, next door to Hyacinth, Blossom and Lobelia.

The moves meant some new houses being built and, for the larger boys, a house with a difference in the form of a very old,
clapped-out caravan that David had been given last summer. It seemed like a good idea at the time, somewhere Josh might want
to spend the night with his chums, but as the months went by the old white, grubby heap had sat in the corner of the walled
garden, steadily falling to pieces. We drag it into a clearing in the wood, remove the wheels, rip out the cupboards, the
seats and the small sink and park it on a bed of pine needles. A mountain of sweet-smelling straw fills up one half. The pigs
are delighted and immediately start zipping in and out of the open door, looking through the low picture window at their leafy
environment.

When my father left the army in his late forties, we moved to Ludlow in Shropshire where he worked for a company that manufactured
agricultural machinery. Dad didn't much like the job but he liked his country life, especially the fishing. Along with his
good friend, Joe Attlee, a local GP, he rented a stretch of river in North Wales, where the sea trout leaped in their thousands,
flashing their silvery scales in the moonlight as they swam upriver from the sea. A caravan was required, occasionally for
sleep but mostly for cooking up a vast breakfast of kidneys, bacon, eggs, tomatoes, fried bread and sausages, which Dad and
Joe would eat at five o'clock on a summer's morning, before starting their three-hour journey back to Ludlow, driving too
fast along the windy Welsh roads, hoping to get home in time for work. The caravan lived with us for almost a quarter of a
century; when Daisy was little, she loved going off with her granddad for picnics, the caravan bouncing along behind his car.
We'd park in woods, or on hilltops and cram ourselves into the tiny home on wheels to watch Dad cook up one of his legendary
fry-ups. After my mother died of bowel cancer at the age of sixty-three, Dad took a cooking course and became a dab hand at
chicken breasts in wine and lemon sauce and rich beef stews. But fry-ups were his
piece de resistance
and they never tasted as good as when eaten round the fold-away yellow formica table, the windows foggy with our breath and
the smoke from the frying pan. The day came when Dad was too old to go night fishing for sea trout and, anyway, by then the
river was fished out, its clear waters wholly devoid of the magical creatures and we advertised the caravan for sale in the
local Ludlow paper. It was priced at fifty quid, but really Dad just wanted someone to come and take it away as it was clogging
up space in the driveway. I was there the day a man drew up in a battered blue Cortina to buy it. 'What are you going to use
it for?' Dad asked as we helped position his towing cup over the caravan's steel ball. 'Well,' he replied, 'I've got nine
children and I reckon that four of them can sleep in here.'

Bluebell isn't looking that fat, but her teats are bigger. The first sign we'll have that she is pregnant is that her stomach
will drop: she'll get bigger downwards before she starts getting bigger outwards. But at least she puts up with her nuptial
sojourn with the boars. Big sister Bramble doesn't take to it at all. David shoves her through the gate, where the mud is
deep and gluey, clinging and sucking at your boots. Bramble squeals madly, thoroughly miffed at this turn of events on an
otherwise peaceful morning. She takes one look at the four eager little guys who started clustering round her and makes an
immediate bid for freedom, forcing her considerable bulk through the wire fence between the wooden gate and one side of the
chicken coop. The wire doesn't stand a chance and Bramble is out on the track, huffing and puffing after her exertions. Consequently
Plan B has been adopted. The area of the girls' wood where their original big house stands was partially enclosed. Now we
gate it off and build a new wooden house deeper into the trees, down near a muddy wallow. As David quips, if the mountain
won't come to Mohammed then Mohammed will come to the mountain: Boris is stepping up to the mark and has been sent to live
with her. Secretly, I think we're all impressed by Bramble's independent streak. And we did need another, separate area with
its own shelter for when Bluebell's piglets finally emerge.

It's now mid-January 2006 and I hope that Charlie and I have signed the last cheque for capital costs for the farm. We've
rented an extra five acres on which we plan to grow just vegetables. No animals, no plants, just rows and rows of sprouts,
carrots, onions, cabbages, cauliflowers, courgettes, beans, peas, beets, turnips, swedes and spinach. There seems to be no
feasible way of fulfilling our contract with Dillington House unless we do. But the new field has meant new fences, new gates
and the purchase of fifty poplar trees to provide shelter from the north wind along one side of the field. I walk across it
on a bitingly cold day, crunching through the stubble left over from last year's crop and shiver. Just this time a year ago,
we were still hauling old fridges out of the area where the chickens now live. I know how much work it has been and how much
it has cost, but although I can see that, on paper at least, we need to expand in order to produce enough to supply not only
Dillington but everything that the Popp Inn (with which we have arranged a small, regular supply contract) needs, as well
as some other local restaurants. I'm worried. Bob, who used to be a council worker in Yeovil, mowing the roundabouts and tidying
up the town's public spaces, is now with us full-time. Clearly we needed an extra pair of hands, but that means another salary
to pay.

The original budget is way out of kilter. Last night Charlie and I decided that we needed to have a serious financial conversation
with David, but we're both rather dreading it. The farm has grown in lopsided ways with little formal structure and hope has
generally triumphed over more serious considerations of profit and loss. Charlie is good with figures: his VAT returns go
in on time and he compiles them himself. I bundle all my receipts, bills, invoices and cheque stubs into an envelope and send
them to my accountant with only days to go before the quarterly deadlines. In our marriage, Charlie looks after our joint
finances, but I'm meant to be in charge of the farm business and I've been ducking the need to sit down with David to hammer
out just where our investments are going and, more importantly, when and what money will be coming in. But I'm cheered when
David tells me that the chickens laid seventy-five eggs yesterday, 17 January, their record production to date. We've laid
four-inch-wide bendy blue plastic perforated pipes through their run and the ground is now dry, despite the heavy rains. It
may be fanciful, but I think they look happier, standing around in peaceful groups and pecking the ground for grubs, their
eyes bright, their feathers glossy.

Since we started the farm, I've been reading copiously about food, farming, the countryside, the environment and animals.
One of the best books I've read is Felicity Lawrence's
Not on the Label.
This searing indictment of supermarket practices lifts the lid on chicken production, food miles, additives and more. I met
Felicity at the beginning of January at the Soil Association's annual conference in London. When she learned that our smallholding
was just outside Ilminster, she told me she'd recently written about the situation in Chard, a small Somerset town five miles
away, where Portuguese immigrants have been brought in to work for Oscar Mayer, a firm which manufactures ready meals for
Sainsbury's.

There are, she told me, enormous problems with the Portuguese immigrants and they are directly linked to the cheap food available
in our supermarkets. Oscar Mayer, which employs 900 people, was also once the owner of Hygrade Meats, where David spent his
dismal years processing pork into ham and stuffing it into packets. Supermarkets keep firms such as Oscar Mayer on a tight
financial string. Their contracts are never assured and can be cancelled at a moment's notice. Like many companies that have
contributed to the UK's economic success in the last decade, Oscar Mayer has invested in all the latest technology to keep
up with the demands of the supermarkets, their main employers. When Tesco opened up their 'metro' stores in the middle of
busy high streets, they ripped out the storerooms in the back to create extra retail space. Computers linked to cash registers
signal when supplies of product are running low; these messages are fed to trucks which restock the shelves, sometimes several
times a day. This technique, where nothing is kept in stock and food is constantly on the move in trucks, is known as 'just
in time'. For the supermarkets, it means prices are kept down because food is never idling in storage, but supplying this
market means that firms like Oscar Mayer have to cope with huge and often last-minute fluctuations in orders. The retailer's
risk of under- or over-supplying is kept to a minimum by transferring the risks down the line. Meeting this unpredictable
demand requires plenty of casual labour, which firms like these achieve by hiring workers from countries with high unemployment
and rudimentary labour rights. Between 2000 and 200I, Oscar Mayer in Chard found itself unable to recruit a sufficiently large,
flexible workforce locally. So they looked abroad, especially to some of Europe's poorer countries.