Chewing the Cud (10 page)

My reply evolved from an initial “That's very kind of you” through “Well, it's a bit early (or late) for me” to “No, not for me, thanks, Mr. Hamper,” but the outcome was always the same, since no dealings in the stock market were ever permitted until my glass had been filled and emptied. Only then would he lever himself up with a grunt and allow me to make my wobbly way out of the sty to view what pigs he had to offer.

Mr. Hamper kept Saddleback sows and crossed them with a Large White boar (that might have been his brother) to produce a very useful sort of blue-and-white pig. Over the years I bought a great many slips from him, and always when we shook hands at the end of a deal, I thought I had had the best of it. True, I had to pay his price. But where would I find a better bunch of pigs? Or a pleasanter man to deal with? Well worth a bit extra. That's what a pint of parsnip wine does for you.

Eventually I deserted Mr. Hamper for a dealer called Alfred Easy, who never offered me a glass of anything and found for me, more cheaply, pigs of a lesser quality. And he in his turn became unnecessary when, after five years or so, I was in a position to breed my own requirement of store pigs.

Molly, the first sow, was a pedigree Large White. Early on I had had pipe dreams of establishing a herd (“Bath & West Champion comes, yet again, from the world-famous Woodlands Large Whites”), but as time passed, I decided to do as the rest of the Romans and stick to the local practice of putting the Wessex Saddleback sow, an outlying pig and a good mother, to a Large White boar. This cross resulted in a sensible, trouble-free sort of pig that grew on well to pork or bacon.

But before I got to that stage, while still at the tender mercies of Hamper or Easy, Molly used to go by trailer to a boar at the other end of the village and would then produce, three months, three weeks, and three days later, a fair number of pigs and do them well. She kept this process up, twice a year, a model mother, until while still in her prime she managed to break a leg out in the Wood and had to be slaughtered.

Quiet and biddable as she usually was, Molly had seemed to me the ideal subject for an experiment in pig
management in the shape of tethering. I bought a very expensive piece of equipment that I had seen attractively advertised, consisting of a complicated harness of the best leather attached by an arrangement of chains and springs to a kind of anchor driven deep into the ground.

Molly submitted, almost without protest, as Gladwyn and I trussed her up in a positive web of straps and buckles and then condescended to walk, like a huge dog on a lead, to the chosen spot. The tether was clipped onto the harness, and we stood back.

For a few minutes Molly rooted around, the chain lying slack, the spring unstretched. But in due course she came, first literally and then metaphorically, to the end of her tether. Finding herself restrained by some unknown agency, she gave a loud squeal of fury and put out all her strength. The mighty anchor stood firm, the strong spring expanded but a little, the stout cable tautened and held her tight.

“You're wasting your time, old girl — that chain would hold a battleship!” I shouted above the squealing. And with that, the beautiful leather strapping all burst like so much binder twine, and Molly galloped angrily into the sunset, the tattered remains of the wonderful patent pig harness flapping forlornly against her sides.

Molly's replacement was a Saddleback, and by the autumn of 1953 there were four living in the Wilderness
henhouses, and trailer rides up the village were becoming altogether too much of a performance. I needed my own boar.

In those days before the introduction of the Landrace, there was no breed to touch the Large White for bacon production, and when I saw two six-month-old boars advertised locally, I rang up a farmer friend and asked him to come over with me to have a look at them. I suspected that his head was a little leveler than mine. I did not want to buy a pig in a poke.

It is a most pleasant and comfortable thing to hang over the wall of a sty and look upon pigs. Any kind of pig is of interest, but people who work with stock learn to tell quality; and the two young boars whose backs were scratched that October morning were a picture.

Litter brothers, they stood shoulder to shoulder and grunted their appreciation of our fingers in the coarse hair of their long, strong backs. Their fringed ears stood stiff, their tails curled tight, and the white lashes lay thick on their closed eyes as they swayed like belly dancers to our touch. The price was right, the bystanding breeder reliable. All I had to do was choose.

There was nothing in it. Lord knows they had length and to spare. But perhaps one was a shade longer than his brother, and I leaned over and gently pulled his ear.

“What d'you reckon, Peter? Which would you pick?”

“There's very little in it, Dick. Perhaps the one you're touching is a shade longer than his brother.”

Maybe the one we left behind also had a happy and memorable life, but I'm glad I didn't take him. I'm sure he could never have been the pig that Monty was.

Something-or-other Field Marshal was his registered name, so he had to be called after that self-important little soldier. But everything about my Monty was big — his heart, his appetite, and eventually his size. Once he became too large to get into my pig-weighing machine, there was no way to gauge his weight but by eye, but before his last illness, five years later, I reckon he would have topped 600 pounds.

By that time he had had for a long while a harem of ten Saddleback sows, roaming the dells and hillocks of the Wood. And always when one happened suddenly upon him around a bush or saw him come crashing through the undergrowth at the cry of “PIG-pig-pig-pig!” and the rattle of the bucket, there would be an instant of shock at the sheer bulk of him. The sows were hardly sylphlike, but when Monty covered one, it seemed that her back must break.

Yet he was the gentlest of animals. Like all his kind, he loved to be scratched, but he had two particular penchants
in the matter. He liked it done on the top of his head, between his great ears; and he liked it done while he was sitting down. Perhaps in the belief that it made things easier for the scratcher — though in fact the reverse was true — he would lower his hams, place his forefeet neatly together, and sit bolt upright, eyes already closing in anticipation.

If the children were playing in the Wood and came upon him, Monty would immediately sit to attention. And though the girls could reach the tickling spot without too much difficulty, Giles at the age of four or five had to reach right up, his nose level with the boar's tusks, his face almost touching the huge snout.

A diary entry in 1959 tells the end of the story:

Thursday 28 May

Monty died in the small hours. Shall miss him, having had him five years, seven months. Vet did postmortem constipation due to eating earth.

I hadn't liked the look of him on the Wednesday and was worried enough to seek professional advice but was not at all expecting what I found on the Thursday morning.

Behind the back doors of the barn was a square area, fenced of course with coffin boards, which led by way
of a narrow passage directly to the Wood and thus allowed us to move pigs between one place and the other. In the center of this square was a hollow, the bed of an old pond. Like some African water hole it was often bone-dry, and the sows would lie on its slopes and enjoy the sun like fat ladies at the seaside. Sometimes, in the wet, it had a lovely muddy mess in it and became a wallow.

That morning there was only one animal lying stretched out on the bank of the pond. For a second I thought that Monty was simply sleeping. But somehow he seemed flattened, almost two-dimensional like a great cardboard figure, and even longer than in life. Later, when the vet cut him open, the endless length of his gut was chock-full of earth, like a giant sausage. Some depravity of appetite had led him to eat the mud of the wallow until at last he was bunged up solid. Not much of a death.

I have one splendid memento of Monty, a photograph of him in his prime, taken by a press photographer who had come to interview me for an article in a local paper. Majestically, the boar sits on his great backside, and respectfully, I squat before him on my haunches, my fingers making their customary obeisance upon his bristly brow. Some pig.

Of course there were plenty of other, lesser casualties. Small pigs often died of what we called “the thumps,” a lung condition caused by an infestation of worms. And there were accidents. A slip drowned in one of the old baths that were used as drinking troughs.

Most losses were from overlaying. In the first days after farrowing, piglets are always at risk. Even the most careful of mothers, getting up or going down with all the caution at her command, cannot alter the fact that she is about 100 times as heavy as one of her newborn children. And squashing apart, sometimes she will accidentally step on one so weightily that the sharp hoof will slice it beyond repair.

There are devices for the babies' protection — farrowing rails for them to shelter behind, corners for them to withdraw into, crates to contain their mothers — but as a rule, the early part of a piglet's life is hazardous. Maybe it doesn't prove anything, but the times when we never lost babies were when a sow farrowed completely naturally out in the Wood.

She would make a huge nest, the size of a small room, out of bracken and coarse grasses and twigs and all sorts of other vegetation, always choosing a well-sheltered spot. I remember going out one morning of heavy frost, and all the Wood was white but for one place. It was under a bank that kept the wind away and beneath a big evergreen that would hold the rain off later, there was this enormous bird's nest in which a contented mother brooded a crowd of newborn piglets all as warm as toast.

But motherhood isn't always so idyllic, and when things go amiss, it can be nightmarish.

Somewhere in the time between Molly's death and Monty's arrival, I bought two hilts (the local name for gilts, or maiden sows) of the Gloucester Old Spots breed. Called the cottage pig, the Gloucester Old Spots had a reputation for doing well on poorish fare and was much used for tidying up the fallings of West Country orchards. Gladwyn must have had a hand in the naming of these
two sisters for they were called Olwen and Blodwen. I mated them to a Spots boar.

When Olwen farrowed, she couldn't have been less trouble. She was placid, careful, and sensible, the epitome of a good mum. Two days later, it was Blodwen's turn.

I had looked at her last thing at night and she hadn't started, but when she did, the scream that woke us was the one and only noise to be made by her luckless firstborn.

I don't know for sure why, rarely, sows will kill and eat their young. Almost always, when it does occur, it's the animal's first litter, and in her excitement or bewilderment she may pick up a piglet in her mouth. If she breaks the skin and tastes blood, it's chomp, chomp. By the time I got there, number one was vanishing down Blodwen's throat, and number two was on its way out to what promised to be an extremely short life. I yelled for Myrle, and we passed the next hours in a drill demanding cooperation and speed.

Blodwen lies down, out comes a piglet, and Myrle shoves the head of a yard broom in the sow's face while I dash in, grab the baby, and dash out again.

By morning we had seven survivors in a basket, but every attempt to re-present them to Blodwen was met with murderous fury. Some we tried to foster onto gentle Olwen, but they did not survive the competition. And two
we put with Anna, who came smartly into milk at sight of these needy babies; but unlike dachshund puppies, newborn piglets have needle-sharp teeth, and Nanny had to retire hurt.

Quite often there would be a runt in a litter. They are called by different names in various parts of the country — cads, wasters, nesslegrafs, there are many terms. Round us they are dags. And the dag would be at risk throughout its usually short life. If it survived the competition and managed to avoid being overlaid, we might run it on, especially in a small or depleted litter, but the smallest and spindliest we put down. If, however, a dag made it to weaning age and had got reasonably plump, we might accord it the ultimate accolade and ask our friends round to meet it, roasted and bearing in its little jaws an apple speared with cloves.