Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (10 page)

Just after Christmas 2005 two new characters joined our bird flock: the turkeys, George and Mildred. George is unpleasant,
though very exotic. If >I'd met him in a swamp in Botswana I'd have immediately started taking photos of this mad-looking creature. He's huge, heavy, with scrappy feathers and a piece of
blue and red flesh that hangs down from his nose, completely covering his beak, a fleshy extension so long that it swings
to and fro when he walks. Round his neck there's an ungainly pile of folded layers of red skin which he can puff up to emit
furious gobbling noises. Even the wonderful Galapagos frigate birds, their red necks blown up and out into huge balloons as
they soar above the drabber females, hoping that their colours will prove the most attractive, have nothing on George's tools
of attraction. When he's sexually excited his neck swells up to the size of a large grapefruit, a bright, pillar­box red which
contrasts weirdly with the blue of the skin on his head. The fleshy tube that hangs down from his beak swells and stiffens,
like a virtual reality erection. His big, round body, perched atop sturdy legs with big-clawed feet, is covered in long feathers,
black, brown, grey, yellowish, lots of shades of colour, which shimmer in the sunlight, turning shades of green and orange.
Mildred, by contrast, is a sad, dull-looking creature. She is almost bald, her small head covered with very short, grey hairs,
as though she's had a bad haircut. Her feathers are grey and brown, not that short, not that long, just boring. She always
seems to be looking down at the ground, as though life has defeated her.

George spends most of his time attempting to mate with Mildred. As a preliminary she flattens herself on to the earth, wings
spread. George lumbers around her, periodically clamping his big heavy claw on her neck to keep her pinned down. He lurches
his full forty pounds at her rear end, wobbles a bit and falls off. Then he starts all over again, seemingly getting crosser
and crosser as though his failure is somehow Mildred's fault. I bought a new book on keeping fowl and it says that 'natural'
mating can be very hard for turkeys: basically the male grows too fat and ungainly to manage it and you usually have to resort
to artificial insemination. David is firmly rooting for George's masculine rights and assures me that Mildred will be producing
eggs by the beginning of February. I remain to be convinced. His antics seem tantamount to harassment.

I wrote an article about the smallholding for
Country Life
and one weekend in January the magazine sends photographer Brian Moody down to take some shots. He takes pictures of George,
of chickens being fed, of winter cabbages and strawberries on bales of straw out of reach of the slugs, as well as of Bramble,
Bluebell, Guinness and Babe eating nuts in the wood. Finally, he takes a picture of me sitting in a wooden hut, holding a
very muddy Hyacinth in my arms. She's still a very little pig, far smaller than others of her age and even though she's fattening
up a bit now that she's away from the older pigs, she's well below size. In early January, she developed a cold and had to
be kept under the heating lamp, which is generally used for rearing tiny chicks, until her body temperature returned to normal.
Brian works quickly, and Hyacinth stays reasonably still, seeming to quite enjoy the fuss. But half an hour later, when I
walk past her pen, I notice that she's disappeared. She's retired to the warm bed of straw in her hut, her venture into show
biz clearly overwhelming. The Greta Garbo of the pig world is, as Charlie jokes, just a pig that wants to be a-loin.

The first pig I ever saw was a saddleback sow who was living in one of a row of three Cotswold stone pigsties, which faced
outwards on to the cow yard at my aunt and uncle's Oxfordshire farm. My father had been in the army when I was born and my
sister Collette and I spent the first years of our childhood in army HQs in Germany, Vienna, Tripoli and Bury St Edmunds.
In contrast, my mother's sister, Giogia, had met and married an English farmer at the start of the war and settled down on
a 350-acre farm outside the village of Great Tew. To this day, their farm remains the most constant physical presence in my
life, a place my sister and I relished in our peripatetic childhood. We both loved our aunt's bighearted warmth and the fact
that in spring there'd always be an ailing lamb or two, wrapped in old towels, their heads peeking out of the bottom drawer
of the Aga. We loved going off with her and our two cousins, Ander and Richard, to collect fresh eggs or pull up carrots from
the vegetable garden. Uncle Ben let us ride on the tractor with him and, if we were lucky enough to be spending Christmas
there, the Christmas Eve trip to cut down a fir tree from the heart of Conegrey Wood was, to me, almost the most exciting
event of the year. I loved the fact that all the fields had names: the Oxpen, the Hangings, Limekiln Quarry, Three Gates,
Porbridge Bank, the Skills, the Wallet; that a sheep called Esther whom Giogia had hand-reared would return to the farmhouse
bringing her two lambs with her to steal a drink from the lavatory off the corridor from the front door; that there was always
a big saucepan on the stove, full of delicious soup made from potatoes, onions and carrots. My mother, Betty, and Giogia were
Jersey born and bred. Their father, my grandfather, was the island's first fully qualified vet. Giogia studied agriculture
at Reading University in the thirties and, when the Germans occupied Jersey in 1940, she left the island for a job near Oxford,
looking after a herd of Jersey cows. My mother was already in London, working as a military driver, and Granny, by then a
widow, left her island home and joined Giogia in Oxfordshire to sit out the occupation.

While taking care of the Jerseys, Giogia met and married my uncle Ben, and when a Mr Evans - the tenant of Beaconsfield Farm,
Great Tew - was kicked out by the Ministry of Agriculture for not achieving high enough production levels, Ben and Giogia
moved in. There had been a farm there for centuries. They took a lease on the main farmhouse, a lovely Cotswold stone building
dating from about 1720, which faces south down a long valley where the soft green folds of the hills seem to embrace the small
stream that runs down alongside the rough track. They also acquired three cottages for workers (with the instruction that
they were not to be fed salmon more than three times a week) and a set of farm buildings, also built of Cotswold stone. The
roofs of the farm buildings, one over fifty metres in length, are made from Stonesfield slate, which comes from a quarry near
Woodstock. It was hewn out of the ground in metre-square chunks and then, over the winter, doused with water so that the frost
would work its way into the crevices and break the stone into the half-inch-thin tiles that make up the roof. As my cousin
Ander says, that would be impossible now, there's just not enough frost.

In the 1970s, a tractor suddenly capsized while crossing the top yard. It had fallen into a perfectly preserved Roman culvert.
Excavations revealed an entire villa, complete with the skeleton of an adult male with an eight-inch knife stuck through his
thigh, which is now in the Woodstock Museum.

My aunt Giogia, a natural born organiser, was soon in charge of the hastily assembled 'land army' for the region, responsible
for visiting local farms and seeing that they were maximising production. They were allocated four POWs to help out: two Germans
called Kurt and Hendrik, an Italian named Aldo and a Serbian called Pieter Vaser, whose mother somehow became the farm cook.
Kurt was nicknamed Booby, and for many years after the war he would return to Beacons­field to visit Giogia and Ben, seeing
them as surrogate family.

In addition to the pigs, who lived in some style in their Cotswold stone sties while they were nursing their piglets, the
farm then consisted of 150 sheep, 28 milking cattle, 600 Rhode Island Red chickens who produced fertile eggs which would be
sold, as well as wheat, barley, swedes, kale and mangel-wurzels. All the food that the animals needed was grown on the farm.
During the war, War Ag - as Ben and Giogia called Lord Woolton's Ministry of Agriculture - insisted that every possible fertile
square foot be ploughed up and put to use. In the 1930's, Britain was importing 70 percent of all its food, but once war broke
out importing food became impossible. Making Britain self-sufficient in food was a government priority, a goal which persisted
after the war ended.

In 1947 the National Farmers' Union persuaded the government to offer a guarantee to British farmers for the price of beef.
So much beef was being imported cheaply from Argentina, that the price guarantee was, in effect, the first 'subsidy' or, as
it was initially called, 'a deficiency payment'. At the same time, the Milk Marketing Board also extended a guaranteed market
for milk. It was a huge incentive for British farmers to produce more and it was vital for the government, who didn't want
to return to the pre-war position of being so dependent on imports. In 1947, the government held out a further incentive to
farmers by giving farming tenants lifetime security of tenure. That security, coupled with the guarantee and regular income
from the Milk Marketing Board, gave farmers a new ability to borrow money to buy machinery and modernise. Other subsidies
followed: for ploughing up the ground, for liming and for adding phosphate and potash. The Ministry of Agriculture sent advisers
round to all the farms, who were on tap for free advice. Giogia and Ben's advisers were called Mr Eddie and Mr Stanforth,
and they worked out of a pre-fab office in Oxford opposite what is now the Islamic centre.

For my cousin Ander, who was born in 1942 and started working on the farm when he was nineteen, farming really changed in
the 19 60's when technology moved on to the land. Once you'd invested in a combine harvester you felt obliged to use it to
the maximum, to get value for money, and so fields that were once used for grazing went under the plough. Uncle Ben's first
combine was a Ford, called an Alice Chambers, and he travelled to Ireland to buy it. The machine arrived at the farm in bits,
and reps from Ford assembled it in the farmyard. Its span was two metres - a midget compared to today's giants, which can
stretch up to ten metres - but it could process twenty-five tonnes of grain in a day. Ben and Giogia gave up the pigs first,
then the cows and finally the sheep. By 1970 the farm was entirely arable: wheat, barley, grass seed and twenty acres of spuds.
By then I was living my own life in London and I visited the farm less often. But I remember that every time I did the farmyard
would have grown, the new Dutch barns, built of corrugated iron and painted green, towering over the old stone buildings.
The small buildings with their relatively narrow doorways were useless in this new world of automation and bigger and bigger
machines, which are effectively factories on wheels. Once they were home to horses and carts, which in 1939 still outnumbered
tractors by I.5 million to 600,000. By 1960, only 20,000 were left and the word 'horsepower' is now used by people who wouldn't
know the difference between a snaffle and a snafu. The old cow yards, flanked on all sides by beautiful stone walls and arches
where the cows once bellowed as they waited their turn for the milking machines, stood empty. The other buildings slowly turned
into storerooms. Perhaps if Giogia and Ben had owned the farm they might have embarked on an ambitious conversion into flats
and offices which, across the farming communities of Britain, became the fate of farm buildings towards the end of the century,
but it wasn't to be.

Today, they're home to swallows and barn owls and, as they're now rearing industrial quantities of pigs again, to sick piglets
and young beef cattle. But the main business is in the huge grain stores, where underfloor aeration helps dry the grain. At
the start of the twentieth century the weight of grain from the harvest was an average of 0.95 tonnes per acre. In the year
the war ended it was I.05 tonnes. Now, farmers are expected to produce 3.24 tonnes per acre, in a mechanised system of production
that has more in common with a factory floor than with a natural relationship between the farmer, the soil and the crop. Not
many people are needed on the farm these days: from a high of ten in the immediate post-war years, it is now just my cousins
Ander and Richard, Richard's son Mark and one full-time employee who look after the twenty­first-century Beaconsfield. And
it is bigger too: today they rent 500 acres, and in the 1970's they bought a neighbouring farm of 150 acres. When Alistair
Cooke started writing and broadcasting from America in 1942 he noted that in Kansas, with its high-powered machines, it took
between one and two man­hours of labour to grow an acre of wheat; in China it took 243 hours. In some ways, this change is
clearly a good thing. Much of the traditional work on farms was backbreaking and ghastly, but it has also altered beyond recognition
the life in the village of Great Tew. Ander can remember when there was a blacksmith and a butcher, as well as the school,
the village store and post office. Almost all those that lived in the village worked on the main estate. Now these tiny cottages,
clustered picture-postcard fashion around the village green where the Falkland Arms pub attracts Sunday lunchtime crowds in
their hundreds, change hands for well over £350,000. The only cottages to sell in the twenty-first century have been to Londoners
like us who visit at weekends.

At the bottom of the farm, where the buildings peter out and the rough track leading down to the Hangings begins, is a wooden
lean-to shed with a heavy wooden door with a padlock. I remember being about six or seven years old, standing in the yard
with Giogia firmly grasping my hand and telling me never to go inside this shed. I remember that every so often there'd be
a pool of evil-looking black liquid collected in the dips in the concrete outside the shed and that inside there were white
plastic drums with a skull and crossbones stamped on the side. Soon after the war, the first industrial chemical, MCPA, replaced
sulphuric acid as a basic weedkiller. It instantly increased crop production. It wasn't dangerous to humans and it worked
on cereal crops because it stayed on the flat leaves of the weeds but ran off the upright stalks of the cereal. Poking around
in the shed today, I found Stacato - which warns against contact with eyes - Starine and Opus, a collection of fungicides,
pesticides and weedkillers, an alchemical arsenal without which no modern farm can hope to compete. Ander is realistic about
chemicals: they increase production, but they come at a price. Natural soil fertility is depleted, the balance of nature disrupted,
and many, such as the pesticide DDT, have caused enormous harm to wildlife. DDT is soluble in body fat, which means that once
it has been ingested it is not easy to eliminate and remains in the body, becoming increasingly concentrated as it moves up
the food chain. Thus it passes from plankton to fish and into water birds. Its accumulation in the bodies of birds of prey
such as peregrine falcons and eagles causes them to lay eggs with thin shells which break during incubation, leading Rachel
Carson to title her influential 1960s book on the coming environmental crisis
Silent Spring.