Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (15 page)

When we close down a corner shop, thus making people drive to an out-of-town superstore for their groceries, or dig up a hedge
to enable farmers to grow even larger areas of wheat, when we ship apples all the way from South Africa to sell in a Somerset
supermarket, and when we rip up great swathes of the Amazon rainforest to grow feed for cattle that live in the USA - to be
turned into hamburgers to keep the dollars flowing through fast-food restaurant tills - we upset the complex balance of the
natural world. As I shake a tiny coriander seed out of its packet and drop it on to the soil in the pot, I realise that by
growing food organically I am doing something, albeit something very small, to try to redress this balance. I also realise
that the process makes me happy. All my life I've lived within a political system which believes that sustained economic growth
is always a good thing, leading us towards happier, more fulfilled, more enriched lives. Yet evidence now points to the contrary.
Once a country has filled its larder, or a person has met their basic needs, do extra riches bring extra happiness?

Surveys of happiness are both popular and revealing and they show overwhelmingly that industrial nations have not become happier.
Random samples of British citizens demonstrate that we are no more satisfied with our lives than our parents were, yet we
have two cars, three annual holidays, endless gadgets and gizmos, access to worlds of information so much stuff that my parents,
at least, never even dreamed of. Measures of health, probably more accurate than measuring elusive qualities like happiness,
paint the same picture but endorse it with harder facts. Rates of depression have increased while stress levels at work have
soared. In the USA, even though real incomes have risen six-fold, the per capita suicide rate remains the same as it was in
1900.

Innovative academics point the finger at the deadly sin of envy. We are creatures of comparison and we want what others have.
Research conducted in 2005 showed that happiness levels depend inversely on the earnings level of your neighbour. If they're
richer than you, you're dissatisfied. If their child has got into a better school, you're envious. If they drive a better
car, take more exotic holidays and buy more expensive shoes, then your own fleeting pleasure is destroyed. We live in an age
which is constantly on the hunt for the next new thing. Something that might seem brilliant today -like a pay rise, or moving
to a bigger house - quickly becomes routine and ceases to delight. The old empty space opens up inside us, nagging at us with
the vexed question of what new material goody might fill the void.

Here on the farm, I am able to step aside from the competitive world I inhabit in the city. Watching the pigs going about
their business, seeing the plants grow, and knowing that though what we do might be small, it is also an affirmation of something
more solid and tangible. Growing plants and vegetables is something that is nearly free for everyone, even though this particular
project is causing us a few sleepless nights as the cash flow steams on in only one direction. Charlie's notion when we set
out on this adventure, that it would cost us the same as a Mercedes, now seems more apt than ever. If we had spent £70,000
on a flash car with all the trimmings, within a few months there'd be another one in the window of one those grand car dealers
in London's Park Lane, beckoning us with the promise of an even better driving experience and, unsaid but true, a quick way
to get one up on the neighbours. I was a hippy in my teens and early twenties and I believed passionately in hippy things
like communes and community and the power of nature and the spirit. Now, in my fifties, after a long diversion into the material
world, maybe I am reverting, although the prospect of one day entering one of our pigs in a show, and winning, seems a very
attractive notion.

We've bought three new saddleback pigs, including a splendid boar who we've called Robinson. After I finish in the potting
shed I go to look at them, lying on top of each other against the garden wall, enjoying a rare moment of sunshine in this
cold, long lasting winter. Saddlebacks have amazing markings, black at both ends with a white band round their shoulders and
front legs, so clearly defined it is as though they've been kitted out to play on the same football team. They have longer
snouts than the Gloucesters and, because they arrived with us as grown-up pigs, they're definitely more skittish and less
keen on human affection. Bramble is sharing a pen with them and when I arrive she ambles over to get a rub behind her ears.
Within seconds, Robinson is heaving himself up on to her hind quarters, something Bramble clearly doesn't have time for. She
shrugs him off, so he has a go at one of his own kind, who is also wholly unresponsive to his ardour.

Boris's health is not improving. He is clearly a 'sickly pig'. First pneumonia, then a skin infection, which, despite antibiotics
and daily baths with an iodine solution, is wretched. Most of his hair has fallen out and his skin is red and scabby and itchy.
I watch him desperately rubbing his shoulder against a fallen tree-trunk, grunting in his efforts to dig deep into the itchy
patch. Two days ago, David moved him into the new chicken runs, where he has sole occupancy of the large wooden hut, built
to house the geese and turkeys or, in the event of a lock-up due to bird flu, most of the flock. For now, though, it is Boris's
home. Inside the hut, he has a pile of straw and a heating lamp which is normally used for baby chicks. Outside, he has the
run of the old vegetable garden, which, when he's not scratching his itchy skin, he clearly enjoys. I'd decided to try tea-tree
oil as a cure for his skin complaint, and when he's finished scratching himself on the log I enter the run to catch him, a
bucket of tea-tree oil and water in one hand. He runs off towards the purple sprouting, grabbing quick mouthfuls but moving
on every time I get close.

I pull off some leaves and hold them out to Boris, who gingerly comes closer. Then his nostrils quiver at the unfamiliar smell
coming from the bucket and he's off again, haring back across the rows of old vegetables towards the shelter of his hut. Inside
the hut, the sad-looking little pig is shivering in one corner. I offer him the leaves and while he crunches them up he stands
still long enough for me to brush his back, sides, stomach, ears and chin with the oil.

The chickens have laid seventy-two fertile eggs, and as I am brushing Boris with tea tree oil an egg cracks open in the incubator
and a tiny bird emerges into life. Within half an hour his feathers are dry and he's flopping around, tweeting incessantly,
leaning his head against the other eggs, checking for signs of movement inside. Bird flu has crept even closer in the last
two weeks. It has now reached France and according to DEFRA it is inevitable that it will arrive in Britain before too long.
The failure to vaccinate livestock in the foot and mouth outbreak resulted in the needless slaughter of thousands of herds.
I remember reading stories about farmers, heartbroken because their beloved cattle were destroyed. Despite that disaster,
we are once again facing a possible pandemic without reserves of vaccination. But this time, for me, the issue is personal
and as I watch the tiny new-born chick take its first tentative steps, I realise how much I will mind if we are told that
they all have to be killed.

The weather has been freakishly cold this January and February. It reminds me of how cold it always seemed to be when I was
a child and we would go skating on shallow ponds every January. My father had a wonky pair of skates, two blades screwed on
to the bottom of some old brown army boots. The ankles flopped this way and that, but he was nifty on the ice and worked hard
to teach me how to waltz on frozen water. He was well over six foot and we must have made a funny sight. I'd hang on to his
hand and practise turns and backwards movements, crashing into his stomach as my balance teetered. But in recent years the
winters have been mild, the early spring flowers arriving at the same time as I took down the Christmas cards.

In this cold, Hyacinth has been suffering: she's so little and one night David found her shivering uncontrollably outside
her hut. She was, he said, almost frozen to the spot. Two days in the shed, in a warm straw-filled box under the heat lamp,
coupled with extra nuts and fresh vegetables, had her back on her feet. Now she's putting on weight at a terrific rate. But
I still agonise that she isn't going to make it and wonder what Charlie would say if I were to suggest that Hyacinth spend
the night on our bed.

7

The First Slaughter

Four days before the first three boy pigs are due to go 'up the hill', as a trip to Snells is called, I go to visit Mr Bonner
to tell him to expect the imminent arrival of our first pork. 'Are they boars?' he asks, as he bags up a string of sausages.
'Oh yes,' I reply, thinking of the discreet though pronounced double bulges under their tails.

He pauses and pushes his white cap back on his head, looking thoughtful. 'Well, I'll take them this time, but the trade doesn't
like boar meat.' He puts down the sausages and reaches over the counter to pick up a pork chop. He bends it backwards and
forwards, the pale meat chunky under his fingers, the fat well attached to the outside edge. 'Boar meat doesn't set so well-don't
know why, something to do with the hormones. The fat falls off and the meat is less solid. It tastes OK,' he adds, looking
at my worried face. 'And I will take them.'

'That's true,' David says when I ask him what we are going to do. 'But only when they're more than a year old. Taste goes
as well, not just the texture.' Ouch, another example of being a dumb townie, thoroughly ignorant of the art of butchering
meat. But I have scored a small but significant triumph. After a week of having tea-tree oil and water brushed on his skin,
Boris is on the road to recovery. He's back with his brothers, his skin still scabby and rough but no longer inflamed, and
his bristly white hairs are clearly growing again on some of his bald patches. I watch him in delight, chuffed as anything
to have made a contribution to animal welfare and relieved that Boris isn't going to be consigned to the group of pigs going
'up the hill'. David's impressed. 'Good stuff - doesn't dry his skin out,' he says.

It is a rare day of warm sun, a spring day sneaking into this long winter when the sun shines brightly and the sky is blue
and the early flowers start opening up their petals: crocuses and a few daffodils mixing with the snowdrops which have loved
the endless frosty days. In
The Times
this morning there's a report from Kew gardens, where the daffodils are still tightly shut. In recent years springs have been
so early that it has been predicted that winter will disappear altogether. We've had the ten hottest years on record in the
last eleven years: lawns have been mown in midwinter and bulbs have bloomed in February. This winter, although there's been
little snow, has actually been more normal and it feels wonderful to be outside in the soft warmth. In the nursery there's
a definite feeling of spring. In the last four days, thirty chickens have hatched in the incubator; now they're in a wooden
box, clustered under the heat lamp, chirping and tweeting in high-pitched voices. Some are yellow, looking like chicks on
an Easter card, but others are various shades of browns, blacks, stripes, with black or white markings on wings and above
eyes. There are eleven different breeds hatching and they're still too small to tell one from the other. Just over a third
of the incubating eggs have hatched successfully, and some of those needed human help at the crucial moment. When the membrane
has dried too much, it becomes too tough for the tiny bird to break through. The geese have not fared so well: at one point
one solitary goose was sitting on twenty eggs, fiercely guarded by the ganders, but she suddenly upped and left her nest,
leaving behind a pile of eggs which duly addled. George and Mildred have produced eleven eggs, but so far none has proved
a winner. Still, the hen coop is in a tizzy of excitement: George and the ganders patrol the ground near the coop, hissing
and gobbling with macho vigour; the rare-breed cock birds crow throughout the day, puffing up their chests and strutting in
majestic circles in front of the females who look fat and full of purpose. There's loads of testosterone in the air.

Fat-Boy the Labrador has woken me up at dawn: he too is beside himself with energy and vim and the reason soon becomes clear.
Charlie turned fifty-five this week and he'd been given a box of truffles, well sealed in a wooden box which was nailed shut.
The box had been left overnight in the bottom of a carrier bag full of books. Fattie has taken out the books, ripped off the
wooden lid and devoured the lot. I go downstairs with him and we watch the huge red sun rising through the bare trees of the
wood to the east of our house and listen to the birds going crazy outside the window.

There's an order to the dawn chorus: first the blackbirds break into song, starting about forty minutes before sunrise, closely
followed by the song thrushes; then the wood pigeons, robins, mistle thrushes, turtle doves, pheasants and willow warblers
join in one by one, until finally the tiny wrens start singing too. I've learned this week that there is a reason why birds
choose dawn as the time of day to make so much noise: the sudden inversion of temperature from the cold of night to the first
warmth of day creates a reflective layer on which sound waves can travel further. It's why noise carries further across the
cold surface of a lake and campers can hear each other talking on the other side. The birds discovered this several million
years ago but we've only just figured it out.

I learned about it at a lecture on climate change which I'd
been to earlier in the week. Standing in front of an audience of almost two thousand people in St Paul's Cathedral, Sir David
Attenborough asked whether it was God's will that we should bring nature under human control. Were we more important than
any other creatures? The answer, he feared, was yes, this is what humanity has always thought. We need, he said, to change
our perceptions if we are to save our planet, we need to learn how to tread lightly upon the earth, as guests rather than
owners. We are all in too much of a hurry both to conquer and control. There can be no doubt, he said, leaning his elbows
on the makeshift lectern, his clothes crumpled, his authority unquestionable, that the planet is changing. Twenty years ago
scientists warned of climate change. He had been sceptical, but he is no longer. The graphs of CO2 emissions in the last hundred
years rose slowly, then more steeply. Now they travel off the page in a vertical line. The lines mirror the rise in population;
there is no doubt that what we are experiencing is not a climate change caused by natural forces, but by us. He said how hard
it was to find remote places any more, and that forests like Borneo, once the richest in the world, had been hacked down to
grow oil palms, then abandoned, leaving depleted soil which is so poor it can't support life. In just a few years, natural
abundance has given way to a wasteland.

He paused and shook his head: he'd just heard that grass had been found growing in Antarctica. We need a change in the way
we live our lives, he said. Small acts like switching off the TV and taking fewer plane trips will add up to fewer carbon
emissions but, more importantly, they will alter the way we look at our world. In the war, he continued, there was a morality
about waste. People were careful with their resources because that was the way they knew it had to be. Now we need a change
of moral attitude. We need to understand that the world has finite resources and that it is sinful to be wasteful. Sitting
beneath the vast, ornate dome of St Paul's, I found myself thinking of my mother's brother, my uncle Francis. Francis lived
in a tiny bungalow on a beach in Jersey. He had been a member of the resistance during the war, captured by the Nazis after
leaping from a window while trying to escape and breaking all the bones in his left foot. He mostly ate fish, which he caught
from the beach or crabs and prawns from the plentiful rock pools of La Rocque bay. Whenever we went to have a meal with him,
the one thing we all knew was that we must finish everything on our plates. As an eight-year-old girl, I remember thinking
that he was a bit bonkers to be so obsessed but I never forgot those meals or his passion.

Two days before the first four pigs are due to go up the hill to Snells, we move them out of the caravan wood and into the
pen nearest the gate. It's hard not to make gloomy comparisons between prisoners being transferred to cells nearer their execution
chamber and, once in mind of that, I decide that I will take them a huge last vegetable supper. Pigs can, in fact, eat anything.
It's one of the reasons they're so bright: any animal that doesn't have to spend most of its life searching for food has had
time to develop its brain power. Mammals can be roughly divided into insectivores, carnivores and herbivores, but there's
flexibility between the divisions. Foxes eat meat, but they'll also forage for wild fruit. Antelopes are herbivores, but occasionally
they've been known to eat birds. The mice that live in our house probably like cheese the best if given a choice, but they
eat meat and paper as well as bird food, which they steal from the big plastic sack of the stuff stored in the downstairs
100. They also seem to eat the plastic, since they make a hole but leave no trace of the bits. This ability to eat a wide
range of food makes mice successful and­certainly in our house - prolific.

Most carnivores, like cats, are pure meat-eaters, but there are exceptions among the group, most famously the panda, which
survives on bamboo shoots, a food so low in essential elements and minerals that the panda can never hibernate and, unlike
his meat-eating bear relatives, has to eat all year round to stay alive. Herbivores graze, browse or pick fruit. Cattle eat
grass. Elephants eat leaves and twigs, monkeys and apes live off fruit. There's only one group of herbivores which eats everything
regularly and that's the omnivorous pig. Their teeth are as generalised and non-specialist as our own.

Being omnivorous not only increases the pigs' chances of survival; it means survival almost anywhere, as they are curious
and dexterous. Like us, they can be described as being neophilic, or fond of things which are new. Their brains are bigger
than those of animals of equivalent size and, according to studies conducted at Bristol University, they're able to remember
places where food can be found, even after long intervals.

On the last morning of the four boys' lives, I watch them happily rooting around underneath the wild rhododendron bushes and
I find myself remembering the fantastic story of the Tamworth Two. At the time that those two little pigs made their gutsy
escape in 1998 I was editing the
Independent on Sunday
and we published a story by Dick King Smith, West Country author of
Babe,
the children's classic about a pig who escapes the knacker's yard to become a skilled sheep-pig, winner of medals and prizes.
Babe
had just been adapted as an enormously successful film and we were all chuffed to be able to include a story honouring the
Tamworths' free spirit by its author. But, as I read the papers in the days following the escape, it was clear that this story
really belonged to the tabloids, who had thrown themselves into the fray with verve and open cheque-books.

The Tamworth Two escaped from Newman's abattoir in Malmesbury, swam across the River Avon and holed up on a wooded hill which
looked out over Malmesbury's historic abbey. This small fact was recorded by the local paper and, on a quiet news day in the
middle of a dreary, grey January, a reporter for
The Times
picked up the story and filed it to his news desk.
The Times
ran a graphic that illustrated how the pigs escaped, and plotted their route across the river and into the trees. Next day,
the
Daily Mail
jumped in.
Mail
readers are never slow to respond to stories about animals, and as letters and calls flooded in from readers anxious to know
where the pigs were and how they were doing, news editor Ian MacGregor saw the potential. This could be much more than a good
heartstring-tugging story, it could become a world-class event, devouring as much space in the
Mail's
pages as any diplomatic incident, political upheaval or death of a statesman.

The pigs had to be found, saved and then provided with a fairy-tale environment where they could live out their natural lives.
MacGregor despatched a young reporter, Barbara Davies, to Wiltshire, with the instruction to find the pigs and bring home
the story. But Fleet Street is a competitive place, and news of the
Mail's
movements soon reached the ears of the
Daily Express,
the paper I was to edit just over a year later. The
Express
news team saw that the
Mail
meant business; their problem was how to get their own story without the huge financial and manpower resources that the
Mail
had at its command. Gerard Greaves, with whom I worked closely in the coming years, recalls the air of panic round the news
desk when it became clear that two small pigs were going to set the news agenda for Britain in the coming days. 'The
Mail
had vets, snappers, tractors; they'd hired the only loader suitable for moving the pigs in the area. And as usual, the
Express
was miles behind.'